Editorial By Noel T. Braymer From the beginning freight has always been the main business of American Railroads. Passenger Trains generally are profitable, but not as much as freight. In many cases passenger service was mostly used to develop land owned by the railroads. The railroads up until the 1940’s had enough freight business to…

Opinion by Noel T. Braymer Since the late 1970’s there has been talk off and on of raising taxes on gasoline as much as 50 cents more a gallon. The reason for this would be to raise money for alternatives to driving such as better rail and transit service, for alternative energy, infrastructure repairs and…

Editorial by Noel T. Braymer RailPAC, while it is non-partisan is a political organization. It is because we are involved in politics that even though we are a non-profit organization, donations to RailPAC are not tax-deductible. Our goal is the creation of a safe, comfortable, economical and well connected rail passenger system for California and…

Editorial by Noel T. Braymer With record amounts of funding being authorized for passenger rail service improvement by the Federal Government, we should expect major service improvements in the near future. The question is given the way things usually work; can we expect real improvements in the near future? In California the project with the…

By Noel T. Braymer Since 8 billion dollars was included in the Stimulus Bill for High Speed Rail, there has been more interest about High Speed Rail in this country. The California High Speed Rail Authority is talking about starting construction by 2011 with the first segment from Bakersfield to Merced running by 2015. Between…

Editorial by Noel T. Braymer After the customary political fun and games, President Obama got an Economic Stimulus Bill which will pump 787 Billion dollars into the sinking economy. Despite the pre-inaugural emphasis on infrastructure construction, the final total for infrastructure was around 100 billion dollars. This pales against the estimated 2.2 Trillion dollar back…

Editorial By Noel T. Braymer After retiring as President of Southern Railway, W. Graham Claytor took over as President of Amtrak in 1982. At that time Amtrak recovered only 48 percent of its costs from revenue. Eleven years latter when Mr. Claytor retired from Amtrak in 1993 Amtrak’s cost recovery was 75 percent. Shortly before…

By Noel T. Braymer In 1978 I was in my mid-twenties, single, the rent for my apartment in Los Angeles was $160 a month, and my car was paid for thanks to my parents. About the last thing on my mind were trains. Other than amusement park rides the only train ride I had been…

By Noel T. Braymer The simple fact is most intercity passenger trains make money, on their direct operating costs. The problem at Amtrak is it doesn’t run enough trains to bring in enough money to cover all its overhead costs. Amtrak has some large overhead costs, centered mostly in the Midwest and East Coast. Yet…

Editorial by Noel T. Braymer “In my view, a national intercity, interconnected passenger rail service is critically important for the mobility and energy independence of the United States.” Joseph Boardman The above comments are from a letter to Amtrak Employees shortly after Mr. Boardman took over as Amtrak President back in late November. These are…