Amtrak - Fifty Years

It was fifty years ago today that President Nixon signed the law nationalizing intercity passenger rail in the United States.  Rather than have a patchwork of private railroad companies - all privately owned, many of them going bankrupt as passenger rail was losing ground to automobiles and airlines - connect us, we would have one, unified system.

And the system contacted almost immediately to a small bunch of routes.

What President Nixon did was more than what he or his eight immediate successors would do for intercity passenger rail in the U.S. going forward.  Republican Presidents ignored Amtrak while Democrats mostly gave lip service to rebuilding and modernizing it.  President Biden is the first President since 1971 to go bold and make a big investment in Amtrak. (Obama, whom Biden served as Vice President, dropped his plans to invest in passenger rail when it became apparent that the lift was going to be heavier than he thought.)  Which makes sense, considering that Biden rode Amtrak back and forth between Washington, D.C. and his home in Delaware as a U.S. Senator.  Folks don't call him Amtrak Joe for nothing, though anti-transit, anti-Amtrak politicians likely call him that as a pejorative.

Despite all that, and despite the fact that Amtrak still has equipment and infrastructure dating back decades before Amtrak's founding, rail travel has been on the rebound in the past fifty years. Ridership has been going up steadily, routes have been improved and expanded, and the higher-speed Acela, pictured above (Spanish for "bullet train lite," but still a pretty sweet ride), was added on the Northeast Corridor in 2000.  But indifference from libertarians who prefer the "personal freedom" of the automobile, budget-conscious members of Congress, U.S. House members whose districts don't have Amtrak service, Americans who are sick and tried of being told to live like the Japanese or the French, and outright pricks like Jim Jordan have held Amtrak back from offering service that gets up to par with Japan's Shinkansen trains and France's TGV fleet.  Many of these same folks want to eliminate Amtrak altogether, and attempts have been made to lessen Amtrak subsidies to the point where it would have to shut down.  

But Amtrak has proven resilient, and for the first time since 1971, we have a big chance to invest the resources it needs to continue for another fifty years.  Even if some priorities, like a high-speed corridor between Chicago and Milwaukee, or increased service in California, have to be set aside for others - like increasing service in Florida or making the Acela a true bullet train - to get increased funding for Amtrak passed, I think it's obvious that Amtrak will stay around, and it will get much better than it is now because President Biden has the fortitude to make it happen even with a sharply divided Congress.  As I said on this blog back in 2003, no one wants Amtrak, except the people.

Notrak

I can't remember the last time an incoming President arrived in Washington by train.  Maybe Ike in 1953.  Lincoln famously arrived in Washington by train in 1861 . . . after having been smuggled through Baltimore in the dead of night to avoid a possible assassination.  But Joe Biden won't even be able to do that.  He had planned to arrive in Washington on Amtrak, a transport service he has famously supported for his entire political career, in advance of his presidential inauguration.  But the dangers posed by the threats of anti-Biden militants proved to be too great.

Of course, this is a lost opportunity for publicity for Amtrak, the national passenger railroad having never been used for the arrival of an incoming President before.  It has been used for the departure of an outgoing Vice President.  (That Vice President's name?  Joe Biden.)  Amtrak, woefully underfunded and underappreciated (especially by the MAGA crowd - public transport being an assault on personal freedom and all), is barely making it to its fiftieth anniversary.  Biden's original plans for getting in to Washington would have been, like the COVID vaccine for all of us, a real shot in the arm for Amtrak.

No matter.  Once Biden is sworn in, he'll likely push for more funding for Amtrak and for modernizing it to bring it up to par with the bullet trains of Europe - something Bill Clinton and Barack Obama mostly paid lip service to with little of anything to show for it.  And if Biden succeeds,  Amtrak will certainly be able to run for another fifty years.

Biden On the Move

I don't mean Joe Biden's poll numbers. I mean his transportation policy.

Joe Biden is a big car buff.  He owns a 1967 Corvette (as seen above) that he loves to take out on the road.  It's one of his most prized possessions.  He's also a big Amtrak supporter, having taken the national passenger railroad to work when he was a United States Senator.  So he knows how much we need public transit to get around and how much it would benefit the economy if we had more regional rail transit as well as a modernized Amtrak on par with the bullet-train networks of France and Japan.  But because he loves cars - and because he brags about having been instrumental in saving General Motors (his mantra from the 2012 presidential campaign when he ran for a second term as Obama's Vice President - "Bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive!") - no one can say he's out to take away people's cars.

