AMTRAK was formed in the 1970s to take over the nation’s private railroad’s passenger network. For years those railroads had been unable to make a profit on most, if not all, of their passenger routes. It is worth noting that America was one of the few countries world wide that still had privately run passenger service.

Support for AMTRAK has been weak since its inception. Many senators and representatives from states that were either marginally served or not served at all wanted to end AMTRAK entirely. It has been recognized since AMTRAK’s inception that certain routes would pay for themselves and make a profit as well. One such route is referred to as the Northeast Corridor, Boston to Washington D.C. The trains on this route typically run at or near capacity. But the same could not be said of the long distance trains even though these trains frequently ran full. The problem was simple, in order to break even the fare charged would have been exorbitant. And some routes were eliminated for this reason, Chicago to Los Angeles via Denver and Las Vegas. Denver to Portland Oregon. Chicago to Miami are among those eliminated.

The first, and probably the most important issue, is how we and Washington DC view AMTRAK. Instead of viewing AMTRAK as a national necessity, as happens in Europe and Asia, it is viewed as an unnecessary luxury. Our national psyche desperately needs to change its view so that in falls in line with the rest of the world.

The second problem is the AMTRAK footprint and level of service needs to be expanded. Such an expansion would initially cost in the billions of dollars but in a budget that is in the trillions of dollars our lawmakers can surely figure out how to get it done. What they now see as a luxury will in the next 20 years become a necessity as the price of long distance travel rises to levels 4 and 5 times what it is today.

Fuel prices are the variable that sets the price for all forms of travel. Through fracking the U.S. has been able to extract oil from old fields that had been considered dry. But such extraction is very limited. This sort of oil extraction will soon be on the decline which means at the same time the U.S. will again be reliant on oil from foreign countries. We are a decade away from $5 per gallon gasoline prices. Airline fuel prices will also rise at the same rate or more. When that happens air travel will become prohibitively expensive for those people who can only fly once a year or less.

Rail travel will become the most cost effective way of moving people and goods from one point to another. But for AMTRAK to be a truly effective railroad, it must serve all large and medium size cities in the U.S. Presently it does not come even close to this but now it the time to act. The longer America waits to enact such travel, the more expensive it will become.

Simply put, AMTRAK must now become a national necessity and it is up to the public to demand service to their city that has no service or to demand a level of service that meets their travel requirement.