Those buff standards were written in blood. Look at early train collision pictures and you can see the wooden passenger cars telescope on impact, killing most inside. As steel cars became available, wooden ones were outlawed.

We can mix light rail with heavy rail as long as they don’t operate together. The San Diego Trolley shares it route with heavy freight, though freight runs at night when trolley is not operating.

Even the steel cars have danger spots, such as the push pull cab car and all vestibules. Design engineers politely term vestibules as “crush zones” designed to collapse and absorb impacts.

I wouldn’t want to be in a vestibule during an accident and I would dead in a goofy light rail vehicle if it collided with a 10,000 ton train.

The $150 million for the corridor is in question, as the auditors counted the riders on Labor Day (a day everyone wants to travel) and when the connecting buses couldn’t cross the bridge. Based on an obvious for the world to see demolition attempt, our Terminator wants to put an end to this.

Then there’s the $30 million, reportedly reduced from $100 million for intercity trains by that nasty congress. The key words are that this has been part of our President’s plan, implying that he is dying to help passenger trains.

I suspect that if you look behind the curtain, the smoke and mirrors, you will find this money is designed to dismember Amtrak and replace it with a tiny pot of money that the states can decide what service they want. They may want service but there won’t be any cash to pay for it.

One proposal to help Amtrak was to eliminate dining and sleeper service, bringing it back to the 1870′s, where like Greyhound you have meal stops (Harvey House days). My favorite was the suggestion that if states didn’t want to pay, the long distance train would lock its doors and simply blow the pigeons off the depot roof.