But I won't be surprised if he takes away your Ford F-150 unless you need it for your job.  Nor would I be surprised if you might have to buy an inexpensive small hatchback or pay more than you already have to to buy a sport utility vehicle.  Biden also believes in fighting climate change, and among automobiles, gasoline-powered vehicles made on light-truck platforms are the worst offenders.  And it you do get a monster wagon, it's going to have to be electric.  Biden is advocating development of electric vehicles as a more sustainable alternative to gasoline-powered cars and trucks, and auto companies in both the U.S. and in other countries are already responding with such product - and electric vehicles are becoming less expensive as time goes on. That big, fossil-fuel-powered SUV you have is set to become as obsolete as that old sedan with the CD player you gave to your kid when he or she got a driver's license.  And if you want a pickup truck, I think you'd better have a carpenter's or plumber's license to avoid paying a gas-guzzler tax, because it's not a big leap of imagination to expect Biden to bring back Barack Obama's tough fuel-economy standards - the jettisoning of which by Trump is probably a reason Ford got rid of its fuel-efficient compacts.     

Biden is the most engaged presidential candidate on transportation issues since Michael Dukakis, because cars and trains are a personal passion of his - just like they are with me - and he knows what he has to do to make cars and public transit sustainable and affordable to give Americans freedom of mobility in an environmentally conscious world.  That's why he's against giving out more permits for fracking.  And while he has said he will not ban fracking where the practice is already operating . . .  trust me, with fracking going bust on its own, he won't have to.  We're moving on from oil and gas shale and going green.

An Unconventional Convention

The Democrats aren't so much having a convention as a long infomercial of live speeches and prerecorded presentations all hosted by noted political power broker Eva Longoria - hardly reminiscent of past conventions in which the chair was usually a cigar-chomping Irish party bigwig with a Noo Yawk accent (although I'd rather look at Eva Longoria, of course), and the GOP convention will likely by hosted by Kevin Sorbo or someone like that.  (Last night the Democrats' host was Tracee Ellis Ross.)  But that's okay, given the pandemic and the fact that no one wants to go to Milwaukee even in normal times.  Sure, it has an art museum.  It has a major-league sports team.  It has nice parks.  Well, so does Newark.  

Now, I kid, of course, but with COVID-19 eighty-sixing rational connections, the Democrats have so far done a good job in making their case to the American voters with full-throated denunciations of Donald Trump and some pretty good character-witness testimonials of Joe Biden.  The video of Biden's travels on Amtrak - which he rode frequently as a U.S. Senator between Wilmington and Washington - not only made the case for Biden with the working-class folks who keep that train system going, it reminded voters of one of his key economic initiatives - modernizing Amtrak and putting it on par with the TGV in France or the ICE in Germany.  But ultimately, as I've already said, Biden himself has to make his own case.  Let's see how he does when he accepts the nomination. 

Off The Rails

Amtrak has had two major incidents since the chartered train carrying Republican members of Congress to their annual retreat crashed with a garbage truck in Virginia.  First, an Amtrak train collided with a freight train in South Carolina, killing two Amtrak employees and injuring a hundred passengers.  Now, this past Tuesday,  an Acela train - an Acela train - malfunctioned when two passenger cars separated while the train was traveling 124 miles an hour through Maryland.  None of the 52 passengers (the paltry number of passengers indicates how few people are wiling to take their lives into their hands on Amtrak these days) were injured.

And to think that trains in Germany, Italy and Japan, the defeated nations of World War II - not to mention trains in France, which was the only major country on the winning side of World War II to surrender - go faster than the Acela without having an incident like this!   

Now that's separation anxiety! :-O

People walk through this inter-car connection, you know.  Fortunately, not this time. 

I'm going to have a hard time rooting for Team USA in the Winter Olympics when I know they're representing a country that can't make the trains run period, let alone on time.  How is it that Elon Musk can send a car into space (and he did that because???) but we can't send a bullet train from Washington to Boston in one piece?  

I remember when I cheered wildly when Martin O'Malley told Rachel Maddow in a 2016 Democratic presidential forum that were were capable of building high-speed rail and sending a manned mission to Mars.  It seems that he was wrong, and that we're not capable of doing either.  

Maybe we can send a Tesla to Mars . . ..

There's Something About a Train That's Tragic

An Amtrak train on its way to West Virginia collided with a commercial motor vehicle this past Wednesday.

It was a chartered train carrying congressional Republicans and their families.  It collided with . . . a garbage truck near Charlottesville, Virginia.

So let me see if I have this straight . . . Republicans, the very people who make it their life's work to cut if not zero out altogether funding for intercity passenger rail and kill passenger-rail modernization programs the second they get the opportunity to do so, are involved in an accident on a train that they themselves chartered, and the accident occurs in proximity to, of all places, the city where white supremacists demonstrated and caused mayhem back in August 2017.

And they'll probably use this accident as an excuse to get rid of Amtrak completely.

