TOLEDO, Ohio — To attend a meeting in Toledo yesterday, Marcus Mason took a train from his Washington home to Baltimore-Washington International Airport, flew to Chicago and then Detroit, then rented a car to complete the trip, the Toledo Blade reports.
That would not seem remarkable, except that Mr. Mason is director of high speed rail corridors for Amtrak, and the purpose of the meeting was to discuss what might be done locally to promote the preservation – and eventually, expansion – of passenger rail service in Toledo and the Midwest.
But riding the only train that links Washington and Toledo takes a leisurely 13 hours, and that would have required Mr. Mason to leave home early Sunday afternoon instead of early Monday morning.
While he professes to riding long-distance trains whenever he can, this one didn’t fit his schedule.
The inability of the Amtrak system to meet more than a very limited transportation need in most of the United States was not lost on some of the two dozen participants in the discussion, which was organized by the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority and held at Martin Luther King, Jr., Plaza.
“We don’t just want Amtrak the way it is. We need frequent, efficient service,” said James Hartung, the port authority’s president.
Others attending the meeting agreed that the most pressing short-term goal has to be preserving service, which is threatened by Amtrak’s deepening budget woes.
“We need to keep the current system functioning, alive and well, until we decide what to do in the long term,” said William Hutchinson, president of the Ohio Association of Railroad Passengers.
James Seney, executive director of the Ohio Rail Development Commission, took the lead in drafting a list of policy goals whose top item was that the federal government should play a leading role in funding the development of high-speed rail systems based around several hub cities, including Chicago and Cleveland.
Mr. Hartung said the port authority would fashion a draft resolution containing the goals that will be distributed to area governments for their consideration, with the ultimate purpose of expressing regional support for passenger rail to the area’s representatives in Columbus and, especially, Washington.
Others attending the meeting included State Rep. Lynn Olman (R., Maumee); John Alexander, chief of staff to the Lucas County commissioners; David Myers, regional administrator for the Federal Railroad Administration; Richard Harnish, executive director of the Midwest High Speed Rail Coalition, and representatives of the University of Toledo, Toledo Area Chamber of Commerce, and Toledo Metropolitan Area Council of Governments.
Several bills are pending in Congress for reauthorizing Amtrak, which faces a mandate to be operationally self-sufficient by the end of this year – a goal that Amtrak has conceded is unreachable.
The passenger railroad has warned that all of its long-distance routes, which includes all trains through Ohio, will be discontinued in October unless the $521 million budget proposed by the Bush Administration is more than doubled.
A recent bill passed by the Senate, which authorizes $4.6 billion a year for passenger rail development plus a one-time $1.4 billion expense for security improvements, most closely follows what Amtrak would like to see, Mr. Mason said, although it leaves open the question of where the money would come from. A one-year, $1.2 billion reauthorization bill is expected to be introduced tomorrow in the House of Representatives, Mr. Mason said.
U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D., Toledo), who addressed the gathering toward the meeting’s start but left before most discussion took place, said one of passenger rail’s most daunting handicaps is the need to operate on tracks owned by freight railroads for most routes outside the Northeast Corridor.
“With this whole idea of shared track, passenger is always a stepchild,” said Miss Kaptur, whose aide, Lindsay Potts, remained for most of the meeting.
But Mr. Seney later said building separate lines for passenger trains is unlikely, so planners will have to accept some degree of coexistence between passenger and freight trains.
“I suspect [putting in tracks] would be like building a nuclear power plant,” he said. “We would be somewhere in a hearing room for the next 25 years.”