Girls, Lesbians, Sluts gather round and let me autisticly infodump the history of Amtrak to you all
Pretty please
Okay so in the early 1900s Railroads had a monopoly on transportation so to counteract this the US Congress pit in place strict anti monopoly laws on the railroads. The issue is they never saw the rise of the automobile so by the late 60s the rail companies were almost all in debt and failing because they were still being regulated like a monopoly despite not being monopolies anymore. During this time they began to close down routes for passengers which hurt small towns and citizens so to come up with a solution to this. First congress tried to force mergers between railways to get them to stop losing money but that lead to the penn Central which collapsed incredibly fast. So Congress agreed to create a national entity to take over the critical but failing passenger rail lines called Amtrak allowing for the existing rail companies to focus on freight and then they never invested in amtrak beyond electrifying NYC to Boston, closed half the long distance routes in 1978, and have used it as a political pawn ever since.
Also there is the bit where Republicans in the FRA and the Nixon Administration designed amtrak to fail after a few years by not allowing it to own the tracks but still operate expensive lines, and have a profitability mandate in its founding charter, but that was completely bullshit and was removed later in the 70s anyways
