Spank That Donkey

(Woo, Woo) George W. Bush has a great chance to repeat one of Ronald Reagan's greatest accomplishments and fire all the Amtrak Workers, like Reagan fired the striking Air Traffic Controllers.

Let me tell you what is wrong with Amtrak from personal experience.  The family and I caught the 'Vermonter' at the New Carrolton Station in Maryland and took it all the way to White River Junction NH.  The entire trip took about 12 hours.  The fastest part of the trip was between DC and NYC, which was only about three hours, (and about half way).

During this time we all went to the dining car, played cards and watched the scenery go by.   What caught our attention immediately after about the fifth train stop was that we kept seeing our conductor changing almost at every stop.  After NYC we asked the remaining conductor why this kept occurring, and his reply was well, each conductor actually runs the train, and each one "knows the tracks the best".  (Fifteen minutes between stops?)

Now the conductor is the guy inside the train who verifies tickets, and assuredly he can radio the guy actually driving the train up front and stop the train, but let's get for real.... He isn't driving the train, now how many actual engineers got on and off at each stop, I don't know, but here inlies the problem.   You could tell right away that the union contract was set up so that it took at least 8 conductors for that twelve hour trip to White River Junction.

You can only imagine how many more duplicative jobs in maintenance the union has saddled Amtrak with...  Now don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of heavy rail passenger travel, and I take it whenever I can, but the system is broken, and I guarantee you the Union is a huge part of it!  Once the unions are eliminated and Amtrak can get it's payroll under control, negotiate with freight companies to improve access to tracks, and finally get profitable.

Fire them GWB!