Nothing makes sense anymore . . .. 

Another Amtrak Derailment

The traffic derailment of the Amtrak train in DuPont, Washington on its first Seattle-Portland run is full of spectacular ironies, the main one being that the fall of some of the train's cars onto Interstate 5 caused massive disruptions on the very transportation network - our interstate system - that Amtrak is meant to relieve.  The lack of positive train control on the train called for more investments in our transportation infrastructure, yet the track itself was newly installed, and, as noted, this train was on its maiden run.

The facts on the ground, however, only illustrate how little attention we pay to our intercity passenger trains. The speed on this track was a mere 30 mile per hour, which meant that trains couldn't go too fast.  Other countries have trains that go at least four times as fast, but the track on this connection between the two most important cities in the Pacific Northwest couldn't handle even thrice that speed; the train derailed at an 80-mph speed.  The track was new, but the technology clearly wasn't.  And the new technology that was needed the most wasn't in place to ensure people's safety. 

And here's a more direct look at that trestle over I-5, from November 2016.

This picture gives you a less encumbered look at the graffiti on the overpass, symbolizing the blatant disregard and lack of respect for our national passenger train system.

And after all of this, three passengers on that train are dead.

Trump wants to spend money on infrastructure, and he hopes to have a plan to introduce sometime in 2018, but if you're a railfan, don't hold your breath.  Even if Republicans actually agree to any spending on infrastructure, Trump, despite his New York City roots,  isn't likely to increase spending on passenger rail, because Republican lawmakers outside the Northeast and California have zero interest in upgrading and modernizing Amtrak.  Indeed, they've spent the past 35 years trying to get rid of it, and this accident gives them an excuse to cut the very funding Amtrak needs to get positive train control installed system-wide.

I give up.  We're never going to have first-class rail service in this century . . . and more people are going to die or be hurt in accidents like the one in Washington State.  It's a damn disgrace. :-(

Off the Tracks

If you're an American, you can expect passenger rail service to be a disappointment.  But in the New York area, disappointment has mutated into disgust.  

New York Pennsylvania Station, North America's busiest railway station, is undergoing significant delays thanks to equally significant repairs needed for the tracks.  It seems that the neglect of the station's rail infrastructure is responsible for more than a few derailments of Amtrak, NJ Transit and Long Island Railroad trains in recent months, and the station itself is so mismanaged by Amtrak that, in rare bipartisan fashion, Democratic New York governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican New Jersey governor Chris Christie are ticked off with the whole damn thing.  Not that they've done anything in recent years to make things any better.  Trains at the station have been increasingly late for years, thanks to failing systems and aging tunnels under the Hudson River that need to be supplemented by new ones.   

On top of all that, the station itself is crowded, cramped, fetid and dilapidated, its grand old waiting room long since torn down and replaced with a sports arena that looks like a giant carburetor filter.  Plans to build a new, modern station named for the late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York and a friend of mass transit, have been just that - plans, never enacted upon.  Amtrak also has to deal with replacing decrepit bridges nearby, including a swing bridge in New Jersey over the Hacksenack River that was built when Roosevelt was President - Theodore Roosevelt - which constantly fails.

And there's the Metropolitan Transit Authority rapid transit system of subways and elevated trains.  I've ridden the MTA constantly whenever I've been in New York, and I've seen the system rebuilt and refurbished over the years.  The trains are cleaner, the stations are decent, the porcelain walls of the station have had art work added to them, such as a Roy Lichtenstein mural in the Times Square station, and the trains run frequently and at a good clip.  And it's all a mirage.  The system has been using equipment that was installed when Johnson was President (Lyndon, not Andrew - the system isn't that old!), its tracks are aging, and expansion of the system has been slow at best - good grief, it took forever just to open a portion of the new Second Avenue line!  The MTA, however, is in a state of crisis and needs a billion-dollar baby of a bailout.  Trains on the F and G lines have derailed in recent years, and an A train derailed in Harlem just last week.  If Billy Strayhorn were alive today, he'd write a song urging folks bound for Harlem to walk.  Simply put, a new 7 train terminal near the Javits Convention Center and some festive murals in the Times Square station have not made New York subways the equivalent of the Paris Metro. 

It's going to get worse before it gets even worse.  Even if Donald Trump's trillion-dollar infrastructure program somehow passes - and Mitch McConnell shows no interest in pursuing it - Trump hasn't mentioned anything about regional mass transit, not even in regard to his hometown of New York City.  His proposal to discontinue long-distance Amtrak routes to shore up the Northeast Corridor will likely, as I've already opined,  reduce what little support there is for Amtrak outside the Northeast.  High-speed trains?  Nah, the federal government is too busy planing another Interstate highway through Nevada and Arizona to care about anything like that!  

