Eight Principles for Establishing a U.S. Passenger Rail System

Neither the nation’s highway nor civil-aviation program achieved liftoff until all interested parties agreed—some reluctantly–that state, local and private efforts alone—or even together–could not do the job.  Not only federal funding, but federal planning and leadership, are essential to building a coherent and effective infrastructure system over which fast, frequent, reliable passenger trains can be operated on a networked basis permitting seamless transfers among bullet trains, high-speed corridor trains, long-distance overnight trains and regional commuter trains.

The federal government was essential to the creation of the highway and airways infrastructures not only because it alone had the resources to fund them, but because federal leadership was essential to making the systems equally useful and equally accessible to all areas of the nation and to all classes of travelers and shippers.

Unless a campaign for new rail infrastructure adheres to the federalist principle it is unlikely to receive congressional support.  Congress does not like to fund regional “experiments” or programs it believes will benefit only certain geographic areas, certain segments of the population or certain business interests.  Currently, legislators from states congenial to passenger trains secure support for their rail programs and projects by agreeing to support pet programs sought by colleagues from “non-passenger-train states.”  But log-rolling strategies have limited scope.  The slow, sparse, unreliable and fragmented U.S. passenger-train service of today will not evolve into an effective passenger-rail program unless good trains serve all states and all routes are linked into a national network through regional hubs offering conveniently scheduled connections. No more fragmentation!

• Support for the first Federal Aid Highway Act grew steadily in the years prior to World War I but did not win congressional approval until the privately owned rail system broke down under the strain of carrying wartime military traffic to the East Coast ports.  Late trains, misrouted shipments and shortages of motive power and rolling stock convinced an alarmed Congress that the nation needed a publicly owned alternative to the privately controlled railroad industry: a national system of highways (and a buildup of the Inland Waterways network as well).
• Congress’s decision in 1958 to create a Federal Aviation Agency and build a modern, computerized, federally operated Air Traffic Control system came only after a series of airline disasters that climaxed (but did not end)  with the June 30, 1956, collision of two large airliners over the Grand Canyon, killing all 128 passengers and crew.  The Eisenhower administration, which had opposed federal traffic control on grounds of expense, ultimately capitulated in the face of public alarm and industry anxiety.
• President Eisenhower’s relentless campaign for a $20-billion, 20-year, 42,000-mile Interstate Highway program came about largely because of Ike’s own “personal emergency.”  In researching his book Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life, author Tom Lewis discovered memoranda in the Eisenhower Presidential Library showing that Ike feared the Depression might resume while he was president and that if he did not have an ongoing public-works project to assure long-term full employment he would go into the history books as “Herbert Hoover II” and the Republican Party would go out of business.

Goaded by his personal emergency, Eisenhower ruined his health and ignored other pressing issues—including airways safety and traffic control—to get his Interstate highway program approved.

What kind of “emergency” is likely to come to the rescue of the American passenger-rail movement?

The most likely candidate is the silent emergency currently unfolding in the freight-railroad industry.  While the Class 1s are not exactly on the brink of failure, they are plagued by a persistent loss of traffic that dates from well before the coronavirus emergency.  Their response so far has been confined to cost reduction through better supply-chain management.  No strategy for attracting new or higher-margin business has emerged because doing so would require a massive capital investment in additional track, higher speeds, flyover junctions, advanced signaling, electrification and grade-crossing elimination that only the federal government can supply.  The Class 1 railroads are stuck between the disappearing world of conventional railroading and the dynamic new railroad industry that they cannot finance by themselves.

If they want to grow, the Class 1s will have to make some sort of deal with the federal government, and admission of fast passenger trains to their new infrastructure will be part of the price.

Such an outcome, however, need not be deemed a “capitulation” by the railroads.  A superior infrastructure will enable the railroads to carry lucrative new lines of freight for which their existing low-speed infrastructure is not adapted.  Collaboration with the federal government on a modern passenger-rail infrastructure can make the railroads winners in the freight business as well, particularly at a time when on-line shopping has made merchandise delivery a lucrative new industry.

