ere is what we know about Richard Anderson’s
vision for Amtrak, what he wants it to be and
become: duh. That’s right, we know next to nothing.
Does Amtrak’s chief executive have a vision? I
suspect so, at least in broad-brush terms. Then why
doesn’t he share it and campaign for its acceptance by the railroad’s
constituencies, particularly customers and the politicians who
control its subsidies? Two reasons suggest themselves. One is that
Anderson is by nature a secretive man; we know he detests jour-
nalists and being interviewed. Yet I watched him being questioned
by a U.S. Senate committee this summer, and he seemed congenial
and responsive. So, I’ll roll out the other possibility, which is that if
we knew his vision, we might not like it.
His Senate committee appearance, whose substance went unre-
ported everywhere, was interesting. He called the state-supported
services (those routes of 750 or fewer miles) the “strongest part of
Amtrak — where the future lies.” Then he went on:
“Here’s the challenge on long distance: From fiscal
year 2013 to 2018, trips over 600 miles went down
by 30%. The trains go 45 mph, and the ticket costs
more than a low-cost airline seat in the same market.
We are working hard to get ridership up, but it’s clear
that trips over 600 miles are not where consumers
want to use Amtrak. And we need billions in invest-
ments [a reference, I think, to the need to replace the
Superliner fleet, some of which is four decades old].
I want to have a dialogue with you and your profes-
sional staff, as we go into reauthorization, about how
to tackle that challenge.”
Then Anderson went on: “I do think there are historically im-
portant trains in the long-distance network we should always op-
erate, like the [Empire] Builder, the [California] Zephyr, the Coast
Starlight. But because we spread our resources like peanut butter,
we don’t have the resources to make such trains really great experi-
ences. ... On the margin, we should be thinking of breaking up
some of those long-distance trains and figuring how to serve the
consumer to provide high-quality service in short-haul markets
where they are using that service today.”
The “reauthorization” Anderson referred to is a periodic retun-
ing of the instructions that Congress gives Amtrak, and this will
occur again in 2020. There’s an expectation that Amtrak will pub-
licly lay out all its cards as part of this process — in other words,
propose the substantive changes that Anderson has alluded to. I’m
not so sure, however. It’s nice to know he wants to keep certain
western trains the way they are, but when Amtrak starts chopping
other long-distance routes into shorter pieces, it will begin playing
with political fire. We saw this past year how quickly U.S. senators
from Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico leapt to the defense of
the Chicago-Los Angeles Southwest Chief when Amtrak sought to
substitute buses between western Kansas and Albuquerque, N.M.
So, the possibility exists that Amtrak will hide its cards from public
view during reauthorization, in order to avoid having Congress tell
it what it cannot do, which is mess with the national network.
Readers of this column know what I think, which is that the
national network damn well needs shaking up. Why do we have a
Cardinal meandering through West Virginia? Why can’t all the
markets between Chicago and New Orleans be served during
hours when people are awake? Why do we run trains between the
Great Lakes cities in the middle of the night? So on and so forth.
The problem as I see it is that nobody trusts Amtrak to make
these changes. I for one do not. Beginning during Joe Boardman’s
presidency it began lying to us. For one thing, Amtrak says the
Northeast Corridor makes hundreds of millions a year in profits,
when in fact it is tens of billions of dollars behind
meeting its capital needs and falls further behind
every year. For another, it counts state subsidies of
short-distance trains as revenue but does not count
federal subsidies of long-distance trains as revenue.
In a perfect world, Congress would subsidize
Amtrak by how many passenger-miles it produces,
raising the appropriations as passenger-miles go up,
and letting Amtrak decide how to run its business.
But because we — you, me, Congress, the states —
have been lied to so long and often, we don’t trust
Amtrak to do the right thing. So we play cat-and-
mouse, and forever wonder what kind of passenger railroad Rich-
ard Anderson wants to leave behind. 2If we knew what his plans are, we might not like it
Richard Anderson’s
vision thing
TrainsMag.com 13COMMENTARY
Fred W. Frailey
[email protected]
Blog: TrainsMag.comH
“I THINK THERE
ARE HISTORICALLY
IMPORTANT TRAINS
IN THE LONG-DIS-
TANCE NETWORK
WE SHOULD
ALWAYS OPERATE.”
— R. ANDERSON“Where the future lies.” Amtrak’s northbound Vermonter crosses the
Connecticut River Bridge at Holyoke, Mass., Oct. 12, 2015. Thomas Mik