The United States remains an autocentric country at heart, and I don't see our attitudes toward public transit changing any time soon.  Trump won't talk about public transit, Hillary Clinton didn't talk about it, and the only 2016 presidential candidate who did talk about it got only 0.6 percent of the vote in the Iowa Democratic caucuses.  The regional public transit system in the greater New York area may be ready for badly needed improvements, but, ready or not, it ain't getting any.

Correction: May 2, 2017

In my post "Fly The Unfriendly Skies," a post about United Airlines that also touched on Amtrak service in Kentucky or lack thereof, I wrote that "apart from a small town near the Mississippi River and along the border with Tennessee, the whole state of Kentucky has no Amtrak service!" The town I was referring to was Fulton, Kentucky, but in fact Fulton is not the only Kentucky community with Amtrak service. Ashland does, too, and I overlooked that even though it is clearly shown on the Amtrak map that was appended to my post. The original error, which I regret, has since been corrected.

Long Distance Runaround

You'd think that, since Donald Trump wants to rebuild the nation's infrastructure, he'd make a commitment to building up and modernizing Amtrak.  Actually, he seems set on destroying it.

The proposed budget cuts affecting Amtrak's Gateway rail tunnel between New Jersey and New York under the Hudson River - a project Trump backer and New Jersey governor Chris Christie supports - have gotten the most attention, but generally overlooked by the mainstream media (which relies on airline commercials) is the proposed elimination of Amtrak's long-distance trains, like the Empire Builder from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest, shown below.

Amtrak doesn't get a lot of ridership on its long-distance lines.  The national passenger railroad uses its profits from the more lucrative Northeast Corridor to fund the long-distance routes.  The Trump administration says it wants to end subsidies for these long-distance lines so that Amtrak can "focus on better managing its state-supported and Northeast Corridor train services."  Nice rhetoric, but to do so would undermine the idea of a national passenger rail service and also likely undermine support for any passenger rail.

"Amtrak operates 15 long-distance trains across the nation, and these routes offer the only Amtrak service in 23 of the 46 states we serve," Wick Moorman, Amtrak's president an chief executive officer, said in a statement. "These trains connect our major regions, provide vital transportation to residents in rural communities and generate connecting passengers and revenue for our Northeast Corridor and state-supported services.  Amtrak is very focused on running efficiently - we covered 94 percent of our total network operating costs through ticket sales and other revenues in [fiscal year] 2016 - but these services all require federal investment."

Former Republican Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi was anathema to liberals, but he supported Amtrak, and I, for one, was grateful for his support.  But he also made it clear that legislators outside the Northeast wouldn't support a system that benefited only the eight states on the Northeast Corridor line - "No national system, no Northeast Corridor," he said.  He had a point, and the point could be made for the other fifteen states with Amtrak service that includes trains other than long-distance ones.  We in these 23 states can't count on lawmakers from the other 27 states, especially those from states that don't even have Amtrak service (like South Dakota or Wyoming), to support Amtrak if it doesn't benefit the whole country.  It's not called Netrak or Caltrak, it's called Amtrak - "Am" for America.  Take a look at Amtrak's route map; the problem isn't that there are too many long-distance train routes, there are too few!      

Good grief, Idaho only has Amtrak service in the tip of its panhandle.  The population centers in the southern part of the state are completely shut out.

I can't help but wonder if Trump's Amtrak spending proposal is just a Trojan horse to get rid of the system altogether.  Trump is a businessman who wants to run America like a business, and any businessman knows that passenger trains make little if any profit, so I am highly skeptical of his intentions.  It could be very well be that passenger intercity trains will soon be as extinct as passenger pigeons, at least in this country.  Apart from Americans who live in towns with commuter rail service - I am not one of them - the only time any of us will get to ride a train is if we travel abroad (yeah, right!) or go on a tourist train using cars and engines only slightly older than most of Amtrak's fleet.

Sad.     

Not Up To Speed

I have bad news for railfans.

The federal government has proposed spending more than $120 billion over thirty years for improvements on Amtrak's Northeast Corridor rail line, which include new trains, new stations, improved track, a new tunnel, and upgrades to bridges.  

Why is that bad news, apart from the fact that this is only a proposal?

Because a more ambitious proposal to build a parallel high-speed line between Boston and Washington for trains going up to 220 miles an hour was rejected.

Rejected.

I give up.  We're never - never - going to have real high-speed rail in this country, maybe not even in California.

So take a good look at this French TGV . . .

. . . because you're never going to see anything like that here.  You're better off going to France, though I wouldn't suggest moving there, because Marine LePen might be France's next president.

Oh well, you know what they say about half a loaf . . .  

