If Amtrak is any indicicator, the US government does NOT know how to run a railroad. They are the last partner you would want on such a project.

I'm not sure I'd really call Amtrak a railroad in the conventional sense of the term. With a few exceptions [1] they neither own nor lease trackage, and merely have legal access to trackage on fairly low-priority terms (the track controllers give them something like "best-effort" access, with no teeth in what constitutes a good effort). They're mostly a weird conglomeration of the former passenger services of a bunch of railroads, which were glued together and dumped on the government in the '70s in order to keep them on life support, but with no mandate to do much of anything but run the former services glued together on top of the trackage that was retained by the former operators.

[1] The exceptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak#Tracks_owned_or_leased_...

I mean they own the majority of the track on the Northeast Corrider line including both the tunnel under the hudson river and the east river tunnel in Manhattan. This is their most heavily used line, and they have priority through those tunnels over LIRR, NJ Transit, and MetroNorth.

That's the main exception, yes, and that one has much better operation compared to the rest of the lines.

I am not so sure. The US government subsidizes Amtrak [1], and if you want to start a new rail line that is probably exactly what you are looking for.

[1] to the tune of $1.4B last year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak#Public_funding

Do you ever feel like we're having the same conversation over and over and over and over and over and over again? Someone really needs to do an FAQ.

You do understand that Amtrak is profitable in the Northeast?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/01/a...

They can pay, they just don't.