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

Derailed: What Went Wrong and What to Do About America's Passenger Trains | Joseph Vranich | Still timely, "DERAILED" a must read.

books:

Derailed: What Wen...

	Derailed: What Went Wrong and What to Do About America's Passenger Trains Joseph Vranich St. Martin's Press, 1997 - 258 pages average customer review:based on 13 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

America needs train service. It suffers from crowded highways and airports, making travel nearly intolerable. Amtrak's future is bleak, and Congress is demanding that Amtrak be profitable by the turn of the century or shut down.

Joseph Vranich, who worked to create Amtrak, now nearly three decades later declares it a "failed experiment." Free of his ties to the rail industry today, he candidly reviews Amtrak's troubled history, its loss of market share, and its ability to provide better and faster service. Vranich reveals how Amtrak trains on most routes are not only slower than American trains were fifty years ago but are also slower than some trains found today in the Third World.

Vranich argues for passenger trains where and when they are needed. He praises innovative commuter rail agencies, high-speed train planners, and long-distance "land-cruise" trains run by independent organizations. He also offers insights from other countries, pointing the way to a successful rail system in the United States. This is a blueprint to defederalize and liquidate Amtrak-- a bold and convincing call to kill a wasteful government system. Vranich shows how to smartly dissolve Amtrak while keeping vital trains running in the twenty-first century.

for more information click here

Deariled-Still a very timely book!

The value of this book continues to grow with the passage of time. In "Derailed" the author predicts that Amtrak is destined to repeate the mistakes of the past. Events are proving him right.

Vranich decried Amtrak's operation of useless "pork barrel" trains but Amtrak went ahead and added a new Wisconsin train that carries an average of five passengers per day. He warned that Amtrak's financial plight will worsen, and it has according to a report by the US Department of Transportation Inspector General issued in late 2000. The writer said that Amtrak would continue to offer deficient service, which is true in the Midwest where in 2001 Amtrak suspended the majority of its Chicago-Detroit service for an entire month due to "poor weather". Mr. Vranich argued for a change in Amtrak leadership. Now the Heritage Foundation, a think tank close to the Republician Party, has called for a clean sweep of Amtrak's board of directors including the resignation Tommy Thompson (President Bush's HHS Secretary and former Wiscon Governor) from the chairmanship of Amtrak's board.

The book is rich in not-easily found research about how foreign nations are replacing their versions of Amtrak with innovative public and private ventures. This work deserves all the praise is has received and, as Amtrak continues to blunder along, is a book that offers important lessons for the twenty-first century.

for more information click here

Still timely, "DERAILED" a must read.

In the midst of renewed interst in the future of AMTRAK, Jospeh Vranich has delivered the best available work on the subject.

AMTRAK must be viewed in a multi-modal passanger an freight enviroment. Saddled with antiquated thinking, and a politically motivated route structure, the ability of AMTRAK to deliver on the promise of future profitability is indeed open to question. Vranich provides the history, politics, technical information, and marketing factors which will effect futre passenger rail operations in the United States. Although controversial, his facts are well researched and his opinions appear well founded. I found the book quite readable, and a must buy for anyone intersted in the area of passenger rail transportation.

for more information click here

Just imagine what government run health care would be like!

There is nothing better than traveling by train. They are far more enjoyable and comfortable than a car or a plane (especially for distances of 50-250 miles), and high speed trains are just flat out cool. I only wish that train travel in America was a viable transportation alternative - but it is not. Joseph Vranich helped build Amtrak when passanger rail was "failing" in the late 1960s. Now he is one of its most staunch enemies.

This book is not that complex, making it accessible to the casual railfan rather than a government policy wonk or rail industry insider. Vranich lays out what and why Amtrak has failed. He also explains what a post-Amtrak world would look and how a transition back to private railroads is to be accomplished in the buraucratic and political reality in which it exists today.

In retrospect, Amtrak probably never should have been created. With visionary leadership and limited government/legal intervention, the railroads probably would have rebounded along with the 80s-90s travel boom spurred on by airline deregulation. Another book worth reading is "Getting There: The Epic Struggle Between Roads and Rails in the American Century" by Stephen Goddard. In it, the author lays out why railroads declined in post-WWII America - placing Vranich's work into a more historical context. Railroads collapsed because of exessive government regulations hampering their inability to compete with the less regulated automobile.

Which leads me to my review's title. I read this book a few years ago and was compelled to revisit it when reading recently, in relationship to the 2004 presidential race, of the failure of the Amtrak Reform Council (aimed at privatizing Amtrak). I was reminded of the current debate on health care. There is a health care crisis looming and it is the result too much government regulation in the pharmacutical and health insurance industries. One needs only to look at the current flu vaccine crisis to see the hand of excessive government regulations and price controls causing shortages. Vranich's book serves as a cautionary warning to us all of what can happen when government takes over an industry its own regulations helped to destroy. Government run passenger rail service in this country is a disgrace and a disaster. The parallels between the railroad and health care industries in this regard are stunning. Vranich explores rail privatization in Europe and elsewhere; similar privatization plans existed in the failed European public health care industry.

Vranich's book is a must read for people who worry about the government-run trains, but also for those of us who worry about a government take-over of 1/7 of the US economy, the health care industry.

Maybe, I'm a bit out there in drawing the comparision, but I doubt it. After reading Vranich's book and seeing the state of American passenger train, I hope I'm wrong. The thought of a hospital run like an Amtrak train scares the crap out of me.

for more information click here

The Right Track

Americans do not back the the millions of tax payers dollars wasted on Amtrack. This book proves that a privatization plan can
work and that high speed train service should be offered in busy
corridors of the country (especially Boston-NY-DC). Long-haul service should be priced as a premium like the Candadian Rocky Mountain tourist train.

And sorry to say, unionized Amtrack workers are public employment at its worst.
They are ALWAYS complaining about their jobs
in FRONT of passengers. Professionalism and customer service does
not seem to be required. Have you ever seen a manager supervising personnel on a train? I believe they would all starve if they had to work on commission.

American passenger train service rates lower than our public education system in comparison to the rest of the world. And that
you really have to work for!

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3