Amtrak ends charter rides. Did you know that you can hitch your own train cars to an Amtrak train? Granted, not many among us have privately-owned rail cars, a novelty for the richest among us, but some do. Anyways, this practice, the Wall Street Journal reports, is going bye-bye:
What’s the latest in this week’s issue? Here’s our editor in chief Stephen F. Hayes on what is in the latest edition of this week's magazine:
Republican members of Congress travelling to an annual retreat at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia on Wednesday morning were involved in a train wreck with a garbage truck, a House Republican aide told THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
The deadly derailment of an Amtrak train near Tacoma, Wash., last week prompted a tweet from Donald Trump. The accident, the president wrote, “shows more than ever why our soon to be submitted infrastructure plan must be approved quickly. Seven trillion dollars spent in the Middle East while our…
The Scrapbook knows there is little that real Americans find so tiresome as lifestyle complaints from East Coast elites who graze up and down the moneyed Acela corridor (“when the waiter finally brought the petits farcis provençaux the vegetables were criminally underdone!”). But allow us this one…
The Capital Bikeshare killer is here. Bike sharing programs are increasingly popular in big cities, and Washington was an early adopter with its Capital Bikeshare program. (The keys even look like little communist flags!) The program got started with millions in subsidies from the government, and…
On November 12, 2015, officials in New York and New Jersey thought they had struck it rich. They had arranged a 50-50 deal with the federal government in which the feds would pay for half the cost of a new tunnel under the Hudson River, the renovation of Penn Station, and a lot more.
On November 12, 2015, officials in New York and New Jersey thought they had struck it rich. They had arranged a 50-50 deal with the federal government in which the feds would pay for half the cost of a new tunnel under the Hudson River, the renovation of Penn Station, and a lot more.
Amtrak interim CEO Charles W. Moorman III made a rare admission for a businessman in a speech last week: His company is never going to make a profit. That’s no surprise to anyone who knows anything about Amtrak, which has cost taxpayers more than $45 billion in subsidies since service began in…
The chief of Amtrak's police division, Polly Hanson, is under investigation for violating conflict of interest rules and committing fraud in hiring her boyfriend's firm for a government-funded counterterrorism contract. For a million-dollar contract on the railroad's RAILSAFE program, she chose ABS…
I took a 7:00 a.m. train this morning from Washington to New York and about an hour into my trip, I made my way to the café car for a cup of coffee. Standing at the little bar/work area was Martin O’Malley. He was just hanging out.
Even as it becomes ever more clear that last week’s Amtrak horror in Philadelphia had nothing to do with, as the refrain goes, “America’s Failing Infrastructure,™” many in the media and lobbying spheres have continued to demand greater spending on rail. As part of that campaign, this week, a New…
Even as it has become increasingly clear that the Amtrak horror in Philadelphia was caused by faulty driving rather than – say it with me – “America’s crumbling infrastructure,” the media have lit up with calls for increased federal spending on rail. In doing so, they frequently repair to our…
A liberal political action group has produced an ad and fundraising campaign that claims "Republican cuts" to infrastructure spending and Amtrak funding have "killed again." The Agenda Project Action Fund, which has been behind such campaigns as the ad featuring a Paul Ryan look-alike pushing an…
Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter says officials now believe all passengers on the deadly Amtrak train have now been accounted for:
The Amtrak engineer at the helm of the crashed train has refused to talk to police or to provide a statement to authorities. The Associated Press reports, burying the lede in the final paragraph of the newswire's story:
After last night's fatal crash of an Amtrak Northeast Regional Train, the publicly supported company's market research and analysis division emailed customers it had invited to take a survey to inform them the survey had been closed.
America’s freight railroads get to continue their argument with Amtrak, America’s passenger rail service.
The federally subsidized railroad service Amtrak is offering up to 24 writers the chance to take a 2-5 day trip aboard a train for free. It's all part what is being called the "#AmtrakResidency program."
There’s long been a certain romance associated with train travel. Think of the trains of the 1920s, replete with well-appointed compartments and dining cars featuring white tablecloths and five-star cuisine. And one need not necessarily go back in time to find examples of impressive trains: Even in…
In Washington there are two kinds of government expenditures. Those that are too small to sweat and those that are too large to do anything about. An example of something too large would be Medicare. In the too small category, there is Amtrak, which gets a billion or so in subsidies every year.…
At a campaign speech, Vice President Joe Biden said, "I'm more at home in a train depot than anywhere else":
Federally funded, low-speed train service Amtrak has launched a website to show its support for the gay pride movement and with the hopes of attracting additional clientele.
The New York TImes reports:
Amtrak, which has never made any money – and has, in fact, required subsidies for all of its surly, customer-unfriendly life – is now proposing to spend about $150 billion to make it possible for riders to go from New York to Philly in under 40 minutes. Which is about how long it takes for…
Reading this piece on Greece's debt-ridden rail system in today's Times, I was struck by these lines: