(The following story by Jane Engle appeared on the Los Angeles Times website on June 25, 2010.)
LOS ANGELES — Amtrak and its leader, Joseph Boardman, are on a roll.
“We’re on course for a banner year in ridership,” the president and chief executive of America’s intercity passenger train operator said in an interview last week in Los Angeles. Overall on-time performance is up too, he added.
Best of all, Boardman said, “We have an administration that says rail is important.”
Of course, he spoke before an Amtrak-operated train stalled after pulling out of Washington, D.C., on Monday, stranding hundreds of passengers in summer heat without air conditioning. (Boardman apologized, and Amtrak is investigating.)
So some kinks remain in Amtrak’s operation, as even Boardman concedes, including outdated rolling stock and a lack of capital to fund improvements.
In a wide-ranging interview aboard the special Beech Grove car, equipped with a viewing platform at the rear of the Coast Starlight train at Union Station, Amtrak’s president talked about the role of long-distance routes (he’s bullish), high-speed rail in California and to Las Vegas (not so much, at least not yet) and why rail fares aren’t likely to go down any time soon.
First: long-distance routes.
These trains, which include storied names such as the Coast Starlight (Los Angeles to Seattle), Southwest Chief (Los Angeles to Chicago) and the Empire Builder (Portland/Seattle to Chicago), devour about 80% of Amtrak’s federal subsidies, Boardman said. But that doesn’t dim the chief’s enthusiasm for his company’s long-haul network.
“It is a lifeline for many rural customers in this country,” said Boardman, who grew up on a dairy farm in upstate New York. “To make rail work, you need to have rail across the country.”
The decades-long debate over whether government should support long-distance trains is “nonsensical,” he said, especially given that it routinely provides staff and funds to aid highway and airline transportation.
“Our long-distance trains are full,” he added, and they’re late less often these days, he said, mainly because as the economy has slowed, so has freight-train traffic, which often impedes passenger trains. Even the Coast Starlight, known to run hours behind, tallied a nearly 92% on-time record in May.
Give up on long-distance trains? Not on Boardman’s watch.
“We’re the United States,” he said. “We’re supposed to care about each other.”
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