Yes, They Might be Out to Get Them

The service cuts that Amtrak plans to make on Oct. 1 remind me of the old phrase “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”

In the rail passenger advocacy and railfan communities – they are not necessarily the same thing even if there is some overlap – there long have been paranoid types who think Amtrak, Congress, the Department of Transportation, the highway lobby, conservative think tanks and goodness knows who else is out to kill the long-distance passenger train.

Those fears are not necessarily unfounded because there are a lot of people in government and in the transportation field who believe long-distance passenger trains long ago outlived their purpose.

Chat lists are ablaze with talk about this being the beginning of the apocalypse of the long-distance passenger train after a memo written by Amtrak vice president Roger Harris to employees was leaked.

Harris wrote in the memo that most long-distance trains will be reduced to tri-weekly operation on Oct. 1, the first day of federal fiscal year 2021. The exception is the Silver Meteor, which will operate quad weekly. The Auto Train will continue to operate daily.

The memo contends that Amtrak remains “committed” to the national network and as ridership recovers from sharp drops triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying economic recession that the intercity passenger carrier will restore daily service to the long-distance trains, possibly by next summer.

Harris framed the move as saving money and a political necessity, saying Congress will not continue to fund Amtrak if trains are running largely empty as they have in the past couple of months.

He probably fears – correctly by the way – that as Amtrak funding is debated in Congress that photographs and videos of near empty coaches will begin showing up regularly in some media channels along with talk of a colossal waste of public money.

Some have questioned whether Amtrak’s real motivation is to drive down ridership, run up losses and then point to those as justification for eliminating the long distance trains.

There is some reason to think this could be about to play out. Former Amtrak CEO Richard Anderson was outspoken in his disdain for the long-distance network even as he talked about retaining some “experiential” service that he never got around to defining.

Another Amtrak vice president, Stephen Gardner, also has been critical of long-distance trains, describing them as relics of another era.

Anderson and Gardner, and perhaps Amtrak Chairman Anthony Coscia, favored a different Amtrak made up of corridor services between urban areas, particularly in the South and West.

Before the pandemic began, Amtrak had done spade work in seeking to interest state legislators in supporting Amtrak’s plans to ask Congress for a pot of money to be used to seed the development of these corridors.

Amtrak would front the initial capital costs and help underwrite operating losses for a few years before the states would be expected to pay for the services in the same way that states pay for corridor services today.

But the pandemic and the recession changed everything.

There are some who believe the announcement of plans to operate most long-distance trains on tri-weekly schedules is a political ploy to prod Congress into giving Amtrak an additional $1.4 billion for FY2021 on top of what the carrier has already requested.

Amtrak CEO William Flynn said in a May 25 letter to Congress that long distance trains would operate less than daily even with the additional $1.4 billion and would be “at risk” without it.

The Rail Passengers Association has been sending out emails to its members since the Harris memo leaked asking them to demand that Congress approve the additional $1.4 billion and mandate that long-distance trains now operating daily continue to do so.

I wrote in an earlier post that getting that extra $1.4 billion is going to be tough for Amtrak to pull off during a recession when Congress is inundated with requests for money from suffering organizations and government entities asking their Uncle Sam to help them survive.

If anything, Amtrak might be denied the supplemental appropriation and forced to take an across-the-board cut in FY2021 funding as legislators talk about the need for “sacrifices for the greater good.”

State governments are already cutting spending for their next fiscal years and such programs as education are seeing funding cuts.

Some states that now fund Amtrak corridor services have reduced their spending on them.

It remains to be seen how the politics of the appropriations process will play out this summer during a presidential election year.

Congress often fails to approve a budget before the current one expires and keeps the government running through continuing resolutions that effectively maintain the status quo for a few weeks while negotiations continue.

Long-distance trains have continued to operate daily because Amtrak received emergency aid last spring. That money runs out in late September.

At this point it is difficult to see how the long-distance trains will survive the summer unscathed no matter how many letters, phone calls, texts, emails, social media posts or op ed columns that passenger train advocates create.

At some point it might get down to a choice of tri-weekly service or service suspensions.

In theory the Sunset Limited east of New Orleans was “suspended” after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

It has yet to return and probably won’t now except as maybe a state-funded service over a portion of its route.

Amtrak’s long-distance trains have survived so many budget battles over the past 49 years that it could be easy to think they will always be there because they always have been.

Maybe this will turn out to be like every other battle and the trains will somehow survive intact. And maybe there is something about this go around that is different from all of those other struggles to save the long-distance trains.

Tags: Amtrak, Amtrak funding, commentaries on transportation, Congress, On Transportation, posts on transportation, Roger Harris