Rail Travel Center issued the following Press Release to most daily newspapers nationwide last Friday. To date we know it has appeared in the Billings Gazette, will appear next Saturday in the Toledo Blade, has been excerpted/quoted in the Sidney, MT paper and may be quoted in Railway Age/Railway Track and Structures. If you find it useful please make any appropriate use of it, including submiting all or portions to your local paper. It is critical that the media understand that there is NO funding for operations in the Bush/Mineta plan and that there are no "empty" long-haul trains. You can request a Word copy by sending an E Mail to me at railvt@together.net
Carl Fowler VP/Gen Mgr Rail Travel Center
Rail Travel Center 125 Main Street, PO Box 206 Putney, Vermont 05346 (800) 458-5394 USA/Canada, (802) 387-5812 Anywhere (802) 387-4350 FAX www.railtravelcenter.com
February 17, 2005
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Please consider this article as an “Op Ed” piece or letter to the editor.
THE REAL TRUTH ABOUT AMTRAK
U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has proposed no funding for Amtrak in the 2006 Federal budget. While the Mineta plan suggests the Bush Administration might provide some sort of 50/50 matching funds for track maintenance, it explicitly rules out any operating support. The states would have to fund any actual trains. This means there would be no intercity train service in the United States, since there is little chance the states can find funding to resume even a skeletal local service.
Amtrak received total operating and capital support of $1.2 billion in 2004. By contrast, total U.S. highway spending in 2001 was $133 billion, of which over 40% was not recovered from gas taxes. This highway figure continues to grow each year. No passenger rail service or highway system anywhere in the world runs at a profit. Mr. Mineta claims we “subsidize” Amtrak and “invest” in highways. The truth is we invest in both. When has anyone of us received a dividend check from our interstate highways?
Rail Travel Center has sold Amtrak travel and tours since 1982. We have a unique perspective to evaluate the myths that surround Amtrak. The truth about Amtrak is very different than that presented by Secretary Mineta. The following is our analysis of the realities ignored by the Administration in its effort to bankrupt Amtrak and shift all support for passenger service directly to the states.
Amtrak’s national network carried over 25,000,000 passengers in 2004, an all-time record. The long-distance trains produced the majority of Amtrak’s passenger miles, 2.7 billion, compared to the Northeast Corridor’s 1.7 billion. (A passenger-mile is one passenger traveling one mile.) The national network is vital. Passengers must be able to connect between trains to travel from one point to another, but Mr. Mineta’s plan assures that, at best, only a few isolated local commuter services would survive. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (Republican) of Texas is correct that Amtrak must be national or it will be nothing!
Greyhound has canceled thousands of miles of rural bus lines, and the Mineta budget compounds the problem by proposing to eliminate Federal subsidies for air service to many smaller airports. Increasingly, Amtrak is the only option in hundreds of cities!
Mineta speaks of “running trains nobody rides between cities nobody wants to travel between”. This betrays his ignorance of how trains work. For example, Amtrak’s EMPIRE BUILDER takes passengers not only between Seattle and Chicago, but serves many cities and towns enroute. This train stops at 38 other stations, including major centers like Spokane and Minneapolis and what Mineta views as “nowhere” communities like Wolf Point, MT, Glacier National Park, and Wenatchee, WA. This train “nobody rides” carried 437,200 passengers in FY 2004. Most riders traveled between the almost totally Amtrak-dependent small towns along the route. There is no parallel bus service for 932 miles from Spokane, WA to Minot, ND, a truth cynically ignored by Mineta, but very important to towns whose only reliable link to the outside world is this vital, well-used train!
The real truth about Amtrak is that due to lack of Federal capital support, it lacks the equipment to meet the demand which already exists. As a tour operator, we have to reserve on long-distance trains a full eleven months before departure to assure space for a group. Sources in Amtrak’s reservations staff advise us they turn away half the requests they receive for sleeper space because of a lack of equipment.
The Mineta plan is fundamentally flawed because it tries to shift the burden of funding Amtrak to the states. A route like the EMPIRE BUILDER is the perfect example of the futility of the Mineta plan. This train serves eight states, all of which would have to agree on a formula to split costs, in addition to appropriating operating money which they do not have. If one state refused, the service would be broken at that state border. Under the Mineta plan, there will be no interstate rail services anywhere. We have a federal government in the United States to address issues that cross state lines, and Amtrak is a classic example. The ultimate truth about Amtrak is that it is remarkably well-used, vital to the real America of small towns and inland cities, and needs national support!
Carl H. Fowler
About the author: Carl Fowler is Vice-President/General Manager of Rail Travel Center. He has worked full-time promoting travel on Amtrak and other railways since November 1982. Mr. Fowler served for over a decade on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Railroad Passengers and was a member of Amtrak’s Travel Agency Computer Advisory Committee. He has addressed the National Press Club on Amtrak and train travel and has ridden over 350,000 miles by train. Rail Travel Center is located in Putney, Vermont. Its web site is www.railtravelcenter.com. Posted by amtraxmaniac (Member # 2251) on :
Thanks for sharing this piece Railvt. Mr Fowler states many of the obvious flaws in the plan. These are all common sense points! Only a true politician can convolute them. Spend a few billion on Amtrak or several hundred on freeways! Middle America better wake up! Your GOP knight in shining armor wants to take your transportation dollars and ship them to LA and NY to build a 10 lane superhighways! It doesn't seem fair does it. What idiots these Amtrak bashers are!!!!
