Major Amtrak Breakdown

Don't say we didn't warn you. Amtrak suffered yet another blow to its already tarnished reputation yesterday when some electrical circuits along the Northeast Corridor from New York to Washington suddenly failed, stranding Amtrak electric trains between the two cities and affecting regional commuter train lines using the corridor - including NJ Transit, where a train got stuck in a tunnel under the Hudson River for five hours! The temperature in the trains reached nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and a woman eight months pregnant began to have contractions three minutes apart.

Blame it on Amtrak? No, blame it on the U.S. government, which has been starving the national passenger railroad of capital for years. The transfomers running the electrified trains - including the troublesome Acela trains - have been in use since Franklin Roosevelt was President and the corridor belonged to the long-defunct Pennsylvania Railroad. The government hasn't spent nearly enough money to help Amtrak function properly, preferring instead to spend exorbitant amounts of dough on aviation and highways. Since the majority of domestic airline flights in this country don't go farther than a thousand miles - a distance that 320-mph trains like the ones used in France could easily cover in a few hours - a comprehensive bullet train service would obviously cut into the very profitable business of selling airline tickets.

Not that Amtrak hasn't given people reason to eschew the train. Acela trains are nice and quick - when they work - but they can only go half as fast as the bullet trains in Europe (stop me if you've heard this before!). Plus, the fact that they were developed in America from the ground up - using off-the-shelf rail technology from the French or the Japanese would have been preferable - speaks volumes both about our ego and incompetence. Americans have an Annie Oakley attitude toward the rest of the world - "Anything you can do, I can do better" - that convinces us there's nothing other people on this planet can teach us that we don't already know. In fact, we don't know a twit about building high-speed rail, so since the Acela trains were developed from scratch, their ultimate reliability problems shouldn't really have surprised anyone.

With Amtrak funding yet again an issue before Congress, Amtrak supporters hope to turn this mother of all mishaps from yesterday into an advantage to turn things around for the beleaguered railroad. It's possible. . . unless the airlines have something to say about it. >:-(