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Fight the Good Fight, by Rudy Dalpra; Safford, AZ

Rudy Dalpra; Safford, AZ

I grew up in Crystal Falls, in the Upper Peninsula, and can remember during WWII, two passenger trains a day stopping at our old historic depot, with the huge winged roof that formed a covering for the cobblestone rail-side platform. Some years later it was necessary to go to Powers, west of Escanaba, to catch trains for Green Bay and points south. The railroads (deliberately in my view) began to make the schedules so erratic, and the service in general so bad, that passenger counts dropped, and then they used the declining ticket sales as justification for further curtailments of service.

This past summer, after making about 20 round trips by highway from southern Arizona to Crystall Falls, I decided to take Amtrak from as far north as possible, which turned out to be Milwaukee, to Lordsburg, New Mexico, which is as close to my home in southest Arizona as I could get. Because of delays, almost entirely beyond Amtrak's control, as far as I could tell, I was dumped in the Lordsburg freight yard at 2:15 a.m. on a Sunday morning, about seven and a half hours behind schedule.

But the trip was such an adventure in its own right, that I am planning another for this summer, taking a different route north by heading west first, to Los Angeles. Can hardly wait!

While at the Milwaukee depot, I picked up membership literature from your organization, and signed on as a member when I got back to Arizona. My ticket was from Wausau, but when I actually got it in hand, I discovered a bus trip would be necessary to get me to Milwaukee.

At any rate, I think what you folks are trying to accomplish is a great demonstration of grass-roots involvement. Nice to have your governor in such a unique position of direct aid and comfort to your cause.

One of our great national disgraces is the decimation if not virtual total destruction of a viable rail linkage between the major cities in each of the country's regions. The air and highway lobbies have a strangle hold on the politicians, and recovery of a legitimate rail system, if it ever happens, will be a lenghty, and I suspect a frustrating process. But know that there are those in the hinterlands who are wishing you well and hoping for the best.

I doubt if there is any area of the country, with the possible exception of the LA metroplex, that is as wedded to cars, trucks, and SUVs as the Phoenix area, which for all practical purposes is the political power base for the whole state. About two years ago, I was shocked to read in the Arizona Republic that Amtrak was giving up its station in Phoenix. There was not one outcry from anyone among the power structure in the smog-choked state capital, about the projected move. I-10 between Tucson and Phoenix is a zoo, but nobody seemed to associate upgraded train service between the two cities as a solution.

I was amazed in the course of last summer's trip, to find how the condition of the terminals have been allowed to degrade. The Texas Eagle itself seemed to be well run. The cars were modern and clean, and the service was very adequate. I Was particularly depressed when at San Antonio the train had a forced delay in a rail yard adjoining the Alamodome. What was once an elegant Spanish motif depot building was unfortunately being renovated into a restaurant by private investor, while the equivalent of a double-wide mobile home had been pressed into service as a ticket office and waiting room.

I could go on, but it is too painful!! Fight the good fight!!

Why not Rockford Service?; by Andrew Sihler

From time to time, in the current excitement regarding the start-up of the first two phases of the Midwest Regional Rail Initiative, I have heard people wonder why the route that puts Madison on the system runs Chicago - Milwaukee - Madison and not Chicago - Rockford - Janesville - Madison. For some questioners, it's a matter of simple curiosity. For others, particularly the NIMBY folks along the Waterloo Subdivision (between the Main Line at Watertown and Madison), they are anxious to find reasons-any reasons-for running the trains through someone else's back yard, and such people will argue that that the population along the southern route is even greater than the northern one. (Not strictly speaking true, ad the "northern route" population actually includes the whole of the Fox Valley.)

There's nothing wrong with the basic idea, and such service might be inaugurated at some future time. I think it's obvious, however, why it's not part of the basic plan called the Midwest Regional Rail Initiative. Let me set out the reasons.

