We have been exploring the effects of the deregulatory interventions that the U.S. implemented from 1970 to 1980—extraordinary measures that aimed to rescue railroad corporations and keep the infrastructure they operate under private control.

As we continue this exploration, we wanted to share a perspective that vividly brings to life the significance of what happened at that time and in the years that followed—not just the harms that were inflicted, but also the opportunities that were missed, the potential that remains untapped, and the enduring urgency of attempting to turn things around.

Who better to do that than Ken Kirschling, who began working in the railroad industry shortly after its deregulation in the 1980s and remains deeply involved in it to this day? Ken is the owner and principal bridge engineer at Rail Star Engineering. By a stroke of good fortune, his office is also right next door to mine.

As you will hear in our conversation, Ken’s up-close experience of the transformations that U.S. railroads have undergone imbues his stories with a unique energy. Decades after the fact, you can still feel Ken’s excitement when he recounts working in an industry that was no longer resource-constrained and was, for a time, actually growing and innovating—even as it was leaving smaller communities behind in order to free up that capital. No less palpable, however, is Ken’s profound disappointment at the funneling of capital out of the system that has since taken place, and the stagnation and deterioration of service that has ensued.

Whether you are already familiar with these themes or approaching them for the first time, this conversation is sure to inspire you with both appreciation and concern for the past, present, and future of this critical national infrastructure on which we all depend.

With Gratitude & Solidarity,

Bill Moyer

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

As we gear up for the release of Episodes 5 and 6 of Reconnect America, we wanted to share some of the conversations that have been guiding us toward a deeper understanding of the last 46 years of U.S. rail transport and the evolving relationship between this critical national infrastructure and the businesses and communities that depend upon it.

My guest for today’s conversation is John Strong, professor of finance at the College of William and Mary. Professor Strong is the author of a handful of articles that have proven uniquely valuable in illuminating some of the interconnected issues that we are grappling with—in particular, the development of the operating model known as Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR) and the rise of a class of activist investors who have aggressively forced this model upon railroad managers in North America.

In addition to these themes, our conversation also explores how the ground for PSR and shareholder activism was laid by an earlier wave of adaptation to railroad and financial deregulation. Driven by the newfound ability to spin off and abandon less profitable lines, merge systems, and enter long-term contracts with discounts that privileged the largest multinational corporations, this initial pivot was aimed at moving fewer, longer, so-called “unit trains” carrying a single commodity from a single origin to a single destination. Financially, it was fueled by an emergent class of index fund managers, whose passive oversight left a power vacuum that would ultimately be filled by activist investors.

In a moment when Wall Street’s stranglehold on U.S. railroads threatens to trigger yet another wave of anti-competitive consolidation, this conversation sheds valuable light on the evolving incentive structures that brought us to where we are today.

With Gratitude & Solidarity,

Bill Moyer

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Jess is a resident of East Palestine, Ohio, where the 2023 derailment of a Norfolk Southern train and the subsequent decision to vent and burn over 115,000 gallons of toxic vinyl chloride caused an environmental and public health disaster whose consequences will be unfolding for decades to come.

In the aftermath of the derailment, Jess dove headlong into studying the countless layers of profit-driven corner-cutting and neglect that led to and exacerbated the disaster. Earlier this year, she launched Rail Watch, an organization aimed at protecting the safety of trackside communities across North America.

Community organizing and coalition-building is of vital importance in a moment of political timidity on the part of our elected officials, regulatory rollback by executive agencies, and the entrenched captivity of railroad and other corporations to the unfettered power of financial interests. Our conversation focused not just on what happened in East Palestine, but also on how to build from the power we have to the power we need to bring about a world where communities are not endangered, but rather served by the infrastructure that passes through them.

I hope you find our conversation as informative and inspiring as I did!

With Gratitude & Solidarity,

Bill Moyer

Jess is a resident of East Palestine, Ohio, where the 2023 derailment of a Norfolk Southern train and the subsequent decision to vent and burn over 115,000 gallons of toxic vinyl chloride caused an environmental and public health disaster whose consequences will be unfolding for decades to come

In the aftermath of the derailment, Jess dove headlong into studying the countless layers of profit-driven corner-cutting and neglect that led to and exacerbated the disaster. Earlier this year, she launched Rail Watch, an organization aimed at protecting the safety of trackside communities across North America.

