Amtrak Director David Gunn Fired

And why should you care? Is there a reason any longer for America to have a cross-country passenger railroad service running on a regular schedule? The thickly-populated east and west coast have almost always needed a fast, reliable mass transit system, but few people seem to want to ride the train from coast to coast, chosing instead the speed of airline travel.

Congress has kept Amtrak afloat, but only with a metaphoric nose above the water by providing it a little over a billion dollars each year, the barest minimum subsidy. (Commerical airlines and road maintenance, it is worth noting, received subsidies worth hundreds of billions each year.) The Bush administration this year proposed a subsidy for Amtrak of $630 million and demanded that it find a way to make the railroad pay for itself, something no major passenger railroad has ever done.

Gunn was reported to "clash" with the Amtrak Board of Directors, all of whom were appointed by President Bush, most of them to interim appointments that will expire when Congress retires from the current session. Is it possible they'll appoint a new director with no ties to the Bush administration, a director who will miraculously find a way to run the railroad at a profit on a budget of a billion dollars a year?

I figure it this way: Cross-country passenger trains will be cut back to next to nothing, if not eliminated entirely, when states refust to fund passenger rail within their borders. The bulk of Amtrak's subsidies will end up in the northeast corridor. California will fund their passenger rail largely on their own, maybe with a small subsidy.