National Association of Railroad Passengers: www.narprail.org

Hotline #393

This is the week that Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta promised to unveil the Administration’s new Amtrak bill. A draft of such a bill indeed floated around Washington this week, but as of this morning you couldn’t find it on the home page of either DOT or the Federal Railroad Administration, and we are not aware of any formal “unveiling”. So long as the document remains unofficial, we’ll simply say that it is roughly the same as the Administration’s 2003 bill.

“Bush’s Amtrak budget hurts Miss.” was the headline over the (Jackson) Clarion-Ledger’s publication of a letter from the mayors of 11 Mississippi cities with Amtrak service. They said nearly 100,000 people boarded or alighted in Mississippi last year, then continued: “Having Amtrak service in our towns [also] is a source of civic pride and is a key part of our economic development. Virtually every town served by Amtrak in Mississippi is…renovating or has already completed renovations to its train station. Some of these projects cost the city in excess of $20 million with the train station serving as an anchor to a larger downtown development project…[Thus] we are urging members of the Mississippi congressional delegation to oppose pushing Amtrak into bankruptcy by ending its subsidy and request that they work to secure federal funding to preserve and expand Amtrak service in Mississippi.”

New York DOT Commissioner Joseph Boardman, the Bush Administration’s nominee for Federal Railroad Administrator, will be among the prospective nominees to testify at a hearing of the full Senate Commerce Committee on Tuesday, April 12, at 10:00 a.m. The last administrator, Allan Rutter, left office in June, 2004. Amtrak Board Members Enrique Sosa and Floyd Hall originally were scheduled to be witnesses Tuesday as well, but they were removed from the agenda. They were Presidential recess appointments and still need Senate confirmation in order to serve beyond this calendar year.

A House Appropriations subcommittee will hold a major Amtrak hearing April 27. This used to be an annual ritual, until then-Chairman Ernest Istook put a stop to it. The new subcommittee chairman, Joseph Knollenberg (R-MI, Royal Oak), recognizes the importance of the issue, although he has not generally been supportive of Amtrak. He clearly is more respectful of his colleagues and their concerns than was Istook. Reps. John Sweeney (R-NY) and John Olver (D-MA) strongly supported Amtrak in their March 18 questioning of Secretary Mineta.

The Washington Nationals, the former Montreal Expos major league baseball team which has moved to the nation’s capital, debuted this week. The team’s website has a release that begins, “Monday started enthusiastically for the Nationals. The players didn’t just talk about playing the first game in Nationals history. They bragged about taking the train to Philadelphia after the Nationals played an exhibition game against the Mets in Washington, D.C. Some of the players had never taken Amtrak in their lives until Sunday night and are willing to ride the train again instead of flying in a plane. ‘It seemed quick. When you have a short train ride, you can’t complain,’ said infielder Jamey Carroll...Reliever Joey Eischen said he wished the Nationals would travel by train all the time. Eischen usually needs sleeping pills to knock him out during plane rides.”

Amtrak suffered two derailments this week.

The Portland section of the westbound Empire Builder derailed Sunday morning around 9:30 AM while going around a curve west of Home Valley at 60 mph. “All four cars left the tracks and slammed into an embankment, where they rested on a sharp angle…[of the 115 people on board] most were uninjured although 30 passengers sought medical attention, with 14 being taken to area hospitals…Inspectors appeared to be focusing on problems with the tracks as the most likely cause for the mishap.”

On April 5, the Oregonian reported: “Railroad crews and track inspectors reported multiple problems with a curved stretch of track in southern Washington just days before [Sunday’s Amtrak derailment]. Cy Gura, an investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board, cited four reports of track abnormalities and said 18 concrete ties had worn down on the track, causing the Amtrak locomotive and its cars to jump off the rails near Home Valley, Wash…”

Also that day (April 3), at about 6:20 PM, Amtrak’s westbound Empire Corridor Train 287 east of Rochester, NY. The cars remained in-line and upright, and there were no reported injuries to the 109 passengers and crew.

New Jersey Transit suspended six engineers and is giving special safety training to all the others after six trains ran stop signals between November 3 and March 22, New York City’s WINS Radio reported on April 6. Four of the six incidents involved trains leaving or approaching New York’s Penn Station. The other violations were at Secaucus Junction, also on Amtrak’s mainline.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration said it expects the price of unleaded regular to hit a peak national average of $2.35 a gallon in May (vs. $2.22 last week) and to average $2.28 April-September. According to today’s New York Times in an article headlined “U.S. Report Sees Gasoline Prices Moving Higher Still,” “analysts said consumer concern about what it costs to fill up at the pump was also pulling down the percentage of people who think the country is on the right track.”

The Department of Homeland Security announced transit security grant allocations which were approved as part of the fiscal 2005 Homeland Security Appropriations Bill. Transit will receive $130 million ($108 million rail, $22 million bus) of the $150 million earmarked for non-aviation transportation security projects. Ferries will also receive $5 million from a separate account. Full details can be read on the Department of Justice website.