PITTSBURGH — There was a time when American passenger railroads set the standard for the world — a time long ago. Memories of the glory days, when companies like the Pennsylvania Railroad carried people in comfort and ease, have been replaced by a sad reality: For great train travel, Americans must look to Europe or Japan, according to an editorial in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Can that ever change? It’s a question that Congress is now forced to answer, but first it must ask itself what value it places on passenger train travel in this country and how much it is willing to pay for it.
Amtrak, successor to the old private lines, has been trying hard to upgrade its operations, particularly with its high-speed Acela trains in the Northeast Corridor, but funding remains a huge problem. Amtrak is both beggar and pauper, and that’s no way to run a railroad.
Pittsburgh’s case illustrates one of the problems. Only a few Amtrak trains — comfortable but not luxurious — pass through and they depart at inconvenient hours and are often late. Still, this service is better than nothing. Pittsburgh, however, might end up with nothing.
If Amtrak cannot get more funding from the federal government, those few — the Pennsylvanian, the Capitol Limited and the Three Rivers — will be gone by the fall, along with 15 other long-distance routes. President Bush’s budget calls for giving Amtrak $521 million for fiscal year 2003. Amtrak says it needs at least $1.2 billion, including $840 million for capital investment, or else it will have to shrink from its national responsibilities to provide service only on its most economic routes.
On Thursday, the Amtrak Reform Council issued a report that recommended a bold new business model to replace the existing structure. The National Railroad Passenger Corp. (the official name for Amtrak) would become a small federal agency with an oversight role. Two other companies would do the heavy lifting — one to conduct Amtrak’s nationwide train operations, the other to own, operate, maintain and improve Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor assets. After a transition period, private interests would be allowed to make competitive bids on operating trains.
The Amtrak Reform Council was set up by Congress. Last November, the reform council found that Amtrak would not achieve operational self-sufficiency by the deadline date set by the 1997 Amtrak Reform and Accountability Act.
In now making its recommendations about what to do, the council says that Amtrak is no closer to self-sufficiency today than it was in 1997 — reporting an unofficial loss of $341 million last year for purposes of self-sufficiency (although it says that if generally accepted accounting principles were used, the loss is really $1.1 billion).
The council’s report is not intended to demolish Amtrak; in fact, it predicts a bright future for passenger rail in America. Its suggestions should be taken seriously as a starting point for the debate in Congress, which must address a crisis 30 years in the making. Just providing more money without some restructuring probably won’t do the job.
But some parts of the report give pause, and one concerns funding: The reform council recommends that the government provide “stable and adequate funding” to support the rail passenger program, but the large amounts of money involved are subversive to the very idea of self-sufficiency. The reform council says that, based on last year’s cash loss, Amtrak’s federal operating subsidy could approach $600 million annually (it also gets $125 million in state subsidies). That’s not counting capital needs: The Northeast Corridor alone, the reform council says, “is in need of about $1 billion annually in capital funds.” And where is this money to come from? The report frankly admits that funding “will be challenging in today’s budgetary environment.”
Privatization may partly be the answer, particularly on long-distance routes, but Britain’s experience is sobering. The British traditionally have taken pride in their railways, but since the privatization of British Rail, train services are widely perceived to have deteriorated. A cartoon in the satirical magazine Private Eye last month summed up the popular attitude. A waiting passenger asks a station master: “Excuse me — is the nonarrival of the 8:15 due to strike action or the return of normal service?”
While the United States is less dependent on rail transportation than Britain, the stakes are still high. More than nostalgia or national pride is involved. Some facts from Amtrak: It serves more than 500 stations in 46 states. It operates over 22,000 miles of track but owns only 730 route miles (primarily between Boston and Washington, D.C., and in Michigan). Some 22.5 million passengers traveled on Amtrak in the year 2000. Each day about 61,000 passengers use Amtrak. The service in the New York-Washington corridor carries enough passengers to fill 121 airline flights per day.
Amtrak is not as important as the airlines or the road system, but it is an important part of the mix. Even outside its area of strength in the Northeast Corridor, many people — students, the elderly, people afraid of flying or who don’t own cars — find it more convenient. In the days after Sept. 11, many Americans found it crucial.
As in the past, this newspaper supports sufficient federal funding for Amtrak. We would like service to cities like Pittsburgh to be part of its national mandate. We are all for reforms that make Amtrak more economical, but we hope that Amtrak’s future isn’t held rigidly hostage to the idea of self-efficiency, which may prove unrealistic even after reforms are made.
With governments as with people, you get what you pay for — and sometimes the money simply must be put down to serve a good purpose regardless of whether a ledger can be balanced. In serving the nation’s transportation needs, passenger train travel remains such a purpose.