1) Lack of demand. Oddly, there has never been such a passenger route in the history of railroading in Illinois and Wis-consin. The reason for that may have been partly technical: although there were (and are) three main lines between Chicago and Rockford-the Illinois Central, the Rock Island, and the Milwaukee Road (to use their traditional names)-only the Milwaukee Road had tracks from Rock-ford to Madison. Of course, in the heyday of passenger railroading, lines often clubbed together to operate passen-ger trains over long distances, e.g. Chicago to Miami; but 150 miles is a little short for any such thing. In any case, the bare fact that the one railroad with through tracks never operated a through passenger train suggests that the demand was all but non-existent. In fact, on the eve of WW II, there were a total of 18 trains a day between Chicago and Madison operated by two lines (the Milwaukee Road and the Chicago and North Western) over four different routes-almost twice as many as proposed by the Midwest Regional Rail Initiative-but the only rail service between Madison and Rockford was Milwaukee Road's one round trip daily of a local (VERY local) "motor" (a primitive precursor of a "Budd Car") that made the run in a ghastly two hours and forty-five minutes. And at that time Rockford was already the second largest city in Illinois.

2) A very important reason, and the one most simply stated, is that Midwest Regional as planned in Wisconsin links together the three major population areas of our state-the Michigan shore, the Fox valley, and Dane County-besides link-ing all those areas with the western part of the state and with the Twin Cities.

3) Midwest Regional will have a stop at Mitchell Field, which would be very handy to residents of Dane County and western Wisconsin via the existing plan; much less so if one had to go through Chicago to make use of it.

4) A route through Rockford and Janesville, if it happens, will involve a mini-mum of 74 miles of very heavy track upgrading. The route proposed for put-ting Madison on the map requires specifically 35 miles of heavy track work, between Madison and Watertown. (Even the main lines will need some track work, of course, and the heavy rebuilding of track between Madison and Portage will be neces-sary no matter how the train gets to Madison from the east.) The track is pretty good on two of the three lines to Rockford-and I believe that all three lines connect-but major rehab will be called for from Rockford north.

5) The ex-Milwaukee Road tracks run right through the middles of Rockford, Beloit, and Janesville, from one end to the other. This presents operations problems for trains operating at any speed, and costs connected with reducing hazards. Ridership studies reveal, with some clarity, that for rail service to appeal to a large segment of the population, the runs have to be frequent, and the travel time has to be noticeably better than driving. This last is a particular problem, since most people seem to have very unreal-istic notions of how long it takes them to drive places. Put differently, it's not clear that a train or two a day over the "southern route" would attract many riders in the first place, and that goes double if the trip-time isn't shorter than it can be driven.

By contrast, with the marginal exception of Waterloo, the tracks from Milwaukee to Madison via Watertown barely graze the edges of the towns they run by (rather than through). Unhappily, there's been some very recent residential development in these little towns, right along the tracks. This complicates things a little, mainly because the residents of these new areas are all hell-bent on collapsing from terror-groundless fears, but the developers had to have some inkling of that or they wouldn't have told pro-spective buyers fairy stories about bike trails and abandonments-and some politicians are for some reason encouraging people-even people living blocks from the tracks-to indulge in baroque fantasies of terror. In plain fact, the tracks themselves impinge very, very slightly on the towns along the northern route, whether on the main line or on the Waterloo Subdivision, in contrast to the level of "urban involvement" on the southern route.

Straight Talk about Amtrak; by Andrew Sihler

An undated, unsigned flyer (presumably the product of Mark Ken'ts "Fight the Train" organization) has recently been circulated, titled What They Won't Tell you about Amtrak. Its contents are a mixture of non-secrets, irrelevancies, and inaccuracies.

Come along with me and let's take a look at what THEY won't tell you about Amtrak!

The flyer tells us that Amtrak was "created in 1971 as a government-owned, for-profit corpora-tion, Amtrak has lost money every year of its existence.... To date it has required over 23 billion dollars of taxpayer assistance to remain in operation".

Not QUITE. The Amtrak legislation of 1971 did indeed create a 'for-profit' com-pany. However, when Amtrak's authorization was revised a couple of years later, the profitability stuff was dropped. That is: since 1973 there has been no claim or pretension or assumption that Amtrak should operate 'for profit'.

It is preposterous to suggest that Amtrak's 'subsidies' are a secret; in fact, their conspicuousness is unique in the subsidy-addicted transportation world.

And make that $5 billion. From 1941 to 1965 train travelers paid a ticket tax which, adjusted for inflation, comes to about $18 billion in current dollars. This was treated as general revenue but should be regarded as a 'user fee', like gas taxes.

In 1997, Congress passed the Amtrak Reform and Accountability Act. This Act established a deadline of 2002 for Amtrak to ... eliminate the need for federal operating subsidies.

Yes. Right. But-this a secret?

The requirement to free itself from federal dependence only applies to operating expenses.

Yup, that's what it says, that's the whole idea. What's your point?