Ranting and Railing

This is ridiculous . . ..

The U.S. Department of Transportation recently announced that Amtrak, the national passenger railroad, will get $2.5 billion that will go to improvements on the Northeast Corridor line from Boston to Washington, improvements to various stations, a new maintenance facility, and 28 new Acela train sets the will increase passenger seating by 40 percent.  The Acela trains, Amtrak's so-called "high-speed" train sets, will go 160 miles an hour or faster after track improvements are made.

So what is ridiculous about this, aside from the fact that some European bullet trains go faster than two hundred miles an hour and also the fact that Acela trains rarely reach their top speed owing to track curves and similar issues?

The $2.5 billion funding is a loan.

That's right, a loan, not a subsidy.  Amtrak is actually expected to pay it back, as if it were a completely private company, like General Motors.

This is just another example of how the U.S. government is non-committed to developing rapid rail in America.  Rather than invest in high-speed rail and commit public money to it, as it does with aviation and highways, the federal government is letting Amtrak borrow money to get its Acela (Spanish for "bullet train lite") service up to second-rate.   It was President Obama's Transportation Department that approved this loan, with the support of Amtrak supporter Joe Biden, our Vice President.  What happens if we get in 2017 a pro-business, anti-big-government President who decides we can't afford to lend money that Amtrak might take more than awhile to pay back?

Worse yet, what happens if Trump is elected President?      

High-speed rail in America?  I'll believe it when I see it, and as for the improvements Amtrak is borrowing money for, that goes double. 

Corridor Concerns

With the governors of Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida - three governors who, incidentally, could all be fighting for their political lives will before they're up for re-election in 2014 - having canceled high-speed rail projects in their states, Congress is likely to do the same for the nation at large. President Obama's attempt to make high-speed passenger rail accessible to 80 percent of all Americans by 2035 could be a casualty of the budget-cutting attempts on Capitol Hill. But - and this is an important "but" - that doesn't mean high-speed rail in America is about to be abandoned completely. And I'm not talking about Illinois's "high-speed" Chicago-St. Louis corridor, which will feature six train sets that travel at 110 miles an hour (you call that fast?) or California's bullet train project, with a projected cost off $100 billion that could be hard to sustain economically and politically.

I'm actually talking about the Northeast Corridor. (Yes, we in the Northeast have the Acela, but at 150 mph it hardly compares to the even faster trains enjoyed in France and Germany.) As a Florida Republican, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman John Mica hardly sounds like an ally of high-speed rail, given the fact that both his governor and his party have said no to it. But Mica not only supports high-speed rail, he thinks that the only way to ensure its success nationwide - even in increasingly crowded California - is to first build it where it's going to get the most use and be most appreciated. For Mica, that means the line between Boston and Washington by way of New York.

"While I want to give California every chance and opportunity to be successful," Mica told a conference of the U.S. High Speed Rail Association in New York on November 8, "I think we have to redirect our efforts to having at least one success in high-speed rail in the nation. And that high-speed rail success needs to be here in the Northeast Corridor."

Mica also reversed himself on privatizing Amtrak. Some Republicans have suggested that privatizing the national passenger railroad and making it susceptible to market forces would encourage high-speed rail to be developed faster. However, Mica, who once agreed with the idea, now rejects the idea, believing that Amtrak is now willing to work with Congress to make something happen.

Meanwhile, Congress is also ready to allocate $15 million as a down payment for engineering work on the proposed Gateway tunnel to connect Secaucus, New Jersey with Penn Station (someday to be named Moynihan Station, after the late U.S. Senator from New York) in Midtown Manhattan. The project looks to be less expensive than the proposed Access to the Region's Core tunnel that New Jersey governor Chris Christie canceled for being too costly, and it will allow thirteen extra New Jersey Transit trains and eight extra Amtrak trains into New York when it is completed in 2020 or 2021. Christie is more receptive to this plan.

As a passenger rail advocate, you take your victories where you can find them . . ..

I Occupied Wall Street

I finally did it.  I went to the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Lower Manhattan today.  I was in town for a stamp show, and in the interest of killing two birds with one stone (metaphorically, of course - I'm an animal rights supporter), I went down to Zuccotti Park to join the protest.  That's right, I didn't go to take pictures, I went to lend my voice to the protests.  I even walked around carrying a sign.

While other demonstrators went around carrying signs decrying the war, corporate greed, and the lack of jobs, I carried around a homemade sign saying, "Save AMTRAK!"  Because, you must understand, Amtrak faces a possible sixty percent cut in funding by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which could be seen as a grudge against President Obama and his oft-thwarted plans for high-speed rail, but is actually the latest in a series of attempts by Republicans to gut and liquidate the national passenger railroad.  Republicans, of course, don't like any public amenity that serves the greater good - in this case, moving people efficiently - but does not make a profit. Obama wants high-speed passenger rail, but he's dealing with Republicans on Capitol Hill who mostly don't want passenger rail at any speed.    

