I hope you'll take some time this Labor Day weekend to listen to my conversation with former Congressman Peter DeFazio, aka Tiger of the House (an honorific and comparison with the great Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, the Tiger of the Senate).

Serving as chair of the powerful House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee for the last four of his 36 years in Congress (and as a member for all 36), he has a priceless and practically peerless perspective on why it is so important for government to be a counterforce to the insatiable appetite of Wall Street.

Mr. DeFazio's career spanned a period when, to his dismay, the checks on big banks, controls on corporate trade, and limits on election spending all went off the rails. He saw firsthand the rise of "Precision Scheduled Railroading" and how it left service, communities, and public interests behind, as Wall Street targeted railroads as an extractable resource, not unlike the forests and communities he also fought to protect.

In 2022, alongside the late Representative Donald Payne J.R., who tragically passed away last year, DeFazio introduced H.R. 8649, the Freight Rail Shipping Fair Market Act. Solutionary Rail was honored to have provided a Rep. Payne a briefing ahead of his taking over the Railroads Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee in 2021. Much of that was strongly reflected in the H.R. 8649. In our interview, DeFazio reveals how the lobbying power of the Class I railroads, and their ability to retaliate against their customers for trying to get better service, ultimately killed the bill.

A progressive who represented a largely rural and politically diverse district, Peter DeFazio sought to create common cause with common sense solutions, always putting communities, the environment, and long term resilience ahead of special interests.

We could learn a lot from him, and this interview is an opportunity to do so. I especially hope the rail shippers out there tune into this one. In the fights ahead, we need shippers to stand for a rail system that works for big and small shippers, urban and rural trackside communities, workers, and passengers alike. We'll be stronger if we fight shoulder to shoulder with no one left behind.

Listen and enjoy!

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Greg Regan is president of the Transportation Trades Department (TTD) of the AFL-CIO. He has been an outspoken advocate in defense of workers and shippers over the last several years, as Class I railroads have made deeps cuts to both their workforce and the quality and reliability of their service in pursuit of stock buybacks and dividends for predatory “activist investors.”

We got a chance to talk with Greg about the Union Pacific’s proposed $85-billion acquisition of Norfolk Southern, a pair of important pieces of legislation recently reintroduced in Congress, the importance of solidarity between workers across different transportation modes, and more.

This is the first in a string of interviews tackling the latest developments in the railroad industry and their implications for ongoing attempts to put rail transport back in service of public interests and solving 21st-century problems. Stay tuned for more!

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Phillip Longman is Senior Editor at Washington Monthly and Policy Director at the Open Markets Institute. He has also written for publications like Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic, and the New York Times Magazine.

Last October, Phil published the essay “Train Drain: How deregulation and private equity have gutted the U.S. freight rail system—and with it, the promise of America’s industrial renewal”. In a pair of followup pieces in January and June of this year, Phil expanded the argument to include other modes of freight and passenger transport.

Phil's thinking is deeply aligned with the vision behind Reconnect America, making this one of the most valuable conversations we have published thus far. Stay tuned to hear more from Phil in the weeks ahead.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Basel Musharbash is principal attorney at Antimonopoly Counsel, where he practices antimonopoly and trade regulation law. By taking on corporate power, his work on behalf of farmers, small businesses, and workers seeks to secure the conditions for small-town economies to thrive.

In September 2024, Basel authored the landmark report “Kings Over the Necessaries of Life”: Monopolization and the Elimination of Competition in America’s Agriculture System, which starkly documented the consolidation of market power in the U.S. agriculture sector and provided a detailed history of antimonopoly efforts in this area between 1860 and the present day.

We got the chance to speak with Basel this past January to learn more about this history, and in particular about the role that railroads and railroad regulation had to play in it. Here is our conversation.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Bill Hutchison and Ed D’Amato are co-founders and co-chairs of the Lakeshore Rail Alliance, a coalition of seven passenger rail advocacy organizations across six states in the Great Lakes Region, working to revitalize service between New York City and Chicago. They are also board members of All Aboard Eerie.

