Now where the question gets itchy is the factor of relative convenience. There are a thousand towns in America with no rail service at all, where inhabitants who want to travel have to make their way by automobile or bus or airplane. These are people many of whom seethe at the thought of northeast-corridor Americans getting around between Boston and Washington on a fleet of trains that are losing money.
Fifty-two percent of travel between New York and Washington is done by railroad. Can the situation be rectified by simply charging more money? Experience shows that it can't. For some people, the demand for train travel is inelastic, but not for a lot of people. If you doubled the rail fare, you would not double the revenue.
This is a pretty universal experience, there being no railroad service in any industrial country that pays for itself. Do we have here an example of an organic exception to the rule that services should pay their own way? That may be in fact the case, but in any event, conservatives need to climb onto a higher level from which to seek a broader perspective. The urbanization of America and the volatility of American travel need to be accepted as a part of the American culture that shouldn't be constrained, let alone aborted, by dogmatic enforcements of otherwise useful rules of procedure.
The plan of Sen. Hollings is significantly to improve and to increase the availability of railroads, and he needs to justify doing this, at a cost of more than $5 billion per year, by persuading Congress and the public that however uneven the usufructs of rail travel to different parts of America, a national endowment is economically defensible, culturally desirable, and tangentially useful to the common defense.