RICHMOND, Va. — Before Sept. 11, Ross Capon was a voice in the transportation wilderness, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports.
From the halls of Congress to local conference centers, he spent a quarter century promoting the advantages of riding trains rather than flying or driving.
It was hard to get people’s attention, though. They were too busy pumping gas or finding the lowest air fare to Florida.
The terrorist attacks changed all that.
Stepping off an Amtrak train yesterday in Richmond – “a minute early,” he noted — Capon provided a nonstop commentary on the state of passenger railroads today, and what needs to happen for them to get better.
Since 1976, Capon has been executive director of the National Association of Railroad Passengers, a Washington-based advocacy group with 15,000 members.
Capon, 54, acts as cheerleader and critic of the nation’s passenger railroad, Amtrak, and tries to get more federal backing from Congress.
Since Sept. 11, he has become Mr. Railroad – the man to interview when you want to know why, at times, Amtrak can be so good and, at other times, so bad.
First Capon’s good news: Amtrak’s passenger revenue jumped by 13 percent in October and, despite the economic downturn, its overall ridership dropped by a mere 1 percent.
The airlines, by contrast, saw a 38 percent dip in revenue, with October ridership down 22 percent.
With many people still shunning flying, Capon said, “Amtrak will play a bigger role in the future.”
But will Congress, which created Amtrak, play along?
That was a theme of Capon’s luncheon talk at The Commonwealth Club. He addressed about 100 members of the Friends of Rail, a business and civic group promoting high-speed rail service.
Amtrak, now 30 years old, is under orders from Congress to turn an operating profit by next December.
But, Capon argues, its impossible for the railroad to compete against two competitors – highways and airports – who get heavy injections of federal tax dollars.
“It builds a terrible bias into state transportation planning around the country,” he said.
Despite its recent popularity, Amtrak is under orders from its federal watchdog group, the Amtrak Reform Council, to prepare a plan to liquidate the entire 22,000-mile system.
“It’s certainly a painful period for Amtrak,” Capon said.
He called on Congress “to provide a reasonable amount of funding to get the job done.”
That’s a formidable task, with billions of dollars worth of track and building needs.
Yet the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks vividly showed the need for a strong rail network.
“The ground has shifted under the transportation establishment,” Capon told the Friends of Rail.
The ground might have shifted, but it can take a long time to turn railroads around, he said. A new service linking Boston with Portland, Maine, has been 13 years in the making, he said, “longer than it took to build the Transcontinental Railroad.”
Congress is considering two multibillion-dollar spending bills that could help Amtrak modernize and speed up. This also draws millions of dollars to Virginia to improve the Richmond-to-Washington rail corridor.
“It remains to be seen where the Bush administration is going to come down on all this,” he said.
Asked if he feels like a voice in the wilderness, Capon, a soft-spoken man who carries a laptop computer, said, “It’s never been quite the wilderness, but the progress is so slow.”