NARP August 1999 Hotlines

#98 - August 6, 1999
#99 - August 13, 1999
#100 - August 20, 1999
#101 - August 27, 1999

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There are now 22 names on S.1144, the bill that would let states spend their TEA-21 funds on intercity passenger rail and make certain other changes to TEA-21. The newest co-sponsors are Bayh (D.-Ind.), Graham (D.-Fla.), Torricelli (D.-N.J.), Abraham (R.-Mich.), Allard (R.-Colo.), and Mack (R.-Fla.). Further action on this bill, as well as on the Senate's transportation appropriations bill, will await the return of lawmakers after Labor Day.

The Washington Post carried as its lead business-section story on August 1 a Don Phillips report on Amtrak's high-speed train sets. He said they have reached 165 mph and -- with the tilt mechanism not functioning -- they ride better at 145 than the Metroliners do at 125. He said the problem of truck hunting was solved by using a different tread profile on the wheels, which apparently led to very rapid wear of the wheel flanges, which they are now trying to solve.

Edward Dubroski replaced Clarence Monin as president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. Monin is a Clinton appointee to the Amtrak Reform Council, where he likely will continue to serve.

After the near-head-on collision between two Silver Palms near Jacksonville early (3:00 am) on July 1, Amtrak restored a second person to locomotive cabs on the Jacksonville-Lakeland portion of these runs. The two-person engine crew presumably will continue while a new "Alertness Task Force" -- composed of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, FRA, and Amtrak -- studies the safety of nighttime one-person engine crews.

The July 15 Florida Times-Union said an "Amtrak safety team, a committee of employees from several departments, concluded June 11 that 'it is unsafe to run locomotives with only one engineer between the hours of midnight and 6:00 am,' according to an Amtrak memo summarizing the meeting's results." Amtrak told NARP that the only basis for the Times-Union report was a meeting among unionized employees, some of whom expressed concerns about the practice. Management was not told about this until after the July 1 accident.

The Times-Union correctly reported that Amtrak's Cliff Black said in the past nine months, the number of instances in which Amtrak locomotive crews were cited for breaking operating rules declined by nearly 20%. The paper did not mention that this decline took place while the number of runs with one-person crews was increasing.

The current Amtrak/BLE contract took effect a year ago. It increased the allowable length of one-person engine-crew runs from four to six hours, and gave all Amtrak engineers a special pay increase in accordance with the general pattern of letting employees realize some of the benefits of more productive work practices.

When the restored Greensboro, N.C., station (mentioned last week) opens in two years, it might be for buses only, as issues relating to restoring tracks past the station are not yet resolved. Amtrak has been in a small facility at an outlying freight yard since 1979.

Air Safety Week recently said Air Line Pilots Association President Paul McCarthy warned that technology is being used to cram more planes into the sky instead of to reduce pressures on pilots and controllers. The August 2 Wall Street Journal carried lead stories about air travel woes in both the "A" and "B" sections. The "B" story, headlined, "Fliers Fume as Air Delays Become a Way of Live," began with an anecdote about a Raleigh-New York flight terminated in Baltimore, where the airline told passengers the train was their fastest way home.

Congress has adjourned until after Labor Day. At this time, we do not expect Amtrak problems when the Senate transportation appropriations bill, S.1143, comes to the floor and goes to conference. Conferees usually are the transportation subcommittee members plus the chairs and ranking members of the full appropriations committees. However, the transportation bill -- and even Amtrak in particular -- still could get caught up in the high stakes budget game now unfolding between Congress and the White House.

S.1144 is the bill that includes a provision to let states spend their federal TEA-21 funds on intercity passenger rail. All Senators -- especially the 22 whose names are on the bill -- need letters of support for it, as they are hearing from highway interests opposed to it. After Labor Day, committee and floor time will be tough to get and will not happen for this bill if the sponsors don't see strong support for it.

