Editoral: Keep the Trains Running
Monday, September 24, 2001; Page A20
© 2001 The Washington Post Company

THE SUDDEN SHUTDOWN of all commercial air flights in the United States on
Sept. 11, along with changes in airport security procedures since, point up
the importance of alternative modes of travel. In particular, people are
talking trains; increased Amtrak use has underscored what its supporters
have said all along -- that train service remains an essential part of the
country's transportation system. Amtrak rose to the extraordinary occasion
by running extra trains, honoring airline tickets and augmenting support
staff where possible. But emergency assistance is one thing; the long haul
for Amtrak demands far more attention than it has ever won in Congress.

Sustaining Amtrak has been a financial challenge since its creation 30 years
ago, aggravated by the failure of Congress to define Amtrak's role and put
sufficient money into it. Amtrak desperately needs capital, but its greatest
missing ingredient is a realistic acknowledgment in Congress that it cannot
be both a public service and a profit-making operation. If anything, the
lasting consequences of Sept. 11 include a need to maintain train service on
longer, typically unprofitable routes. Such service may begin to attract
more passengers and revenue; flights that took three hours or less -- and
that now may take four to five hours with security checks -- become less
attractive when trains can make the trips in roughly the same amount of
time. But a national rail system should not be limited to profitable routes;
public service still must be part of the Amtrak mandate. Federal subsidies
for other transportation -- by air or on the roads -- have not been limited
to the most heavily populated corridors, nor should they be.

During the lifetime of Amtrak, the government has put nearly 70 times more
money into highways and aviation than into the train system. If Congress is
serious about maintaining or increasing railroad travel, lip service about
the virtues of riding the rails won't do; more capital must be committed.

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The Washington Post
Sunday, September 23, 2001

The View From the Ground

Amtrak: The Boost That Began Sept. 11 May Not Be Temporary

By Don Phillips
Washington Post Staff Writer

The view of Lower Manhattan from Amtrak trains racing across the
Jersey Meadowlands toward Penn Station is different today, after the
Sept. 11 terrorist attack. So is the public view of the passenger
train itself.

With Reagan National Airport closed and air service across the nation
disrupted, a lot of people are packing the nation's trains, at least
temporarily. Some are driven to the train by fear, others by the
grounding of the National-La Guardia shuttles. But especially in the
Northeast Corridor, from Washington to New York to Boston,
businesspeople are beginning to look at trains as a short-term
godsend and even a permanent time saver.

Ed Mortlock of Burke, Va., travels between Washington and New York
twice a week as a consulting engineer with Parsons Transportation
Group. He usually flies, to gain maybe an hour over the train. But
rolling toward New York on the 6 a.m. Metroliner last week, Mortlock
said new airport security measures may wipe out the shuttle's time
advantage.

"This could be Amtrak's rescue call," he said.

In the five days after the attack by terrorist hijackers, Amtrak
ridership shot up at least 17 percent nationwide, to about 80,000
passengers a day. The numbers will be greater when Amtrak finishes
auditing the airline tickets it exchanged for train tickets.

Amtrak already has 41 percent of combined rail-air travel between
Washington and New York. If travel to intermediate cities such as
Philadelphia is included, that percentage rises to 70 percent.

"I am told that new security will add an hour to airline trips," said
James Brunkenhoeffer, legislative director of the United
Transportation Union. "With that, Amtrak has an excellent opportunity
to gain passengers who have used the shuttle."

In California, people have already been flocking to trains in such
numbers that the state has entered a partnership with Amtrak and two
freight railroads to blanket the state with faster, more frequent
trains, backing its commitment with a 20-year, $10 billion expansion
plan.

Other states already were talking about or have committed funds
for "high-speed rail" routes. Most of these could hardly be called
high-speed in the sense of a 186-mph French TGV, but California is
already proving that people will ride faster trains -- say, 90 mph --
if service is frequent and reliable.

Virginia is a surprise entry in the passenger-train sweepstakes. In
fact, the state is sometimes mentioned as a fledgling entry into the
family of formerly highway-dominated states -- such as California and
Washington -- that have made a commitment to rail passenger and
freight movement.

Virginia has committed $370 million to add a third track to the CSX
Transportation line between the Potomac River and Richmond. The state
is also spending $9.5 million to refurbish the old Main Street
Station in downtown Richmond.

