It’s official: Amtrak will add a second daily round trip to its Pennsylvanian service between Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Philadelphia and New York City, likely beginning this fall.
But it’s old news, given how long Amtrak’s been talking about it.
It’s the culmination of a $180 million project to improve the Pennsylvania portion of the route (part federal tax dollars, part commonwealth taxpayer dollars) designed, primarily, to reduce delays to Norfolk Southern freight trains that share the route with Amtrak. Norfolk Southern owns the line.
But as we noted three years ago, when this project first was announced, it will do little to nothing to reduce Amtrak travel times on the route.
As a laudatory Post-Gazette editorial was forced to admit at the time, “(O)verall [passenger train] speeds won’t go up: It will still likely take around 9 hours to get from the Golden Triangle to New York.”
And nearly 5 ½ hours to Harrisburg, we reminded then, adding that one can drive to New York City from Pittsburgh in just under 6 hours. And one can drive to Harrisburg from Pittsburgh in just over 3 hours.
And a major bugaboo remains that while passenger trains are supposed to have priority over freight trains, because the line between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg is owned by Norfolk Southern, freight typically gets special preference.
Again, from a 2023 “At Large”: “Thus, it more than appears that taxpayers are having their pockets turned out to subsidize not better or faster passenger train service but Norfolk Southern’s freight-fueled bottom line.”
But that’s not the only problem the perennially “problemed” Amtrak faces.
As Davd Peter Alan wrote after Amtrak’s late July board meeting (at Railwayage.com), “Amtrak is operating under adverse conditions of some sort over most of its network. These conditions are different on each of Amtrak’s service lines, from poor infrastructure on the Northeast Corridor (NEC) to financial difficulties that the states are now facing.”
It’s now “tiny long-distance network” is in “critical” condition because of Amtrak’s failure to keep up with capital infrastructure work and very old rolling stock, Alan says.
Alan also reports that Amtrak dumped the news on July 31, a Friday, that it indeed is considering a major restructuring. Details are sparse. But it’s difficult to image the coming second Pittsburgh train will be very long lived, even with Amtrak now touting “record” passenger numbers on that line.
Here’s a troubling headline and subhead from the SpotlightPA media site:
Pennsylvania small towns set to get latest wave of federal funding for EV chargers: The state leads the nation in building new federally funded electric vehicle charging stations.
Per the report:
“The funding is the latest wave of a $5 billion federal program created under the Biden administration to build out EV chargers across the country. A previous phase of the program placed chargers along interstates and other major roads, but this round is focused on building chargers in local communities. All told, Pennsylvania is slated to receive $171 million by the program’s end.”
Taxpayers nationwide continue to have their pockets turned out for something they have absolutely no business paying for.
Did government pay for the establishment of gasoline filling stations in the 1900s? No, the oil companies that stood to profit from the sale of gas did. They saw an emerging market, risked their own capital and turned a profit (and to this day) from meeting demand.
So, why have electric companies not done the same thing and built electric vehicle charging stations to capitalize on the advent of EVs?
Why indeed. There’s insufficient demand in a contrived marketplace created by government that is not worth any power company’s mass investment. The losses that major automakers now are incurring for taking government bribes to build such vehicles is proof positive of their not risking their capital alone for a dud product was a prudent decision.
Yet government – at all levels – continue to ram this nonsense down the public’s throat and make them pay for the gagging.
As one commentator on the story put the rural charging station story into perspective:
“Thirty-six chargers installed so far at a cost of $5,868,000! Incredible. Mostly paid for by people that don’t own electric vehicles or no vehicles at all. Only a Democratic Socialist mind could understand the logic here.”
For shame. For there’s absolutely no logic involved in such public purpose-less command economics.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
