WASHINGTON, D.C. — Amtrak President David L. Gunn yesterday proposed the creation of a federal trust fund for passenger rail similar to those that help build roads and airports, and he said states must eventually cover operating losses on all state and regional trains for those services to survive, the Washington Post reported.
Gunn, who has spent much of his five-month tenure trying to keep Amtrak alive and to stabilize it, told a meeting of rail officials and consultants that those goals have been accomplished for the time being and the time has come to start preparing for the future.
“Of course, stability at Amtrak would be chaos anywhere else,” Gunn said in a speech to the annual Passenger Trains on Freight Railroads Conference, sponsored by Railway Age magazine.
For the first time, Gunn outlined publicly some of his ideas for the future of the passenger train. He said that federal and state governments must pay for capital costs such as tracks, locomotives and passenger cars and that state governments must pay for the cost of operations not covered by ticket revenue. If no one is interested in paying those costs, he said, the trains will disappear.
Even with those measures, Gunn said, no American alive today will see a costly network of trains running at 180 mph or faster lacing the country on newly constructed high-speed tracks, like the French TGV or the Japanese Shinkansen. Anyone who thinks so is “smoking funny cigarettes,” he said.
Instead, he said, the United States can do quite well with an “incremental” approach concentrating on trains going perhaps 90 to 110 mph, on upgraded tracks, with frequent service between urban centers.
Gunn acknowledged that he does not know how a trust fund would be financed, although he said it could take the same form as the current transit section of the highway trust fund, which provides $4 for each $1 the states provide.
But the highway trust fund is financed through gasoline taxes, and other participants in the conference said there is no way Congress would put the trust fund in jeopardy for Amtrak. Gunn did not even mention highway gasoline taxes as a possible source. He noted that freight railroads now pay 4.3 cents per gallon in fuel taxes — a total of about $170 million a year — that go directly to the Treasury. He said that could become the seed money for a trust fund. Freight railroads, led by Union Pacific Corp., strongly oppose use of the fuel tax for a trust fund and want it repealed so they can use that money for their own capital projects.
Gunn called on the freight railroads to join him in seeking more-stable funding for Amtrak, which he said would provide the freight lines with badly needed capital improvements that they cannot now finance privately.
He said he sees signs that the freight railroad industry is deteriorating operationally under a burden of heavy traffic that still has not produced adequate revenue. He said money spent on tracks and facilities for passenger trains would also provide badly needed freight capacity.
“They’re having a lot of fun playing with trains, but they’re not earning much for it,” he said. “More tonnage and less money. It doesn’t work.”
Gunn said that freight railroads often do a poor job of running Amtrak trains and that some railroads consistently run them hours late. But he said they don’t deliberately run Amtrak trains poorly; many of their freight trains can’t run on schedule, either. “We’re all in the same leaky boat,” he said.
Gunn said the freight railroads should view Amtrak’s problems — the railroad has lost money for 31 consecutive years and nearly ran out of money this past summer — just as miners used to look at canaries lowered into mines to test for deadly gases.
“We’re flopping around in the bottom of our cage,” he said.