EIGHT train passengers died last week in Philadelphia. Their deaths are particularly alarming because they were doing nothing more dangerous than traveling along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. The news about the train accident has focused on technological fixes that might have prevented the disaster. The deaths are, however, also rooted in our long love-hate relationship with the railroads. It is this particular history that has served to render our railroad problems so intractable.

Amtrak is a public-private corporation, but the government’s involvement in rail began long before Amtrak. It has taken various forms: public subsidies, public stock subscriptions, the leasing of convict labor, partial public ownership of private railroad corporations, and regulation. Government funds were the lifeblood of many 19th-century American railroads. The partnership structure meant that the public absorbed the risk. Those who controlled the corporations, if not the corporations themselves, reaped the benefits. (The Europeans, who have maintained their state-owned companies and close government supervision, have done much better at passenger travel.)

In a country of vast distances and poor roads, railroads became essential, but there were still many reasons for Americans to dislike them. And nothing focused, and still focuses, public attention on the deficiencies of railroads like accidents. Train wrecks yield victims, and, more commonly, trains kill those who work on them. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, railroads rejected new technologies that could have improved safety as too complicated and too expensive.

There was pressure to nationalize the railroads, which often meant operating them like a modern interstate highway, with the government owning and controlling the infrastructure and allowing regulated private carriers to use the tracks. During World War I the nearly catastrophic inefficiency of the railroads brought about temporary nationalization, but by and large the public option was never exercised.