company, passenger rail was tightly controlled and very expensive (Van Oss 1893). Only on rail lines owned by multiple companies did rail companies compete for passenger traffic with better trains and cheaper fares. Even here, the incentive was primarily to use the passenger service to advertise the line for freight (Van Oss 1893). Entering the 20th century, rail continued to develop, becoming a booming business. Even passenger rail expanded, growing in ridership to reach its peak during WWII. During this period, transportation into the city from the suburbs was mostly provided by interurbans, streetcar-type rail systems that operated above ground, unlike in Europe where such transit was supported by rail lines. The interurbans were poorly planned and operated and fell into disuse during the Great Depression, leaving suburban populations without transit to the city centers (Hilton 2000).
With the introduction of the automobile in the 1930s, followed by the inception of the Interstate Highway System and the development of commercial aviation in the ‘50s and ‘60s, passenger rail ridership quickly declined. By the 1970s, passenger rail, with the exception of the Northeast Corridor, had been all but obliterated by auto and plane travel (Fred Bartoli). In 1970, Congress passed the Rail Passenger Service Act creating a company that would become Amtrak to take over the ailing intercity passenger rail system in 1971 (“Historic Timeline”). At the time Congress essentially believed that passenger rail would die out on its own, using Amtrak only to ease the process. In the past few decades, however, Amtrak has actually been expanding with renewed public and government interest in rail transit as an environmentally-friendly alternative to auto travel. Stations the Amtrak has been downsizing for years are now running over capacity and call for improvement and reexpansion.
Figure 3: Federal Funding has increased dramatically since the company's creation in 1971. Passenger rail, once thought doomed to die out, has made a tremendous comeback with the initiation of high speed rail.
Figure 4: Starting in the 1950s federal transit funding shifted overwhelmingly to auto and air, while rail funding dropped to almost nothing. The rebound of Amtrak can be seen in the 1970s & 80s.
Photo 3: This tiny Amtrak station in Amsterdam, NY exemplifies the downsizing of passenger rail in the auto age
Photo 4: An Acela train, Amtrak's newst fastest train