Saving the Southwest Chief

In recent years, the Southwest Chief, the train that runs from Chicago to Los Angeles, has come under threat by Amtrak's bare-bones budgets and Burlington Northern Santa Fe's (BNSF) downgrading of the line between New Mexico and Kansas. In the instances that Amtrak's lines come under threat, Amtrak should be given the opportunity to buy them and given the funds to do just that.
You could say that Amtrak is a fancy form of public transit, but it still provides small downs across America with their only non-private links to the outside world. Coach buses don't stop in Westport, NY or maybe even Cut Bank, MT. One of the writers for the Taos News wrote an excellent article on the Southwest Chief's situation. Anyways, back to our discussion: it's not like the Southwest Chief does nothing for the local economies in the communities it serves: "A report presented to the subcommittee in November says ridership on the Southwest Chief between 2010 and 2012 went up 6.7 percent, with a total of 127,269 passengers in 2012. The report also says the train’s current route supports a total of 368 jobs, with $29.3 million in total economic output."

If New Mexico and Colorado sign on, then Kansas has more incentive to sign on, especially Colorado, which is in the midst of a transit boom. The Southwest Chief is a crucial part of the Amtrak network. And it has appeared that New Mexico's state legislators are appearing to be interested in such an idea, especially with the advent of New Mexico's Rail Runner commuter rail. In recent years, Congress has made it clear that transportation and infrastructure is not just not a priority, but not a concern either. Meanwhile, a newspaper in Texas believes that Amtrak is using the Southwest Chief to make a point: I kinda have to agree with that.

The trackage that the Southwest Chief runs on is historic: trains like the Super Chief ran on the Southwest Chief's trackage, and in fact, the Southwest Chief is the direct descendent of the Super Chief.

And Uriel Garcia's article had one sentence that stood out in a way that I have never seen before in an article: "In recent years, the federal government has not funded rail needs as much as it has highways and airports."