Roads care is different as is DOD and such. They are neccessities, Amtrak isn'. Amtrak is a business, the others are not.
In other words, the government should subsidize the things you think are necessary and nothing else. Got it.
Well for Amtrak you remove unprofitable routes. You work on providing more dependable service to start out with. Instead of say 3 Cardinal routes you have now, you drop down to 2, increase your volume on those two routes making them more profitable.
Dropping down to twice a weeks will reduce volume, not increase it. Does the phrase "death spiral" mean anything to you? Look northward to Via and see what's going on up there.
No. 1 job of the gov't is security, which is what the military does, everything else falls in line after it, so you spend whatever is needed to accomplish job 1, then all other things the gov't wants to do can be paid for if they have funds. Propping up Amtrak should be way down on that list.
Amtrak is way down on that list, and we spend FAR more on defense than we need to in order to guarantee our security. What enemy of ours warrants spending as much money on defense as we do?
If you droped that down to say maybe half or a little more then have like 17, I bet you could on average pick at least a couple of hours.
You'd lose that bet.
I would think most stops are at least of 15-30 minute range and that doesn't include the train having to slow down when approaching those stops and the time it takes to get back up to speed.
You would think wrong. Have you ever even been on an Amtrak train before?
Also Amtrak should have the tracks to make it from start to finish without having to pull over for "other" trains.
Also, this is impossible without massive amounts of money to build new tracks. Where is that money going to come from? (hint: If people with a real business plan thought that they could make a profit doing it, there's nothing to stop them from doing so right now)
Well they spoke last night of a rail system in Japan that is private and having postive cash flow and one in england. If the airline and bus systems can operate and be profitable, why can't trains?
That doesn't include capital costs. And the airline and bus systems can operate and be profitable on the back of what? GOVERNMENT INVESTMENT IN INFRASTRUCTURE!!! How about that?