With the recent submission of 278 pre-applications for the high speed rail grants from 40 states, one question remains to be answered: who should manage all of these high speed rail lines when they’re built?
Building and upgrading infrastructure is the foremost issue on everyone’s mind, but it may stand to begin answering this critical question now. Considering who will manage and how these lines will be managed is probably an integral part of each of these applications, but few sources have highlighted plans for their continued operation once service has been established along these routes. Might these be municipally owned and operated? Or perhaps joint public-private ventures?
Might I step out onto a limb and suggest a coordinated high speed rail deployment and operation? Perhaps a locally-operated, nationally-managed system of high speed rail operations integrated into Amtrak. After all, the bastard lovechild trainsets of Bombardier and Alstom under operation by Amrak on its Acela Service are the only high speed trainsets in operation in the United States. What unique lessons can Acela’s operators tell us about running high speed rail in the United States, as opposed to running high speed rail elsewhere? What benefits might we gain from such an organization and what terrors await?
One benefit would certainly be the possibility of creating uniform infrastructure in each high speed corridor. Along those lines, such an organization would be able to purchase standardized equipment en-masse, reducing initial purchase costs. Once you have nationally standardized infrastructure and equipment, you gain the ability to interoperate equipment and have overlapping service between these established corridors. This opens the door to a national high speed rail network, rather than islands of high speed rail access. A similar merger between LIRR and Metro North Railroad to form MTA Railroads has been considered to cut costs and reduce redundant staffing within the two organizations. The merger would allow joint orders of equipment, reducing the overhead and extra cost in having to complete two separate orders for nearly identically operating railroads.
By having each initial corridor locally operated by a local high speed rail division of Amtrak under a national high speed rail division, each corridor can receive the specialized management it needs to thrive. But in this lies the danger of bureaucracy and local railroads being held hostage to the whim of different states. There’s also the issue of equipment failures. While the standardization of these trainsets across the national system would allow for equipment to be routed where necessary, it would also mean that if an issue comes up with the build quality of these trains, the whole network could be brought down, much like what happened with Acela in its first few months.
The idea of having high speed rail incorporated into Amtrak is a nightmare to Amtrak critics, who see the organization as a ‘mobile, money-burning machine’, among other things. Amtrak has suffered in the past in part due to poor management as a result of negligent appointments to the head of the organization, as well as negligence on the part of the government and the general public. A lot has improved recently within the organization, especially with the recent line of organization heads who have actually known a thing or two about managing a railway and advocating for its existence. Amtrak is certainly no British First Group, Eurostar, French SNCF, German Deutsche Bahn, or Japan Railways Group, but it’s all we’ve got and it’s managed to show through Acela that passenger service can break even or be profitable in the United States.