WASHINGTON, D.C. — After four months on the job, Amtrak’s new president, David Gunn, says he has figured out how to save the bedraggled national passenger railroad, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
He’s using the railroad’s brush with bankruptcy in July to focus broader attention on how many regions would be hurt if Amtrak stopped running.
And he is going to seek support from a large group of government officials and business leaders that has stayed on the sidelines of the never-resolved debate that has left Amtrak with barely enough funds to keep going throughout its 31-year history.
He calls his new target audience “the mushy middle — mushy in terms of their views toward rail.” These people constitute a majority in Congress and state legislatures, he said.
For decades they have been caught between two extremes, Gunn said in an interview in his Washington office. Hard-liners, arguing that government should not own a railroad, have been trying to kill Amtrak since Congress created it in 1971. On the other side, passionate proponents have offered nothing huge and costly projects, Gunn said.
“If you have something that is reasonable and that doesn’t break the bank, and produces results in our lifetime, a lot of people will come into the fray and take the argument away from the extremes,” Gunn said.
This must happen soon, he said. “This place can’t muddle through much longer. It has to have some stability or we’ll start running out of equipment; bridges and signal systems will begin to fail,” Gunn said.
Long-term, state and local government must share in the cost of the nation’s passenger rail system, akin to the way they share the cost of highway construction and transit systems, he said.
“If it’s all federal,” Gunn laughed, “I’ll be like a piece of chum in a tank of barracudas. Everybody wants free service. You’ve got to have something that disciplines requests.”
Gunn is asking Congress for $1.2 billion for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, more than double the $521 million subsidy it got this year. A final federal budget is unlikely until after the November elections.
That additional money is urgently needed, he says, to catch up on long-deferred maintenance, get wrecked railcars returned to service, and make long-overdue improvements to track and signals.
To gain credibility, Gunn has switched to a budget system that doesn’t require an accounting degree to understand. “You can spend a day going through these sheets and know what we’re spending money on,” he said, holding up the document he would present to his board the next day.
Turning to a page, Gunn asked: “Want to know what this $4.8 million is for? Glad you asked. Here’s the specific project. It’s going for cable renewal between milepost 29.5 and 135.” Turning to another section, he said: “Here’s a list of wrecked cars we’re going to repair. Here’s the schedule.”
Gunn has thinned management to the point where there was an eerie quiet at corporate headquarters last Wednesday. Where other chiefs show up at the Washington Post editorial board in chauffeur-driven cars, Gunn walked in Tuesday from the nearby Metro subway stop.
The outcome of Amtrak’s struggles will have a profound impact on the Philadelphia region. If Gunn succeeds, Philadelphia would be in an even stronger position to attract companies that value easy rail access to New York and Washington.
Gunn, 65, has a much broader and deeper railroad background than his recent predecessors. “He’s had experience across the board. He knows rail operations, the technology and the human resource side of the fence,” said John C. Spychalski of Pennsylvania State University, a noted transportation scholar.
Gunn’s incremental approach makes sense, Spychalski said, adding: “When you put forth a comprehensive long-range strategic plan that develops rail service to its full potential, the cost clearly causes a rush to the exits among politicians.”
Amtrak has been in financial trouble since Congress created it in 1971, bowing to a railroad industry, beset by bankruptcies, that wanted to abandon money-losing passenger service.
Its brush with bankruptcy has its roots in 1997, when the Republican-controlled Congress decreed that Amtrak must wean itself from federal operating subsidies by this fall.
Gunn’s two predecessors, first Thomas Downs and later George Warrington, tried to meet that goal by spending money on capital improvement projects they hoped would lower operating costs. They invested, for example, in new technology and tried to reduce maintenance costs with more frequent overhauls of equipment.
“The accounting system became perverted because of this glide path to self-sufficiency. Who knows how I would have responded in that environment. Management went through contortions to drive down the operating budget,” Gunn said.
Amtrak’s chance of meeting the self-sufficiency mandate was doomed by early last year when it became apparent that Congress would come up with only half of the promised capital improvement money.
Then long delays in the introduction of new high-speed Acela Express trains robbed it of badly needed new revenue. The picture went from bad to worse when the economy slumped after Sept. 11.
Over the last year, Amtrak lacked funds to repair wrecked or damaged cars. With no spares on many routes, there was little time and staff to make minor repairs and clean cars thoroughly, as was evident from rattles and filth on trains last week.
“When was the last time this restroom was cleaned? There’s a big puddle on the floor,” a woman complained to the conductor on the Washington-to-Boston Train 66 Wednesday evening.
“All I can suggest is that you try one of the other cars,” the conductor replied.
Gunn has spent a lot of time on trains. After earning a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard Business School in 1962, he went to work for the old Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, and spent as many as 200 nights a year in sleeping cars.
From the mid-1970s until he retired in 1999, he spent his time overhauling transit systems. He was general manager of SEPTA from 1979 to 1984.
He prefers the tried and proven. For example, when he was called out of his retirement retreat in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in May, he moved into the same apartment building, near Washington’s Reagan National Airport, where he had lived when he was general manager of the Metro transit system in the early 1990s.
To save Amtrak, Gunn said, “we need to achieve modest victories in new high-speed corridors,” not try to mimic Japan and Europe with bullet trains. “Once you attempt speeds over 150 miles an hour, it gets very complicated and very expensive. There are many places where 110-mile-an-hour technology can compete with airlines and cars,” Gunn said.
“With what they’re doing at airports — making you take your shoes off and be searched — and the delays,” Gunn said, “we can have an hour penalty on running-time and beat the airlines.”