Earlier this year, Bill and Ed published a white paper titled “Creating a Robust American Passenger Rail System.” It argues for a complete revamp of how we do passenger rail in the United States. Drawing from passenger rail systems around the world, and from the keys to the success of the U.S. highway and aviation systems, the paper proposes establishing permanent formula funding for a new, national passenger rail authority to construct a network of dedicated passenger tracks that will be open to competition from private operators.

We got the chance to speak with Bill and Ed this past March to learn more about their proposal. Here is our conversation.

You can find the Lakeshore Rail Alliance on BlueSky, Threads, LinkedIn, and Mastodon. You can also contact Bill and Ed by email at [email protected].

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

As you may have seen, we recently published Episode 3 of our main Reconnect America series. It delves into the creation of Amtrak in 1970 and investigates why Amtrak failed to preserve the robust passenger rail system that it took over from the private sector.

One of the factors we explored was the decision to leave U.S. rail infrastructure under the ownership of freight railroad corporations, who retained responsibility for managing the flow of traffic. As a result, Amtrak trains suffer horrendous delays at the hands of their hosts, who have a vested interest in giving priority to their own trains over Amtrak’s.

The freight railroads, in turn, often blame the problem on a lack of infrastructural capacity, and use the slightest potential increase in Amtrak service as a pretext to extort the public into dumping wildly overinflated sums of money into their capital projects.

Though laws passed between 1970 and 1973 attempted to mitigate this conflict of interest early on, these statutes have practically never been enforced.

But according to Tom White, a veteran railroader with nearly 60 years of experience in the industry, law enforcement is not necessarily the solution we need. And neither, in many cases, is a lack of infrastructural capacity to blame. After all, the U.S. has relatively low traffic density on its rail system, relative to the rest of the world—and in much of the country there is less traffic today than there was for most of the 20th century. Theoretically, there is already more than enough physical capacity for freight and passenger trains to operate over the same system without significant conflicts.

Rather, Tom believes that the deeper problem is a severe loss of knowledge in managing rail traffic—a field called dispatching. As the deregulated freight railroads have been taken over by activist investors who have sought to extract wealth from the industry at any cost, the qualifying standards for railroad dispatchers have been cut to the bone. The ability to plan ahead in order to optimize fluidity is no longer expected or even taught. Tom’s solution, therefore, would be for the Federal Railroad Administration to mandate far more robust training standards, just as the Federal Aviation Administration does for air traffic controllers, and as countless other government agencies do in their own respective fields.

Our Rail Bites series presents you with some of our favorite clips from our amazing guests on Reconnect America. With Rail Bites, you can look forward to more frequent, shorter-form content in between our carefully crafted longer episodes.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Solutionary Rail used our monthly Hive Call with folks around the country as an opportunity to have a discussion with three of the nationally recognized passenger rail champions we featured in Episode 3:

* John Robert Smith, Chair of Transportation for America and former Amtrak Board Chair.

* Meredith Richards, National Chair for the Rail Passengers Association.

* Tom White, Co-founder of Climate Rail Alliance and veteran rail planner and author with nearly 60 years in the industry.

These are three of the leaders who shaped our recent episodes and who are shaping our thinking about rail in the public interests. Each talk about their past and present work, and build upon the content of Episode 3 and update us all on the current state of affairs with Amtrak, what they see happening in rail today, and where we go from here.

Subscribe for Free to the Reconnect America podcast to be notified about future events and each episode of this documentary project.

John Robert Smith addresses the expected economic benefits of soon-to-be-restored Amtrak service along the Gulf Coast; how initial opposition from the Class I railroads was overcome to achieve this; and how reconnecting rural towns and small urban centers with passenger rail could be a way of doing justice to the crucial role that these places have in the country as a whole. (Also featured in Rail Bite #1). Amongst other things, John Robert (and the others) provides us with a nuanced critique of Amtrak’s management as well as a proposal from Transportation for America to create a national passenger rail equipment pool. T4A priorities for the Surface Transportation Reauthorization can be found in these slides from his recent presentation at this EESI event.

