Many people who fear for the long-distance trains don't understand the political dynamic here. The main justification for spending Federal tax money on passenger rail to keep it alive is to provide an alternative to driving, to reduce road congestion and emissions. The routes that perform that service are corridors (preferably with multiple frequencies per day) connecting large population centers and focusing on average ride length of 200 miles or so.
The long distance services ("national network") provide some value as they feed a certain number of passengers into the corridor services and they provide mobility for the 10% of the population who can't or won't fly or drive. But most of the small towns and cities they serve don't really have traffic congestion problems, don't have problems with emissions of "criteria pollutants" (NOx, PM, and VOCs), and don't have enough auto traffic to make a difference with regard to greenhouse gas emissions. The main value of the National Network is to allow Amtrak to get political buy-in from a larger pool of Representatives and Senators than might be the case for something that only served densely populated urban areas. In other words, the Senators from Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Montana, etc. are willing to vote for funding the NEC or other corridor services in exchange for the Senators from the NEC states, Illinois, California, etc. voting for Federal funds for the Long-distance trains that serve their mostly rural states. The long-distance trains provide a lot of local indirect benefits to the economies of the small towns through which the trains pass, but it's not clear that those benefits alone justify spending Federal money on them. But the deal where Congress funds both long-distance and the NEC benefits both -- without the deal, there would be neither. This also means that the long-distance trains aren't going away any time soon, even if Mr. Gardner is the bogeyman many think he is.