Community organizing and coalition-building is of vital importance in a moment of political timidity on the part of our elected officials, regulatory rollback by executive agencies, and the entrenched captivity of railroad and other corporations to the unfettered power of financial interests. Our conversation focused not just on what happened in East Palestine, but also on how to build from the power we have to the power we need to bring about a world where communities are not endangered, but rather served by the infrastructure that passes through them.

I hope you will take a few minutes to watch the preview above—and keep an eye out for the full interview, coming soon!

With Gratitude & Solidarity,

Bill Moyer

That promise has been broken, and Wall Street is only partially to blame. A lack of clarity and specificity in the statutes that authorize the Surface Transportation Board (STB) to regulate U.S. railroads has also prevented this agency from exercising the authority it is meant to have. That is why a growing base of support is coalescing around the bipartisan Reliable Rail Service Act.

Ann Warner, the guest of today’s episode, is one of the figures at the forefront of this coalition. She serves as managing partner at Ann Warner LLC and spokesperson for the Freight Rail Customer Alliance (FRCA), an “alliance of freight rail shippers impacted by continued unrestrained freight rail market dominance over rail-dependent shippers.”

Ann’s legal expertise and her work at the FRCA make this episode a perfect follow-up to our fascinating conversation earlier this month with FRCA President Emily Regis. Whereas Emily focused more on the concrete ways in which Class I railroads take advantage of their customers—who often have no other transportation options—Ann helps us understand the legal structures that allow these abuses to continue.

In particular, Ann illuminates why the Reliable Rail Service Act is necessary to right these wrongs and begin to put U.S. railroads back in service of public interests rather than Wall Street greed.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

As we prepare to continue the story into the present day with Episode Five, we are exploring the experiences of shippers who depend on railroads to move their products, by speaking with some of the folks who represent these businesses in negotiations with railroads and before the Surface Transportation Board (STB).

Emily Regis is one of these people. Emily is president of the Freight Rail Customer Alliance, an “alliance of freight rail shippers impacted by continued unrestrained freight rail market dominance over rail-dependent shippers.” Emily is also Fuel Resource Administrator for the Arizona Electric Power Cooperative and President of the National Coal Transportation Association.

Now, those familiar with Solutionary Rail will probably know that much of our work has been focused on facilitating a transition away from fossil fuels. So you might be wondering: why are we talking with someone who works on behalf of coal producers and their customers?

For one thing, as we highlighted in Episodes Two and Four of our main series, a large part of the reason why the U.S. was once able to balance the public purpose of rail transport with the need of shareholders to earn a profit is because of the principle of common carriage. Railroads once had an obligation to provide reasonable service upon reasonable request to every shipper along their lines. It was only once they were allowed to discriminate, de-market, and turn business away that the system ceased to serve the public. Coal shippers have no other option than to move their product by rail, and so they—alongside shippers of a few other rail-dependent commodities—are especially vulnerable to the railroads’ ongoing abuse of their market power.

But there is another reason why having this kind of conversation is so crucial to the Reconnect America project. One of the central pillars of the vision we’re developing here is the idea that when it comes to rail transport, fighting for the public interest is a cause that transcends partisan politics. It is not that we don’t have disagreements. But if we cannot talk with people that have different perspectives on some things, then we will never learn enough about them to find out what we have in common.

As you will hear in this conversation—which took place in early October, between Emily and Solutionary Rail Director and Reconnect America Host Bill Moyer—we do have a lot in common. And we also have a ton to learn from people like Emily. When we advocate for a rail system that better serves communities, rail customers are one of the key intermediaries in that relationship. It is their needs that have to be amplified and addressed.

The picture that Emily paints in this conversation is one of a rail system dominated by a business model that benefits only the railroads and their shareholders, at the expense of customers. It is a system that has seen cuts to service, a weaponization of surcharges, a suppression of complaints against the railroads for fear of retaliation, and a process to address these complaints that is impossibly bureaucratic and resource-consuming—and not all that helpful even when it succeeds. We discussed the dangers of the pending merger between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern, for shippers that would be left captive to the monopoly power of a single railroad to move their freight. And we considered possible ways to re-envision how we do rail transport in this country.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

In Episodes 2 and 3, we focused on how the public responded to the partial collapse of this system in 1970 by creating Amtrak, a publicly-owned passenger railroad which relieved railroad corporations of their costly obligation to move people. We also discussed how Amtrak was nonetheless tasked with making a profit on this money-losing service, forcing it to eviscerate the nation’s passenger rail system in pursuit of that goal.

