(The following article by Matthew L. Wald was posted on the New York Times website on June 29.)
WASHINGTON — Amtrak’s revenues have been stronger than expected in the last few months, and operating expenses have been lower, so the railroad’s financial stability has improved, the president, David Gunn, said Tuesday.
But rebuilding efforts on track that the railroad owns have increased delays, as have equipment failures and congestion on freight railroads. Mr. Gunn also said the system runs the risk of “major asset failure” that would be extremely disruptive to service, because it relies on very old bridges and electrical systems, he said.
“We’re approaching the moment of truth for Amtrak in many respects, because the physical conditions have to be addressed,” he said, singling out four drawbridges in Connecticut and the electric system that supplies the overhead wires in Penn Station in New York.
Joined by state officials from California, Washington State, Wisconsin, Virginia and North Carolina, Mr. Gunn called on Congress to provide $3 billion for a five-year demonstration project intended to improve rail service over existing short-haul routes. Under the states’ proposal, the federal government would cover 80 percent of the capital costs and the states 20 percent, to put rail on an equal financial footing with highway projects.
States and others have made many proposals for high-speed rail corridors, many involving new rights-of-way and new equipment. “There have been scores of proposals but they’ve always been in the tens of billions of dollars and it scares people off,” said Eugene Skoropowski, a California official in charge of the rail corridor from the San Francisco area to Sacramento.
The ones identified Tuesday would involve relatively modest projects to cut bottlenecks, improve signals and add sidings and double-track in some areas, and would generally involve running trains at less than 80 miles an hour.
At the Federal Railroad Administration, Steven W. Kulm, a spokesman, said: “In general we endorse the proposition of changing the funding system to more equate how it is with highways and transit systems.” That would mean states choosing the routes and bearing the expense of subsidizing operations, with the federal government contributing to construction expenses. But he added that the Bush administration had not proposed any percentage division in capital expense.
Meanwhile, the administration and Amtrak are profoundly divided over continuing subsidies for the railroad. For the fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1, the administration is proposing $900 million, unless Congress makes major changes in Amtrak’s structure. Amtrak supporters say those changes would dismantle passenger service. Amtrak says it wants $1.8 billion. It asked for that amount last year and got about $1.2 billion, but Mr. Gunn said Tuesday that the railroad had had some extra money to spend because of higher revenues and lower operating expenses, in part because of cuts in employment. At the end of its fiscal year, on Sept. 30, the railroad will have $150 million to $200 million more available than it had projected, he said.
The railroad has increased the pace of capital improvements but has been slowed to some extent by the withered state of the industry that makes passenger rail equipment, and by Amtrak’s own ability to deploy equipment and people, Mr. Gunn said.
A side-effect of track work, including replacing rail and installing concrete ties, has been more delays.
In the 12 months that ended Sept. 30, 2003, delay minutes reached just over 3 million, up from about 2.85 million in the previous year and about 2.7 million in the year before that, according to Amtrak. Reconstruction work on the tracks owned by the railroad, failures on track owned by Amtrak and problems on the freight rail lines on which Amtrak operates all grew over the period. Outside the Northeast, Amtrak trains operate on lines owned by the freight railroads.