Amtrak turned 45 on May 1. I wish it many happy returns.

Today's American passenger railroad network is an exciting, vibrant mix of Amtrak, local commuter trains and light rail networks. While Amtrak is the designated "intercity" network, there are parts of the country where Amtrak is indistinguishable from local commuter transportation districts.

The South Shore Line service in Chicago and northern Indiana is a good example of intercity service run by a transit district with no connection to Amtrak. Several examples can also be found on the Northeast Corridor.

The fiction of transit districts being only for suburban service is further blurred in Florida and California. Some of these transit districts actually predate Amtrak, but not by many years. Complicating matters still more are those trains run by state transportation departments that may or may not contract with Amtrak for operations.

The thrust of this article is not to parse passenger railroads, or even transit districts, but to take an anniversary look at how America got here and how we continue to move into Amtrak's 46th year. Let's start by looking at Amtrak's first decade.

On startup day — May 1, 1971 — Amtrak actually had no tracks and no rights of way on which to build tracks. It had stations — lots of them.

The big ones, like Chicago Union, New York Grand Central and Penn Station, were maintenance headaches and cash drains. That hasn't changed. Amtrak let go of a lot of little ones, perhaps too soon, but who had the money to keep too many stations? There is strong evidence that Congress thought the public would soon lose interest in passenger trains and Amtrak would, before the end of the decade, fade into unheralded oblivion.

Back then, Amtrak continued 182 trains, most retaining their original names or numbers. The logic behind continuing trains or dropping them is today buried in history, but it's a good assumption there were external political motivations. No local politicians wanted to be seen as responsible for making the trains go away.

Good connections were lost, making for gaps in travel and/or long layovers to continue a journey. Few, if any, through cars were run. However, because the railroads were still used to scheduling the passenger trains in between regular freight movements, and because the passenger trains retained existing schedules, the on-time performance for most of the 1970s was no worse or better than it had been prior to Amtrak. Service, too, appears to have been no worse and little better.

Today, Amtrak enjoys on-time performance in the high 70s to high 80s (as a percentage of end-point stations reached on time) for Northeast trains, down to lows in the 50s to mid-70s for trains running on tracks not owned by Amtrak. I was unable to find a source that tallies the total amounts Amtrak has had to pay to passengers for missed connections over the years.

Also today, largely as a consequence of the freight railroads being unable to tolerate any delays to freight movements, today's Amtrak schedule isn't as weatherproof as it was back then. It is more delay tolerant, with hours of padding for the longer routes contrasted to what was on the books in the 1970s, but a bout of serious bad weather knocks trains off the schedule for, on occasion, days at a time.

In the 1970s, Amtrak operated with a hodgepodge of locomotives and rolling stock acquired from the participating railroads. For much of the 1970s, you could still see the colorful livery of the great streamliners of the pre-Amtrak past on locomotives and cars. If you rode a continued train a week, a month and sometimes even years after Amtrak started, it likely looked very much like the same named or numbered train the week before Amtrak started.

For the sake of efficiency and to keep 'em rolling as long as was mechanically possible — before Amtrak could afford to buy new — the locomotives and cars eventually became jumbled all over the system. This led to the 1970s being termed Amtrak's "rainbow era." By mid-decade, new equipment, painted in Amtrak's colors, began appearing and mixing with the old, most of which also appeared in Amtrak's colors.

As for Amtrak's logos and colors, a 1970s versus today comparison would take up the better part of a whole article on a future date.

Today, little so-called "heritage," pre-Amtrak equipment remains on Amtrak's roster, and it's all up-to-date as far as colors. I count five pre-Amtrak switchers in terminal areas and 23 diner or lounge cars running on regular routes. Everything else belongs to Amtrak or to the states that host state-sponsored Amtrak service.

Amtrak's got a better look and a better eye on how it will look in the future. In our current political world, image is half the battle, and Amtrak is winning that one. We look forward to new equipment and new routes with the same enthusiasm that we welcomed Amtrak 45 years ago, in part because today's Amtrak looks like a railroad that will last at least another 45.