In this episode, we retrace this history from the freight rail side of things, showing how our refusal to take full public responsibility for this critical infrastructure, even when circumstances seemed to cry out for it, led us on a wild goose chase in search of another path to stability. That chase carried us through two industry-wide death spirals, two merger waves, two temporary nationalizations, and a record-shattering bankruptcy, until legislators finally decided to change the paradigm—not by taking on the cost of providing the service, but rather by sacrificing service and giving free rein to Wall Street greed, all in the name of economic efficiency.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Recommended: Phillip Longman’s October 2024 article arguing that fixing our freight rail system is a prerequisite to re-industrializing the U.S., “Train Drain: How deregulation and private equity have gutted the U.S. freight rail system—and with it, the promise of America’s industrial renewal”

Co-written and produced by Bill Moyer and Sasha Elenko. Engineering by August Moore and Tom Stiles. Musical theme by Ken Jacobsen and additional music by Ota Prota.

Forward Together!

-Bill Moyer (host)Reconnect AmericaSolutionary Rail

Recommended pieces from Byron’s excellent Substack, The Pacific:

* “UP Triggers the Endgame”

* “We Need a New Staggers Act”

* “Paper Barriers and Feudal Warlords”

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

In 2023, Surface Transportation Board (STB) member Robert Primus was the sole board member to vote against the merger of Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern to form Canadian Pacific Kansas City. President Trump’s recent illegal firing of board member Primus further weakens the STB and corrupts its adjudicatory mandate. The absence of a key critical voice from the Board raises the pressure on concerned workers, shippers, competing railroads, and the public to make their voices heard. Unless Primus is reinstated, the approval of this Wall Street railroad merger is a near done deal.

Railroad workers, in particular, find themselves in a difficult situation. Being divided into several different unions, workers and their union leaders are often forced to choose between accepting concessions for their own particular craft and holding out in the name of industry-wide solidarity. A UP-NS merger involves even higher stakes, as it could very well result in significant cuts to the workforce resulting from the elimination of redundancies between the newly-combined railroads.

To better understand the dilemmas faced by workers in the fight ahead, and to help us pick apart the smokescreens that UP and NS are promulgating in an effort to charm workers into submission, we got in touch with Ron Kaminkow. Ron is a longtime ally and collaborator of Solutionary Rail’s. He is also a co-founder, former general secretary, and current trustee of Railroad Workers United (RWU), a cross-union caucus of railroad workers that aims to build industry-wide solidarity to more effectively stand up to Wall Street’s railroads.

Last month, RWU, passed a resolution unequivocally opposing all future Class One railroad mergers. (Read the press release here.)

Although this conversation between Ron and Reconnect America Host Bill Moyer took place before Robert Primus was fired from the Surface Transportation Board, RWU has also released a statement condemning the move and demanding Primus’ immediate reinstatement. Solutionary Rail will be addressing this in the coming weeks as well.

Ron and Bill’s discussion ranged from this resolution and the stakes involved in the merger for workers, to the service meltdowns that Ron witnessed as a railroad worker during the last merger wave in the 1990s, to the larger question of whether the coast-to-coast transcontinental railroad that UP and NS are proposing to form might not be a better idea if it were owned and overseen by the public.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Serving as chair of the powerful House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee for the last four of his 36 years in Congress (and as a member for all 36), he has a priceless and practically peerless perspective on why it is so important for government to be a counterforce to the insatiable appetite of Wall Street.

Mr. DeFazio's career spanned a period when, to his dismay, the checks on big banks, controls on corporate trade, and limits on election spending all went off the rails. He saw firsthand the rise of "Precision Scheduled Railroading" and how it left service, communities, and public interests behind, as Wall Street targeted railroads as an extractable resource, not unlike the forests and communities he also fought to protect.

In 2022, alongside the late Representative Donald Payne J.R., who tragically passed away last year, DeFazio introduced H.R. 8649, the Freight Rail Shipping Fair Market Act. Solutionary Rail was honored to have provided a Rep. Payne a briefing ahead of his taking over the Railroads Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee in 2021. Much of that was strongly reflected in the H.R. 8649. In our interview, DeFazio reveals how the lobbying power of the Class I railroads, and their ability to retaliate against their customers for trying to get better service, ultimately killed the bill.

