(The following article by James Ewinger was posted on the Cleveland Plain Dealer website on July 9.)
CLEVELAND — Passenger trains seem to sneak through northern Ohio in the dark of night, but many people want to push them into the spotlight.
It’s easy to see why.
Trains are fuel-efficient and comfortable, they allow more-relaxed boarding than commercial air travel, and they are inexpensive – especially for trips under 400 miles.
But booming freight service that dominates the rails is a challenge to efficient passenger service, and expansion is even more difficult with cuts in public subsidies.
Ohio and Indiana are the only Great Lakes states that don’t support some kind of passenger service, even though Ohio is one of the few states with an organization dedicated to railroad building – the Ohio Rail Development Commission.
The commission and the private advocacy group All Aboard Ohio think good in-state service could be developed within a decade.
The hard question is how.
Rail traffic, in all forms, is a victim of its own success.
More freight is shipped by rail now than ever before, but on fewer miles of track than in the 20th century. Ohio had 9,600 miles of track in 1968. It now has less than 6,000 miles.
Matthew Rose, chief executive officer of the sprawling Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, warned recently that the entire nation’s transportation system is rapidly approaching capacity.
A Union Pacific executive recently told Rep. Steve LaTourette that his rail line already is out of room.
Freight is pretty much the exclusive business of the nation’s railroads today
They begged to dump passenger service for years, claiming heavy losses, and got their wish in 1970 when Congress created the National Railroad Passenger Corp., known as Amtrak.
The Faustian bargain that the traditional rail lines struck with the government was to give passenger trains priority on the rails that the private rail lines still own.
There, the problems of success begin to manifest themselves.
The booming freight business means longer freight trains, many too long to fit on sidings to allow Amtrak trains to pass. That means the Amtrak trains, rather than the freight trains, end up as the ones that step aside.
A June 23 Amtrak trip illustrates the state of passenger service.
Destination was Galesburg, Ill., a major hub for the Burlington Northern Santa Fe, known as the BNSF, which celebrated its rail heritage that weekend.
Galesburg is a quaint town about 40 miles east of the Mississippi River and east of the similar-size Iowa town that put the Burlington in BNSF.
Some credit the old Burlington Route Zephyrs with saving passenger rail service in the 1930s, or at least reinventing it. Now the Zephyr name is all that remains, and it belongs to Amtrak. The Ohio-to-Illinois trip required one train to Chicago and another, called the California Zephyr, to Galesburg.
On June 23, the westbound trains were late because of flooding in the Northeast. On the return trip June 25, the trains were late for more chronic reasons – crowded rails.
On June 23, eight eastbound freight trains were stopped and off schedule near Elyria, stalling at least one eastbound Amtrak train.
The 13-year-old Ohio rail commission wants to ease the congestion and hasten the passenger trains with its plan for rail service connecting Ohio’s three largest cities. This includes putting passenger trains on rails they won’t have to share with freight trains.
So far the commission’s greatest production has been to upgrade rail crossings.
LaTourette, Republican of Concord Township, says every crossing in his district has been improved this way.
The rail-development group also produces studies, and it wants to produce more.
The group’s Stu Nicholson said Ohio is among 27 states planning or implementing passenger or freight systems. That so many states are interested speaks to the growing importance of rail service, he said, but it also illustrates how keen the competition is for federal dollars.
And then there’s the debate about who rebuilds the rail system.
The Bush administration wants the states to do it, or at least to take a bigger role. The railroads are doing a lot of it on their own, but the railroads complain that they don’t get the sort of federal subsidies that bolster commercial air travel and major highway systems.
The federal government gives Amtrak $1.4 billion to keep it running. That’s less than 1 percent of what the U.S. Department of Transportation gets in its annual budget.
LaTourette has fought Amtrak budget cuts but fears that what Amtrak now gets may be just enough for the rail line to fail.
It has to pay $280 million in debt service alone, because it over-reached during the Clinton administration, LaTourette said.
The Bush administration has tied subsidies to reforms, said a spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration. LaTourette said the reform is for the states to take up half the cost of passenger rail service nationwide, and he doubts that any state will do that.
Amtrak, on the other hand, has come up with its own reform package, a more systematic approach, the congressman said, that already has included the slashing of many middle-management jobs.
That was evident on the June trip to Illinois, both aboard the trains and at Chicago’s majestic Union Station.
“Look, here’s what’s going on. They’re getting rid of people. Each of us has two jobs, and we can’t be in two places at once,” an exasperated assistant conductor told an older woman on the Chicago-to-Cleveland passage.
Illinois wants to expedite the trains and has a $1.5 billion program designed to ease rail congestion and encourage the growth of transportation-sector jobs to offset lost manufacturing jobs. But that state is uniquely poised, because, as one rail observer said, “they used to say all roads lead to Rome. Now they say all railroads lead to Chicago.”
Ohio cannot claim as much traffic, but it remains a major transportation nexus between New York and Chicago.
For the moment, it also cannot claim any program as grand as Illinois’.
Nicholson, of the Ohio rail commission, said work could begin within two years if federal money is granted for the necessary studies.
Until then, Nicholson joked, people have to be part bat to catch a train in Cleveland because they have to come out at night.