By the time you read this, Amtrak will have dodged another bullet and found enough money to avoid a threatened shutdown over the July 4th holiday, according to an editorial in Traffic World.
Last week, in the face of Amtrak President David L. Gunn’s Independence Day ultimatum, dire predictions boiled forth from Washington. Without $200 million in loan guarantees or an emergency appropriation, Gunn said, he’d have to begin shutting down Amtrak last Wednesday. When it was clear that Congress and the Bush administration were not going to agree on a solution by then, Gunn delayed the shutdown a week.
The doomsday-scenario-drafting reached a fever pitch during a telephone press conference with union officials in the Transportation Trades Department of the AFL-CIO. In addition to the prediction of commuter nightmares, TTD Executive Director Ed Wytkind and several officials of unions that represent Amtrak employees held forth to dozens of reporters that the shipper customers of the nation’s freight railroads would be in big trouble unless Amtrak got a speedy cash infusion.
If Amtrak shut down, all freight trains on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor would come to a stop and rail shippers throughout the country would immediately see huge rate hikes needed to pay for a shortfall in contributions to the Railroad Retirement Fund, union officials warned.
Both predictions were inaccurate statements made out of ignorance or guile that might have stirred panic in the shipping community if newspapers, television and radio news reporters paid any attention to the freight industry. Instead, all of the coverage concentrated on the plight of the rail commuter.
House Transportation Committee Chairman Don Young reacted to those predictions, however, by drafting legislation to ensure that freight trains in the Northeast Corridor would keep rolling through any Amtrak shutdown and by prodding the Surface Transportation Board to be ready to use any authority it had to ensure that freight keeps moving. (See Associate Editor John Gallagher’s report in the print edition.)
The message from unions and many politicians last week was clear: we don’t have time to talk about reform. With a Gunn to our head, all we have time for is shoveling more cash into what veteran Washington journalist Llewellyn King, publisher of White House Weekly, called “that great invalid of public service.”
But Amtrak financial crises always have a way of solving themselves. What we have to make time for is true reform of Amtrak.
Gunn’s testimony before a Senate panel on June 20, after only a month at the helm, was promising. He talked about thinning out a bureaucracy that had 85 vice presidents, used too many high-priced consultants and has built $4 billion in debt by launching too many ventures that didn’t help the bottom line. He promised to create a zero-based budget for next fiscal year. “I will return Amtrak to the basics of running a railroad,” Gunn said.
Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta last month put forth several important proposals, including shifting the federal funding burden to the states with Amtrak routes, introducing passenger service competition and selling the Northeast Corridor.
But Gunn indicated he’s in conflict with the administration and congressional critics of Amtrak. He believes the country needs a federally subsidized national passenger railroad company and that proposals to privatize or reorganize Amtrak are a waste of time, and he opposes suggestions to cut out the most heavily subsidized long-haul routes.
On some of these issues, Gunn has an ally in the freight railroads. Association of American Railroads President and CEO Edward R. Hamberger quickly objected to Mineta’s idea of “franchising” passenger rail corridors, expressing fear that a proliferation of operating companies will bring chaos to the rails. He may be right.