A progressive who represented a largely rural and politically diverse district, Peter DeFazio sought to create common cause with common sense solutions, always putting communities, the environment, and long term resilience ahead of special interests.

We could learn a lot from him, and this interview is an opportunity to do so. I especially hope the rail shippers out there tune into this one. In the fights ahead, we need shippers to stand for a rail system that works for big and small shippers, urban and rural trackside communities, workers, and passengers alike. We'll be stronger if we fight shoulder to shoulder with no one left behind.

Listen and enjoy!

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

We got a chance to talk with Greg about the Union Pacific’s proposed $85-billion acquisition of Norfolk Southern, a pair of important pieces of legislation recently reintroduced in Congress, the importance of solidarity between workers across different transportation modes, and more.

This is the first in a string of interviews tackling the latest developments in the railroad industry and their implications for ongoing attempts to put rail transport back in service of public interests and solving 21st-century problems. Stay tuned for more!

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Last October, Phil published the essay “Train Drain: How deregulation and private equity have gutted the U.S. freight rail system—and with it, the promise of America’s industrial renewal”. In a pair of followup pieces in January and June of this year, Phil expanded the argument to include other modes of freight and passenger transport.

Phil's thinking is deeply aligned with the vision behind Reconnect America, making this one of the most valuable conversations we have published thus far. Stay tuned to hear more from Phil in the weeks ahead.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

In September 2024, Basel authored the landmark report “Kings Over the Necessaries of Life”: Monopolization and the Elimination of Competition in America’s Agriculture System, which starkly documented the consolidation of market power in the U.S. agriculture sector and provided a detailed history of antimonopoly efforts in this area between 1860 and the present day.

We got the chance to speak with Basel this past January to learn more about this history, and in particular about the role that railroads and railroad regulation had to play in it. Here is our conversation.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Earlier this year, Bill and Ed published a white paper titled “Creating a Robust American Passenger Rail System.” It argues for a complete revamp of how we do passenger rail in the United States. Drawing from passenger rail systems around the world, and from the keys to the success of the U.S. highway and aviation systems, the paper proposes establishing permanent formula funding for a new, national passenger rail authority to construct a network of dedicated passenger tracks that will be open to competition from private operators.

We got the chance to speak with Bill and Ed this past March to learn more about their proposal. Here is our conversation.

You can find the Lakeshore Rail Alliance on BlueSky, Threads, LinkedIn, and Mastodon. You can also contact Bill and Ed by email at lakeshorerail@gmail.com.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

One of the factors we explored was the decision to leave U.S. rail infrastructure under the ownership of freight railroad corporations, who retained responsibility for managing the flow of traffic. As a result, Amtrak trains suffer horrendous delays at the hands of their hosts, who have a vested interest in giving priority to their own trains over Amtrak’s.

The freight railroads, in turn, often blame the problem on a lack of infrastructural capacity, and use the slightest potential increase in Amtrak service as a pretext to extort the public into dumping wildly overinflated sums of money into their capital projects.

Though laws passed between 1970 and 1973 attempted to mitigate this conflict of interest early on, these statutes have practically never been enforced.

But according to Tom White, a veteran railroader with nearly 60 years of experience in the industry, law enforcement is not necessarily the solution we need. And neither, in many cases, is a lack of infrastructural capacity to blame. After all, the U.S. has relatively low traffic density on its rail system, relative to the rest of the world—and in much of the country there is less traffic today than there was for most of the 20th century. Theoretically, there is already more than enough physical capacity for freight and passenger trains to operate over the same system without significant conflicts.

Rather, Tom believes that the deeper problem is a severe loss of knowledge in managing rail traffic—a field called dispatching. As the deregulated freight railroads have been taken over by activist investors who have sought to extract wealth from the industry at any cost, the qualifying standards for railroad dispatchers have been cut to the bone. The ability to plan ahead in order to optimize fluidity is no longer expected or even taught. Tom’s solution, therefore, would be for the Federal Railroad Administration to mandate far more robust training standards, just as the Federal Aviation Administration does for air traffic controllers, and as countless other government agencies do in their own respective fields.

Our Rail Bites series presents you with some of our favorite clips from our amazing guests on Reconnect America. With Rail Bites, you can look forward to more frequent, shorter-form content in between our carefully crafted longer episodes.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

* John Robert Smith, Chair of Transportation for America and former Amtrak Board Chair.

