Amtrak needs to kill all operation outside of New England until they can get that system working. DC to Boston should leave a evey half hour or better 24x7, with average speeds of 150 mph. Note average includes all stops (new York city obviously is a stop, we can debate others). This is perfectly possible and would make money. Until they get that working they shouldn't try anything with harder to make work routes.
Why would killing all of those routes help Amtrak? The sentiment of "we should prevent you from expanding until you fix all of your problems" tends to lead into death spirals instead of solutions.
Because money is limited and those routes lose money. Taking whatever is lost running those routes adds some more pocket change to fixing the routes that Amtrak should improve the most. Sorry to the handful of people who live in the middle of nowhere, but for every one of you Amtrak serves there are 10,000 people on the east coast that would use improved service.
The death spiral can sometimes be real, but lack of focus also is a death spiral. Amtrak has been around since the 1970s and most of the improvements to the east coast have been obviously needed and yet haven't happened. While we can (many do) debate what route to run new rails, what is the most important step to take first, and many other details, the big picture is the same to all observers.
Of course the reality is Amtrak exists for political reasons. Probably more realistic is to split Amtrak into two parts (with completely different leadership), one with the goal of making the east cost work well, and one with the goal of political appeasing people on in the middle of nowhere. The way you run the two systems needs to be very different and so there is no reason to keep them together as the concerns of each is a distraction from the other.
> Because money is limited and those routes lose money.
The money problem is in large part lack of money for capital expenditures, which Amtrak wouldn't have with a pure-NEC system anyways. The capital expenditure is going to have to come from Congress, and it's a lot easier to beg money from Congress if it isn't seen as purely benefiting rich coastal leftist elites.
> While we can (many do) debate what route to run new rails, what is the most important step to take first, and many other details, the big picture is the same to all observers.
Having read several transit enthusiast blogs, I will assure you that the big picture is not the same to all observers. The viewpoint of most enthusiasts tends to boil down to "just build something and people will get excited about it," whereas people like Alon Levy have instead argued that the real issue is that the US is relying on a century-old mindset of how to run trains and somewhere between ignorant and irrationally dismissive of how foreign countries run their superior modern rail systems.
It may well be that I only read things from the Alon Levy bubble, and so I discount the rare times I come across something else as a crackpot and don't look for others in that bubble... This wouldn't be surprising, Alon Levy has good arguments as to why he is right (and has changed my mind a few times), while the others are obviously not living in reality.
Shedding marginal products and focusing on profitable ones is a classic turn around strategy.
Rail in the US could definitely use a model system to prove out it's viability. The biggest ongoing project is California's and that's shaping up to be a disaster.
