There are serious questions about routes outside the Northeast, said Michael Buckley, communications coordinator for AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department, 'But Amtrak is politically popular. Every member of Congress has train station in his or her district. The quandary is the financial challenges. Congress does not support passenger rail, but they don't want any cuts in service because they use it.'

Still, if the nation's rail service was to be completely privatized, the task of coordinating several train companies running on a limited number of privately owned tracks would ultimately bring chaos to the rails.

Great Britain, which has undergone much privatization, has the highest train fares in Europe and the least developed networks of electric rail. Railtrack is the company that owns and operates Britain's railway infrastructure-the tracks, signals, tunnels, bridges, viaducts, level crossings and stations. About 20 different companies run on the tracks, the biggest being Virgin (yes the same company that runs the airline) Railtrack recently went the way of the American energy company, Enron, in that the stock became almost worthless, while the British train system has been barely creaking along.

Meanwhile, high-speed trains made by French, British, German, Swiss, Italian, Swedish and Canadian companies currently link major cities on 12,000 km of track. Most of these government-run railroads have lost billions of dollars, but at least they have something to show for it-a sophisticated web of state-of-art electric rail networks. A longer version of this article originally appeared in the Desert Post Weekly, an alternative weekly based in Cathedral City, California (www.desertpostweekly.com).