(Reuters circulated the following article on September 3.)
WASHINGTON — The Senate gave Amtrak a lift on Wednesday as the passenger rail service worked to repair a potentially serious problem with its antiquated infrastructure in New York.
The appropriations subcommittee on transportation approved $1.34 billion subsidy for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, more than $400 million above what House leaders and the White House have agreed to support.
“This is not what Amtrak wanted, but it will give it stability,” said Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington state Democrat. Murray engineered a series of cuts to get more money for the nation’s only city-to-city passenger railroad.
The subcommittee figure is expected to hold up when the full appropriations panel meets to consider a $90 billion transportation funding bill on Thursday.
The compromise with Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican and the subcommittee’s chairman, signaled that Murray, the panel’s ranking Democrat, had squeezed as much as she could from the budget for the railroad.
“This is as good as we can do for Amtrak,” Murray said.
The proposal was supported by other key Republicans, including Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. “They really stuck their necks out. This was pretty difficult to get this much,” said one railroad industry source.
Amtrak did not say the new amount would force the system to shut down as it did after the House Appropriations Committee limited the subsidy to $900 million in its transportation spending plan.
“We will continue to advance our plan and look to Congress to provide an adequate level of funding to fulfill our needs,” Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black said. “We have said it before, the railroad is in dire need of investment to bring it to a state of good repair.”
The railroad has asked for $1.8 billion after receiving slightly more than $1 billion this year. Amtrak has said the sharp increase is needed to make repairs to its crumbling infrastructure in the Northeast.
An immediate problem was aggravated last month when the North American blackout knocked out the second of three electric cables running through New York’s East River tunnels. The 12,000-volt cables installed in 1935 to feed power from a rail yard in Queens to New York’s Pennsylvania Station, and are essential for maintaining Amtrak and commuter service.
One cable has been out for several years and Amtrak and commuter railroads are relying on the last functioning line. Temporary repairs are under way on the cable disabled by the blackout.
“We hope to have that finished in the next couple of weeks,” Black said. “That one cable is holding out. If that fails before the second one is patched, we’ll have a real problem on our hands.”