Tom Carper: “I do not believe any of the Senators who are on the floor at this time were serving in the House or the Senate when…”

“I do not believe any of the Senators who are on the floor at this time were serving in the House or the Senate when Amtrak was created. It was created in 1970 and it was created after an extended debate which found none of the private railroads in this country wanted to continue to provide passenger rail service. They wanted out of the business and they got out. They convinced the Congress and then the President, Richard Nixon, that they should be able to buy stock in this entity called Amtrak, they should turn over a lot of their rolling stock--their locomotives and their passenger cars or dining cars, the whole Northeast corridor from Washington to Boston, repair shops, train stations--to this new entity, Amtrak, to see if they could make it go as a quasi-governmental entity whereas for years the private sector had not been able to make a go of it. Lo and behold, 32 years later Amtrak has not been able to figure out how to make money, how to make a profit doing what the private railroads could not make a profit doing in the 1970s or 1960s or the years before that; that is, carrying people.…”