A lot of informed Amtrak email; here’s one:

As a FORMER employee of Amtrak, and knowing something about train
operations, your comment about privatizing Amtrak is well heard. But, if
Amtrak were to privatize, you wouldn’t get an 11 PM train or even a 10 PM
train leaving DC or NYC, because the ridership numbers are not there on a
consistent basis to make any money (or break even). Trust me, Amtrak could
do better operationally (they do have the right man in there now, David
Gunn), but when your are forced to work with a track system infrastructure
(rail beds, tunnels in Baltimore, which by the way are about 100 years old,
and have leaks from the Baltimore City storm sewers, which the city has
refused to pay to fix) originally built over 100 years ago, and a catenary
system over 70 years old (on the south end DC-New Haven, CT), many funds are
needed to just band-aid the infrastructure. Just be happy that Amtrak is
subsidized in part, because if it wasn’t you would have probably left at 8
PM to get back home (1.3 or 1.8 billion ain’t much out of a 2 Trillion
Dollar budget). Just some food for thought, not defending Amtrak, just
giving a little lesson in transportation economics. I know your arguments
are for privatizing, but please name one privatized passenger railroad in
the world that is successfully making money owning there own infrastucture?
It may work here, but not really to sure it would (some of the privatization
proposals are comical), based on the British Rail fiasco.