I haven't seen anyone call attention to this yet.......<p>The graphics, politics, views, etc. posted by this webmaster appear precisely identical to another website of this nature I ran into a year or two ago, which ranted to no end about the "evils" of railroad grade crossings and trains killing "innocent" trespassers, particularly on the Northeast Corridor. The logic and scaremongering were a throwback to the time of posters in the 1830s warning citizens of the "Evil Rail Road" that would consume all the air, run over carriages and children, etc.<p>I too contacted the webmasters. As could be guessed from the website, they had had a daughter killed by a train on the NEC. I haven't seen references to the site lately, so I guess they got tired of defending their views to railfans who badgered them with the logic of "if you stay off the tracks, you aren't gonna get hit, and if they're too young to understand, why aren't you watching them?" And yes, they sort of accused me of being part of a conspiracy.<p>NONETHELESS, as a taxpayer, I do agree with a major point of theirs: Costs do escalate dramatically between design and completion, and there are many cases where ridership failed to meet expectations by a wide mark. Baltimore suffers from both a light-rail system that serves a ballpark and football stadium but runs down a corridor of dead stores and serves a shopping mall that is close to dead, and a subway system that the locals joke goes from a ritzy shopping mall in the suburbs to Johns Hopkins University and little else useful in between. All in all, rail transit in *some* cases do qualify as major boondoggles.<br>



LNER4472@juno.com

Agreed, but with it understood that most of the incidental costs relating to these projects of whatever practical value are not related to the actual design and construction of the line, but are government imposed and make any federally funded projects cost much more then a private sector project in an unregulated environment. <br>



lathro19@idt.net