Derailed: What Went Wrong and What to Do About America's Passenger Trains Review

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Derailed: What Went Wrong and What to Do About America's Passenger Trains ReviewJoe Vranich has provided a thought provoking and well written account of the sad state of US passenger trains. Mr Vranich, a former Amtrak official, is now one of the most vocal critics of the US national passenger train service.
The book provides a detailed accounting of the many management failures and broken promises that have bedeviled Amtrak for the past 30 years. However, it is clear that Mr. Vranich has an ax to grind, and indulges in selective presentation of facts. For example, he devotes considerable space on the inability of Amtrak to meet average travel times common in the 1920s to 1940s, laying blame totally on Amtrak inepitude. Yet Amtrak is at the mercy of the freight railroads over whose tracks it runs, and many of the most direct routes between city pairs were abondoned decades ago.
Half way through the book, the reader finally gets to Vranich's main thesis: highspeed rail technology (e.g., maglev) is the only viable future for passenger trains in this country. A reasonable conclusion. Yet he undermines his position by blaming Amtrak and Southwest Airlines for the cancellation of highspeed rail projects in Texas and other states. If they can't make the trains run on time, and clean the bathrooms, and refrigerate the food, how could they possibly conspire to stop a major project funded at the state level? These projects failed because of "not in my back yard" attitudes, and a total lack of interest in the US Congress to put rail on equal footing with highways and aviation.
Vranich gets the big picture right, but falls into a polemical trap made from his own biases.Derailed: What Went Wrong and What to Do About America's Passenger Trains Overview

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