The idea is both to increase Virginia Railway Express commuter
service from Fredericksburg and to effectively make Richmond the
southern end of the Northeast Corridor with frequent higher-speed
trains.

Gov. James S. Gilmore III (R) said in an interview that he sees the
day when frequent fast-train service would be extended south through
the Carolinas. "Virginia can't see itself in a vacuum anymore," he
said. "We are a central player in this country."

Tracking Downward

Across the country, states that are suffering from serious highway
congestion are studying the rail solution. The new passenger-train
movement, combined with the disruptions caused by the deadly
hijackings, may boost rail service to play a far more prominent role
in American life.

But first, someone has to do something about "the Amtrak problem."
While the passenger train grows more popular, Amtrak seems to be
ticking down toward bankruptcy. With its Northeast Corridor
deteriorating just at the time of its greatest need, Amtrak was even
forced to mortgage part of New York's Pennsylvania Station for $300
million to keep operating up to the new fiscal year, beginning Oct.
1, when it gets next year's federal appropriation.

Amtrak's problems date back to the day it was created to take over
passenger service from private freight railroads -- May 1, 1971. The
legislation creating Amtrak was based on a principle that some now
call "the big lie" -- that Amtrak would be a profitable company.

By the late 1960s, passenger trains were disappearing fast. The
railroad companies, which were undergoing their own problems and
facing possible bankruptcy, badly needed to rid themselves of the
financial burden of deteriorating passenger trains as passengers
deserted them for jet planes and the growing interstate highway
system.

The final blow came when the Post Office removed mail from passenger
trains in favor of planes and trucks. Losses burgeoned. Painfully,
one by one, passenger trains began to disappear.

A public outcry persuaded Congress that something must be done.
Debate began over a plan to bail out the passenger train. The plan
was then called "Railpax," the old telegraphers' code for "rail
passenger." The name was later changed to Amtrak,
combining "American," "travel" and "track."

President Richard Nixon's advisers were dead set against putting
federal money into the passenger train. But Stuart Saunders,
president of the ailing Penn Central, and other railroad chiefs
lobbied hard.

Their message: If you don't either subsidize us or allow us to shed
passenger service, you will have a worse problem. We will go bankrupt
and shut down, and you will have to nationalize us because we haul
the coal, grain and other bulk commodities that trucks can't handle.
Solving the passenger problem now would be a cheap alternative.

Thus was born the big lie.

Key members of Congress and a cadre of bright young government
workers produced a plan that said that Amtrak would become profitable
after two years if the government put up $40 million in seed money
and the freight railroads contributed most of their passenger
equipment and some locomotives.

They cooked the numbers. They freely admitted it at the time. It was
the only way to save the passenger train, and this country would need
the passenger train someday.

"Someday" may have been Sept. 11.

"This is an opportunity, I think, to put Amtrak on a serious
footing," said James W. McClellan, senior vice president with Norfolk
Southern Corp., who was then one of the chief planners of Amtrak.

"We believed someday we'd need Amtrak, and we knew if we lost [the
passenger train], we'd never get it back," McClellan said. "It looks
like the time's arrived."

Survival Struggle

For 30 years, Amtrak has engaged in a yearly battle to survive.
Although it has received $27 billion in federal payments over the
past 30 years, each appropriation always seemed to be just enough to
keep the trains running but not enough to truly modernize.

Until recent months, Congress and various administrations had done
almost nothing to make a rational decision on what Amtrak's mission
is, what it should be, and how to pay for it. But the debate already
seemed to be starting when a meeting between Amtrak President George
Warrington and Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta jolted the
issue to the foreground.

Warrington, who had issued a constant stream of rosy predictions
about Amtrak's financial future, was forced to ask Mineta for
permission to mortgage Penn Station because he was running out of
cash. By all accounts, Mineta exploded with anger. He felt blindsided
by a problem he didn't need during his first months in office.

Deputy Transportation Secretary Michael Jackson was put in charge of
developing a new plan for the passenger train, including what to do
about Amtrak.

