Hotline #905 - November 24, 1995

The Senate's Amtrak authorization bill may come to the floor in the coming week, but that won't happen in the House until the week after.

Last week, we reported the return of dining car service on the Desert Wind west of Salt Lake City, as reported to us by Amtrak. However, that report was wrong, though Amtrak says they are still studying returning the dining car.

A good New York Times editorial on November 21 criticized House and Senate conferees on the National Highway System bill for caving in to highway interests on Amtrak and on billboards. It quoted Senator Warner (R.-Va.) saying he had stood up to Chairman Shuster (R.-Pa.) and neither one of them had blinked. Concluded the Times, "That is correct. The Senate capitulated -- without batting an eye."

On the same topic, there was a colloquy on the Senate floor on November 17 in which pro-Amtrak Senators lamented the loss of the Roth-Biden Amtrak flexibility language. Those who spoke were Biden (D.-Del.), Lautenberg (D.-N.J.), Chafee (R.-R.I.; who was a conferee), Roth (R.-Del.), Pell (D.-R.I.), Hatfield (R.-Ore.), and Boxer (D.-Cal.). Biden also read letters to the conferees from the governors of Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Michigan, Delaware, and New Jersey supporting flexibility.

The new vice president for Customer Services of Amtrak's Intercity business unit in Chicago will be Lee Bullock, effective December 1. He currently holds the same position for the Western business unit in California. He replaces both Pete Turrell in Chicago and Chuck Bothwell in Jacksonville, meaning that the two previous Intercity positions are made into one. A search for a replacement for Bullock in the West is underway.

Florida DOT is conducting public meetings on the five high-speed rail proposals. Three remain. They are November 28 at the Belleview Resort Hotel in Clearwater, November 29 at the Tampa Convention Center, and November 30 at the Lakeland Convention Center. They all run from 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm.

An editorial column in the Wall Street Journal on November 15 by rail consultant Ray Chambers argued for public-sector capital investment in passenger trains, which is good; but advocated privatization of Amtrak through discontinuance of long-distance service, which is bad. The column linked Chambers with the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank in Seattle, and identified him as representing freight railroads. But the column did not note that he represents smaller railroads, as well as Turbomeca, which built the turbine engine now being demonstrated in New York State. Both Turbomeca and some of the smaller railroads might have an interest in favoring corridors at the expense of long-distance service.

The Rio Grande Ski Train has announced its winter schedule. It will run every Saturday and Sunday, except Christmas weekend, from December 17 to April 2. It runs from Denver Union Station right to the slopes at Winter Park.

The Canadian government began selling shares in the freight railway it owns, Canadian National, last week. Privatizing railway operations is fine, but selling the whole railway is another matter. If the government kept ownership of the tracks and rights-of-way, CN would be on a more equitable footing with highways and airports. Future private railway operators would benefit from that. Instead, Canada -- and Mexico, for that matter -- are plunging headlong toward the unbalanced American model for transportation, in which public-sector highways and airports receive tremendous, indirect benefits.