(The following story by Jane Engle appeared on the Los Angeles Times website on June 27, 2010.)
LOS ANGELES — In an interview in Los Angeles last week, Joseph Boardman, president and chief executive of Amtrak, talked about what’s next for rail in the West.
From super-speedy steel wheels on steel track to magnetic levitation systems that suspend trains above track, there has been no lack of schemes and dreams to link Southern California to Northern California and to Las Vegas with high-speed rail. But after decades of talk among various entities, nothing has yet been built.
“I see it happening on an incremental basis,” Boardman said of a high-speed link between the two halves of the Golden State. “You’re going to build it in pieces.” And probably, he added, using conventional technology, not maglev.
In fact, steel-on-steel is what the California High-Speed Rail Authority, which recently was awarded $2.25 billion in federal funds, proposes to use on a line that could one day stretch from San Diego to Sacramento.
Back East, Amtrak’s popular steel-on-steel Acela Express can hit 150 mph. It’s the star of the company’s Northeast Corridor network, which beats the airlines on market share, claiming nearly two-thirds of the traffic between New York and Washington, Boardman said.
As for restoring rail service to Las Vegas, which ended in 1997 with the demise of Amtrak’s Desert Wind route between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, Boardman said his company has no current plans to do so.
Although not shy about criticizing potential competitors (“A lot of people think they can run a railroad”), the president was vague about why Amtrak is reluctant to pursue service to Sin City.
“If there was enough investment … it might work,” he said, with improvements such as double-tracking and upgraded track. The question is: Who would fund and construct it?
Apparently not Amtrak.
“We are not a builder of railroads,” he said. “We’re an operator.”
Meanwhile, Amtrak is looking to wire up the West’s trains with Wi-Fi Internet service.
“We need to to have Wi-Fi on everything,” Boardman said.
Amtrak’s Matt Cahoon, senior officer for maintenance scheduling, said the company has been trying to improve reception and reduce outages on a Wi-Fi system that it began installing last year in business-class cars on California’s Pacific Surfliner trains, which run between San Diego and San Luis Obispo.
“Access has been sporadic,” Cahoon said. But he said Amtrak continues to work on it.