Your assumption is incorrect. Freight railroads have tremendous incentive to maintain their tracks for passenger speeds, as faster passenger speeds also allow faster freight train speeds (freight train speeds are still lower, but for a given class, there's a passenger speed and a freight speed, and generally to increase freight speeds, the allowable passenger speed also has to increase). And when railroads have high-priority freight that can net them, in some cases, a quarter million bucks per trip, that is significant incentive to keep the railroad in good working order, and to clean up any problems as quickly as possible.That's the difference, not between public and private ownership, but between passenger and freight. Had the freight companies also owned the passenger service, they would be more responsive to quickly solving the rail problems both from an economic and public blame points of view. Since freight delays are almost always not as big an issue as passenger delays, there is now no incentive to go up and beyond to accommodate passenger service just like there is not much incentive to repair or maintain tracks for passenger speeds. Public ownership is not the only solution. I see some alternatives:
- Public ownership
- Public or third party corporation that defines standards that must be met by railroads hosting Amtrak trains and penalizes railroads that fail to meet requirements. Amtrak retains its current status.
- Railroad operation of passenger trains on their tracks with strict requirements on service standards with penalties. Amtrak becomes just another operator in the NEC. Rolling stock and passenger engines owned by the government or by Amtrak.
Compare the privately owned freight infrastructure to the state of publicly owned infrastructure (let alone all the politics, rather than economics, that goes into most infrastructure decisions that are public), and I'd much rather keep the railroad network in private hands.
Point is, it simply makes no sense at all for a route that hosts one or two passenger trains per day, and several dozen (or more) freight trains per day to not be in the hands of the freight companies. To change that would be to trigger a serious decline in the freight railroad system in the US (which, honestly, would be good for nobody). For routes that have lots of passenger traffic, it does make sense for a passenger operator to own/maintain the tracks, but if you look around, in many instances that's already the case (almost all of the commuter routes in/out of Chicago are owned by a passenger operator; the bulk of the NEC service is owned and/or managed by passenger operators, most of the Surfliner route in California is owned by passenger operators). There's really only a relatively small amount of Amtrak mileage that hosts more than a couple passenger trains per day that isn't owned by a passenger operator, and in most of those cases I can't find any economic justification for changing that (the big questions being who's going to pay, and how willing are they to pay for it?).