UNIVERSIDAD DE CUENCA

NAME: EDISSON ZHUNIO

Amtrak
Privately operated passenger rail service
The Delaware and Hudson Railway'sLaurentian in 1975 providing same-day service passenger service
between New York City and Montreal
From the middle 19th century until approximately 1920, nearly all intercity travelers in the United States
moved by rail. The rails and the trains were owned and operated by private, for-profit organizations.
Approximately 65,000 railroad passenger cars operated in 1929.
For a long time after 1920, passenger rail's popularity diminished and there was a series of pullbacks and
tentative recoveries. Rail passenger revenues declined dramatically between 1920 and 1934 because of the
rise of the automobile. In the same period, many travelers were lost to interstate bus companies such
asGreyhound Lines. However, in the mid-1930s, railroads reignited popular imagination with service
improvements and new, diesel-powered streamliners, such as the gleaming silver Pioneer Zephyr and Flying
Yankee. Even with the improvements, on a relative basis, traffic continued to decline, and by 1940 railroads
held 67 percent of passenger-miles in the United States.
World War II broke the malaise. During the war, troop movements and restrictions on automobile fuel
generated a sixfold increase in passenger traffic from the low point of the Great Depression. After the war,
railroads rejuvenated overworked and neglected fleets with fast and often luxurious streamliners
epitomized by the Super Chief and California Zephyr which inspired the last major resurgence in
passenger rail travel.
The postwar resurgence was short-lived. In 1946, there remained 45 percent fewer passenger trains than in
1929, and the decline quickened despite railroad optimism. Passengers disappeared and so did trains. Few
trains generated profits; most produced losses. Broad-based passenger rail deficits appeared as early as
1948 and by the mid-1950s railroads claimed aggregate annual losses on passenger services of more than
$700 million (almost $5 billion in 2005 dollars using CPI).
By 1965, only 10,000 rail passenger cars were in operation, 85 percent fewer than in 1929. [ Passenger
service was provided on only 75,000 miles (120,000 km) of track, a stark decline. he 1960s also saw the end
of railway post office revenues, which had helped some of the remaining trains break even.

Causes of the decline of privately operated passenger rail service

The causes of the decline of passenger rail in the United States were complex. Until 1920, rail was the only
practical form of intercity transport, but the industry was subject to government regulation and labor
inflexibility. By 1930, the railroad companies had constructed, with private funding, a vast and relatively
efficient transportation network, but when the federal government began to construct the National Highway
System, the railroads found themselves faced with unprecedented competition for passengers and freight
with automobiles, buses, trucks, and aircraft, all of which were heavily subsidized by the government road
and airport building programs. In 1916, the amount of track in the United States peaked at 254,251 miles

(409,177 km), compared to 140,695 miles (226,427 km) in 2007 (although it remained the largest rail
network of any country in the world).
Some routes had been built primarily to facilitate the sale of stock in the railroad companies; they were
redundant from the beginning. These were the first to be abandoned as the railroads' financial positions
deteriorated, and the rails were routinely removed to save money on taxes. Many rights-of-way were
destroyed by being broken up and built over, but others remained the property of the railroad or were taken
over by local or state authorities and turned into rail trails.

Government regulation
From approximately 1910 to 1921, the federal government introduced a populist rate-setting scheme.
During World War I the railroads proved incapable of functioning as a cohesive network. This forced the
United States Government to nationalize the rail industry temporarily. In the 1920s railroad profits stagnated,
many redundant and unprofitable lines were abandoned, and many passenger facilities were allowed to fall
into a cycle of deferred maintenance, all of which in small ways drove passengers away, either by higher
fares or less appealing service. At the same time, the rise in popularity of the automobile and US Highways
such as the Lincoln Highway began to eat away at local rail passenger traffic. Increases in labor costs also
further hindered the railroads ability to make profits on smaller and more sparsely populated lines.
The primary regulatory authority affecting railroads, beginning in the late 19th century, was the Interstate
Commerce Commission (ICC). The ICC played a leading role in rate-setting which would at times hindered
railroad's ability to be profitable in the passenger market. In the 1930s, train speeds were ever increasing,
but no advance were being made in signalling and safety systems to prevent collisions. This led to the
horrific Naperville train disaster of 1946 and other crashes in New York in 1950. In 1947 the ICC issued an
order requiring US railroads, by the end of 1951, to install automatic train stop, automatic train control or cab
signalling wherever any trains would travel at 80 mph (130 km/h) or faster.
Such technology was not widely implemented outside the Northeast, effectively placing a speed limit in other
areas which is still in effect today, and why the 79 mph (127 km/h) maximum passenger train speed is
common in the United States. In 1958, the ICC was granted authority to allow or reject modifications and
eliminations of passenger routes (train-offs). Many routes required beneficial pruning, but the ICC delayed
action by an average of eight months and when it did authorize modifications, the ICC insisted that
unsuccessful routes be merged with profitable ones. Thus, fast, popular rail service was transformed into
slow, unpopular service.
The ICC was even more critical of corporate mergers. Many combinations which railroads sought to
complete were delayed for years and even decades, such as the merger of the New York Central
Railroad and Pennsylvania Railroad, into what eventually became Penn Central, and the Delaware,
Lackawanna and Western Railroad and Erie Railroad into the Erie Lackawanna Railway. By the time the ICC
approved the mergers in the 1960s, slower trains, years of deteriorating equipment and station facilities, and
the flight of passengers to air and automobile transportation had taken their toll and the mergers were
unsuccessful at preserving these railroad's passenger train service. It is important to note the Erie
Lackawanna was never a major hauler of passengers, nor its predecessor roads, and was mostly a freight
railroad. The Penn Central merger was a failure because it merged two large struggling railroads on paper
only; two separate management structures remained with little or no integration of assets or management of
the former Pennsylvania Railroad and New York Central system. The massive overhead costs of this
operating scheme played a far greater role in the Penn Central failure than any actions take by the ICC or
any other US Government agency.