* Meredith Richards, National Chair for the Rail Passengers Association.

* Tom White, Co-founder of Climate Rail Alliance and veteran rail planner and author with nearly 60 years in the industry.

These are three of the leaders who shaped our recent episodes and who are shaping our thinking about rail in the public interests. Each talk about their past and present work, and build upon the content of Episode 3 and update us all on the current state of affairs with Amtrak, what they see happening in rail today, and where we go from here.

Subscribe for Free to the Reconnect America podcast to be notified about future events and each episode of this documentary project.

John Robert Smith addresses the expected economic benefits of soon-to-be-restored Amtrak service along the Gulf Coast; how initial opposition from the Class I railroads was overcome to achieve this; and how reconnecting rural towns and small urban centers with passenger rail could be a way of doing justice to the crucial role that these places have in the country as a whole. (Also featured in Rail Bite #1). Amongst other things, John Robert (and the others) provides us with a nuanced critique of Amtrak’s management as well as a proposal from Transportation for America to create a national passenger rail equipment pool. T4A priorities for the Surface Transportation Reauthorization can be found in these slides from his recent presentation at this EESI event.

Meredith Richards has shared with us how transportation officials in Virginia came to prioritize moving more people by rail as an antidote to rampant congestion on Virginia’s highways and the impressive results of economic benefits studies conducted by the Rail Passengers Association, and how adding trip frequencies led to a ballooning of ridership numbers on one Amtrak service. (Also featured in Rail Bite #2 & Rail Bite #8). In this panel discussion, Meredith augments our previous conversations with additional insights and an update on the current work of the Rail Passengers Association. Listeners will likely want to checkout the “Blueprint” she refers, RPA’s approach to the upcoming Surface Transportation Reauthorization being considered by Congress. Learn more at RailPassengers.org/blueprint.

Tom White, says that part of the problem is that we have forgotten how to make good use of the trains we have. Current U.S. intercity passenger rail service is often so unreliable, infrequent, and inconvenient in its scheduling, that most people who take an Amtrak train once or twice are given little reason to do it again. Top speed is just a number when you’re stuck behind a parked freight train for thirty minutes; and even overall trip times count for little when the only available trip starts or ends in the middle of the night. (Also featured in Rail Bite #7.) In this panel discussion Tom provides considerable additional information about his open access ideas, the needs for a shared standard for passenger cars for the equipment pool idea to work, and insights into the need for - and challenge of instituting - a higher standard for workforce development in rail operations.

If you agree that this is important information, help us build a movement by sharing Reconnect America with your friends.

In this third episode of the Reconnect America series, we continue our deep dive into the history and future prospects of U.S. passenger rail—and the vital importance of rail service to the social and economic vitality of communities across the country.

In Episode 2, we discussed the historic social contract that the U.S. struck with its privately-owned railroads in the late 1800s, and the railroad’s common carrier obligation to serve passengers and freight. We described how a series of public investments in competing modes of transportation gradually undermined the rail industry’s capacity to compete and thus pushed the industry to the brink of collapse.

Episode 3 picks up with the creation of Amtrak, an attempt to save the railroad corporations by relieving them of their common carrier duty to provide passenger service. We examine the political conundrum that ignored past experience, skirted around the option of nationalizing the rail system, and ultimately both saddled Amtrak with an impossible mandate and failed to truly resolve the crisis for the freight rail system. We hear from multiple expert guests how Amtrak’s initial mandate to make a profit on service that hadn’t been revenue positive for at least 50 years ignored the broader value of rail service. They describe how that led to vast sections of the US population being left behind, how the new relationship between private freight and public passenger rail has played out, and what these leaders are doing to restore passenger rail service to communities across the country.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Mentioned:

* David Alff’s book: The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region (Code: “UCPNEW” for 30% off)

Also Recommended:

* Phillip Longman’s October 2024 article argues that fixing our freight rail system is a prerequisite to re-industrializing the U.S.: “Train Drain: How deregulation and private equity have gutted the U.S. freight rail system—and with it, the promise of America’s industrial renewal”

* Rail Passengers Association President and CEO Jim Mathews’ February 2025 article on the evolution of Amtrak’s mandate from profit-centric to service-centric: “Op-Ed: Amtrak Isn’t Profitable—And That’s Okay”

* While you’re at it, check out Jim’s fantastic Instagram monologue from April 2025, which tackles Amtrak privatization and the myth of profitable passenger rail.

