(The following editorial by Dave Zweifel was posted on the Madison Capital Times website on April 2.)
MADISON, Wisc. — No one knew what to expect about a year and a half ago when the Amtrak board of directors unceremoniously fired David L. Gunn as its president.
Gunn had been a fly in the ointment to the Bush administration’s plans to effectively dismantle Amtrak by severing its highly successful Northeast Corridor runs from the system, cutting its federal subsidy and doing away with its long-distance trains.
He tenaciously fought the Bush plans and successfully lobbied members of Congress to thwart them. He wound up getting fired.
Some 10 months later, the Amtrak board finally decided on his permanent replacement, a former Union Pacific Railroad freight executive named Alexander K. Kummant. Since the president of Amtrak’s board, David M. Lamey, is a Bush appointee, the natural assumption was that Kummant was the proverbial fox in Amtrak’s henhouse.
Kummant, however, has been anything but.
He has come down squarely against any dismantling of Amtrak’s long-distance trains, likening the City of New Orleans and the Empire Builder (which runs across Wisconsin) to national parks.
“The cost of cross-country trains comes to about a dollar and a half per American per year,” he told The New York Times shortly after his appointment last September. “I haven’t had the opportunity to go to Glacier National Park since 1976, but I pay taxes every year in the hope that I have the option to go back.”
He added that once you do away with long-distance trains, they’ll be gone forever.
He strongly opposes severing the profitable high-speed Northwest Corridor from the national Amtrak system and he is sure Amtrak can work with its unions rather than privatizing some of its services, a welcome relief for many Amtrak workers.
Meanwhile, Kummant has presided over a lot of Amtrak success. Its ridership has jumped 11 percent this past year and the national train system is recording record revenues month by month. Plus — and it’s a big plus — many of the trains have been upgraded and they are often actually running on time, as I can attest from personal experience.
Don Phillips, a columnist for Trains magazine, is as pleasantly surprised as anyone. He theorizes that Kummant has always been his own man and does not intend to be anybody’s messenger boy. He also guesses that even Bush’s appointees on the Amtrak board are starting to realize that passenger rail is a growth industry in America and rather than being dismantled, needs to revitalized.
Phillips believes that Gunn deserves a lot of the credit. While president, he streamlined what was a bloated management and stuck money into the Northeast Corridor to make it a viable alternative to air travel from Washington to Boston.
Regardless of who gets the credit, there’s new hope that government leaders are finally taking passenger rail seriously. If they give it the support it needs, there’s no question that rail will take off and provide the United States with a sensible and much needed transportation alternative.