The New Passenger Paradigm Five Years Later

I remember reading up on a Railway Age article five years ago on something called the New Passenger Paradigm. In the article, AIPRO's Ray Chambers laid out how things were shifting in the world of passenger rail. 

Given where things are now, I say that the pace to a post-monopoly environment has been glacially slow. Consider the evidence:

• Congress has consistently failed to back up its action (i.e. it has talked about the need for more competition among corridors and overnight trains but did nothing to make sure the proper provisions in PRIIA and the FAST Act were followed)
• Once the Tea Party backlash happened, the Obama Administration largely lost interest in even building a decent passenger rail system
• The Trump Administration aside from its open hostility towards CAHSR, was all talk and no action on even regular passenger rail, belying its campaign gripes about China having faster trains than America
• The AIPRO itself dissolved last year to no fanfare after it received virtually no support from the rail community and scant media coverage while some of its members formed a separate mass transit trade group
• The U.S. still hasn't had more than one private passenger rail organization at a time since 1983 (the Rio Grande and Georgia Railroad's mixed trains)--or the end of 1978 (Rio Grande, Rock Island, Southern, Reading) if you're talking about true passenger trains. While Brightline started up in early 2018, the Saratoga & North Creek became a fallen flag shortly thereafter
• When it comes to bidding, Herzog's operation of CT Rail is the closest that any Amtrak commuter competitor has come to running intercity rail
• Other than Pennsylvania and the San Joaquin Valley, no state entity is even willing to challenge Amtrak (see the 2018 fiasco with the loss of discounts where only California's three JPAs pushed back against the Anderson regime and kept said discounts)

Even after reading this article and understanding some behind the scenes actions, it still isn't much comfort when it seems like getting there from here is a near impossibility when rail activists are much more comfortable defending the status quo and ridiculing any non-Amtrak passenger operator. Calling the national network skeletal at this point is being way too kind when expansion should have been on the agenda decades ago--oh wait, Graham Claytor did that only for that to be undone by his NEC successors and Congress implemented prohibitions after the collapse of the Mail and Express plan in 2001.