Meredith Richards has shared with us how transportation officials in Virginia came to prioritize moving more people by rail as an antidote to rampant congestion on Virginia’s highways and the impressive results of economic benefits studies conducted by the Rail Passengers Association, and how adding trip frequencies led to a ballooning of ridership numbers on one Amtrak service. (Also featured in Rail Bite #2 & Rail Bite #8). In this panel discussion, Meredith augments our previous conversations with additional insights and an update on the current work of the Rail Passengers Association. Listeners will likely want to checkout the “Blueprint” she refers, RPA’s approach to the upcoming Surface Transportation Reauthorization being considered by Congress. Learn more at RailPassengers.org/blueprint.

Tom White, says that part of the problem is that we have forgotten how to make good use of the trains we have. Current U.S. intercity passenger rail service is often so unreliable, infrequent, and inconvenient in its scheduling, that most people who take an Amtrak train once or twice are given little reason to do it again. Top speed is just a number when you’re stuck behind a parked freight train for thirty minutes; and even overall trip times count for little when the only available trip starts or ends in the middle of the night. (Also featured in Rail Bite #7.) In this panel discussion Tom provides considerable additional information about his open access ideas, the needs for a shared standard for passenger cars for the equipment pool idea to work, and insights into the need for - and challenge of instituting - a higher standard for workforce development in rail operations.

If you agree that this is important information, help us build a movement by sharing Reconnect America with your friends.

Why was Amtrak created? What impact did that have on US passenger rail service? How is Amtrak’s story part of a broader struggle between public purpose and private profit that has consistently plagued U.S. railroading?

In this third episode of the Reconnect America series, we continue our deep dive into the history and future prospects of U.S. passenger rail—and the vital importance of rail service to the social and economic vitality of communities across the country.

In Episode 2, we discussed the historic social contract that the U.S. struck with its privately-owned railroads in the late 1800s, and the railroad’s common carrier obligation to serve passengers and freight. We described how a series of public investments in competing modes of transportation gradually undermined the rail industry’s capacity to compete and thus pushed the industry to the brink of collapse.

Episode 3 picks up with the creation of Amtrak, an attempt to save the railroad corporations by relieving them of their common carrier duty to provide passenger service. We examine the political conundrum that ignored past experience, skirted around the option of nationalizing the rail system, and ultimately both saddled Amtrak with an impossible mandate and failed to truly resolve the crisis for the freight rail system. We hear from multiple expert guests how Amtrak’s initial mandate to make a profit on service that hadn’t been revenue positive for at least 50 years ignored the broader value of rail service. They describe how that led to vast sections of the US population being left behind, how the new relationship between private freight and public passenger rail has played out, and what these leaders are doing to restore passenger rail service to communities across the country.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Mentioned:

* David Alff’s book: The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region (Code: “UCPNEW” for 30% off)

Also Recommended:

* Phillip Longman’s October 2024 article argues that fixing our freight rail system is a prerequisite to re-industrializing the U.S.: “Train Drain: How deregulation and private equity have gutted the U.S. freight rail system—and with it, the promise of America’s industrial renewal”

* Rail Passengers Association President and CEO Jim Mathews’ February 2025 article on the evolution of Amtrak’s mandate from profit-centric to service-centric: “Op-Ed: Amtrak Isn’t Profitable—And That’s Okay”

* While you’re at it, check out Jim’s fantastic Instagram monologue from April 2025, which tackles Amtrak privatization and the myth of profitable passenger rail.

* For a fascinating deep dive into the backroom politics behind Amtrak’s creation and the design of its initial system, this series of articles by Jeff Davis of the Eno Center for Transportation are highly recommended:

* “Amtrak at 50: The Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970”

* “Amtrak at 50: Defining the ‘Basic System’ of Service Routes”

* “Amtrak at 50: How McKinsey Designed A National Railroad”

* Amtrak recently revealed the name for its new service along the Gulf Coast: the Mardi Gras. Read the press release here.