* For a fascinating deep dive into the backroom politics behind Amtrak’s creation and the design of its initial system, this series of articles by Jeff Davis of the Eno Center for Transportation are highly recommended:

* “Amtrak at 50: The Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970”

* “Amtrak at 50: Defining the ‘Basic System’ of Service Routes”

* “Amtrak at 50: How McKinsey Designed A National Railroad”

* Amtrak recently revealed the name for its new service along the Gulf Coast: the Mardi Gras. Read the press release here.

Episode Timeline:

* 00:00—Episode 2 Recap

* 00:57—Episode 3 Introduction

* 07:15—The Political Origins of Amtrak and its Profit Mandate

* 12:36—Profit-driven Abandonments and their Impacts on Communities

* 19:24—Failure to Invest in Service Reduces Ridership, Increases Need for Subsidy, and Undermines Economic Benefits of Passenger Rail.

* 21:51—The Terms of the Deal We Struck With Private Railroad Companies in 1970-73

* 24:10—Failure of Private Railroads to Give Priority to Passenger Trains on Tracks

* 26:40—Refusal of Private Railroads to Accommodate New and Expanded Service on Track; Symptomatic of Deregulation

* 32:03—Passenger Rail as a Potential Area for Trans-Partisan Collaboration, Rural Revitalization.

* 37:16—Passenger Rail as a Vital Essential Service

* 39:10—Conclusion, Previewing Episode 4

Co-written and produced by Bill Moyer and Sasha Elenko. Engineering by August Moore. Musical theme by Ken Jacobsen and additional music by Ota Prota.

First, that passenger rail is an economic engine. Using reports and modeling tools developed by or in partnership with other institutions, the RPA has demonstrated that passenger rail routes often catalyze economic development in the communities they service at a scale many times greater than the cost of providing the service.

And second, that the key to maximizing those benefits—as well as optimizing the number of tickets sold per train and therefore reducing reliance on operating subsidies—is to invest in a high level of service. As we learned from Tom White in Rail Bite #7, passenger rail service in the U.S. today is often so threadbare that it fails to provide a desirable alternative to driving or flying for many travelers.

Crucially, however, the way to improve service is not to focus on making a profit, but rather, well, to prioritize improving service—something Amtrak was not initially created to do. It is only through decades of hard experience that lawmakers in the U.S. have gradually amended Amtrak’s mandate to emphasize service over profitability. As we learned in Episode 2 of our main series, and from Maddock Thomas, the pursuit of profit in the passenger rail business leads, as a rule, to worse, rather than better service.

Our Rail Bites series presents you with some of our favorite clips from our amazing guests on Reconnect America. With Rail Bites, you can look forward to more frequent, shorter-form content in between our carefully crafted longer episodes.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

According to Tom White, a veteran rail planner and author with nearly 60 years of experience in the industry, the problem is that we have forgotten how to make good use of the trains we have. Current U.S. intercity passenger rail service is often so unreliable, infrequent, and inconvenient in its scheduling, that most people who take an Amtrak train once or twice are given little reason to do it again. Top speed is just a number when you’re stuck behind a parked freight train for thirty minutes; and even overall trip times count for little when the only available trip starts or ends in the middle of the night.

It’s not that Americans will only ride bullet trains—it’s that we will only ride trains that actually meet our transportation needs. And 54 years into the Amtrak era, few of us are even aware that this is a possibility on our existing system. As Mr. White says, we need to create  “a much better picture of what could be before people are going to want it, rather than trying to convince people they want more of a bad product.”

Our new Rail Bites series presents you with some of our favorite clips from our amazing guests on Reconnect America. With Rail Bites, you can look forward to more frequent, shorter-form content in between our carefully crafted longer episodes.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

However, as we learn in this Rail Bite, Amtrak was given a contradictory mandate. On the one hand, it was expected to preserve passenger rail service, which had long ceased to be viable as a profit-seeking enterprise. On the other hand—and at the same time—it was expected to turn a profit and avoid relying on taxpayer subsidies. Because of this, many people believe that Amtrak was created to fail.

