TOLEDO, Ohio — After months of uncertainty, Amtrak, which quietly reached its 31st birthday last week, appears increasingly likely to see its 32nd, the Toledo Blade reports.
A bill introduced late last month in the U.S. House of Representatives provides the minimum $1.2 billion that Amtrak officials say they need to run the nationwide passenger train system as it now exists, including three daily roundtrips between Chicago and the East Coast via Toledo and a fourth via Fostoria.
A passenger-train bill already passed by the Senate authorizes $4.6 billion a year for developing new services.
But while Congress appears likely to avert a shutdown of all of Amtrak’s long-distance routes — including all service in Ohio — the system’s future remains cloudy.
Years of austerity have led Amtrak to postpone track repairs on its busy Boston-Washington corridor and set aside dozens of train cars damaged in accidents, rather than repair them.
The April 18 Amtrak Auto Train derailment in Florida sent 14 of the system’s double-decker Superliner cars to the sidelines. The Superliners are the backbone of Amtrak’s long-distance train fleet, including the Capitol Limited service between Chicago and Washington via Toledo.
Last year, Amtrak mortgaged New York’s Pennsylvania Station for $300 million to cover operating expenses, and in February it announced layoffs of 1,000 employees, including 228 at the heavy-repair shop in Beech Grove, Ind., and about 200 station agents and attendants. Operating hours at numerous stations were reduced, including at Cleveland though so far not in Toledo, where the station remains open around the clock.
“We’ve lost too many of our good employees in the past few months,” Raymond Lang, Amtrak’s regional director of government relations in its Chicago office, said during a local forum last month on the future of passenger train service.
“My concern is a lack of continuity. It’s being lost in a number of places,” Frank Stoy, whose 21-year career with Amtrak in Toledo ended last month when his position as regional marketing manager was cut, said later in an interview. “In our marketing department, that’s a real concern. It’s important to know how the product has evolved. Fresh ideas and skills can be a benefit, but you need some familiarity too. There aren’t a whole lot of people left who have more than five years’ experience.”
Marcus Mason, Amtrak’s director of high-speed rail corridors, said after the forum that the layoffs had spared the most critical areas.
“Yes, there will be institutional memory left,” he said. “Especially where we need it: on the safety side, and on the operations side.”
Mr. Stoy said he is concerned about the morale of those who remain. The Federal Railroad Administration last month began a special safety watch on Amtrak to make sure employees’ concerns about their job futures and seniority-related relocations don’t distract them at work.
No serious accidents have been attributed to Amtrak employee mistakes, but The Washington Post reported a spike in rules violations during April that aroused safety officials’ concern.
Karina Van Veen, a spokeswoman at Amtrak’s Washington headquarters, said the “enhanced monitoring” is something the railroad administration has done previously with other railroads that were having financial problems.
The layoffs “haven’t decimated complete departments. We’ve simply cut down to the bare bones,” Ms. Van Veen said.
Ever since it took over operation of most intercity passenger trains in the United States on May 1, 1971, Amtrak has been fighting for its life. While funding for other modes of transportation is distributed among numerous accounts in the federal budget, a single line item has always appeared for Amtrak, and that line has almost always been contested. During the 1980s, the Reagan administration routinely penciled zero on that line, but Congress always put money back for the trains.
Thirty years of defending its existence have left Amtrak with little time to look forward, Mr. Mason said.
“There’s never been a planning group,” he said. “If there was a planning group, we’d have to lay them off.”
On May 15, David Gunn, credited with reviving the New York City transit system during the late 1980s and the former head of the Philadelphia, Washington, and Toronto transit agencies as well, will become Amtrak’s new president and chief executive officer.
Mr. Gunn succeeds George Warrington, who stepped down last month to head New Jersey Transit after conceding that Amtrak could not meet a Congressional mandate to at least break even on its operating expenses – a goal Mr. Warrington had said five years earlier was reachable.
When his appointment was announced April 26, Mr. Gunn said that his first task would be preparing a shutdown plan in case Amtrak runs out of money but that it is not his intention to dismantle the passenger-train system.
“I have always been a strong proponent of a strong national passenger rail network,” he said. “I’m convinced that by securing adequate operational and capital funding, we will be able to rebuild our plant and equipment in an effective and efficient manner, and continue to provide a high-quality service to the traveling public.”
Right now, however, Amtrak appears to be one derailment away from having to pull old cars out of storage to maintain operations. Between March 15, 1999, and Sept. 13, 2001, Amtrak lost 30 Superliner cars in accidents and a couple more to breakdowns. Perhaps a half dozen were total losses, but most of the others sit at the Beech Grove shop awaiting repair.
After the Auto Train accident, believed to have been caused by faulty track, took 14 more cars out of service, Superliners assigned to the Chicago-Cincinnati-Washington “Cardinal” and Chicago-Toronto “International” trains were sent south as replacements. Single-level cars from other routes were reassigned to re-equip the two Chicago trains, costing one of three daily New York-Miami runs its sleeper and diner service.
“We’re doing the best we can. We do have enough [equipment] to meet the needs of our guests,” Ms. Van Veen said. While no cars are being repaired, she said, the $1.2 billion fiscal 2003 funding request that Congress appears poised to approve “includes a significant amount to repair and upgrade our fleet.”