We’re On A Mission...Are You With Us?

By Jim Mathews / President & CEO

There’s a lot of chaos right now involving anything within a reasonable radius of the U.S. government – and that includes Amtrak, transit funding, and research and development. Some of the newspapers are covering it, but many aren’t, and if you rely on television for your news you’re getting very little of it, or only the most surface bits.

Nonetheless, wholesale cuts to rail services in nearly every community are on the table, along with just ceasing payment on projects already approved, under contract, and with dollars obligated. It’s the kind of thing we’ve never seen before, and it’s a huge challenge to anyone who cares about passenger rail, transportation, or indeed many other efforts with significant government involvement.

Here’s my promise to all of our 127,000 members, donors, and direct supporters: no matter what happens, we will stay focused on our mission of bringing more trains, and better trains, to more places, for more people, everywhere. We’ve done this since 1967, helping to create Amtrak, pushing back on 1980s and 1990s passenger-rail funding cuts, and then in 2021 helping to create the historic $66 billion passenger-rail investments in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act – also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

It's not about partisanship. It’s about supporting communities through passenger rail and access to public transportation, it’s about prosperity for those communities and the places around them – whether they’re cities or America’s Heartland – and it’s about fairness, ensuring that we invest everywhere and not just in the country’s power centers or financial capitals.

Next week, the Surface Transportation Board will convene the first of three 2025 meetings of the brand-new Passenger Rail Advisory Committee, of which I am a member. The STB is the economic regulator for railroads and Amtrak, and we’ve have been working this week on finalizing our agenda for our Feb. 11 all-day session. That meeting will be as good a place as any to continue to fulfill our mission and begin building the case – again – for a robust and well-funded passenger-rail network.

A few things are top-of-mind for us going into next week. First is finding ways to speed project delivery. As I alluded to in my remarks last week to the AASHTO Council on Rail Transportation annual Winter Meeting, we have a broken and inadequate process for adding more frequencies or starting new service in this country. It just takes too long, imposes too many hurdles and obstacles and, in the end, fails to produce either the service we want or even the safety and surety we think we’re getting by making it so hard to do.

And speeding project delivery is about more than just starting new train routes. Whether it’s building big, complicated things like tunnels and bridges, or small-scale things like platforms, or even creating the industrial base we need to start supplying railcars at the scale and speed that our growth demands, we must find a way to make things faster, easier, and cheaper to do. As a staff, we’ve been working for more than a year on proposals around creating a national equipment pool for long-distance and intercity passenger cars. It’s a pretty simple idea: make it so the car builders will have a market large enough, and sure enough, to commit to building at the pace and volume we need here in America.

We also plan to wave the flag for reforms in liability, insurance cover, and especially indemnification. These issues are enormous barriers to entry for anyone hoping to do something even moderately new in the passenger rail world; my colleague and RPA member Henry Posner III (of Iowa Interstate and Railroad Development Corp fame) describes it as “decriminalizing passenger rail.” I’m not sure I’d go THAT far, but it’s clear that we need an answer to this problem if we’re going to create the service everyone wants, needs, deserves, and has repeatedly voted to provide.

On-time performance will also be very high on our to-do list. Passenger trains in this country run too late, too often. Equipment issues don’t make up anywhere near the largest share of the reasons for late trains, but they’re there, and it’s time to look harder at the entire support ecosystem for this equipment to understand why cars and locomotives can’t be cared for well enough to run like they do on any other railroad.

Likewise, working out a realistic path so that Amtrak’s half-century old legal right to preferential dispatch on the host railroads gets recognized will also be a huge agenda item for us, because that’s the number-one reason Amtrak trains run late nearly everywhere. Norfolk Southern was disingenuous when they argued in Federal court recently that Amtrak is looking for the equivalent of a Presidential motorcade across the nation’s freight network. A nice rhetorical flourish, but a misrepresentation both of preference as spelled out in 49 U.S.C. § 24308(c) and of what Amtrak wants in its relationship with host railroads.

Nationalizing passenger service under the Amtrak banner in 1971 was a taxpayer-funded bailout of the private railroads, and every year Amtrak exists is effectively a taxpayer subsidy to the freight railroads, who would otherwise have the legal burden of supplying passenger service as a common carrier. Running Amtrak trains like top priority intermodal Z-trains in exchange for that publicly funded largesse – especially when we’re generally only talking about one train a day in each direction – seems a fair exchange.

And yes of course we’re STILL working every day, every hour, with our allies in and out of government to make sure that dollars already obligated for kick-starting vital investment in our long-neglected passenger-rail infrastructure don’t get clawed back – especially if it’s done in an extralegal way with no precedent or statutory authority.

It’s a lot of work, and we have a very small team to do it. That’s why I’m asking what I asked at the very top of this piece. Are you with us? Will you help? Will you engage your local and national leaders as a regular citizen? Will you add your voice to these efforts? Will you volunteer? I think I already know the answer, based on the many thousands of responses we saw to our digital Call to Action from engaged members, donors, and supporters when the funding freeze was first announced. I hope you’ll keep it up, because we’re going to need that kind of response again and again and again.