Whether it was created to fail or not, Amtrak’s planners had their marching orders. They set about designing a system they thought could eventually turn a profit. The result was that Amtrak discontinued about 250 trains—roughly half the system at the time—on day one of taking over passenger service from the private sector. Despite these cuts, aimed at minimizing losses, Amtrak has still never turned a profit. So it has been forced to cut service time and time again.

To adjust to this reality, Congress has shifted the statutory language surrounding Amtrak several times, to emphasize providing service and to de-emphasize—and ultimately eliminate—the obligation to turn a profit. However, Amtrak is ultimately constrained by the amount of money the federal government chooses to allocate to it, and that amount has thus far never been sufficient to generate a genuine revitalization of the system.

As Amtrak today faces a renewed threat of privatization, it is beyond essential to understand why Amtrak was created to begin with, and how the mandate it was given incentivized the development of the system we have today.

Maddock Thomas, our guest in this Rail Bite, is a researcher and organizer with Railroad Workers United (RWU), a cross-union caucus of railroad workers, that has been taking the lead in fighting for a rail system that better serves, not just the people who operate and maintain it, but all of us.

In particular, Maddock is one of the key leaders of RWU’s Public Rail Now campaign and the author of the 2024 White Paper “‘Putting America Back on Track’: The Case for a 21st Century Public Rail System.”

Our new Rail Bites series presents you with some of our favorite clips from our amazing guests on Reconnect America. With Rail Bites, you can look forward to more frequent, shorter-form content in between our carefully crafted longer episodes.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

In this timely Rail Bite, Mr. Ross—who is also a practicing Certified Public Accountant—illuminates some of the widespread misconceptions behind the expectation that passenger trains turn a profit.

In his view, we often fail to recognize the key factors that make some transportation enterprises profitable—from public investment in infrastructure to unique circumstances that allow for additional business ventures to be synergistically added to the transportation service.

Mr. Ross also argues that the purpose of government is in some sense the opposite of that of business: whereas businesses are primarily obliged to return profit to their investors, governments exist to put tax revenue toward satisfying the needs and interests of taxpayers—albeit as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Our new Rail Bites series presents you with some of our favorite clips from our amazing guests on Reconnect America. With Rail Bites, you can look forward to more frequent, shorter-form content in between our carefully crafted longer episodes.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

For almost a century, traveling by rail in these places was about as commonplace as it is today in many other parts of the world, if not more so. In Episode 2 of our main series, we explored how public investment in competing modes of transportation in the twentieth century gradually undermined the ability of railroads to provide service at a profit. The episode left off in 1970, when the federal government created Amtrak to relieve the private sector of their historic obligation to move people. In our forthcoming third episode, we will learn how Amtrak was created with a contradictory mandate: to earn a profit while providing an essential public service that had become unprofitable in most places.

One of the results of this mandate was that large swaths of the country lost access to service. Many places lost it on Amtrak’s first day, when half of the passenger trains previously operating on the U.S. network were yanked overnight. Many more places lost service in the years that followed, as these remaining connections came into conflict with the insistence that passenger rail turn a profit.

The route connecting Chicago and Seattle through the southern tier of Montana holds the unique distinction of being discontinued twice in the Amtrak era. Under the auspices of the North Coast Limited, trains had traversed this corridor since 1900. The decision to cut the route from Amtrak’s initial system, which went into effect on May 1, 1971, caused such an uproar that trains were back up and running on the route about six weeks later. But it was not to last. The re-branded North Coast Hiawatha was discontinued once again in 1979.

Today, the route is on the verge of another comeback. The organization behind it all is the Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority (BSPRA), a public rail authority formed in 2020 by a joint resolution of 12 counties in Montana, with the stated mission of restoring service to the southern tier of the state. One of the leading figures behind this effort is Dave Strohmaier, chair of BSPRA and chair of the Missoula County Board of Commissioners.

In this Rail Bite, Mr. Strohmaier pays homage to the impressive—and perhaps surprising—array of constituents that are coming together to drive the effort forward. Whereas the loss of service 46 years ago contributed to a “palpable sense of loss” and disenfranchisement—part and parcel of a broader trend—the effort to revive it has become a source of connection in divisive times.

Our new Rail Bites series presents you with some of our favorite clips from our amazing guests on Reconnect America. With Rail Bites, you can look forward to more frequent, shorter-form content in between our carefully crafted longer episodes.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Mr. Alff is associate professor of English at SUNY Buffalo and author of the 2024 book The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region (Code: “UCPNEW” for 30% off).

