(The following story by Fort Worth Star-Telegram writer Gordon Dickson appeared on the Aberdeen American Statesman?s website on September 29.)
ABOARD THE TEXAS EAGLE — Bill Hettinger hasn’t set foot on an airplane since before his divorce 15 years ago.
He has hated flying since 1957, when an Army pal’s helicopter crashed during training at Fort Jackson, S.C. For years, Hettinger flew as a last resort. Now, he has the luxury of time and sees no reason to ever leave the ground again, unless it’s aboard a train crossing a trestle.
“I take Amtrak everywhere I go,” he says. “Everything I need is here. I’m single. I’ve got no kids that I know of. I’m semi-retired. I can see the country.”
Soon, he could be seeing a lot less of it.
One rainy weekend this month, Hettinger was among 210 passengers aboard Amtrak’s Texas Eagle, one of several long-distance trains that will almost certainly be eliminated if Congress follows through on plans to cut federal funding.
David Gunn, president and chief executive of Amtrak, wants a minimum $1.8 billion to continue the current level of service in 2004.
“The vast majority of Americans believe there should be a national passenger network,” he said in an interview. “The amount it takes to fund this is not a lot of money in the scheme of things.”
But the House Appropriations Committee, which contains many critics of Amtrak, has approved only the $900 million proposed by the Bush administration.
A Senate committee has approved $1.35 billion. The precise amount will probably be decided by a House-Senate conference committee this month or in early October.
Many critics see no reason to continue spending taxpayers’ money on a passenger rail service that depends on aging equipment running on tracks owned by freight railroads. Supporters say that the nation needs alternatives to automobiles and airplane travel, and that it’s unfair for the federal government to spend billions subsidizing highways and aviation while expecting passenger rail service to be self-sufficient.
If the Texas Eagle shuts down, more than 220,000 riders in Texas would have to find other ways to travel, and dozens of employees could lose their jobs.
Thousands of workers are threatening to walk off the job Oct. 3 in a one-day protest of a lack of funding.
The Texas Eagle has carried passengers from Texas to Chicago for 55 years. About a fourth of the passengers are train aficionados who ride the rails for nostalgia’s sake, according to a recent Amtrak survey. Another fourth, like Hettinger, are afraid to fly.
But others – senior citizens, college students, and young families – take the train because they’re on a budget or want to see America from a different vantage point.
The Texas Eagle travels through Texas twice a day – north to Chicago and south to San Antonio. Half the train’s 26 stops on the 1,000-mile-long route are in Texas. The train, which is on time only about one of every five trips, is pulled by a 1990s General Electric diesel locomotive.
Behind the engine are a baggage car, two sleeper cars, three coaches, a dining car and a double-decker lounge car. The lounge has a sightseeing area on its upper deck, and a snack bar on the lower deck.
Passengers can move around freely, but the locomotive and baggage car are off-limits. The sleeper cars are for first-class passengers only.
The most scenic portion of the trip is probably in Arkansas. But the train usually passes through The Natural State in the middle of the night, when most passengers are trying to sleep.
At any given time, there are about 11 employees aboard the Texas Eagle.
Amtrak recently eliminated the employees’ dormitory car in a cost-cutting move. Attendants now share a sleeper car with passengers, separated from the paying customers by a blue curtain.
“You’ve got to have some privacy,” says Dining car attendant Eddie Martin Jr.
Gunn, Amtrak’s president, says the elimination of the dormitory car was necessary so the Texas Eagle could be pulled by one locomotive, rather than two.
If the Texas Eagle is eliminated, some of the employees could lose their jobs.
“We feel the workers who have been running this railroad every day feel they have run out of string. There’s no more duct tape left to keep this going,” says Charles Moneypenny, director of the Transport Workers Union’s Railroad Division, which represents about 2,000 workers, including the train attendants.
The union is among six organizations planning the work stoppage next month to protest a lack of federal funding. About 8,000 of Amtrak’s 21,000 employees are expected to participate, including engineers, Moneypenny says.
“We don’t think the public really knows how dire this situation is,” he says. “I think the feeling among some (politicians) is, let’s kill Amtrak and see what comes out of the ruins. We don’t think that’s right.”
Ed Witkind, executive director of the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trade Department, says workers have reached a boiling point. His organization includes several labor unions that represent Amtrak workers.
“This is about workers who have held together a company for years and continued to beg for everything they earned,” he says. “Employee morale is at an all-time low. If you were employed at Amtrak and all you heard or read in the newspapers was that the company is trying to survive, it’s hard to imagine the employees feeling secure.”
Under President Bush’s proposal, states would be required to further subsidize passenger rail. Amtrak would be broken into regional segments, focusing on short-distance corridors where there is large demand for trains.
For example, the St. Louis-to-Chicago portion of the Texas Eagle might be a candidate for a short-distance corridor. But to save the entire long-distance line, Texas, Arkansas and Missouri might be expected to determine how to pay for the portion from San Antonio to St. Louis.
The Texas Eagle lost $38 million in 2001, according to the Amtrak Reform Council, which was appointed by Congress to monitor the rail service.
U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, is critical of the administration’s plan and is leading a campaign that calls for the federal government to invest $4 in Amtrak’s long-distance lines for every $1 spent on the Northeast Corridor, which has traditionally received a larger proportion of the funding.
“We are really trying to give Amtrak a real chance to succeed,” she says. “I think there’s room for Amtrak to be a healthy alternative without taking away from aviation or highways, and certainly we could stand to alleviate some of the stress on the highway system as well.”
Amtrak doesn’t own any track outside the Northeast Corridor, which serves Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston.
The Texas Eagle runs mostly on tracks owned by the Union Pacific railroad, and in many places the tracks carry a tremendous amount of freight traffic and are badly in need of repair.
“The nation’s freight railroads are in trouble, and Amtrak’s problems are the canary in a coal mine,” says Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. “They’re carrying more traffic than ever before on a constricted system of railroad tracks.”
The conductors and engineers, who are charged with the safe operation of the train, change in Fort Worth, Texas; Marshall, Texas; Little Rock, Arkansas; and St. Louis. Federal regulations limit how long they can be on duty – 12 hours for a crew with two engineers, six hours for a crew with one engineer.
The rest of the crew – the chef, the assistant chef and attendants – live in Chicago and work the train all the way to Fort Worth.
In Fort Worth, they spend the night and take the next day off – mandatory down time. The next day, they board the northbound Texas Eagle to work the trip back to Chicago.