Amtrak is 51% owned by congress. It is federal life support that keeps it propped up when any real business would have folded decades ago.
I worked for Amtrak and have some insights.
Grift and corruption are rampant. I had a boss who did nothing but spend all day on the phone with potential contractors trying to get them to pay for travel and meals at fancy restaurants to meet with him. And he wasn’t even an executive.
The higher you go on the totem pole the worse it gets.
Amtrak hasn’t turned a profit once in its entire existence. Doesn’t that tell you EVERYTHING you need to know?
In Brazil mass transit was privatized. All the buses are owned and operated by families. Mass transit in that country is far better than Amtrak can ever hope to be. And they’re still a 3rd world country.
End federal funding of Amtrak and privatize its constituent pieces as they were before it was formed. Let the free market dictate the fate of it all and let competition drive the best serving to success or failure.
Economic Darwinism will give us a much better product.
Absolutely agree - the federal government should not be subsidizing Amtrak (or anything for that matter). I do recall enjoying train trips a long time ago, but with the government in the picture, I question the safety of the infrastructure. If Amtrak was privatized and allowed to compete in an open and free market, I think we would be amazed to see how much track renovation, car upgrades, passenger involvement, and overall positive contribution to America’s transportation infrastructure, would occur in such a short period of time. Get govt out of Amtrak…save the expense and turn it over to our tried and true economic forces of supply and demand.
4 years ago while working at Amtrak I was invited to inspect one of their new Acela trainsets which cost them 2.4 billion. Now here in 2024 those trains still haven’t been deployed and they are running out of places to store them. If they ever are put into service they will be limited to the same 90 mph limit as the legacy trainsets because the track infrastructure never got overhauled and cannot handle higher speeds.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted due to the delay in deploying the fleet and in the meantime they have been forced into cannibalism to keep the older obsolete trains running because parts for them aren’t made anymore.
This is your tax dollars at work here. Imagine all the homeless veterans that could have been helped with that money. Imagine any of millions of actual good uses that money could have been used for.
I resigned from Amtrak during the pandemic after they instituted a vax mandate for everyone even people like me who were working from home. They even announced that they wouldn’t stop their mandate even if the courts ended the federal vax mandate which they did.
As a member of their information technology architecture review board I once had to vote upon the approval for the development of a vaccination status tracking system. This was in spring of 2019 before operation warp speed had been implemented. Myself and most others on the review board voted against it but the higher ups overruled everyone and the project was approved regardless.
I asked myself how did they know that they would need this before there was any serious talk of a C19 vaccine?
I guess Amtrak can predict the future. And for the sake of our country I hope they now see a future where they no longer exist and their entire army of H1B visa workers has been sent back to India and China.
Amtrak is another hard core DEI employer and has eliminated thousands of jobs for American workers and replaced them with overseas staffing, contractors and visa workers.
So not only are they wasting our tax money on the abject failure of their new train fleet and substandard service but they are paying the money out to thousands and thousands of foreigners too. A former colleague there told me that 4 visa workers were hired to replace me and do all the work I did by myself. DEI in action.
Hopefully DOGE will set fire to Amtrak and burn it to the ground. I will roast marshmallows over the fire.