John McCain Hates Trains

John McCain hates trains. It seems this has been well known by train and railroad advocates for some time now but seeing how gas prices are soaring, the demand for rail transportation is exploding and John McCain is the Republican nominee a perfect storm is forming for the railroads to be a campaign issue.

TRAIN TRAVEL is finally becoming a third rail of politics. The first one to fry over it might be John McCain.

For years, McCain, in the comfort of cheap gasoline for autos and airplanes, made Amtrak a personal whipping boy. Despite the fact that governments in Western Europe and Asia zoomed far ahead of the United States by supporting high-speed trains to relieve congestion, promote tourism and now as we are coming to know, save the planet, McCain has spent considerable capital in denying the passenger rail system the capital to modernize.

In 2000, when he was chairman of the Senate Science, Commerce and Transportation committee, McCain killed $10 billion in capital funding for Amtrak. He denounced Amtrak as a symbol of government waste, claiming, "There's only two parts of the country that can support a viable rail system - the Northeast and the far West."

Could McCain get even less visionary? Of course he can.

In the section of McCain's website called "reforming our transportation sector," there is no mention of rail.

from: McCain's agenda on Amtrak