Go Watch ‘The Last Train to Resist Amtrak’

Let’s face it: a lot of online “documentaries” today are truly slop, and a fair number are now churned out by AI bots instead of real humans. So it’s like a sweet, gentle breeze when something new hits the intertubez that’s thoughtful, well-crafted, and grounded in real honest-to-goodness research.

“The Last Train to Resist Amtrak” is, nominally, about the saga of the California Zephyr -- that is, the California-City of San Francisco-Rio Grande-Denver Zephyr. But along the way, YouTube documentarian Peter Dibble manages to tell the story of the Rio Grande Railway, the Southern Railway, the birth of Amtrak, Brock Adams, Graham Claytor, the Southern Crescent, the Auto Train, and so very much more. (Hat tip to my friend and long-time Association member John James in Arizona for passing it my way.)

Woven throughout the roughly hour-long program is a nuanced discussion about whether and how passenger rail, including Amtrak, will ever become profitable. It’s an important discussion because the conversation around Amtrak and profitability continues to be deeply misunderstood, even by some inside Amtrak.

As I’ve written here before, Amtrak critics base their profit-motive analysis on a combination of ideological blindness, a quirk in Amtrak’s early legislative history, and admittedly confusing prose in the Amtrak statute itself. But, for the past 46 years the laws on the books have not required Amtrak to make a profit, and trying to make Amtrak profitable not only won’t work but will make it even harder for Amtrak to do what we already pay it to do.

None of the critics’ misperceptions can overcome these factual realities: one, that Congress changed its mind in 1978 on this topic and since then has never required Amtrak to make a profit; two, that the Congressional Research Service confirmed that change in 2002; three, that the Supreme Court has ruled – twice – that Amtrak is not a “private company,” and; four, that when Congress re-visited Amtrak’s mission and purpose in 2021 in the Investment in Infrastructure and Jobs Act (IIJA), also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Congress explicitly stripped profit-making out of Amtrak’s to-do list, line by line by line.

Peter Dibble’s new film (“program”? “video”? “stream”? What do we call YouTube documentaries?) makes the absence of a profit objective for Amtrak crystal-clear, and for that I’m especially grateful. Because public confusion over Amtrak’s for-profit status helps nobody, not Amtrak nor the policymakers trying to improve transportation. And as we start working on reauthorizing the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, I’d rather talk about the future than continue to rehash tired old arguments that are not only long-settled but which actively damage the cause of getting more rail investment.

In 2024, I wrote that Amtrak will never be a successful “company” in the traditional sense, and the leadership team is setting itself up for failure if it implies that Amtrak should be measured by that yardstick. I stand by that assertion, even as Amtrak begins to tout the potential for turning an operating profit by 2028 during its public Board meetings.

If Amtrak tries to masquerade as a for-profit company, it diminishes the public policy purpose for which it was created and for which it continues to be funded. A have-it-both-ways mentality (today I’m a company, tomorrow I’m an agency) contributes to the public’s confusion about how their tax dollars are actually being used. Worse, it could actually undermine continued congressional support by setting unreasonable expectations – expectations which have already been debunked and legally removed for decades.

Asking today’s version of Amtrak – part rail operator, part construction conglomerate – to pretend to make a profit now is tying cinder blocks around their ankles and telling them to run a marathon. Paradoxically, it also makes Amtrak look much worse than it actually is.

Amtrak can fairly be described as a successful government agency that does a pretty solid job with the public monies it gets, thanks to high farebox recovery, broad daily service across small and needy communities across the country, strong customer loyalty, and a return to pre-pandemic levels of record-setting passenger growth.

The yardstick we use to measure success for government programs and agencies is different than the one we use to measure the success of private companies. As a for-profit company, Amtrak fails...spectacularly. As a government agency, created half a century ago to carry out a public purpose recognized in law and in Supreme Court rulings, it is a spectacular success worth celebrating, supporting, and building up.

The very last sentence on the very last frame of “The Last Train to Resist Amtrak” reads like this: “While it has improved over the last 50 years, Amtrak continues to face many of the same challenges that have plagued it since the 1970s. It still hopes to turn a profit one day.”

Sigh.