Reddit reviews Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service A Year Spent Riding Across America

Thanks. Worth a read: https://www.amazon.com/Waiting-Train-Embattled-Passenger-Service/dp/1603580646

I thought the book Waiting on a Train was a nice objective overview about what's wrong with Amtrak (or, more precisely, our rail infrastructure and some of the large freight companies).

That's part of it. But part of it was a fundamental flaw in the legislation that created Amtrak. The freight lines are private because the freight companies were given land grants in return for accepting "common carrier obligations" (in a nutshell, agreeing to provide passenger service).

When Amtrak was created, the freight railroads turned over their passenger rail assets to the National Passenger Railroad Corp (Amtrak's parent company) in return for being released from their common carrier obligations. That legislation, however, failed to establish passenger service priority. It simply requires that the freight lines allow Amtrak trains, not that they prioritize them, as is done in every other country in the world.

It's very, very complicated. And it's part funding, it's part mismanagement. It's also partly Congress screwing things up. Congress demands that Amtrak operate to places where it cannot possibly do anything but bleed money, and then Congress turns around and berates Amtrak for being inefficient.

There's a fantastic book on this by Professor James McCommons of Northern Michigan University. Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service. It's available on Kindle, and it's definitely worth the ten bucks for anybody who wants to really get into the nuts and bolts of the history and present of why Amtrak struggles so much.