The following articles by Professor Alff are also must-reads for anyone interested in the history of U.S. passenger rail and the nature of infrastructure:

* “What Is Infrastructure Anyway?” in Boston Review—from the ancient concept of “public works,” which aimed for not just material, but also spiritual edification; to the invention of the term “infrastructure” by French railway engineers in reference to the gravel ballast underlying railroad tracks; to the endurance of the older, deeper notion of public works in the cultural and recreational initiatives of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration—this article will change the way you think about infrastructure.

* “Why America Still Doesn’t Have Fast Trains” in Time—well, it turns out America did have fast trains. As early as 1967, the “TurboTrain” (heard of it?) reached speeds that remain untouched in the U.S. to this day. But an insistence on keeping upfront investment to a minimum doomed this powerful train and others to operational mediocrity—a trap that continues to ensnare U.S. passenger rail 60 years later.

Our new Rail Bites series presents you with some of our favorite clips from our amazing guests on Reconnect America. With Rail Bites, you can look forward to more frequent, shorter-form content in between our carefully crafted longer episodes.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Those who follow U.S. passenger rail closely know that Virginia has accomplished a lot in the last several years, and Mrs. Richards has been one of the figures at the center of it all.

In this clip, Mrs. Richards discusses how transportation officials in Virginia came to prioritize moving more people by rail as an antidote to rampant congestion on Virginia’s highways.

Key Takeaways:

* The initiative that Virginia launched to expand rail service is called Transforming Rail in Virginia.

* To realize this vision, the state established the Virginia Passenger Rail Authority (VPRA) as an independent agency outside the more highway-centric Virginia Department of Transportation.

* To fund VPRA, the state legislature created the Commonwealth Rail Fund, which directs 7.5 percent of gas tax revenues to freight and passenger rail, 93 percent of which goes to VPRA. This guarantees a continuous stream of funding for rail. In contrast, at the federal level and in most states, rail funding depends on the ever-changing winds of politics.

Our new Rail Bites series presents you with some of our favorite clips from our amazing guests on Reconnect America. With Rail Bites, you can look forward to more frequent, shorter-form content in between our carefully crafted longer episodes.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

In this clip, Mr. Smith begins with a discussion of the expected economic benefits of Amtrak's Gulf Coast service between New Orleans and Mobile, which is slated to begin operations this year. Amtrak discontinued service on this route in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina damaged the infrastructure. The freight railroads who own the tracks, CSX and Norfolk Southern, then resisted attempts on the part of Amtrak and the communities along the route to restore passenger service. Over the past few years, however, the parties have reached an agreement, and a resumption of service is all but certain.

One key force in securing the return of service along the Gulf Coast has been the Southern Rail Commission, a rail advisory compact between Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Independent rail planning and policy organizations like the SRC have emerged as crucial catalysts for the expansion and revitalization of state and regional rail systems across the country.

The clip closes with a discussion of the vital connections that passenger rail can provide to rural towns and small urban centers who have been left behind economically—and how restoring that service could be one way of doing justice to the crucial role that these places have in the country as a whole.

Our new Rail Bites series presents you with some of our favorite clips from our amazing guests on Reconnect America. With Rail Bites, you can look forward to more frequent, shorter-form content in between our carefully crafted longer episodes.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

(Photo credit: Transportation for America)

So what happened to our once-great passenger rail system? How did the U.S. become so car-dependent that many Americans today ride trains for the first time when they travel abroad? In this first of two episodes on passenger rail, we learn about how railroads once connected us all, how public investment in other modes of transportation—but not in railroads—gradually undermined rail travel, and why in 1971 the government eventually took passenger service off the hands of the privately-owned railroads.

Our brilliant guests in this episode include three book authors, two board members for the country’s largest passenger rail advocacy group, a railroad industry veteran, and an award-winning policy analyst.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Mentioned:

Phillip Longman’s article: “Train Drain: How deregulation and private equity have gutted the U.S. freight rail system—and with it, the promise of America’s industrial renewal”

David Alff’s book: The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region

(Code: “UCPNEW” for 30% off)

Co-written and produced by Bill Moyer and Sasha Elenko. Engineering by August Moore. Musical theme by Ken Jacobsen and additional music by Ota Prota

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that compliment this podcast HERE.

Please help us keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future.

This project is 56% funded. Please help us reach our goal without paywalls or ads by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.