My sign provoked interest, and  I even got a couple of people to ask about it. I explained Amtrak's situation to them, and I convinced them quite easily that a strong Amtrak would provide more jobs to Americans and help more people travel, as well as benefiting the public realm.  As I see it, it all ties in with the demonstrations against the consolidation of power and money by private interests.

I was surprised at how small Zuccotti Park was, because television footage always seems to make it look larger. It was supposed to have been cleared yesterday for a power washing that has since been postponed.  Ironically, the last time I had been on this block was four years ago, when I was at the plaza across Broadway from the park four years ago where Isamu Noguchi's sculpture Red Cube stands, and . . . the plaza around the sculpture was being power washed.

Zuccotti Park was jammed full of protesters, though, so it was not exactly a small group of embittered misfits. These people were workers, hipsters, young professionals, and ordinary people like myself demonstrating against the growing power of corporations and making it clear that we've had enough. (There was even a theater group performing, appropriately enough, Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot.)   As for my pet cause . . .  Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992 promising to modernize Amtrak but the Republicans took over the House of Representatives two years later and tried to kill it.  So I've seen this movie before . . . and I don't want to see it again.

I stayed for about twenty minutes, taking in the protests and the sloganeering, but I had to move on, as my time in New York was limited.  I think I got enough people to see my sign and think about how Amtrak is linked to their idea of a better America.  I think I made my point.

And I may go back. :-)  

Derailed AGAIN!

I knew it was too good to last.

Do you remember those rail projects I talked about on Wednesday? Well, it seems that now you can forget them. House Republicans are not only interested in killing the $53 billion, six-year plan from the Obama administration to bring bullet trains to Amtrak, they're proposing to slash funding for the existing national passenger railroad. That means the proposed tunnel between New York and New Jersey under the Hudson River is also in jeopardy. U.S. Representative Hal Rogers (R-KY), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, insists that the ridership on Amtrak is too small to justify more subsidies at taxpayers' expense. (The media report that the Republicans are prepared to "fight" President Obama's Amtrak plans.) In New Jersey, where a new tunnel under the Hudson River is desperately needed, not only is Governor Christie not showing any interest in standing up to Rogers, but Republican U.S. Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen, a member of the House Appropriations Committee and whose district (in which I live) includes commuter rail service to New York City, has been mum on the issue too.

I wish more Republicans would come clean and admit that they don't want to support any transportation project that cuts into the profits of car sales. That's why they supported President Obama's call to spend more money on highways. Oops! Correction: John Boehner called that wasteful government spending. Still, it makes sense that the Republicans would support a profit-oriented transportation network, given their enthusiastic support for the GM and Chrysler loans. Oh, wait a minute - they didn't support those either!

So what is the Republican idea for a transportation system that moves more people and creates more jobs? Apparently, it involves people selling Japanese and Korean cars made by workers in foreign-owned factories located in right-to-work states - preferably SUVs rugged enough to handle decrepit highways and go over grade crossings of abandoned railroad tracks.

Oh yeah, there are many more budget cut proposals aimed at the sort of amenities that make a country worth living in. I'll get to that later.

All Aboard The Train

We passenger rail advocates had a very good day yesterday. I don't know if we'll have many good days ahead, but yesterday was a very good day because of the announcement of two major rail projects involving the Northeast.

First, an alternative idea has been announced in the effort to build a new rail tunnel between New York City and New Jersey. Amtrak is planning to build a $13.5 billion tunnel that will connect New Jersey to Penn Station in Manhattan and will mostly follow the route of the tunnel canceled by New Jersey governor Chris Christie, but it will involve more of a federal role and will spare New Jersey taxpayers any cost overruns. And, it will connect Amtrak and NJ Transit's trains with other lines rather than end a block or two away under Macy's. This is actually not a new idea, as it is a revised version of a 1999 proposal to build two tunnels from New Jersey, one connecting with Grand Central Terminal and the other connecting to Penn Station. The Grand Central proposal was abandoned in 2003 due to infighting between NJ Transit and its commuter rail counterparts serving New York and Connecticut over sharing Grand Central access.

The tunnel that will now be built was originally scuttled in favor of the Access to the Region's Core (ARC) tunnel killed by Governor Christie. As Paul Mulshine reported in the Newark Star-Ledger, the ARC plan "pleased no one except the NJ Transit executives and the contractors who would have gotten the work." Connectivity was a major complaint among the ARC tunnel's critics, because it led to a separate station near Macy's and was derided as the "tunnel to Macy's basement." Christie probably looks like a hero now, having canceled the ARC tunnel and forced the pursuit of a more cost-effective alternative. He's in favor of the Amtrak plan.