Steven Covey’s best-selling book, The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, names vision as the first act essential to success.  Successful people, he writes, “Begin with the end in mind.”  That means they start by envisioning the end product of their efforts—the way things will look and work when the effort is completed and successful—and then work backward from the end-state vision to determine the steps necessary to start it, cultivate it and bring it to completion.  Think about what you want first—and then plan the steps that will get you there.

Failure to begin with the end in mind leads to a fatiguing cycle of projects without progress—plan after plan and project after project as a succession of random attempts and experiments that fail to jell into a definitive accomplishment.

Highway supporters learned this lesson the hard way:  They began agitating for paved roads during the 1880s but failed to secure congressional support until 1916 because they could not decide who exactly the highways should be for:

• The first backers sought only “farm-to-market” roads that would “get the farmer out of the mud” and enable farmers to deliver loads of grain to railroad grain elevators.  Even though the U.S. was still largely a rural nation, Congress did not see farm roads as a national cause and failed to act.
• Next came a movement for “post roads” to assure speedy delivery of the U.S. mail to rural recipients.  Again, Congress found postal delivery inadequate as the sole justification for an expensive new road system.
• A third highway interest group later emerged: urban car owners who wanted an intercity highway network so they could use cars for business travel to distant cities as well as for leisure and tourism (an effort actively denounced by many farmers who viewed this sort of highway program as a subsidy to urban elites).
• One group even argued for a “national” highway system linking all state capitals (as if an Indianapolis-Lansing highway had more utility than a highway linking Chicago with Detroit).

Failure of advocates to coalesce around a single, realistic, comprehensive goal delayed the emergence of a federal highway program for three decades.  Ultimately, only strong planning and organization by a new organ of the federal government—the Bureau of Public Roads–reconciled all the regional and factional interests to create a truly national highway system that served all personal, commercial and governmental purposes.  (And even with all highway advocates pulling for the first time in the same direction, it still required the World War I railroad collapse to persuade Congress at last to pass a highway bill.)

After World War II, advocates of modern, federally funded airports and a uniform, federally managed air-traffic control system also lost valuable time by failing to identify a national interest superior to the parochial interests that fragmented what should have been a solid pro-aviation political bloc.

• Private pilots saw no need for big commercial airports because their airplanes were small, and they balked at federal air-traffic control because they believed equipping their planes with radios would put them under federal “surveillance” and take away their “freedom of the skies.”
• Air Force and Navy aircraft reported to their own controllers who were not in contact with civilian controllers, causing several fatal crashes between commercial airliners and military aircraft whose crews did not know civilian airliners were in their vicinity.  Citing “national security,” the military continued to balk at joining the civil system in a common air-traffic control network until the continuing loss of life embarrassed the parties into a compromise.
• The Eisenhower administration claimed civil aviation was not a federal responsibility and that the cities could fund the airports themselves while the cash-poor airlines—several still on federal subsidy—could build their own air-traffic control system.

Passenger-rail advocates must demand strong federal leadership in defining the purpose and shape of the coming passenger-rail system.  Advocates should stop petitioning “their” congressman for a grant to improve train service in a single state or region and begin approaching the entire Congress for a massive federally financed national infrastructure program like those that gave us modern auto and air travel.

When the movement for better roads broke out, the federal government had no authority to fund or build roads and no organ capable of planning a highway system.  All it had was an Office of Road Information with a tiny staff that sent out brochures about road construction.  Before any road planning or construction could go forward, Congress had to upgrade the ORI to the Bureau of Public Roads (in 1915), fund it with a budget big enough to build a 42,000-mile network and staff it with engineers, planners and bureaucrats who knew how to coordinate 48 state road programs into a single national effort.

