WASHINGTON, D.C. — Talking with David Gunn about his new job as the head of Amtrak is like asking the biblical Job, “What’s new?”
Gunn radiates a perverse problem-solving pride as he details the crises he has survived since moving into his office over Washington’s Union Station in mid-May, according to an editorial written by Walter Shapiro and published in USA Today. There have been four major derailments and a cash crisis so severe that Gunn had to threaten to shut down the trains before getting a $100 million government loan and an emergency $200 million congressional appropriation. And two weeks ago, engineers discovered dangerous cracks in the higher-speed Acela locomotives that have forced Amtrak to drastically reduce its premium service in the Northeast Corridor.
Gunn, 65, has to laugh at the opening question of an interview Thursday afternoon: Do you regret leaving a comfortable retirement in Nova Scotia to try to become Amtrak’s version of Casey Jones? “I’ve lost a lot of sleep,” Gunn admits. “It’s been very stressful. But I tend to be sort of focused. When I start doing something, I keep doing it. But, yes, there have been the odd times when I’ve said, ‘Christ, what am I doing here?’ ”
This Labor Day weekend, Americans who venture far from home will discover you can’t get there from here … at least not easily. Someone needs to invent a word to describe that 2002 phobia: fear of airport security. For those who can’t face the barbed-wire airports, the common alternative is traffic-snarled highways. Writing about traffic in this week’s New Yorker, John Seabrook points out that Americans own twice as many vehicles as they did in 1970, but road capacity has increased only by 6%.
In a rational world, America would have long ago realized that seat-belt-free train travel is a 19th-century technology that works. Instead, for three decades, the nation has been saddled with the rambling wreck called Amtrak. Built out of the leftovers when private railroads gleefully ceded passenger traffic to a government corporation, Amtrak has never been properly funded and has been saddled with a route structure that reflects political pull on Capitol Hill as much as it does passenger needs.
Small wonder that Gunn, a veteran of transit turnarounds in Philadelphia, New York and Toronto, laughingly concedes that Amtrak is the challenge he has been training for his whole life. “This is the worst situation,” he says. “This is four aces. This is a full house. They don’t get any bigger than this.”
There is a penny-pinching view among some in Congress and the Bush administration that Amtrak is an anachronism that should be weaned of its government subsidy, privatized or simply shut down. But there is also an untapped constituency that supports preserving and modernizing train travel. After all, rail normally carries more passengers than the airline shuttles between Washington and New York and between Boston and New York. After the travel nightmares spawned by Sept. 11, an alliance of road-weary warriors, environmentalists and nostalgia buffs may yet emerge as a political force.
Campaigning in New Hampshire this month, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, an almost certain 2004 Democratic presidential contender, repeatedly won cheers as he sung the ballad of the rails. “In a country that sees people sitting for hours wasting gas, wasting time, wasting productivity, why not generate some energy around a transportation system that the nation can be proud of?” Kerry declared in Keene. “We have the capacity to have a rail system that is not put to shame by what the Japanese have done with the bullet train and what the French have done.”
At the moment, Gunn lacks the ammunition to worry about ever competing with the bullet train. His immediate concern is winning congressional approval of Amtrak’s $1.2 billion budget request, the minimum Gunn says is necessary to preserve passenger service and to end years of neglect of equipment and track maintenance. The Bush administration, beguiled by the fiction that rail travel can someday be self-sufficient, has proposed $521 million for Amtrak.
A typical bureaucrat might be preparing for a bare-bones fiscal future. But instead Gunn is confidently planning to spend the full $1.2 billion, laying the groundwork to repair wrecked passenger cars and to hire back hundreds of laid-off maintenance workers. “That $521 million is a non-starter,” Gunn says. “You could not put together a budget on $521 million. There wouldn’t be enough money to run for three months.”
No fiction about Amtrak bedevils Gunn more than the belief that the railroad could prosper if it only shed its money-losing long-distance trains. Politics alone would derail this notion, as Gunn underscored when he said with incredulity, “So I’m going to go over to the Hill and say to them I need $1.2 billion, plus I’m going to take away all your service.”
But more than that, the numbers don’t add up to salvation. Long-haul service does lose $300 million a year, but because of generous labor protections in the Amtrak legislation, most of that money would initially need to be spent whether the trains operated or not. Gunn estimates that scrapping the national route system would save a paltry $18 million in the first year.
Everybody seems to have a theory about Amtrak, from the dreamers who talk about 250-mph trains to the free-market conservatives who want to sell it off to the highest bidder. But David Gunn is not a theorist. He just wants the trains, all of them, to run on time.