Speaking of Amtrak, here's the other big story. Vice President Joe Biden went to Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia to announce that the Obama administration will press for a re-authorization of the federal Surface Transportation Program with an expanded mission that includes high-speed intercity rail, committing the government to a $53 billion, six-year plan to get such a system started. It looks like this country is finally prepared to commit itself to modernizing passenger rail before the end of this decade, not unlike the commitment to the moon landing project of the 1960s. But Republicans in Congress are still wary of more government spending, and some anti-rail politicians are convinced that our primary transportation focus must be on highways. Commitment from the executive branch to a national goal doesn't guarantee success. If you disagree, I have a national health insurance card from the Clinton years I'd like to show you.

I want to believe this is for real this time. Biden seems to. But online readers of newspapers like the Camden (N.J.) Courier-Post, which was the primary source for this blog entry, not only don't believe it, they don't want it. The arguments are the same - it will bankrupt the country, it will lead to higher taxes, it's an expensive toy - and they don't take into account the massive government subsidies given to aviation and highways. I hope this project gets under way soon. Because the Northeast Corridor Acela train, while sleek and comfortable, averages 60 to 80 mph between Boston and Washington despite its 150-mph top speed . . . and trains in other countries go faster than that.

It was a new day yesterday for American passenger rail advocates, but it may be an old day soon if not much happens.

More High-Speed Hijinks

I found the smoking gun on the real reason so many Republicans not only oppose subsidies for high-speed rail, but any funding for conventional passenger rail. It's been smoking for two years, but it's still hot. Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the conservative House Republican Study Committee, rhetorically asked in 2009, "Why should we subsidize an industry that will directly compete with the automobile industry, which is so critical to our area?" Ohio depends largely on auto-related jobs. So getting Amtrak is not about wasteful spending, it's not about government mandates, and it's not even about government control of mobility - Amtrak, as Paul Fussell noted in 1991, "does, after all, cut into the very profitable business of selling cars."

Airlines used to oppose subsidies for Amtrak because it cut into the similarly profitable business of selling plane tickets, but more and more airlines support Amtrak as a transportation alternative to clear the skies of so many airplanes, the congestion from which is making air travel more uncomfortable than it already is. But even the real reason for killing Amtrak, as expressed by Representative Jordan, doesn't hold water. President Obama is committed to a diverse transportation sector that includes railroads, aviation, and highways, and in that spirit he bailed out two domestic car companies to save the very jobs Jordan says a fully funded national passenger railroad would destroy. Jordan displays obvious ignorance of Germany, the country that invented the superhighway, with its well-maintained autobahns and its quality public transportation, including the InterCity Express (ICE) high-speed rail system.

In the new Republican House, congressmen who are actually more responsible for this issue are more sympathetic to Obama's long-term plan to put high-speed rail within reach of 80 percent of Americans by 2035. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee John Mica (R-FL) and Representative Bill Shuster (R-PA), who oversees a subcommittee devoted to railroads, endorse Obama's plan provided it includes private funds and focuses on only a couple of rail corridors. This would help by showing how effective high-speed rail can be in generating economic growth and improving the quality of life, encouraging other parts of the country to follow suit. But the bureaucratic hassles among state and local agencies that have to be navigated before any tracks can actually be set cause enough of a problem for high-speed rail advocates without the mostly Republican opposition.

I once noted that not all Republicans oppose modernizing our passenger rail system. It's only too bad that most of those who support it aren't in Washington.

Thanksgiving Transit

On this day before Thanksgiving, the busiest traveling day of the year in America (so we're told), the body scanner boycott that was expected to snarl airports and flights pretty much didn't happen. Most people are comfortable with the searches because they understand the importance of keeping the skies safe. Except that I personally don't know if full body scanners - placed in airports by politically connected security firms - are the way to go.

The controversy over the scanners, though, has only magnified the need for more transportation alternatives to flying, and that includes more passenger trains. Terrorists can't hijack a train and run it into a building, and to respond to the inevitable point that they can still commandeer a train and take hostages, there would have to be a lot of al-Qaeda commados to take over all of the cars. True, they can set of bombs in a train or derail it. But apart from the Madrid train bombing in 2004, such incidents are rare.

Michael Moore, incidentally, traveled from Florida to New York on Amtrak recently on a trip that took more than a day at a distance of a thousand miles, and he noted that a high-speed train could travel across the continent - three times the distance - in half the time. The train Moore rode had sleeping accommodations that would have been considered primitive on the original transcontinental railroad, yet the train was packed with riders, indicating a customer base for trains that Ohio governor-elect John Kasich insists does not exist.