Episode Timeline:

* 00:00—Episode 2 Recap

* 00:57—Episode 3 Introduction

* 07:15—The Political Origins of Amtrak and its Profit Mandate

* 12:36—Profit-driven Abandonments and their Impacts on Communities

* 19:24—Failure to Invest in Service Reduces Ridership, Increases Need for Subsidy, and Undermines Economic Benefits of Passenger Rail.

* 21:51—The Terms of the Deal We Struck With Private Railroad Companies in 1970-73

* 24:10—Failure of Private Railroads to Give Priority to Passenger Trains on Tracks

* 26:40—Refusal of Private Railroads to Accommodate New and Expanded Service on Track; Symptomatic of Deregulation

* 32:03—Passenger Rail as a Potential Area for Trans-Partisan Collaboration, Rural Revitalization.

* 37:16—Passenger Rail as a Vital Essential Service

* 39:10—Conclusion, Previewing Episode 4

Co-written and produced by Bill Moyer and Sasha Elenko. Engineering by August Moore. Musical theme by Ken Jacobsen and additional music by Ota Prota.

In this Rail Bite, Meredith Richards, who is chair of the Rail Passengers Association (RPA), articulates two principles that lie at the center of successful passenger rail systems everywhere.

First, that passenger rail is an economic engine. Using reports and modeling tools developed by or in partnership with other institutions, the RPA has demonstrated that passenger rail routes often catalyze economic development in the communities they service at a scale many times greater than the cost of providing the service.

And second, that the key to maximizing those benefits—as well as optimizing the number of tickets sold per train and therefore reducing reliance on operating subsidies—is to invest in a high level of service. As we learned from Tom White in Rail Bite #7, passenger rail service in the U.S. today is often so threadbare that it fails to provide a desirable alternative to driving or flying for many travelers.

Crucially, however, the way to improve service is not to focus on making a profit, but rather, well, to prioritize improving service—something Amtrak was not initially created to do. It is only through decades of hard experience that lawmakers in the U.S. have gradually amended Amtrak’s mandate to emphasize service over profitability. As we learned in Episode 2 of our main series, and from Maddock Thomas, the pursuit of profit in the passenger rail business leads, as a rule, to worse, rather than better service.

Our Rail Bites series presents you with some of our favorite clips from our amazing guests on Reconnect America. With Rail Bites, you can look forward to more frequent, shorter-form content in between our carefully crafted longer episodes.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Why is it that many Americans suddenly seem obsessed with building high speed rail, when most of us don’t even use the 21,400-mile passenger rail system we already have? It’s not as though regular passenger trains are incapable of going faster than the cars we choose to drive instead. Many Amtrak trains can top 100 miles per hour, given the right track conditions. And who can claim that being stuck behind the wheel in traffic is enjoyable?

According to Tom White, a veteran rail planner and author with nearly 60 years of experience in the industry, the problem is that we have forgotten how to make good use of the trains we have. Current U.S. intercity passenger rail service is often so unreliable, infrequent, and inconvenient in its scheduling, that most people who take an Amtrak train once or twice are given little reason to do it again. Top speed is just a number when you’re stuck behind a parked freight train for thirty minutes; and even overall trip times count for little when the only available trip starts or ends in the middle of the night.

It’s not that Americans will only ride bullet trains—it’s that we will only ride trains that actually meet our transportation needs. And 54 years into the Amtrak era, few of us are even aware that this is a possibility on our existing system. As Mr. White says, we need to create  “a much better picture of what could be before people are going to want it, rather than trying to convince people they want more of a bad product.”

Our new Rail Bites series presents you with some of our favorite clips from our amazing guests on Reconnect America. With Rail Bites, you can look forward to more frequent, shorter-form content in between our carefully crafted longer episodes.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.