(The following editorial was posted on the Oregonian website on May 10.)
PORTLAND, Ore. — Today marks the anniversary of one of the great events in American transportation history — the golden spike celebration at Promontory, Utah, and the opening of the transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1869.
Now, 136 years later, President Bush is about to swing his own sledgehammer: He and some in Congress are proposing to drive the last spike into Amtrak and the nation’s coast-to-coast passenger rail system.
The Bush administration is threatening to zero out the railroad’s federal subsidy, push it into bankruptcy and dismantle Amtrak into regional services supposedly supported by the states and private operators.
That would be a terrible mistake. Yes, Amtrak faces daunting problems: its fastest trains, the Acelas, are sidelined with brake problems; it doesn’t own most of the tracks it uses; it is billions of dollars behind in capital maintenance. And yet, Amtrak still carries 25 million riders across this country — and keeps them off overwhelmed highways and away from overcrowded airports.
Amtrak keeps rattling along even though Congress and a succession of presidents have repeatedly failed to invest enough in passenger rail. No passenger rail system in the world makes money or can sustain itself without government help. Yet the Bush administration and other Amtrak critics in Congress keep insisting that the railway reach self-sufficiency.
Congress regularly spends billions to bail out airlines, but only grudgingly gives Amtrak slightly more than $1 billion a year. Germany, by comparison, invested $9 billion in passenger rail in 2003 alone.
Amtrak needs significant reforms, including a much bolder investment in key rail corridors such as the Northwest route between the Willamette Valley, Seattle and British Columbia. But the reforms should come in the context of trying to save and enhance the existing passenger rail system, not shut it down.
With an uncertain energy supply, the threat of terrorism and badly congested highways and airports, the United States needs passenger rail. This is no time to set train travel back 136 years.