Contrary to popular wisdom, not all Republicans are against high-speed passenger rail. Incoming House Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica of Florida has supported it (find more information on the Sunshine State's high-speed rail project here), and that noted lefty Trent Lott consistently supported bullet trains for Amtrak, not to mention the mere existence of Amtrak as well. I actually wrote a letter to Lott when he was a senator, in which I thanked him for his support for the national passenger railroad.

Unfortunately, many Tea Partiers and Tea Party sympathizers have to be dragged kicking and screaming into supporting a public works project many see as government intervention with and control over our freedom of mobility. France and Germany have enjoyed this cutting-edge rail service for years, and China has already started to build its own high-speed rail network. Japan inaugurated its bullet trains in October 1964 - the month my parents got married, to give you a personal perspective - in time for the Tokyo Olympics. Eurostar bullet trains link Britain with the continent through the Channel Tunnel. Meanwhile, we can't even build a commuter tunnel under the Hudson River. But with Florida and now Illinois gearing up to build trains that can outrun the Acela, we may soon have some rail projects with tangible results to demonstrate just how vital bullet trains can be for America.

Until then, consider yourself lucky if you at least have driving as a viable alternative to flying. Just watch out for those toll booths. Happy Thanksgiving.

High Speed Hijinks

More on the latest high-speed rail initiative. . . .

The Obama administration recently announced eight billion dollars in grants to build high-speed passenger rail lines in the Northeast, Florida, Texas, the Midwest, and California. Many passenger rail advocates who have been waiting for a moment like this are pleased. I was, too . . . until I saw how fast these "high-speed" trains would be going.

Some of you might think we already have a high-speed train - Amtrak's Acela, which travels the route between Boston and Washington. Right. I've ridden that train before. It's certainly very sleek, it's stylish, and it's faster than the old Metroliner it replaced. But high-speed? No way. A TGV in France can take you from Paris to Lyon - approximately the same distance between Boston and Washington - in two hours; the Acela covers that distance in five hours. Though the Acela can go as fast as 150 mph, it doesn't always go that fast.

Nor am I impressed with the planned 110-mph train from Chicago to St. Louis. It's worth noting that Germany's InterCity Express has trains that go up to 200 mph or more. Theoretically, you cover the the 298-mile distance from Chicago to St. Louis in a little over an hour and a half, while a 110-mph train out of Chicago would take even longer to reach Springfield. The high-speed train sets Obama is touting are faster than conventional U.S. trains, and some would say they'll be "pretty fast," but "pretty fast" isn't going to be fast enough.

It's quite embarrassing to many Americans our intercity passenger trains aren't as fast as trains elsewhere, but even more embarrassing is the fact that our current intercity rail system is so hopelessly antiquated, thanks to decades of shoestring-budget investments and deferred maintenance, that anyone who wants to ride the rails might be better off using a handcar. Japan began running bullet trains in 1964 - 1964! - and our passenger trains have seemingly been traveling at speeds last considered world-class in 1864.

The jobs these new high-speed rail projects will create will likely include openings for conductors, engineers, waitstaff, and cleaning staff - but the dirty little secret is that it won't necessarily create a lot of high-tech engineering jobs, as opposed to the kind of engineers who just drive the damn things. That's because much of the expertise to build high-speed trains is . . . overseas. President Obama wants the new "high-speed" trains in America to use American high-speed rail technology. One observer compared that to Bangladesh using Bangladeshi technology to start its own space program.

Meanwhile, the latest federal budget is projecting a huge deficit. Speaking of Bangladesh - this country is so damn broke, it's too bad George Harrison isn't around to stage a benefit concert for the United States.

Jindal On Track

Keith Olbermann reported on his MSNBC show yesterday that Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, after having ridiculed President Obama for advocating funding for more high-speed passenger rail, recently signed his state up for . . . money for a high-speed passenger rail line. Olbermann chastised Jindal for hypocrisy, but I won't. I'm glad to welcome Jindal aboard. I'll happily cheer on any elected official who invests in high-speed passenger rail, as the United States sorely lacks in that arena - among other things - and we need more of it.

Well, Acela isn't exactly like the bullet trains American railfans experience abroad.

Also, I have to confess: I loved Trent Lott. Sure, the Mississippi Republican was backward on race issues and had plastic hair, but he was also one of Amtrak's biggest supporters in the Senate. I even wrote him letter once commending him for his support for the national passenger railroad.

If a politician supports bullet trains for Amtrak, that politician will have my backing. A pro-Amtrak politician would have to be pretty despicable not to have my support.

So don't try to sweet-talk me with railfan banter, Sarah Palin.