Op-Ed; Amtrak woes could doom rail's future

THOMAS M. KEANE JR.
873 words
16 August 2002
Boston Herald
All Editions
029
English
(Copyright 2002)

The much-touted renaissance of rail seems to be headed for the dark ages - and Amtrak is to blame.

It's 6 a.m. Tuesday. Bleary-eyed passengers, having just purchased their tickets, sit waiting. I am one of them. Two minutes before the train is to depart, the loudspeaker brays out. The Acela train from Boston to Washington has been canceled. The next available Acela train?

Try next week.

The last two months haven't been good for America's railroads. Amtrak officials threatened to solve their budget crisis by shutting down all operations in early July; it was saved only by a last- minute government loan of $205 million. A few weeks later, a train from Chicago ran off the tracks near Washington, D.C., injuring scores of passengers. Then knuckleheaded Amtrak employees on a commuter train into Boston refused to stop the train to seek medical help for a gravely ill passenger who died of the heart attack he suffered on board.

But it is this week's embarrassing collapse of Acela that epitomizes Amtrak's failures. Acela was to be the high-speed, comfortable rail service that would revolutionize travel along the Northeast Corridor. Amtrak spent billions of dollars and a decade on the project. Scheduled to begin operating in mid-1999, the new trains finally made their debut in December 2000.

The trains, seemingly the best that rail technology has to offer, certainly look good. Yet, they are now falling apart. Riders find that about half of the bathrooms on Acela are broken; the locks consistently fail, leaving the toilets inaccessible to passengers (or worse, with passengers stuck inside, desperately screaming for a conductor to release them). Footrests are falling off and remain unrepaired. Table trays are broken. The luggage compartments were misdesigned and riders are constantly hitting their heads. The cafe car, sold as a restaurant on the rails, is understocked, with many items gone before the trip is half over.

And the condition of the cars is symptomatic of the condition of the rail service. If it's on time, Acela can make the run from Boston to New York in three hours and 20 minutes; the trip from New York to D.C. is just two hours and 50 minutes.

But that's a big and frequently improbable "if." Amtrak has just recently admitted that Acela has the worst on-time record of any of its rail services. That's no surprise for frequent riders. Trains are regularly canceled due to breakdowns or malfunctions. And once they get going, passengers are subjected to mysterious and unexplained stops, with the trains sitting dead for 15 to 30 minutes at various points along route.

Acela shares tracks with a wide variety of commuter trains and it is a regular occurrence that one sees those supposedly slower trains zooming past the stalled Acela - with those on the other train waving and laughing at the high-priced passengers stuck in a gleaming new train with no bathrooms and no food.

And the most recent problem with the trains? Cracks in their shock absorbers - cracks that Amtrak officials apparently knew about three years ago.

Amtrak's too-glib response to all of this is, "money." If it only had more of it, a lot more, then everything would be fine. It points to congressional requirements that it operate many long-distance lines at huge losses. "We have a policy problem," Amtrak says, meaning inadequate subsidies, "not an Amtrak performance problem."

Except that's not true - and Amtrak's failure along the Northeast Corridor is proof.

Because while it certainly is the case that railroads out in the hinterlands lose lots of money, that's not so along the East Coast, where it's a huge moneymaker. That's particularly the case with Acela. In the 19 months it has been operating, Acela - despite costing almost as much as air travel - has captured a significant chunk of the market, carrying more passengers than the Delta and US Airways shuttles. Sure, it's been helped by the Sept. 11-induced fear of flying, but still, Acela has demonstrated that the demand is there.

Yet, this jewel of the system is now falling apart. Contrary to what Amtrak would have us believe, the problem is performance. A government-chartered monopoly, Amtrak is any economist's proof that competition really is better. It doesn't know how to manage its money, it treats its customers as cattle, and it operates more to serve its own many fiefdoms than to provide decent rail service.

That's why the Amtrak Reform Council - a national group of politicians and transportation experts - is on target when it calls for a complete restructuring of rail operations. The council proposes that Amtrak get out of the business of operating any trains in the Northeast Corridor altogether, with the job going to private businesses.

It's a radical, but necessary step. Amtrak has long sought to convince the public that it and the future of rail were synonymous. In fact, with Amtrak around, rail may be doomed.

Tom Keane can be reached at tom@tomkeane.com.

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