I started this as a reply to email I received from a business associate. He 
was chagrinned that today's youth in general are wholly ignorant of their own 
community's local history. This also extends country-wide to an ignorance of 
the tremendous part which railroading has played in the building of our country 
and the day to day maintenance of our lifestyle which we enjoy today.

Our beloved government all but destroyed the railroad industry in a systematic 
assault upon capitalism that any learned person would associate with a communist 
or socialist based society, but not that of the most free country of the world, 
the U.S.A.

To this day it amazes me that so few people have any inking of what transpired 
during the first 80 years of the twentieth century. It has affected each and 
every one of us and continues to do so to this very day. Big government 
continues to control our lives and blatantly confiscate the lion's share of our 
hard fought earnings. 

If you are one of those hypocritical bleeding-heart liberals or one of the 
mindless sheep who has enabled our farce of a government to steal our futures, 
then read no further, this wasn't written for you, it was written _about_ you.

I'll limit this essay to a short recounting of how we lost much of one of our 
country's most valuable resources. It was our transporation backbone, it was 
many people's lifeline to civilization and society, it was critical to our 
national defense, it was critical to the growth of our country and its economy, 
it was essential to every city in the continental United States, it bettered 
the lives of virtually every citizen and it was rewarded by all of its 
beneficiaries with near annihilation through simple greed, corruption and 
incompetence the likes of which has seldom been eclipsed in this or any other 
country.

This national resource is, of course, our railroads.

These days the lack of understanding of the contributions of railroads to both
the every day lives and the history of this country just boggles the mind. It
is as if since WWII American railroads have been our country's dirty little
secret which nobody wants to acknowledge or talk about until someone gets
killed at a grade crossing or until a train with toxic chemicals in the consist
derails. I have a pet theory regarding the average citizen's ignorance of our 
railroads and maybe some day I'll write a book on the subject.

Maybe it has to do with guilt stemming from the fact that every other
mode of transportation, both freight and passenger, has received unbelievably
massive subsidies for over 75 years while the railroads were taxed and
regulated nearly to death. The government successfully destroyed passenger
rail service in the USA and very nearly did the same to freight. It's like
those ads showing pictures of starving children overseas, 99.9% of us just
stick our heads in the sand because we just don't want to know about it, it is
an unpleasant thing. One of the principles upon which our country was founded
is a capitalistic freedom to do business without unfair restrictions. Since
1907 that freedom was unduly denied to the railroads. In my years of
researching that topic from both sides of the fence the one common theme which
stuck out like a sore thumb for about 75 years in the 20th century was our
railroads begging our government to allow them to compete on a level playing
field. The list of heinous crimes which our government has perpetrated against
the railroads is absolutely staggering. The confiscation of private wealth was
enormous and it was confiscated essentially without prejudice. The smallest
stockholders suffered as much, if not more, than the largest. Teddy Roosevelt
enacted laws that strictly specified exactly how much the largest recurring
expense (labor) would cost as well as exactly how much revenue could be
generated (rates) and thus he destroyed the railroads' ability to generate
investment capital for major improvements. From that point on the railroads
were no longer attractive to potential stockholders because they were
effectively prevented from being able to offer a reasonable return on
investment. When a hostile governing body controls both the cash going out 
and the cash coming in, only someone ignorant would buy into that situation.

It took about 40 years of slow decay until railroad line abandonments and 
passenger train-off petitions made it clear to anyone who bothered to take
a look at the situation that something was very wrong in railroading. Through 
the decade of the 1950's the government maintained the status quo and nothing
changed. Eastern railroads hemorrhaged money and still nothing was done. 

The single most glaring example of government abuse of the railroads was 
nothing short of slavery, something supposedly abolished since the days of 
our Civil War. Until the 1970's the railroads were, nearly without exception,
required to provide unprofittable passenger service to the public, as 
commuter, local and long-distance passenger trains. In an unparelleled fit 
of liberalism it was legislated that the railroads must both provide and 
pay for the continued operation of passenger trains which more often than not 
carried fewer paying passengers than train crew members. Not a dime was 
offered in compensation, they simply made the law say it was OK to steal 
railroad money on behalf of the citizenry. People today whine about the 
per-capita pittance required to keep Amtrak running, but nary a peep is 
uttered regarding the tens of billions which basically was confiscated from 
the railroads in the twentieth century.

By 1960 the concept of railroads as unsubsidized public utilities remained 
and they started failing, first one by one and then two by two. Ten more 
years passed. Penn Central's failure was the left jab, Amtrak was the right 
cross and the failure of another 10 or so other class 1 railroads was the 
knock out punch. The government had succeeded in destroying the viability 
of over half of our nation's rail mileage and virtually all of its passenger 
service. It would take a full decade longer to get things back on track, but 
the irrecersible damage had already been done.

Our polluted cities, congested and dangerous highways, lack of travel choices,
lack of shipping choices, higher prices, loss of industry and manufacturing
and the general degeneration of our society into one which lacks a strong work
ethic is the legacy of our incompetent, greedy and corrupt goverments. From
the municipal to the federal level, our 'representatives' have perverted our 
once great nation into the laughing stock of the world. 

The parasitic feeding frenzy of our society continues unabated today. The
railroad, steel and manufacturing industries were so utterly consumed, piece 
by piece,  to the point that there is virtually nothing left of them today. Now 
that the governments' cash cows no longer exist it has turned on the rest of us 
as its mechanism to perpetuate its own totally out of control existence. The 
screaming liberals continue to fight for tax increases to support big government 
while many cities are dying on the vine because their residents are sick of being 
nickled and dimed to death for the privelege of living in a cesspool.

Our elected officials and their increasingly political judicial cronies continue 
to allow lawyers to gut what remains of the tobacco industry (as if any given 
smoker didn't make their own choice to smoke) and run rampant over the rest of our
populace, looking for any way to twist the law into some grotesque caricature
which will allow them to legally steal some money from any innocent victim who
had the audacity to place their faith in the American system of justice. Just look 
on the covers of your phone book to see what's wrong with America today.

While I am proud to be an American I am simultaneously very ashamed to be one.

God help us all. If the last hundred years is any indication, then I don't 
think we're capable of helping ouselves.