This year, Amtrak has requested almost a billion dollars in federal funding, of which about half is earmarked for operating expenses, half for capital expenditures.

Yes-? And-? Most of the capital is for the electrification of the line between New Haven, Conn., and Boston, which will secure a significant return on invest-ment. And it comes to all of 0.035% of the total federal budget of $1.8 trillion.

On average, taxpayers pay about 40% of the cost of every Amtrak trip. On certain long-distance routes, such as New York to Los Angeles, the taxpayers pay $1000 per passenger.

Not pretty. The least of the absurdities, here, is the reference to a 'New York to Los Angeles route'. There is no such thing by rail.

The rest of the paragraph is an exercise in dishonesty (or stupidity; take your pick). It works like this. First, you divide the 'subsidy' by the number of passengers a year, say 21 million; the 'subsidy' is, say, $595 million. Or no, sorry, $1 billion, because you include that big, one-time electrification investment, even though it contributes nothing to travel from 'New York to Los Angeles'.

This comes to $56.70 per passenger. Then you find that the average price of an Amtrak ticket that year was $140 (roughly a round-trip between Washington and New York), of which $56.70 makes up 40%. Then you look at a big, long-distance ticket-price, like $2,500 from Chicago to Los Angeles for a Deluxe Bedroom at a peak travel period. You've already identified $56.75 as the total 'taxpayer' contribu-tion to this trip, but you ignore that and instead attach the 40 percent thing to this trip as well. Now, really!

Between 1989 and 1998, the US population increased by 1.1% [? per year]. Intercity travel (measured in passenger-miles) increased by 5.5% per year for automobiles, increased by 3.9% per year for airlines, increased by 1.3% per year for buses and decreased by 0.2% for Amtrak.

Sorry, the figures for Amtrak are obsolete: today, in fact, trains are carrying more riders than at any time in Amtrak history. And by a considerable margin.

Amtrak's market base is mostly affluent individuals. Only 13% of its ridership earns less than $20,000/yr, 75% of its ridership earns more than the national average, 33% earns over $75,000/yr and 20% earns over $100,000/yr.

First, it is to be taken for granted that the traveling public will not be a cross-section of the population as a whole. The less 'discretionary spending' available, the less likely you are to travel overall, and those living in outright poverty don't travel much, especially as intercity bus connections become fewer and fewer.

Second, surveys show that among train travelers there is a rough inverse cor-relation between length of trip and affluence. This is partly just a matter of arith-metic: some 65% of Amtrak riders are in the northeast corridor (Washington-Philadelphia-New York-Boston) where trips are short and riders affluent.

The flip side is that most trips outside of the corridor are longer and patrons are less affluent. The thousands of people getting on and off of Amtrak coaches in say Montana every year are not likely to be 'mostly affluent individuals'.

Finally, note that the 25% in the below-national-average range comes to 5.25 million or so travelers; and the 2.73 million travelers who are virtually at or below the poverty line probably could not travel at all if Amtrak were not there.

Of course, these statistics are meaningless without direct comparison to other subsidized modes of transportation. What percentage of air travelers, for example, make less than $20,000 a year?

78% of the targeted ridership for the Midwest Regional Rail Initiative is recreational travel.

Not exactly. (Not an 'Amtrak statistic' in any case.) What the TEMS study for Midwest Regional actually said was that 78% of travel will be non-business. Revealing this particular 'secret' suggests that whoever wrote the flyer thinks there is some minimum acceptable percentage of travelers with serious purposes. In any case, has highway or airport construction ever been evalu-ated on the basis of the seriousness of their users' purposes?

There follow four paragraphs purporting to be an exposé of questionable financial and accounting practices on Amtrak's part. The account is confused and misleading in its use of terms like 'Generally Accepted Accounting Principles', as though this were a simple matter. In fact, different enterprises have different kinds of account-ing principles, and necessarily so. The crux of these paragraphs is whether 'main-tenance' (of machinery) is an operating or a capital cost; and whether Amtrak was granted 'special permis-sion from Congress to use capital funding' for maintenance.

Congress did indeed act thus. But only because congress had previously required Amtrak-and Amtrak alone among transportation operators-to treat maintenance as an operating expense. Gov. Thompson was right to chastise the Amtrak Reform Council for trying to impose bookkeeping principles on Amtrak that differ from the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles used by all other modes of transportation. And Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), who chairs the committee that the ARC reports to, agreed that the ARC's analysis was inappropriate.

