(The following editorial was posted on the Lakeland Ledger website on September 29.)
LAKELAND, Fla. — In the great days of rail travel, most trains had names. Some still do. With the exception of World War II’s years, the Orange Blossom Special was a winterseason-only train that ran from 1925 to 1953, carrying wealthy travelers from Florida and New York.
After coming through Washington, Richmond and Savannah, the train stopped in Jacksonville, where it split to make runs to Miami and St. Petersburg.
The train they call “The City of New Orleans” still travels from Chicago, crosses the Ohio River at Cairo, Ill., and follows the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchatrain on its way to its namesake city -or at least it did until Hurricane Katrina cut off service south of Jackson, Miss.
Steve Goodman wrote a song about it in 1970, and released it on his first album the next year. But it was Arlo Guthrie who made it popular with his 1972 recording.
“This train’s got the disappearing railroad blues,” wrote Goodman.
So, too, does Amtrak’s budget. The Bush administration’s proposed 2006 budget has no federal support for the nation’s passenger train service. The current budget includes $1.2 billion for Amtrak, a private company formed by Congress in 1971 with the passage of the Rail Passenger Service Act. Amtrak formed a national rail network by operating trains under contracts with various railroads.
During a time of record gasoline prices and two major airlines in bankruptcy, the administration talks of eliminating support for a transportation system that is cheap and efficient.
Congress isn’t likely to go along. The House has agreed to hold the funding level at $1.2 billion in the coming fiscal year. A Senate committee recommended an increase to $1.4 billion.
Amtrak Chairman David M. Laney told congressional members last week that the rail service is making progress in reducing costs while increasing ridership. The trains carried more than 25 million passengers last year.
Officials in the Bush administration believe that Amtrak should operate without a subsidy, and when that happens, according to the White House budget statement, “Amtrak would quickly enter bankruptcy, which would lead to elimination of inefficient operations.”
Bill Strong, southeast regional director of the National Association of Railroad Passengers, told The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn., that no passenger rail system can operate profitably without a substantial subsidy.
Strong also noted that the airlines have substantial costs covered by the Federal Aviation Administration’s funding of airports and air-traffic-control system.
“If Amtrak had the same opportunity to receive federal infrastructure investments as highway and aviation interests, with a federal match comparable to funds available to those modes of transportation, many more communities would avail themselves of passenger rail service,” said 35 senators in a bipartisan letter sent to the White House shortly after the zero-subsidy idea was proposed.
This week, Colin Peppard, transportation policy coordinator for the Friends of the Earth, has been aboard an Amtrak train on a 10city tour. The organization supports trains because they are fuelefficient, less polluting and take cars off the roads. He’ll be in Seattle and Olympia, Wash., today, and finish the tour in San Francisco on Friday.
“There are a lot of people across this country that rely on Amtrak,” said Peppard. “People use the trains for all sorts of things — to get to work, visit relatives, travel for business, return home from college. I want to talk to these folks and hear from them why they are riding trains.”
It’s too bad some Bush administration officials and members of Congress didn’t go along for an educational ride.