Interesting essay in National Review Online today about the future of Amtrak by Iain Murray, who writes that he was part of the team "that privatized the British rail-infrastructure body, then called Railtrack, in 1996".

Check out this quote:

Yet, despite the sure knowledge that terrorists are only too ready to attack major transportation systems, as the attacks in Madrid demonstrated, Amtrak has repeatedly failed to allocate funds responsibly. As [Department of Transportation Inspector General Kenneth Mead] says, “Programming millions of scarce capital dollars for fixing long-distance sleeper cars when bridges that Amtrak owns are beyond their functional and economic lives and must be refurbished or replaced is unacceptable.” Ample evidence that Amtrak is more interested in trains than in infrastructure is provided by Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black, who told GovExec.com in reaction to the inspector general’s report that, “Asking Amtrak to maintain railroad tracks is like asking Greyhound Lines to maintain the interstate highways.”

Big, big difference: Greyhound doesn't own the roads its buses travel on. As I understand it, as part of the creation of Conrail (when the government merged Penn Central and half dozen or so other northeast railroads) in 1976, Amtrak was given ownership of the Northeast Corridor, the largely ex-Pennsylvania Railroad four track mainline that's the backbone of railroad travel from Boston to Florida.

Actually, of the two 1970s-era government-created shotgun railroad weddings, Conrail has been infinitely more successful: it was allowed to divest itself of unprofitable lines; designed to be eventually privitized; and eventually was, turning a profit in the 1980s and '90s as an efficient freight handler. In the late 1990s, its locomotives and rolling stock were merged into CSX Corporation and Norfolk Southern.

Too bad Amtrak didn't follow a similar route. But President Bush's second term is a golden opportunity to divest the government of this Nixon-era dinosaur.