American trains need more than railfan nostalgia
Well, as much as some of the (usual) points make sense about Amtrak sharing rail unreliably, the role of subsidies (hidden or overt) compared to other modes, I find that stories like this miss a fundamental truth &#x2F; constraint that I have come to believe.<p>For better or worse, we have a country that is in its middle age of infrastructure and people.   We are a rich country with established interests and property rights where land for railroads can no longer be just appropriated or bought cheaply to reconfigure a rail system.  We have people who can pay to have individual transportation and not have to put up with the minor inconveniences of public transport.  We have all the debt of a middle aged country, plus we need to think of our other healthcare expenses in middle age, and don&#x27;t have the appetite to pay for another muscle car from our youth.<p>All these reasons make investing in rail a relatively expensive proposition compared to alternatives, and not only that, but it&#x27;s especially expensive because of our high wages, standards of construction, environmental reviews, etc.  So we stop investing in it.<p>By the way, what happens along with this?  When you get into this phase of a country, your engineering capabilities change, and specifically, your ability to even build these systems even starts to degrade and fall out of practice.<p>Take rail, or any heavy construction&#x2F;engineering industry.  People working in such a field join it to have exciting careers, see growth, etc.  Generally few people join just to maintain a static system.  Unfortunately, there&#x27;s much less excitement in being &quot;maintenance&quot; although some people are quite innovative even in such fields.<p>So where you used to have a cohort of thousands of people trained and skilled at all aspects of rail building (engineering, operations, finance, project management, etc), now those people have either consolidated to the few projects remaining in the US (traveling around, moving cities to where the work is), work for Parsons or others who can aggregate enough work to keep a team together, or aged out, attrited away, gone to where the actual business is booming: Asia.<p>You think about how in the US, if you had to get together the expert team to build a new rail connecting 2 cities, you would have to search far and wide to find the people qualified, and pay them huge contractor sums.  Not only that, they would be out of practice of how to pitch such a deal to the cities and the people along the route.  Everything would have to be done custom.<p>In China, just to take an example, there are (up until just recently) 10,000 rail engineers who stamp out such a rail every goddamn month.   How can you compete with a country that&#x27;s in such a growth phase, unless somehow your country has an active strategy about how to renew itself in middle age?<p>It&#x27;s a problem.  A very hard to solve problem, deeper than just rail schedules or simple subsidies.