They'd rather spend hundreds of billions on the highways...They obviously are not concerned with polution or controling noise!!!GRRRRRRR!!! Wait a minute...oh it must be the (lobbyist) money Posted by mikesmith (Member # 447) on :
Patrick: Quit being a typical ignorant liberal {Your GOP knight in shining armor}. Mineta is a democrat.
Posted by amtraxmaniac (Member # 2251) on :
Conservative or liberal, he's bad for Amtrak...And so is the Bush Administration.
Posted by amtraxmaniac (Member # 2251) on :
By the way mike, I have no desire to get dirty by calling names.I shouldn't have made the idiot remark, and I'm sorry.I should have used the word 'sadly misinformed'. I'm only referring to one person who happens to being the highest ranking GOP official in office (hence the 'shining armor' remark) I'm not labeling a whole party. I know of plenty of conservatives that have a mind of their own to support Amtrak, but it seems to be many of them are more interested in getting behind our president. That would be the case even if the democrats are in charge. All Hail To The Chief!
Posted by mikesmith (Member # 447) on :
Patrick: I {and most conservatives} can easily agree to the "sadly misinformed" statement, regarding Amtrak. That's why I keep writing letters.
Besides, our President does have other concerns, such as killing those people that want to do us harm. And Bush does have an MBA, so delegation of the mundane tasks {read "budgets"} are delegated to the underlings {Mineta's staff}.
Posted by Mr. Toy (Member # 311) on :
quote:From the press release originally posted by Railvt: "Sources in Amtrak’s reservations staff advise us they turn away half the requests they receive for sleeper space because of a lack of equipment."
I got this release in my e-mail the other day, and that one line stood out to me. Is that really true? If so, it makes a strong case for system expansion. Is there any way to document that and bring it to the attention of our Congresscritters?
Posted by Railvt (Member # 1397) on :
based on 20+ years of interaction with Amtrak's best res agents. Our statement on sleeper space is anecdotal, because until just the last two months, Amtrak refused to keep wait list requests and thus never had a "proveable" data base on this matter. But this information has been shared with us by numerous contacts in the Res Bureaus over the past 20 years.
As a tour operator we would love to run western National Park tours on a weekly basis throughout the summer, but this is impossible due to a lack of sleeper space. Amtrak simply does not have enough serviceable sleepers to add extra cars on a regular basis to accommodate group needs.
Amtrak finally instituted a waitlist procedure after years of prodding by my company, by NARP and other rail specialist agents, because at last under DAvid Gunn they are taking a positive--opportunity view on this matter. Under Claytor (alas), Downs and especially Warrington they prefered not to take waitlists because they had to staff a position or two in the res bureau to follow up when space cleared. They were afraid it then wouldn't sell. Yet no other transportation company, air, rail or sea, took this view. A properly run waitlist not only assures trains go out full, but more importantly produces a data base to assess when to add cars (if they are available) and can be used to help justify repairing damaged equipment and/or buying new cars. VIA RAIL not infrequently sends out 25-30 car CANADIANs in high season because of it's waitlists. Gunn at last has recognized this.
The fact that we often find the long-haul sleepers sold out 6-8 months (and sometimes more) before departure eloquently speaks to the reality that Amtrak was turning away countless high tarrif riders. Gunn very correctly silenced the idiotic suggestion from Ken Meade that he should park all his sleepers when he noted Amtrak earned $128,000,000 from sleeper sales in FY 2004--far, far more than the cost to run those cars. Sleepers are at least a "break even" product line and on many trains they clearly are profitable and thus reduce other losses on the route.
Carl Fowler Rail Travel Center
Posted by Mr. Toy (Member # 311) on :
Railvt, I did not realize until now that you were the author of the press release. I got a copy from Friends of Amtrak, and I forwarded it to one local weekly paper ( Monterey County Weekly ) which I thought might be the most likely in this area to publish it.
quote:Originally posted by Railvt: Gunn very correctly silenced the idiotic suggestion from Ken Meade that he should park all his sleepers when he noted Amtrak earned $128,000,000 from sleeper sales in FY 2004--far, far more than the cost to run those cars.
That is also very interesting information. I had not heard that before, either. Again, is this documentation readily available? It should be shouted from the rooftops. It lends credence to my suspicions that these trains do make a positive contribution to Amtrak's bottom line, even if Amtrak as a whole does not make a profit.
What really irks me is these politicians who insist that Amtrak be run in a more businesslike manner, then make these proposals that make absolutely no business sense. Mineta's comment that when trains that pass through states that don't pay, they should keep the doors shut, would never have been spoken by a businessman. Only a career bureaucrat could have thought that one up.
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