(Scripps Howard News Service circulated the following article by Bartholomew Sullivan on June 28.)
WASHINGTON – Nighttime on the City of New Orleans
Changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee
Half-way home, we’ll be there by morning
Through the Mississippi darkness
Rolling down to the sea.
– Steve Goodman, “The City of New Orleans”
Arlo Guthrie sings “The City of New Orleans” somewhere just about every night.
The classic song about the train that’s got the “disappearing railroad blues” captures the spirit of an America that, when it was written in 1970, seemed to be fading fast, Guthrie said. Now, a congressional proposal to end Amtrak’s City of New Orleans service, and most long-distance Amtrak service across the country, has Guthrie hoping it’s not too late to save a cultural icon.
In 1979, he rode the now-defunct Montrealer from his home in western Massachusetts to Washington’s Union Station and played a protest concert to stop a Carter administration plan to cut passenger rail service. He said last week that it may be time to ride from the Windy City to the Big Easy to save The City of New Orleans. In the same breath, he wondered if Congress would even notice.
“They’re backed up against the wall with so many other crazy things going on that the fate of the nation’s train system is probably not on their to-do list,” he said. “But it should be. I can’t believe they’re that preoccupied that they can’t actually sit down and reason it out and find a way to keep the trains rolling,” Guthrie said. “Because it’s not just a symbol. If it were just a symbol, maybe we could live without it. But it’s more than that. It’s the hope for the future. Everyone knows that.” The House appropriations committee last week voted to approve only $550 million for Amtrak – a 55 percent cut from current funding – for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1. The full House is expected to take it up on Wednesday. Amtrak officials say that level of funding not only prevents the continued operation of long-distance trains like The City of New Orleans, it effectively derails all service.
“If it’s finally enacted that way, Amtrak would simply cease to exist,” said longtime Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. Debt service and severance payments to employees working on the terminated long-distance routes would eat up the entire appropriation.
In a letter to employees, Amtrak president David L. Gunn put it bluntly: “The practical impact of $550 million in federal support would be the same as zero funding for Amtrak, and they know it.”
Fans of passenger rail service hope something closer to the $1.8 billion sought by Amtrak will be restored when it comes up in the Senate, which has traditionally been more favorably disposed to the agency. The same bill that cuts Amtrak increases Federal Aviation Administration funding by $877 million.
Others predict that when the public learns that storied train routes like the Sunset Limited, Empire Builder, Southwest Chief and California Zephyr are set to be chloroformed, there will be outrage. Some of it has begun to bubble up.
“Once it becomes obvious to the public that the passenger trains are going to die, there will be some kind of uproar and uprising,” said Bill Strong of Germantown, Tenn., a Southeast regional director of the National Association of Railroad Passengers. “But it might be too late.”
An Illinois Central Chicago-to-New Orleans route was first called The City of New Orleans in 1947, said Amtrak’s Chicago spokesman Marc Magliari. When Amtrak took over the passenger system in 1971, it called the overnight route The Panama Limited. In 1981, The City of New Orleans name was restored. Since 1998, it has run daily once in each direction. The fare is currently $183 one-way.
It has some ardent fans in Memphis, Tenn. Many of them meet monthly at the White Station branch of the Memphis and Shelby County Library System as the local chapter of the National Railway Historical Society.
Memphis Redbirds general manager David A. Chase, 51, the society’s chapter president, said that it was “beyond my imagination” to shut down passenger rail service.
“Arlo Guthrie and (his late father) Woody Guthrie will have nothing to sing about if we don’t have The City of New Orleans,” said Chase.
“Especially in this day and age, when air travel is in peril … we probably need more than ever to rely on rail service.”
The City of New Orleans chugged out of the Crescent City northbound on Friday with 398 passengers. Forty-nine got off at Memphis, but 51 others got on. Southbound from the Windy City with 350 passengers, 46 got off at Memphis and 29 climbed aboard.
Amtrak ridership is up and its loss per passenger mile has been declining in recent years, its supporters point out.
Strong said the Bush administration “has gotten some very bad and incorrect information that they’re passing out as gospel.” The truth is that no passenger rail system could operate profitably without a substantial subsidy, he said. He pointed to the FAA funding of airports and the whole air traffic control system supporting for-profit airline companies and multibillion-dollar highway construction used by passenger buses.
Guthrie says it’s short-sighted to cut Amtrak service.
“I wish there were some other thing that I could think of to do that would help rekindle interest in the train system,” he said. “I think if a little more thought went into it and these guys (in Congress) could pay a little bit more attention to it, they could surely figure out some way to do it without destroying one of the things that made the country what it is in the first place.”