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- Newsgroups: rec.railroad
- Path: sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!agate!overload.lbl.gov!s1.gov!lip
- From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
- Subject: The US Passenger Railroad Gap
- Message-ID: <1992Nov14.085532.4207@s1.gov>
- Sender: usenet@s1.gov
- Nntp-Posting-Host: s1.gov
- Organization: LLNL
- Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1992 08:55:32 GMT
- Lines: 31
-
-
- This may be old hat to some of you people, but here in the
- United States, we suffer from a severe passenger railroad gap compared
- to some of our economic competitors. I tried to estimate some numbers,
- and I came up with, for the number of intercity trains dispatched a
- day, of:
-
- Amtrak: 250 to 300
-
- [approximate count from most recent schedule]
-
- Europe: ~20,000
-
- [Thomas Cook schedule: crude estimate]
-
- There are no commuter trains in Amtrak's count, though some
- _may_ be counted in the Thomas Cook schedule.
-
- Even the two schedule books show the rather glaring size
- differential (about a factor of 100).
-
- I think that this would be a great thing for some pol to make
- a fuss about:
-
- How we Americans are suffering from a dangerous Railroad Gap,
- and how we must catch up, no matter what the cost, lest we fall
- hopelessly far behind and lose rather badly.
-
- [in the spirit of other gaps that have plagued Americans, like
- the bomber and the missile gaps]
-
-