What 9-11 Taught Me About Advocating for Passenger Rail

By Stu Nicholson / RPA Board Member

I arrived at work as Public Information Officer for the Central Ohio Transit Authority (COTA) in Columbus, Ohio just a few minutes after the first hijacked jet hit the World Trade Center. My co-workers rushed into my cubicle and said, “Turn on your TV. Something just happened in New York”. I had barely turned on the small TV on my desk when we witnessed the second plane strike the other WTC tower. It was clear it was no accident and that everything about our world and sense of security had changed in those moments. It was our generation’s Pearl Harbor.

Almost immediately, President Bush ordered all flights grounded over American airspace. And not long after that, I got a phone call from my counterpart at the Columbus, Ohio airport. I could tell the urgency in his voice as he told me the airport was about to receive an unknown number of diverted flights and thousands of passengers. “Can we get some buses out here to get people from the airport to the downtown hotels?”, I was asked.

I relayed the request to my bosses, and we assigned about a dozen buses to the airport and kept them running until all the diverted passengers were transported.

But what I remember most from that day was how some of our drivers came back telling of passengers who wanted to go to the Columbus Amtrak Station, and how they were incredulous when told Columbus had no Amtrak service since the last train rolled out in 1979.

That fact is (sadly) still true today, as I serve as a Board Member for the Rail Passengers Association. That story sticks with me as strong as ever. But today it’s a lesson about how skewed our transportation system had become even before 9-11.

With a few exceptions, our national passenger rail system is still not nearly what it should be, even as Amtrak and the Federal Railroad Administration advance expansion plans for both new regional corridors and more long-distance routes.

And on this 23rd Anniversary of 9-11, I would submit we aren’t doing enough to add to our advocacy pitches that more, better and faster passenger train are necessary to our national security.

Almost 3 years after 9-11, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, impacting thousands of people who had no way to evacuate because they didn’t have a car and many of them died. Meanwhile, the freight railroads literally pulled welded rail tracks out of Lake Pontchartrain after Katrina to help get a lifeline restored for moving in emergency supplies and to help the region rebuild.

It's worth noting we are just now restoring Amtrak service between Mobile, Alabama and New Orleans..... 19 years after Katrina.

Also worth noting is a 2006 report on this by the Midwest Interstate Passenger Rail Commission, and it is still a valid assessment of what can and should be done.....

https://miprc.org/Portals/0/pdfs/MIPRC_rail_&_emergency_preparedness_report.pdf

If we had to mobilize passenger railcars to evacuate during another disaster, I doubt our nation could do it. Amtrak is already hard-pressed to roster enough rolling stock to run its own scheduled trains. Which is why we need to advocate for the following:

• A bigger and more robust passenger railcar and locomotive manufacturing base
• Creation and strategic deployment of a reserve of either new equipment or modernized older equipment
• A commensurate capital investment to make the above possible.

Coupled with the ongoing establishment of new regional and long-distance routes, we should be investing now to encourage growth in the manufacturing sector, just as the federal government has done with the CHIPs Act for the computer industry and incentives for the automobile industry.

Our passenger rail system and our national security deserve no less.

(Stu Nicholson is an RPA Board member, former Executive Director of All Aboard Ohio, former Public Information officer for the Ohio Rail Development Commission & COTA and also a veteran former broadcast journalist.)