Hotline #740

The conference committee on 1993 DOT appropriations finished up most of its work yesterday. Exact figures cannot be confirmed until September 28, but we are hearing that the committee approved all the Senate numbers for Amtrak funding in 1993. That is very good news, if it is true -- we should know for sure on September 28. If the Senate figures stand, look for a Viewliner order this year and the start of electrification construction on the Boston line next summer. It looks like Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D.-N.J.) has pulled Amtrak through once again, with the support of the New England Congressional delegation in particular.

Transit appears to have fallen somewhere between the Senate bill and the House bill, which was inflated by the Moody amendment. We should know more about that on September 28 as well.

A final vote in both houses on the DOT bill is expected in the middle of next week.

The Amtrak board met September 23, approving $400,000 as their share of a new intermodal station at Emeryville, Cal. This would partially replace the functions of the old Southern Pacific station in Oakland, which was damaged by an earthquake and will be torn down soon. Emeryville would serve trans-bay buses from San Francisco.

A new vice president of passenger services was named. He is Arthur McMahon, who is now Senior Vice President of Customer Services for British Airways in New York. The current Amtrak passenger services chief, Gene Eden, retires next week.

For the first 11 months of fiscal 1992, through August, Amtrak system revenues are down 3% from the year before. Expenses are down 2%. Ridership through July is down 4%.

Hillary Clinton rode a Metra commuter train yesterday between Glen Ellyn and North Western Station in Chicago. This weekend, President Bush is on a whistlestop tour of Michigan and Ohio, using a private train supplied by CSX and Union Pacific.

New York Assemblyman Jerrold Nadler, a strong advocate of rail in the Empire State, has been nominated to Congress by Manhattan Democrats. Rep. Ted Weiss, who died September 14, nevertheless won the primary the next day and needed to be replaced on the November 3 ballot.

The DOT has awarded $3 million in intermodal planning grants to Alaska, Florida, Louisiana, New Mexico, Ohio, and the six New England states. Among other things, that money can be used to plan transit connections to airports and grade-crossing separations. We can think of a high-profile intermodal project in New England that should be looked at in this context -- the Boston Central Artery rail link.

Kansas City Southern announced plans to acquire MidSouth Corporation, a Jackson, Miss.-based regional railroad spun off from Illinois Central Gulf in 1986. KCS has no passenger service, but MidSouth was considered a few years ago to carry a Dallas section of the Crescent. One of the reasons that never happened was slow conditions on MidSouth tracks between Meridian, Miss., and Shreveport, La. KCS said it would make track improvements, but it was not clear if that would help the prospects of a Dallas train. The ICC could take up to a year to approve the deal.

Another discount airline has sprung up, owned by former employees of Eastern, PanAm, and Midway Airlines. It is called Kiwi and is offering $99 one-way fares from Newark to Chicago, and other cheap fares from Newark to Atlanta and Orlando. Such programs have the effect of eating into Amtrak's overnight services revenues.