(The following article by Patrick McGeehan was posted on the New York Times website on November 18.)
NEW YORK — Norman Y. Mineta, the secretary of transportation, came to New York yesterday to talk about Amtrak, and though he certainly did not praise the national railway, he did not shovel much dirt on it, either.
Speaking at a breakfast meeting of the Association for a Better New York, Mr. Mineta reassured some in the audience by saying he wanted to improve Amtrak, not destroy it. In the wake of the abrupt dismissal of Amtrak’s chief executive, David L. Gunn, last week, some people were braced for an announcement of radical change.
Instead, Mr. Mineta said he supported federal spending “to improve the tracks, tunnels, bridges and stations along the Northeast Corridor,” which extends from Washington to Boston. He said that control over train service on those tracks should eventually be handed over to a consortium of the eight states they run through.
“What we want to do with the Northeast Corridor is take the physical infrastructure back, invest in the physical infrastructure to bring it up to a good state of repair, and then, at that point, turn it over to the states,” Mr. Mineta said after his speech, before rushing to catch a plane back to Washington. (He did not take Amtrak, his spokesman, Robert Johnson, said, because he “did not have four or five hours on either end of his schedule to travel by train.”)
Mr. Mineta, who said he was trying to get Congress’s attention when he recommended this year that the federal government cut off Amtrak’s annual subsidy, did not detail how much the federal government would invest in the corridor under his plan. Nor did he say when control would shift to the states or how eight states would jointly manage the sprawling enterprise that tens of thousands of people depend on to get to work each day. Commuter railroads, including New Jersey Transit, pay Amtrak to let them run trains on its tracks.
“I was glad that he talked about a future role for the federal government in maintaining an intercity passenger rail service,” said Amy Rosen, a former Amtrak board member who is now a transportation consultant in New Jersey. “But I wished that he talked about what that meant and what their plan was. I never heard him say the word ‘commuters.’ ”
George Warrington, the executive director of New Jersey Transit, said that his agency already paid Amtrak more than $100 million a year in user fees and capital investments, and that he was less concerned about who owned the tracks than about who would control operations along them.
Mr. Mineta said that Amtrak’s critics would get a clear answer about the board’s intentions when a successor to Mr. Gunn was chosen. “They’re looking for a turnaround C.E.O., not a liquidator,” he said.
But his reassurances did not placate the most outspoken of those critics. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, warned against accepting the idea that the Bush administration wants to save Amtrak.
“The administration is trying to save Amtrak like the Big Bad Wolf is trying to save Little Red Riding Hood,” Mr. Schumer said. “Don’t be fooled. The administration wants to kill Amtrak, not save it.”