Andrew I doubt you will get a lot of support from the St louis citizenry. We’ve done our share by building metro. Besides, when Lambert’s heaviest traffic load comes from crop dusters several years down the road we will have successfully isolated ourselves from all those progressives out there in those blue states. Then and only then will we be safe and happy in our own little cultural backwater.

Andrew Bradley:

“We could easily move some money from our country’s bloated defense budget and get the military-industrial complex to build high-speed trains rather than $350 million F-22s that the Defense Department does not even want.”

If money can be moved from our defense budget, why not return it to the people who paid it to the government in the first place? Then anybody who wants to play with trains, can approach lending agencies with their own business plans for financing.

Excuse me but your hand is in my pocket again.

Oh my - Lunar and Iconoclastic Sage are pretty petulant aren’t they? I get both of these viewpoints - but come on, lighten up … the only thing that negativity will get us is inertia.

Andrew - I share your vision on the potential upside that high speed rail can bring. I also think that creative minds will find a way to make it happen. On one point I agree with Sage - the private sector is probably the best answer, for a variety of reasons - cost control, timeliness, creativity, the national deficit, etc.

Oh yes, lets just keep pouring tax payer dollars into losing government programs. Sounds like a very good liberal idea, and it has worked so well in the past.

You really owe it to yourself to read “Atlas Shrugged” sometime. This novel, written before the founding of Amtrak, depicts a time when this country begins thinking in socialistic terms. As a result, the government steps into the railroad industry and begins forcing railroads to serve lines that cannot financially support the service. Amtrak is the fulfillment of that prophetic novel. Amtrak charges fares that cannot come even close to paying the costs of the service. Why should taxpayers be funding this at all?

“Amtrak charges fares that cannot come even close to paying the costs of the service. Why should taxpayers be funding this at all?”

–for the same reason we fund roads and interstates, and airports; because transportation is a fundamental aspect of infrastructure, and therefore is a legitimate activity for government to be funding. (I noted the passive-aggressive comment ‘play with trains’, implying trains are a novelty; too bad that’s simply not true.)

If you’re using my money to build roads, then I’m using your money to build trains; the fact that you don’t use them or like them doesn’t make them less important.

reality check:

“–for the same reason we fund roads and interstates, and airports; because transportation is a fundamental aspect of infrastructure, and therefore is a legitimate activity for government to be funding. (I noted the passive-aggressive comment ‘play with trains’, implying trains are a novelty; too bad that’s simply not true.)

If you’re using my money to build roads, then I’m using your money to build trains; the fact that you don’t use them or like them doesn’t make them less important.”

Trains are a novelty, except in population concentrations as in an overcrowded Western Europe or Japan. We’ve had trains and still have some but because of it’s size, the country has not developed along rail lines, nor will it, some of the roads you resent using your money for support the limited usage of trains.

Your nostalgia for things past is better placed in one horse buggies with a triangular warning reflector like the Amish use to slow down society.

Since Obama became President there has been a significant increase in US Military casualties in Afghanistan. If you watch the mainstream media you may not know this as troop casualties are not as highly reported as in the Bush days so not to embarrass the Obama administration. But the current administration has also once again put the blame on Bush saying that he didn’t pay enough attention to this war as the reason for this increase. There is most likely another very valid reason. A soldier just returned from Afghanistan.

This brave US soldier says that since Obama has been the “Commander and Chief” US military moral is at the lowest it has been since the Clinton days. He says the biggest reason for the increase in Military casualties in Afghanistan is the largely unreported immediate change in the rules of engagement that Obama insisted on the first week he was in office. No longer are US troops allowed to return fire on suspected terrorist insurgents if any so called civilians are in the area and could come under fire. If they are being fired upon by snipers from a village they are not allowed to return fire especially if any women and children are present.

The Muslim and Taliban insurgents know of this change in our rules of engagement are now using women and children as shields in fire fights with US troops knowing that they will not return fire. One of this recently returned soldier’s best friends was killed in a fire fight by snipers firing from a building in a village where the Taliban had positioned women and children standing in plain view on the roof of the building. His unit was prohibited by Obama’s new orders from returning fire at the snipers. I don’t care how you feel about the war in Iraq or Afghanistan or Bush but to put our brave soldiers in harms way like this and then tie their hands to defend themselves is just wrong!!!

Passenter/Rail service works better in the east, in the high density areas because it never took the same deep dip-there as it has in the midwest.

Out here…infratructures were destroyed or modified…running on schedule
became impossible because passenger trains have to stop for freight trains. And good ole St. Louis eliminated all passenger train service into and out of Union Station. Midwest population has been lost to the Sunbelt, West, and to the Carolinas.

Again it is not ‘high time’ this or that is done. It’s 40 years too late.

Burroughs, I’ve heard the same thing-Do you have anything in print that supports this???