(The following Associated Press article was published by the New York Times on April 25.)
WASHINGTON — Amtrak will renovate Civil War-era tunnels and replace overhead electrical wires installed when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president under a five-year upgrade plan announced today.
The plan by Amtrak’s president, David Gunn, ignores calls for eliminating some money-losing long-distance trains and would keep the nation’s passenger railroad’s high-speed service at existing levels.
Amtrak came under pressure from Congress last year after announcing that 18 of the long-haul runs would be scrapped to save money.
“If you’re going to have any service left, this is what you’re going to have to do,” Mr. Gunn said of the plan presented to Amtrak’s board on Thursday. “When it’s done, we’ll have a good railroad.”
Mr. Gunn said Amtrak needed twice the $900 million President Bush wants to spend in 2004 to keep the trains running, but a spokesman for the Transportation Department, Leonardo Alcivar, said the department did not expect to ask Congress for more money. Mr. Alcivar was also skeptical of Mr. Gunn’s plan.
“What was presented today represents a staff draft and is unfortunately a best-case scenario that consists of several assumptions, multiple risks and is noticeable for what is not included as potential costs,” Mr. Alcivar said.
He said the plan made unrealistic cost estimates for buying new rail cars and assumed that the troubles of the high-speed Acela service would go away. The Acela trains, which run between Boston and Washington, were taken out of service last year because of cracks in shock-absorbing assemblies that keep the locomotives from swaying.
Mr. Gunn wants to buy 14 self-propelled diesel cars to run between New Haven and Springfield, Mass., and on the Chicago-Milwaukee line. He also wants to replace 75 50-year-old cars that would cost more to overhaul than the cost of new cars.
Now, only 81 percent of Amtrak’s passenger cars can be used. Overhauling old cars and rebuilding them by replacing toilets and electrical systems would make 90 percent of them available in five years, Mr. Gunn said.
Overhauling the trains will save money by requiring fewer employees to maintain them, he said.
The railroad also needs to install 162 miles of concrete ties and replace 270 miles of track on the 1,900 miles of track it owns. Station platforms, roofs and escalators need repair. Electric wires strung in the 1930’s between New York’s Penn Station and New Rochelle, N.Y., must be replaced.
Replacing a Baltimore tunnel that was built in the late 1860’s would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but Amtrak is instead planning to fix the tracks and drainage inside, a spokesman, Cliff Black, said.
Mr. Gunn said he hoped the manufacturers of the Acela can keep the troubled equipment on the tracks after last year’s shock-absorbing problem.
The plan calls for about $2 billion annually from the government through at least 2008. Amtrak has averaged $1.5 billion in government money in each of the past five years, Mr. Gunn said.
Last year, Mr. Gunn’s threat to shut down the railroad resulted in a $200 million government loan.
Congress allowed Amtrak to survive through 2003 by granting almost all the $1.2 billion requested through September. That money was split between an operating subsidy and capital expenses.
Unless the railroad is brought into good operating condition, Mr. Gunn said, fewer people will take trains, and Amtrak will need a bigger operating subsidy. Amtrak no longer claims it can ever become self-sufficient.