[Phantom Lord]

Really, who are the top 3 private "train" companies in regardes to transporting poeple. NOT BUILDING TRAINS, but operating a train system.

[biblewonk]

Well, living here in Iowa I tend to think in terms of freight and Union Pacific. No one travels by train around here. It would be impossible to do that competitively. I think it costs 1000 dollars to travel across country by train when it is about 250ish by plane. Who would want anything to do with a business case like that? But go to your nearest coal fired power plant and see if they haul that coal by truck? How much do you suppose that coal would cost if you have to pay a 300 truck drivers instead of one train engineer? It is also amazing to learn how much energy all of those trucks require to haul the same amount of coal that one train can haul. This article said 9 times as much but I think it's more.

[Publius]

Train companies (railroads) got out of the passenger business when the government agreed to bail them out of it in 1971. Not that the railroads hadn't been moving heaven and earth to kill their passenger business for years, all of which was intended to get the regulators off their backs.

The Class I railroads don't want the capital cost of owning and maintaining passenger equipment, but most of them have no problem with working with third party carriers, usually commuter rail systems, who are willing to pay the railroad to dispatch the train over their tracks for a price.