WASHINGTON — According to a wire service, Amtrak’s success in the Northeast, where travelers are increasingly choosing trains over planes, proves that a well-funded rail system can thrive, Amtrak President George Warrington says.
He said the nation has shortchanged its passenger trains for the three decades since Amtrak was created to run them.
“This nation spends more money annually on cleaning up roadkill on highways and on salt for snow removal” than on passenger rail, Warrington said in an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press.
He is making a series of appearances before congressional panels to argue that intercity trains are a public service in desperate need of more federal funding.
Warrington said Amtrak achieved a milestone in the last three months of 2001, when more people traveling between New York and Washington chose Amtrak trains over the hourly air shuttles run by US Airways and Delta.
The route is served by Amtrak’s premier train, the high-speed Acela Express, as well as conventional trains. To introduce Acela Express, Amtrak relied heavily on its most recent major infusion of federal funds — $2.2 billion approved by Congress in 1997.
“This is the first time ever in the history of Amtrak that we are dominating that market,” Warrington said.
David Castelveter, a spokesman for US Airways, said the airline does not disclose how many people ride its shuttles. Peggy Estes, a spokeswoman for Delta, said, “The discerning customer remains loyal to the Delta Shuttle.”
Amtrak likely benefited from the disruptions to the nation’s air travel system following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Reagan National Airport, the southern end of the Boston-New York-Washington shuttle corridor, was closed for more than three weeks following the attacks and still is not back to its pre-Sept. 11 level of flights.
Warrington said Amtrak’s market share will continue to grow if track improvements in the Northeast help reduce travel times. But that will take more federal dollars — Warrington’s top priority.
He is pressing Congress for a major increase in funding even as lawmakers weigh proposals to close or restructure Amtrak, the nation’s provider of intercity passenger trains for 31 years.
Amtrak has received federal appropriations of $521 million each of the past three years — less than 1 percent of all federal transportation spending.
President Bush has proposed the same amount for the fiscal year that begins in October. Amtrak has requested $1.2 billion and has threatened to cut some or all of its 18 long-distance trains unless it receives that amount.
Warrington said 30 years of “muddling through” has left Amtrak with a $5.8 billion backlog in needed work to its trains, tracks, rail yards and stations.
A key Amtrak ally, Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., is proposing legislation that would extend Amtrak’s existence five more years and authorize up to $4.6 billion a year for Amtrak operations, renovations to Amtrak-owned tracks in the Northeast and development of new high-speed corridors around the country.
The legislation also authorizes $1.4 billion in one-time security improvements.
“The time to move ahead is now,” Hollings said. “We cannot wait for highways and airports to become so clogged that they cannot operate any longer.”
Warrington said the Hollings bill is significant because it proposes a level of federal funding sufficient to maintain the national rail system that lawmakers demand.
But funding for Amtrak, always a contentious topic on Capitol Hill, is a particularly hot subject this year.
Amtrak lost $1.1 billion in 2001, the most in its 30-year history. To cut costs, Amtrak is eliminating 1,000 of the company’s 24,600 jobs and making other cuts in training, advertising and equipment maintenance.
The Amtrak Reform Council, created by Congress in 1997, released a plan last month that called for breaking up Amtrak and franchising out some routes to introduce competition into passenger rail.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a leading congressional critic of Amtrak, has proposed a radical restructuring that would abolish Amtrak and maintain only those routes taken over by the private sector.