This tax-payer funded bailout of toy trains is outrageous! If they get their subsidy we should get equal subsidies of roads, cars, suvs, RVs, and car manufacturers!

we should get equal subsidies of roads, cars, suvs, RVs, and car manufacturers....

A wise man said, "Be careful of what you ask for; you might end up getting it."

Amtrak should add casino cars to fund themselves.

"we should get equal subsidies of roads, cars, suvs, RVs, and car manufacturers!"

Is that just passenger rail that should get all those billions of dollars to match the road and auto expenditures of the last sixty years, or should they split it with freight rail? :-P

Not just casino cars, but bordello cars on the sleeper trains. Then the money would roll in.

Just where has squeezed been?

They already got all that and still couldn't function as a profit-making corporation...

Amtrak is not a profit-making corporation. Why should we maintain the auto companies and all their extraneous side businesses? They should go under like all sucko capital ventures that cannot support themselves. We've already got a transportation industry that is busy sucking up public funds and that's trains! We don't need to do with cars what we did such a crappy job with on trains.

"This tax-payer funded bailout of toy trains is outrageous! If they get their subsidy we should get equal subsidies of roads, cars, suvs, RVs, and car manufacturers!"

"We" did. It was called the stimulus bill. Go by Amtrak!

Blumenauer seems to be talking about high-speed, inter-city rail. Why would we want that? It's just too Euro. Or Japanese. Not fit for us Americans.

There's something depressing about reinventing the wheel. At one time we had a number of good passenger train systems throughout the nation. We let them die. I remember riding the Great Northern east and then the Chessie and others in 1967. Now there's nothing but Amtrak and a few hobby steam lines.

At one time we had an intricate network of trolley streetcar systems throughout Portland the the outlying areas. So did other metropolitan areas. The oil and automobile industry did them in.

Now we get to pay to restore what we already had up to 50-60 years ago.

"Why would we want that? It's just too Euro."

'We' don't. Intercity rail is just more industrial policy, cooked up by politicians and delivered with the "green, sustainable" seal of approval.

clearly i have to spell my point out.

the eight billion in rail funding is a miniscule fraction of the trillions that have subsidized the paving over of our country so that lard-arsed uhmrekins can toodle along in their tricked-up suvs.