(The following article by Henry J. Holcomb was posted on the Philadelphia Inquirer website on July 4.)
PHILADELPHIA — Amtrak president David Gunn huddled with Philadelphia business leaders last week to help energize their campaign to save the national passenger railroad.
His main meeting was with the CEO Council for Growth, an affiliate of the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, which has declared Amtrak’s busy Northeast Corridor essential to this region’s economic health and future growth.
The Bush administration is pressing to cut off federal funding as a way to force reforms. Amtrak says this would force the national passenger-rail system into bankruptcy. Some business leaders have privately noted that airlines keep flying during bankruptcy, so trains would still run and Philadelphia would face no immediate threat.
So one of Gunn’s chief objectives in the meeting, in a Center City conference room of the Saul Ewing L.L.P. law firm, was to say bluntly that Amtrak is not like the airlines.
“We have a negative cash flow, so if you push us into bankruptcy, trains will stop running – for months,” Gunn said.
Service would eventually be taken over by a reluctant freight railroad, whose employees would be unfamiliar with the demands of high volumes of trains moving at high speeds on the Northeast Corridor, Gunn said.
The disruption, he warned, would dismantle a technically competent group of employees, “the working stiffs who know how to put the lines back up when they go down,” Gunn said.
When trains eventually start running again, there will be far less service than what is required to handle demand that has been growing in recent years, he said.
Gunn said the national passenger railroad needed $1.6 billion a year for four or five years – up from the current annual federal subsidy of $1.2 billion – to catch up on deferred maintenance and repair its “creaking and outdated systems.”
He also stressed that Amtrak was already being reformed. Over the last three years, it has cut costs, improved productivity, and made sweeping changes to make it easy for the public and Congress to see how it spends money, Gunn said. The workforce has been cut from 24,700 to 19,600 in that period, he said.
“I’m reforming what I control,” Gunn said. He said he needed action by Congress to change railway labor law to end costly jurisdictional conflicts in maintenance shops and shrink the size of train crews.
“I need the ability to write job descriptions based on modern equipment, not steam engines,” Gunn said.
He also proposed that Congress establish minimum revenue standards for long-distance trains. If not met, trains would be canceled unless state governments made up the shortfall.
The long-distance trains remain popular in the states they serve. They are essential to getting congressional support for the major high-traffic corridors on the East and West Coasts. “Long-distance trains are a political reality,” he said.
The nation’s transportation system is in crisis and needs intercity passenger trains more than ever, Gunn said.
“There has never been a greater need for intelligent allocation of federal transportation dollars. Oil prices are rising. Highways are increasingly congested. The airlines are losing more money than we do. The freight railroads are in real trouble,” Gunn said.
The nation also needs to focus more on technical competence in managing Amtrak and other public transportation systems, Gunn said. “There is a tendency to hire political managers,” he said. When systems get in trouble, he said, they hire “someone like me to come in for a while… then I get too outspoken and get replaced by a political person.”
After listening to Gunn for an hour, Thomas A. Caramanico, chairman of the CEO Council’s infrastructure working group, said his group needed to work harder to “get the word out that Amtrak is making real reforms.”
“As an engineer, I think they know what they’re doing,” said Caramanico, president of the McCormick Taylor Inc. engineering firm.
Amtrak is gaining support in Congress. On Wednesday, the House rejected drastic cuts approved by a committee. The Senate is working on its own version of Amtrak legislation.
But the battle is a long way from over, Gunn said. He prefaced comments on future plans with, “if we’re still here.”