(The following article by Alan Wirzbicki was posted on the Boston Globe website on March 17.)
WASHINGTON — An effort spearheaded by Senate Democrats to save Amtrak’s federal subsidy failed on a close vote yesterday, dealing another setback to the passenger railroad that has struggled for years to operate in the black.
President Bush’s budget, submitted in February, provides no funding for Amtrak, a move that the administration and its critics say will probably drive the corporation into bankruptcy by the next fiscal year. The Senate voted 52 to 46 against an amendment offered by Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, and backed by much of the New England delegation, to restore $1 billion in Amtrak subsidies to next year’s budget.
Four Northeastern Republican senators — Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, and Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both of Maine — joined Democrats in supporting the failed amendment. Collins said that trains are a ”critical part” of the East Coast transportation system and that the railroad ”benefits our environment by reducing harmful emissions.”
Amtrak carried about 25 million passengers last year, most in the Northeast, but it operated at a loss of $600 million and has never made a profit.
The Bush administration wants to drive the railroad into insolvency and start from scratch with what it says will be a more rational system of short routes run by the states .
Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta welcomed the vote and said in a statement yesterday that the amendment’s defeat signals that the Senate ”is ready to begin an earnest discussion” on the future of passenger rail.
The administration wants to shift responsibility for intercity passenger rail from the federal government to individual states, which would require state governments in the Northeast to come up with millions of dollars to keep the trains running.
Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, both of Massachusetts, cosponsored the Byrd amendment and voted yesterday to restore funding.
In remarks on the Senate floor before the vote, Kennedy called the Bush plan a cynical attempt to kill Amtrak and said the states ”don’t have the resources to acquire and operate the system.”
Kennedy said that the United States spends far less on rail service than other developed countries, including Japan and Germany, which spend about 20 percent of their national transportation budget on trains, compared with the 2 percent Amtrak has requested.
The corporation could still win a reprieve in the House, where 21 mostly Northeastern Republicans have said they would push to restore federal funding, or at later stages of Senate budget debate.
The Senate tally took some Amtrak backers by surprise, since several Republican senators who normally support Amtrak, including former majority leader Trent Lott of Mississippi, voted against the amendment.
In a statement, Senator Tom Carper, Democrat of Delaware, called the vote short-sighted and criticized colleagues ”who have publicly supported Amtrak in the past” but voted against the amendment yesterday.
Ross Capon, head of the National Association of Railroad Passengers, said yesterday’s vote was only the ”first inning” in the budget debate over Amtrak and said he was confident that the railroad’s Republican supporters would side with Amtrak at later stages of the budget process.
”We’ll just have to see whether this is a forerunner of a terrible year for Amtrak or just the first part of a process that quite frequently looks gruesome at the outset but gets better,” Capon said.
An Amtrak spokesman declined to comment on yesterday’s Senate vote. In February David Gunn, Amtrak’s president, called the Bush plan irresponsible and said of the administration, ”they have no plan for Amtrak other than bankruptcy.”