Tom Waits once sang, "Money's just something you throw off the back of a train." He could have been singing about Amtrak, everyone's favorite unprofitable, publicly subsidized railway system.

Amtrak was created during the Nixon administration to sustain passenger train travel in the United States. Up until then, U.S. passenger rail service was in decline, losing money to air travel and an ever-growing car culture. But, as Simon Van Zuylen-Wood writes for National Journal, Amtrak didn't exactly save the dream of viable American train travel. Instead, it has been bogged down in bureaucratic nightmares ever since.

All you've got to do is look around the world: People often underscore the inadequacy of American rail service with comparisons to train service in Europe or Asia. For instance, the Acela Express is the speediest train in the Americas, but its average of 68 miles per hour between Boston and Washington pales in comparison to the 154 mph average of a Spanish train running from Madrid to Barcelona. Even funding comparisons are depressing. While China will spend $128 billion this year on rail travel, Congress recently approved a paltry spending package that gives Amtrak just $1.4 billion per year. U.S. trains aren't the planet's premier railways—not by a longshot.

To get the story on Amtrak's bedeviling history, funding fiascos, and disasters (rail lines between New Orleans and Florida were washed out by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and have never been restored), read Van Zuylen-Wood's excellent full article, which concludes with a chicken-and-the-egg question. Is there really no demand for trains, or does a lack of excellent train service prevent people from wanting a ride? Ultimately, he writes, U.S. rail service is a paradox: "To get to the conservative dream of a privatized Amtrak, you would first have to pursue the liberal path of spending a massive amount of public money." Good luck with that one.

Source: National Journal

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io