The United States is not famous for its trains, and with good reason. Passenger rail service has long since been eclipsed by automotive commuting, and freight rail service has some serious competition from trucking.
Add to that the fact that America’s rail infrastructure has some major problems, and Amtrak, the nation’s only long-distance passenger rail service, is losing money on most of its routes.
President Donald Trump wants to cut the Department of Transportation’s budget by 13 percent. This would completely eliminate funding for Amtrak’s long-distance routes, among other things. The reason the administration gave for making the funding cuts to Amtrak’s long-distance routes was that they would allow it to “focus on better managing its state-supported and Northeast Corridor train services.”
And there’s no doubt that the Northeast Corridor needs help.
The NEC, which provides train service between Boston and Washington, D.C., is the only profitable part of Amtrak’s services. During fiscal year 2016, the NEC served 11.9 million riders—that’s over half of Amtrak’s daily riders.
But the corridor has been plagued with problems including a derailment at New York’s Penn Station that caused a collision between an Amtrak train and a New Jersey Transit commuter train, and ongoing travel woes resulting from another derailment during the first week of April.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers’ annual Infrastructure Report Card, the NEC is in desperate need of repairs, to the tune of $28 billion. The ASCE also says the average age of NEC’s backlog projects is 111 years and includes 10 movable bridges, three sets of tunnels, and one viaduct. “Amtrak has been left with little choice but to be reactive to maintenance issues due to inadequate funding,” the ASCE writes.
The Department of Transportation loaned Amtrak $2.45 billion to buy high-speed trains that will be fully operational in 2022. But those high-speed trains won’t be riding on high-speed tracks. Amtrak’s Executive Vice President for Business Development along the NEC, Stephen Gardner, said that the NEC is in desperate need of track repairs, and that the track hasn’t had a complete overhaul since 1976.
One thing you may not know is that Amtrak operates on tracks owned by freight rail or commuter rail companies, and pays fees to do so—but it has to rely on those companies to keep the tracks in good repair.
“All of that means you have some loss of reliability and also loss of trip time that you might have been able to achieve with a dedicated system,” Gardner said earlier.
But all is not lost when it comes to America’s passenger rail service. The Trump administration’s proposed budget restructures subsidies to benefit Amtrak’s state-sponsored routes like the Heartland Flyer, which travels between Oklahoma City and Forth Worth, Texas, making stops along the way. Amtrak’s state-sponsored routes serviced 14.7 million people in the 2016 fiscal year.
Nonetheless, losing some of those long-distance train routes like the California Zephyr, which travels between Chicago and San Francisco, would be a shame. There’s nothing quite as romantic as long-distance train rides, with meal cars and sleeper cars.
Photo: A Northeast Regional train from Amtrak at Union Station connecting Washington to New York on the Northeast Corridor. Credit: EQRoy / Shutterstock.com