(The following article by Stephen Kiehl appeated in the Baltimore Sun on July 30.)
BALTIMORE — If Amtrak has a future – and that is not at all certain – it can be found in a quarter-century-old track-laying machine that spent the past few years collecting weeds in a Delaware rail yard while tracks rotted across the country.
Yesterday, the colossal machine was back at work, grinding and clattering like a relic of the Industrial Age as it inched through a tunnel in Baltimore. It lifted up sections of rail, scooped out the wooden ties underneath and deposited in their place new concrete ties fit to support high-speed trains.
The resurrection of the machine is a sign of a new back-to-the-basics culture at Amtrak, where leaders have concluded that buying speedy new trains doesn’t make sense if the tracks they run on are old and slow.
“Let’s focus on running the system that we’ve got,” Amtrak President David L. Gunn said yesterday. He has requested $1.8 billion in federal money to keep the railroad going next year. “We have to get the equipment back to a good state of repair,” he said. “It’s been deteriorating for years.”
But the Bush administration delivered to Congress yesterday a 52-page bill that would make Amtrak an independent company – with no federal subsidy – and force it to compete with private firms to run passenger trains. Those contracts would be awarded by the states, which would get the federal subsidies.
Maryland would be part of the Northeast Corridor Compact, which would decide, starting in three years, which company would provide regional rail service. The states would be responsible for maintaining tracks. The administration says too much money has been sunk into Amtrak with too little payoff.
“We honestly believe that passenger rail is worth doing well, and it’s worth doing right,” said Alan Rutter, the federal railroad administrator. “If this structure is put in place, and if Congress applies the dollars, we’ll end up with more service rather than less.”
Amtrak’s five-year plan, announced in April, calls for a $5.4 billion investment in improving equipment – tracks, signals, bridges, train cars. The plan calls for installing 162 miles of concrete rail ties, the slats that connect the two rails.
The work began in May in Maryland and Delaware, and today Amtrak will finish installing 24 miles of new ties between Baltimore’s Penn Station and Wilmington. The concrete ties will allow trains to travel 110 mph – up from 60 mph now.
Some of the wooden ties were so eroded they looked like driftwood washed up on the beach.
To have one bad tie is OK, as long as there are three good ties before it and three after, said Jerry Herndon, a deputy division engineer at Amtrak.
“But if I have two ties bad, I have automatic speed restrictions – 60 mph for passenger trains and 40 mph for freight,” he said. “We have a lot of speed restrictions due to bad ties.”
Until last year, Amtrak was deferring repair work and laying off maintenance workers in an attempt to become financially self-sufficient by December 2002. But the result, Gunn said, was more than 100 wrecked and damaged cars piling up in rail yards while the infrastructure fell apart.
When Gunn became Amtrak president last year, he focused on rebuilding the railroad and controlling expenses. But he also sought to put to bed the idea that Amtrak could ever make money.
“Amtrak for too long had been engaged in the charade of pleasing its detractors by endorsing the concept of self-sufficiency,” Gunn told Congress as he laid out his costly five-year plan. “It will not make us profitable; it will make us better.”
That philosophy was on display yesterday in the Union Tunnel in East Baltimore, where the Swiss-made track-laying machine methodically did its job. Operating like a snowplow, it carved out foot-deep ditches on either side of the track to expose the ties.
Then another part of the machine pulled the spikes out with long metal pinchers. When the machine couldn’t remove the spikes, workers came along to get them out using tools resembling crowbars.
The two rails were then lifted up and spread out from their normal separation of 4 feet, 8 1/2 inches to about 9 feet. The machine scooped up the wooden ties and flipped them onto a conveyor belt. The new ties came forward on another belt and slid down a ramp, where they were dropped into place. The machine can lay about 2,000 ties a day. There are 2,640 ties in each mile of track.
“I spend more time with this machine than with my kids,” said Gary Graves, Amtrak’s director of track construction, who has been working on the machine for 22 of its 25 years. He recently was called back from a vacation to oversee a repair that required getting a fuel injector pump from a junkyard.
Usually, the parts come from Switzerland, if they can be found at all.
Even after the track-laying machine moves on, the work is not done. Another machine comes along to heat the rails to 110 degrees so they will expand before being attached to the ties. Next, a train comes to dump gravel ballast between the ties. Yet another machine compacts the gravel, and a fourth machine smoothes it all out.
When the track-laying machine is finished in Baltimore, it will move on to Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
“It’s the most dramatic symbol of what we’re trying to do,” Gunn said. “And we’ll keep going until the snow comes.”