RICHMOND, Va. — Amtrak President David Gunn was nearing the end of a guided tour of Richmond’s Main Street Station yesterday when something caught his eye, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.
He pointed out two support beams with badly corroded metal at the base of the railroad viaduct near the station’s entrance.
Someone had scrawled notes in chalk on the scarred metal, including a note that a piece was “broken in half.”
That stopped Gunn, a veteran rail and mass-transit official. The rail viaduct through Shockoe Bottom carries freight, but it also carries plenty of people on the twice-a-day Amtrak trains to and from Newport News.
“This is serious,” he said. “If that were my bridge, I’d be worried about it.”
In his first tour of Richmond, Gunn, 65, lived up to his reputation as the plain-spoken leader of Amtrak.
He was touring the city-owned train station that is undergoing a $48.2 million renovation.
He praised the quality of the AMTRAK interior work – with marble floors and careful craftsmanship to bring back some of the original look of the 101-year-old facility.
Main Street Station has been closed to rail service since 1975. It is slated to reopen in March with eight or nine passenger trains per day.
Asked later about his safety concerns, Gunn said he was not calling into question the structural integrity of the viaduct owned by Richmond-based CSX Corp.
“No, those bridges have a lot of extra meat built into them,” he said. “But eventually you come to a point you have to fix them. You’d rather not see it.”
CSX spokesman Robert Sullivan said the span is “absolutely structurally sound. It poses no danger to the public or to employees or train crews or anyone else.”
CSX crews regularly perform repairs and maintenance on the track around the station.
“But nothing that has to be done is critical to the integrity of that structure,” Sullivan said.
He conceded the cracks in the beam “don’t look good.”
Amtrak’s Gunn said such signs of decay reflect a broader public-policy problem. Only a concerted national effort will save the nation’s railroads, both passenger and freight, he said.
Gunn compared Amtrak to the canaries that British miners once used to ensure they had enough oxygen to breathe.
“Amtrak is sort of the canary of the railroad industry,” said Gunn, 65. “We suffer from deferred maintenance, deferred investment and lack of government support.”
There are some bright spots, he said, including Virginia’s work to improve train speeds and track conditions from Richmond to Washington.
“Richmond to Washington is a logical corridor,” he said. “You have a great rail line. It has the capacity to run a lot of trains.”
Since taking over Amtrak in May, Gunn has been likened to the captain of the Titanic. He has experienced service meltdowns, costly derailments and a fight for federal funding.
With no budget passed by Congress, Amtrak is operating on the basis of its last $1.2 billion annual budget, he said.
Will Amtrak survive? “If I knew, I’d tell you,” Gunn said with a laugh.
Its fate should be decided by spring, when Congress passes its next budget.
“If you want my best guess – we’ll survive, because it’s totally illogical to push us off the cliff.”