The Senate sent a short-term aviation authorization extension to the House, which in the 11th hour last week substituted in its place the House's five-year AIR-21 bill that takes the aviation trust fund off-budget. The House then sent it back to the Senate, which had already adjourned. Thus, the aviation authorization has leapfrogged past the Senate floor stage, leaving the final matter in the hands of conferees. It is critical that passenger rail be dealt with in any process that takes aviation funding off-budget. The Senate budget resolution says that enactment of AIR-21 would mean that mandated highway, aviation, and transit spending together would exceed the resolution's transportation funding total, raising serious doubts about Coast Guard and Amtrak funding.

AIR-21 does not just firewall air trust fund dollars, it also continues the roughly $2.4 billion a year in general funds that aviation enjoys, thanks to the old assumption -- still fostered by aviation interests -- that the air trust fund is just for facilities construction, and the general taxpayer should fund air-traffic control operations. That $2.4 billion must be handled in a way that leaves room in the budget for Amtrak.

The Federal Aviation Administration this week in a letter to the Illinois DOT renewed its doubts about the prospects for a third Chicago airport at Peotone, near Kankakee. The FAA said it found the state's passenger forecasts too optimistic and said more conservative forecasts are needed to attract adequate public financing. That won't dissuade the state, however, which is determined to proceed with this prairie boondoggle. Though the state's new passenger rail funding is important, the danger that the state will try to reroute the Chicago-St. Louis line through Peotone may continue to be a problem until the Peotone scheme is killed for good.

The truck driver whose truck derailed the City of New Orleans in March and killed 11 Amtrak passengers got his Illinois commercial driver's license back on August 1. The Illinois Secretary of State said there was little that could prevent the return of the license as long as criminal charges were not filed against truck driver John Stokes.

The Chicago-Green Bay Thruway bus connection has been extended to Marinette, Wis., and Escanaba, Rapid River, and Marquette, Mich.

The state-sponsored train between Burlington and Rutland, Vt., connecting with the Ethan Allen, starts August 16. It will run Monday through Friday through Labor Day, then be suspended for track work. It will run again Monday through Saturday September 26-October 31.

The lead story in the Wall Street Journal on August 2 was about the new Boeing 737 airplanes that are profitable for the airlines to run, but are cramped. The story said overall complaints from airline passengers in May rose 86% from a year earlier, to over 1,700.

Be sure that you have thanked your Senators who are co-sponsors of S.1144, the bill that would give states the flexibility to spend some federal TEA-21 funds on intercity passenger rail. The continuing support of these Senators will be important to passing the bill when the Senate returns in September.

For the first time, a section of the Northeast Corridor electrification was powered up on August 18. A substation at Warwick, R.I., was activated and is now providing power to a 27-mile stretch of catenary in the immediate vicinity. This segment is now available for testing, including by new equipment.

A new state-supported train will begin running between Bellingham and Seattle, Wash., on September 2. It will be part of the Cascade Talgo service, and run southbound in the morning and northbound in the evening -- the opposite of the train on that route now. It will make connections in Seattle for Portland. Washington and Amtrak are negotiating with British Columbia right now to extend the train all the way to Vancouver.

Chairman Bud Shuster of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on August 3 introduced H.R.2681, the "Rail Passenger Disaster Family Assistance Act of 1999." It would codify several things Amtrak already does after a train accident. It would also make the National Transportation Safety Board the point of contact for families or others wanting information about passengers right after an accident, and prohibit lawyers from contacting families for 45 days after an accident.

Union Pacific is talking to the City of Boise, Ida., Ada County, and Boise Locomotive about selling them 18 miles of former main line for $2.6 million. UP is trying to abandon part of Amtrak's former Pioneer route southeast of downtown Boise. If this line is abandoned, and if the Pioneer is ever restored, such a new train would have to stop far outside of the City of Boise.

The last day of operation for the Thruway bus service between Philadelphia, Bethlehem, and Allentown will be September 5. The bus company with that contract is ending all its service on that route.