When air travel spun into a major safety crisis in the 1950s, Congress replaced the old and inadequate Civil Aeronautics Administration in the Commerce Department with a new, independent Federal Aviation Agency (now “Administration”) trained, funded and staffed to complete giant airport projects and to train a vast cadre of professional air-traffic controllers to man the new radar and computer systems needed to direct traffic.  A nationwide buildup in high-performance passenger-rail will require that Congress first establish and fund a new Federal Railroad Infrastructure Administration reporting directly to the Secretary of Transportation.  A new and bigger bureaucracy must be created by Congress to configure the new passenger-rail map and get its infrastructure built so that it advances the interests of travelers, freight shippers and the railroad industry.

While the manufacturers of passenger trains and the builders of rail infrastructure undoubtedly are important in bringing about a strong passenger-rail infrastructure program, nothing is likely to happen without buy-in from the U.S. railroad industry itself, because Class 1 right of way is essential to developing high-performance passenger rail infrastructure.  While a few modern passenger-rail enterprises such as Brightline and Texas Central will be able to secure private funding, they represent special situations unlikely to be duplicated in the rest of the nation.  Likewise, the California High Speed Rail System, to be built by the largest and richest state in the Union entirely within its own borders, does not represent a concept easily transferable to poorer states, or to regions where the passenger-rail routes must cross state lines.  Historically, it is federal programs that are used to transcend the geographic and fiscal differences between states.  The late Merrill Travis, chief of the Illinois Department of Transportation’s passenger-rail bureau, liked to say, “It’s easier for the federal government to build a highway from coast to coast than for two states to build a bridge over a river between them.”

Thus, for financial, political and geographic reasons, most of the nation’s new passenger-rail infrastructure will have to follow existing main-line alignments belonging to the Class 1 railroad industry.  This means that any federal infrastructure program supporting a modern passenger rail system will have to include a mechanism that will appeal to the interests of the Class 1s.  To win support, such legislation must:

• Preserve the railroads’ investment in their rights of way and if possible, enhance its value.
• Preserve the railroads’ ownership of their rights of way (except where segments of new alignment are built on property not currently owned by the railroads).
• Preserve the railroads’ monopoly of freight service on their tracks.
• Encourage the railroads to use the improved passenger-train tracks to operate new types of lightweight, express merchandise trains that cannot find “slots” on conventional rail alignments.
• Permit railroads to buy into Train Oriented Real Estate Developments around the new stations built for the passenger trains.

Now is the time to strike.  The industry is in trouble:  Class 1s may need passenger rail as badly as passenger rail needs the Class 1s—Historically, America’s privately owned railroads have resisted all attempts to increase the number of passenger trains on their tracks and have accepted federal infrastructure funding only with strong reservations and strict conditions.

That situation may at last be subject to change because 49 years after Amtrak relieved the railroads of their passenger trains and 29 years after Congress deregulated their ratemaking practices, the railroads again are facing a crisis: During the biggest peacetime economic boom in American history, the U.S. railroads began losing traffic, with both conventional carloads and intermodal lifts drifting steadily downward starting in early 2019.  Despite intense economic pressures on the motor-carrier industry, trucks continued to take business away from the railroads.  So far, none of the Class 1s has disclosed a strategy for recovering this business or growing the top line over time.  The industry’s focus has shifted almost entirely toward further cost reductions—the “operating ratio–” and no initiatives to secure “high-rated” merchandise shipments have emerged.

This failure to develop a growth strategy suggests the U.S. railroad industry has “hit a wall” in its efforts to grow.  New business—and particularly high-margin merchandise freight business—cannot be attracted unless the railroads can improve both their over-the-road speeds and their service reliability, both of which require increases in infrastructure quantity and quality that cannot be financed by the private capital markets on which U.S. rail carriers historically have relied.

Only large amounts of sovereign capital—federal funding–can address the railroad infrastructure crisis, and the price of obtaining this capital must be the industry’s willingness to embrace the movement of fast, frequent intercity passenger trains as one of its principal lines of business.