Even before the meeting, Congress was struggling with how to fund
growing calls from states for money to start high-speed rail
operations. A majority of the Senate had already signed onto a bill
to allow Amtrak to issue $12 billion in bonds for high-speed rail.
And the hijackings actually delayed a planned announcement by Rep.
Don Young (R-Alaska), chairman of the House Transportation and
Infrastructure Committee, to provide states the authority to issue
$36 billion in bonds and to borrow $35 billion in low-interest loans
to fund projects.

James P. RePass, president of the National Corridors Initiative,
which promotes high-speed rail service, said both bills should be
passed, and more, because the rail system has been neglected too long.

"It is a terrible thing to have terrorists' acts trigger the crisis,
because now we are going to have to make decisions under duress that
should have been made years ago," he said.

Now, after the hijackings, Amtrak will ask Congress for $3 billion in
immediate funding to step up its security and to improve the New York-
Washington corridor to handle an expected increase in traffic.

Actually, the corridor needs many billions of dollars. It has been
undermaintained for years, and many of its facilities are ancient and
have been patched together year by year. For instance, the tunnels
coming into Baltimore from the south were built in 1877. Many bridges
are reaching the end of their service lives. And the tunnels into
Penn Station in New York have been described by several federal and
state agencies as a disaster waiting to happen because they lack
adequate escape routes.

Worse, from an operating point of view, the corridor's electric
propulsion system needs to be upgraded. Amtrak is buying new 150-mph
trains -- the Acela Express -- but the electric propulsion system
limits the trains to 135 mph.

If Amtrak can squeeze its current 2-hour-45-minute Acela schedule
down even by five or 10 minutes, and perhaps below 2-1/2 hours for
limited-stop or nonstop trains, and make schedules reliable, then
airline security delays could send a lot of air passengers to the
rails.

But first, Congress must deal with another obstacle that grew out of
the original big lie. Several years ago, Congress ordered Amtrak to
become "operationally self-sufficient" by December 2004. The idea is
for Amtrak to pay its operating costs from revenue while still
getting federal money for capital projects.

Transportation Department Inspector Kenneth Mead has said that the
drive for financial self-sufficiency has led Amtrak to spend funds
for quick-hit projects that would improve the bottom line while
cutting back badly on maintenance and improvement in the Northeast
Corridor.

Amtrak's Warrington basically agreed, and in May he called on
Congress to decide whether Amtrak is a business or a provider of
public service. In an interview on Friday, he put it more bluntly.

The self-sufficiency requirement is "inappropriate, impractical and
irrational in the context of recent events and public service
expectations," he said.

A New Mission?

Just a few miles south of Manhattan, at a location that was once
within sight of the World Trade Center, is the new Newark
International Airport train station, which may be part of Amtrak's
new mission.

The station was to have opened by Oct. 1, but it has been delayed at
least two weeks because its construction workers were pulled off the
project to help with rescue and recovery at the World Trade Center.

All over Europe, airports have train stations. There is a TGV station
in the Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, for example, and a number of
airlines actually have through ticketing on the TGV to Brussels and
many points in France.

In the United States, there has been no true connection between
airports and intercity passenger trains -- as opposed to subway or
light-rail trains. Even the rail station near Baltimore-Washington
International Airport is far from the terminal, with only an
unreliable shuttle-bus connection, and has no checked baggage or
ticketing facilities.

It is uncertain how new security measures will affect arrangements at
Newark, but that station is supposed to have ticket counters and
checked baggage facilities, and the airport monorail system will
connect it to nearby air terminals.

Amtrak trains from Washington, Boston and Harrisburg, Pa., will
arrive hourly at the station, which was built by the Port Authority
of New York and New Jersey, as will numerous New Jersey Transit
commuter trains.

Continental Airlines, which flies out of Newark, plans to have ticket
counters at New York Penn Station, and Continental officials have
said they will eventually offer through-ticketing with Amtrak,
perhaps eliminating air service from Newark to some corridor cities.

Many in the aviation industry have called for greater use of train
service to free gates now used at major airports for short-hop
flights, easing congestion and providing more gates for long-haul
flights.

"It makes absolutely no sense to restart the shuttles or to have
flights under 500 miles when there is train service," said Clark
Onstad, former FAA general counsel and aviation consultant. "Why take
the chance?"

Staff writers Lyndsay Layton and Katherine Shaver contributed to this
report.

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