FRN

Just came across two blogs about Amtrak. Both are written by passenger rail advocates, neither of whom is happy with the situation at the moment. But while Dan Zukowski’s Amtrak blog takes a pro-Amtrak position (recent posts assail freight railroads for failing to move Amtrak trains in a timely manner), Joseph Vranich’s blog, Replacing Amtrak, does what you might expect: it calls Amtrak a “colossal failure” and argues that it has become an instrument of federal pork that focuses on preserving “irrelevant” long-distance routes instead of actually improving passenger rail service. Vranich was involved in Amtrak’s creation in the 1970s; he’s the author of End of the Line: The Failure of Amtrak Reform and the Future of America’s Passenger Trains; Zukowski, for his part, has published an e-book, Why America Needs Amtrak: The Fight to Save Our Trains.

Both of these blogs have been running for well over a year, so I’ll have a lot of catchup reading to do.

Previously: NARP Blog.

• Buy End of the Line at Amazon.com
• Buy Why America Needs Amtrak at Amazon.com