On a fast train to nowhere

My apologies, dear FOCEs, for not blogging today. It was a busy and eventful 24 hours, and for better or worse I was too busy to blog. But no fear -- I'm back. I leave this post for all you poor sods with nothing better to do on a Friday night, with perhaps more after I get back from dinner because I have nothing better to do on a Friday.

In honor of my Cranky Travels to the Big Apple yesterday, I bring you this Bloomberg report about the latest trials and tribulations of Amtrak's high-speed Acela Express service (which I did not use, to ease the Cranky Budget). The brakes, it appears, are cracking.

So is the veneer on the idea that this high-speed rail idea was a good one. Sure, the Northeast Corridor between Washington, New York and Boston is the only profitable part of the rail network. And I'm willing to believe that high-speed trains are the best way to compete effectively with the airline shuttles. And I'm sure with proper marketing, careful schedule and reliable service, the train could do just that.

But how you get from those suppositions to the notion that it would be wise to design the trains from scratch (instead of borrowing bullet-train designs already used for years in Europe and Japan) is beyond me. Should we now be surprised that the trains were rolled out late and have been plagued by one technical problem after another? Of course not. Did anyone think that this process would not end in eternal litigation as Amtrak and the manufacturers sue each other to the Chattanooga Station and back? If you though we'd avoid that scenario, here's the bridge link. Should we be appalled at the waste of our taxpayer money? I sure am.

I ride Amtrak periodically, but have not enjoyed the Acela Express experience yet. My main experience with the service is seeing it flagged as "delayed" on the boards in stations every time I ride a regular train. Amtrak is presumably embarassed about this latest episode. Well, they should be. Surely we ought to be able to make the trains run on time.