Hotline #924 - April 5, 1996

Dennis Sullivan, Amtrak Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, has announced he will resign effective April 15. He has served Amtrak for 23 years. Amtrak President Tom Downs announced that he will appoint Robert VanderClute to replace Sullivan. VanderClute will be acting vice president for operations until the board approves his permanent appointment. VanderClute won high marks for his recent interim leadership of the Intercity Business Unit.

Senator Breaux (D.-La.) apparently has lifted his holds on the Senate Amtrak authorization bill, S.1318, in exchange for getting a commitment for floor votes on his amendments. The bill is now on the Senate calendar for the week of April 29. Democratic Senators still need to hear that it is important for them to let the bill come up.

The George Falcon Golden Spike Award, presented every year by NARP, will go to Senate Finance Chairman William Roth (R.-Del.). He is the leader in the Senate of the effort to get a half cent of the gas tax for Amtrak, as proposed in S.1395. He, along with Senator Biden (D.-Del.), has also been a leader on the concept of ISTEA flexibility for states to invest in passenger rail. While Roth succeeded in getting that in the Senate version of the National Highway System bill last year, it was knocked out in conference. Now it is back, as part of S.1318, Amtrak reauthorization.

The Dr. Gary Burch Memorial Safety Award will go to Lenore Slimbock, Assistant General Manager - Customer Service, with Amtrak in Philadelphia. She is recognized for the extra attention she places on passenger safety in the running of 30th Street Station.

Both the Golden Spike and the Burch awards will be presented at the NARP annual reception in Washington on April 25.

The coming battle over taking transportation trust funds off budget is heating up. Favoring the move is House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Bud Shuster (R.-Pa.), who has gotten a majority of House members to sponsor his bill. Key opponents are appropriations leaders and House Budget Chairman John Kasich (R.-Ohio). At a Budget Committee hearing last week, Kasich said he didn't even think there should be a highway trust fund or a federal Department of Transportation. "I don't even want to send the money to Washington," he said. "Let the states keep it and do what they want."

It is unclear what the impact on Amtrak would be if Kasich got his way. If the trust funds actually were taken off budget, however, the Transportation Appropriations Subcommittees might well be disbanded because their scope would be reduced so drastically. That would be terrible news for Amtrak unless other steps were taken to protect it.

The first meeting of the Rail Safety Advisory Committee took place April 1 and 2. This committee was chartered by the Federal Railroad Administration as a means to involve different elements of the rail industry in its rulemaking process. The FRA hopes that by involving management, labor, consumers, and others, consensus will be reached before final safety rules are written, and that the resulting rules will be contested less often. The committee has 48 members from 23 organizations, including NARP. It will split into smaller working groups to work on specific rulemaking issues.

Amtrak will expand bicycle access further this year. Already, unboxed bikes can be taken onto certain trains in the Northeast and Western business units. Intercity Marketing Vice President Steve Scott told NARP members last week in Lincoln, Nebr., that special racks will be provided for unboxed bikes this summer on the California Zephyr and a few other Intercity trains.