FORT WORTH, Texas — The Texas Eagle rumbled into Fort Worth last week, 33 minutes late, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.
Pat Woods, 32, of Luton, England, climbed aboard enthusiastically. He has been visiting the United States for about a month, using Amtrak to get around.
“It is usually late, but I am in no rush,” Woods said as he snapped up four carry-on bags and hopped aboard the Chicago-bound train.
“The people I have met on Amtrak are people who are scared to fly, tourists and older people who prefer to travel on trains.”
Taking an informal count of the dozen or so other passengers boarding from the Fort Worth Intermodal Transportation Center, he added, “America was built on rails, so it’s a sort of paradox.”
Just two months after a financial crisis nearly shut down the country’s only nationwide passenger rail system, Amtrak is still making three daily stops in Fort Worth, but the long-term future is as foggy as ever.
The Texas Eagle stops in Fort Worth twice a day — once for southbound service to San Antonio, and once for northbound service to Chicago. The train runs on schedule only 21 percent of the time, which is among Amtrak’s worst on-time performance rates, and ridership is down 12 percent from a year ago, according to Amtrak figures.
The Heartland Flyer, which makes daily runs between Fort Worth and Oklahoma City, has a much better on-time record of 71 percent and is financially backed by a $4.6 million subsidy from Oklahoma. But ridership on that train is down 7 percent from a year ago.
And if the Texas Eagle were discontinued, it is uncertain whether Oklahoma officials would still be willing to subsidize the Heartland Flyer beyond the current appropriation, which expires in 2004. An estimated one-third of Heartland Flyer passengers disembark at Fort Worth and connect to the Texas Eagle for service to the rest of the United States.
A third Amtrak service in Texas, the Sunset Limited, also has one of the rail line’s worst on-time performances at 36 percent. That route is Amtrak’s longest, stretching from Orlando, Fla., to Los Angeles through San Antonio.
Amtrak President David L. Gunn is requesting $1.2 billion to keep Amtrak running through September 2003, and Congress is expected to debate the issue in October.
The approval of that funding would be just the first step in an overhaul of intercity rail passenger service that is expected to take several years.
Gunn has said he does not object to Congress scrutinizing Amtrak’s long-distance routes and discontinuing those that don’t pass muster.
The Texas Eagle was one of 18 long-distance routes that escaped closure this summer, but it could still be viewed as an underperforming train based on declining ridership and poor on-time performance, rail passenger advocates say.
Still, Amtrak officials remain optimistic that the rail line’s financial troubles can be conquered, even if the battle for funding continues to be a yearly controversy.
The Texas Eagle “is going to continue running as long as we secure the $1.2 billion we requested,” Chicago-based Amtrak spokesman Howard Riefs said. “We will find out sometime in October on the Hill.”
As for the long-term future, Riefs said, “The appropriations cycle is done on a yearly basis. Every fall, we look to Congress and the White House as to what the appropriation might be.”
The Union Pacific Railroad owns much of the right of way that Amtrak uses in the southern and western parts of the country. The company’s maintenance work on many tracks has contributed to the delays, said Union Pacific spokesman Mark Davis, who is based in Omaha, Neb.
“During the summer months, we go through a huge maintenance blitz, a lot of it on not only the Texas Eagle route but other routes,” he said. “Whenever a track is not up to standards for a certain speed, then you have to reduce the speed of that track. Naturally, if you have a lot of those it slows the performance down.”
Amtrak officials blamed the delays on a combination of factors, including maintenance and freight-train congestion.
The on-time performance must be fixed because the closure of any of Amtrak’s long-distance routes would cause a collapse of the nation’s only coast-to-coast passenger rail system, said Ross Capon, president of the National Association of Railroad Passengers.
Some critics have called for ending Amtrak service in its current form and replacing it with regional rails. But others say Amtrak can only succeed as a nationwide service.
“Frankly, the system is so skeletal that any individual train you take out is going to take one or more states with it, and that’s the end of service in Arkansas, and in Oklahoma, and in most of Texas,” Capon said. “I think the debate this year has pretty much focused on Amtrak as a unit, and maybe the long-distance trains as a unit.”
Amtrak’s financial problems are heart-wrenching for people who view passenger rail service as a romantic part of the country’s history.
Alan and Vicki Case, who live in Woodward, Okla., rode the Heartland Flyer last week just for the thrill of it.
“It’s our granddaughter’s fourth birthday, and we’re taking her on [her] first train ride,” the Cases, a retired couple, said as they stepped off the train in Fort Worth.
Holding her grandparents’ hands was a wide-eyed Jalee Wills, still speechless from her first rail experience.
If there were more tourists like the Cases, Amtrak’s problems would be less severe, some say.
But among those who are looking for a way to save Amtrak, the perplexing problem facing the company is how to convert its passenger service into a viable option for travelers who need to be somewhere on time.