The two indented paragraphs on p. 2 of the flyer are a confused and confusing discussion of Amtrak's finances (including a reprise of the phony capital/maintenance question). All the wattle-shaking and brow-mopping boils down to a pair of vapid tautologies: you can tell failure by its failure, and success by its success.

The Office of the Inspector General's anxieties about the successful completion of the Northeast Corridor electrification (dated 7/21/99) are beside the point: the project is complete-even though Amtrak appears yet again to have been ripped off by private enterprise (the FBI has just joined Amtrak in investigating charges of fraud and corruption on the part of the company that installed the electric gear).

Amtrak's revenue-enhancing mail/express business "can compete in the express parcel business while other railroads can't mainly because of Amtrak's ability to assert right-of-way for its trains when using other railroads' tracks". (The remainder of this paragraph offers an interpretation of history that is every bit as peculiar as this sentence.)

Amtrak's mail and parcel operations have nothing to do with some imaginary 'assertion' of 'right of way'. Amtrak runs trains that are daily (for the most part) and fast. Freight railroads could do the same, whensoever they decided to do so, Am-trak or no Amtrak. When the Union Pacific asked the federal Surface Trans-por-ta-tion Board to make Amtrak stop its mail and express operations, the UP admitted that it had no interest in any such enterprise themselves, now, but were worried that Amtrak's operations would make it difficult for them to go after such business in the future, if they changed their minds. (Their suit was denied by the board.)

The bottom line is ... how much of your money are you willing to pay in your taxes to support this enterprise, and why should the taxpayers in general continue to subsidize the transpor-tation "choice" of a limited number of affluent individuals when more economical and more environmentally friendly forms of transportation are readily available, without subsidies?

Oh, where to begin-? More economical? Than what? Than a car at 40¢ a mile? Including goodies like special weekend fares and family discounts?

More environmentally friendly? (Wha-?!) First mention of that in this document. (And possibly the first time such a claim has been made in the history of the world.)

Readily available? Well, true, there are (subsidized) roads everywhere. But not everyone who wants to visit a friend in Fort Wayne, say, thinks of driving around Chicago as a 'readily available' option. As for flying, well, the Mid-west Regional Rail Initiative, feeder bus lines apart, will serve Tomah, Portage, Wisconsin Dells, Watertown, Oconomowoc, Sturtevant (Racine/Kenosha), and half a dozen other towns in the state that don't have airports. And oddly, intercity bus connections are if anything available in even fewer markets than airplanes.

How much money are you willing to pay? Well, how much do you pay now? Try this on for size. Currently, Amtrak's operat-ing subsidy comes to 0.033% of the total federal budget of $1.8 trillion. Do the arith-me-tic for your own case, but by way of example consider someone who pays $10,000 in federal income tax. Out of this sum Amtrak's share comes to a whopping $3.45. Another way of looking at it is that this taxpayer is disgorging a personal contri-bution of $0.00000016 for each and every Amtrak ticket sold. Hey, just imagine all the benefits and improvements in life that would be possible for the long-suffer-ing tax-payers if they weren't being sucked dry by Amtrak.

And finally-'Transportation... without subsidies'? What? Where? Name one!

Rudy Dalpra
Safford, AZ

As a supporter of Amtrak I have enjoyed your newsletter these past several
years, but have decided not to renew my subscription. Thanks for sending a
few extra issues. I watched the C-span coverage of the ARC meeting and can
readily see what a challenge lies ahead for those hoping to promote a viable
national rail service.

When cities like Phoenix, clogged by exhaust emissions to the point of
having to issued periodic health advisories to residents, elects to close
own its rail terminal, you know how sick the public leadership mentality is
in this country.

When I was a kid in Crystal Falls, MI, a U.P. mining town, there were two
passenger trains a day through town, creating great excitement and
anticipation for the locals. Is a young adult I watched as the rail
companies slowly undermined public ridership by reducing the quality of
service, and then used declining passenger volume to justify further cuts in
quality.  It was a national disgrace from which we are not likely  to ever
recover. I give you folks who are fighting the good fight a lot of credit.

And from my vantage point in southern Arizona I will do my best to restore a
new public call for a national rail network worthy of public support. I've
chastized Sen. John McCain a time or two via e-mail for his stance on national rail, but of course important issues like new conveniences for the public have a low priority in Washington.

Avante !

Rudy Dalpra
Safford, AZ