Amtrak moved into a temporary station in Salt Lake City on August 7, as part of a downtown track consolidation project. The new site where Amtrak is now will be made into an intermodal facility.

Amtrak began offering a trial coffee service on weekday Hiawatha trains that leave Milwaukee at 6:20 am and 8:00 am, on August 16. The coffee is located at self-service areas on the train. Passengers will be able to fill out surveys about this and other services during the 90-day trial. This is a good step in the right direction, though NARP has been telling Amtrak for years to do something about the Hiawathas, which haven't had a lounge car since 1981. More recent attempts to get a private-sector refreshment cart on these trains have gone nowhere.

The Indiana State Budget Committee last week approved a plan by the Transpo transit agency to move the South Bend Amtrak station downtown, using $1.5 million in state funds.

The former Santa Fe station in Emporia, Kans., that Amtrak used until two years ago burned on August 9, and is described as a total loss.

The 10% discount for NARP members for most Amtrak travel is now available to those who book tickets on-line on the Amtrak web site.

An attacker stabbed three men on the eastbound Lake Shore Limited yesterday at about 3:30 am. The train stopped at Olmsted Falls, O., 14 miles southwest of Cleveland, where the attacker was arrested. Passengers were bussed into Cleveland after the injured were cleared from the train. They later were bussed up the line toward New York State and some were put on other trains. Two of the stabbing victims were Amtrak conductors, and one was a passenger. All three were hospitalized, though one conductor with less severe injuries has been released.

The attacker was identified as Aaron Hall, 41, whose last address was Ontario, Cal. Witnesses have said that the incident began in the dining car when Hall became unruly, and stabbed those who tried to subdue him. Hall told police later than an Amtrak attendant threatened him with a gun, but no guns were found during a search of the entire train. Later, Hall was arrested while attempting to blend into the crowd after the train was stopped. After he was detained, he became very violent and broke several pairs of plastic handcuffs and the back window of a police car. He is in Cuyahoga County Jail with bond set at $1 million, charged with three counts of attempted murder.

Such attacks are so rare on Amtrak that the Federal Railroad Administration does not keep records on them. Amtrak has said it will review whether security on trains is adequate. However, considering the rarity of such events, elaborate, expensive security measures may be as impractical for Amtrak as they would be for Greyhound or any local transit service.

Amtrak said on August 25 that its passenger revenues were up 6% for the first nine months of the current fiscal year, compared to last year. This is a nine-month period that ended June 30. Passenger revenues were $738 million, which is $49 million higher than the previous year and $11 million higher than the level planned in the Amtrak budget.

Police in the Richmond, Va., area seized $320,000 in suspected drug money from an Amtrak passenger early on August 24, the most ever seized in that area. The seizure took place at the Amtrak station when the southbound Silver Meteor was making a regular, middle-of-the-night stop. Police, acting on a tip, approached the passenger and asked to examine a piece of luggage, and found the money. No drugs were found, and the man was detained, questioned, and released. A similar seizure on April 9 resulted in a find of $294,000 in two suitcases an Amtrak passenger had in his sleeping car room.

Heavy rains last night caused flooding over parts of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor in the Baltimore area, delaying several trains severely.

A nine-mile stretch of Amtrak-owned track from Providence to Pawtucket, R.I., according to yesterday's Providence Journal, is such a mess with graffiti and trash that Amtrak has specially targeted it for a clean-up campaign in anticipation of the start of Acela service, along with seven other so-called "hot-spots" along the Northeast Corridor. Among the efforts is a goal of washing away new spray-painted areas within 48 hours of it being reported. Such quick attention has proven a successful way for some rail transit agencies to discourage graffiti taggers and artists.

To pay for the effort, Amtrak is using $4 million of its appropriation toward the Acela project to pay for 18 new police officers and special clean-up crews armed with high-pressure hoses and graffiti-resistant paint. There is also a toll-free hot line to report problems, offering up to $500 for information that leads to a conviction.

Amtrak and local officials dedicated the newly renovated train station at Washington, Mo., on August 14.