Hotline #953 - October 25, 1996

With the presidential election just a couple weeks away, and with President Clinton leading in the polls, it is a good idea for NARP members to write to him. People should tell Clinton that the following things must happen early in the new administration -- that Amtrak needs an authorization bill with measures making its operations more economical, that states must have flexibility under ISTEA to invest in passenger rail projects, that Amtrak needs a half-cent of the gas tax for capital investment, and that Amtrak must get a good 1998 appropriation. In particular, the operating grant must be high enough to avoid the mess we have faced this year with discontinued routes.

Norfolk Southern has made a counteroffer for Conrail. The bid it announced on October 23 is 8% higher than the price CSX said last week it and Conrail had agreed on. Norfolk Southern has pledged greater access to outside carriers than CSX has, particularly in the New York City area.

The House of Representatives will hold a hearing on the merger of CSX and Conrail on November 19. The hearing will be held in the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, whose chairman, Bud Shuster (R.-Pa.), is from a district that includes key Conrail facilities.

Meanwhile, the Clinton DOT's assistant secretary for policy, Frank Kruesi, has told the Journal of Commerce he is alarmed by the increased pace of mergers in recent years. "We are very serious about wanting to ensure that competition in the rail industry is maintained and thrives," he said. "We have been concerned for some time about the amazing implosion of the railroad industry," he added.

The Heritage Foundation -- whose hatred for Amtrak is so great that it is incapable of saying anything objective about it -- has sent newspapers a column on cutting government waste, which has been printed in some of them. Basically, it says although Amtrak's subsidy is big, it is cutting services, and yet is about to start a Boston-Portland service that is expensive and slower than private bus services. What the Heritage Foundation doesn't want the public to know is that Amtrak funding has declined in recent years, that Congress has temporarily reprieved the threatened services, that Boston-Portland service will happen because it's the will of Congress and of the voters of Maine, that private bus operators have already agreed to coordinate schedules and ticketing with Amtrak, and that the new rail service will attract motorists who never would have considered taking the bus.

New RoadRailer equipment has been arriving in the last couple weeks. They are being built in Lafayette, Ind., and can be seen in the Amtrak coach yards in Chicago.

All train traffic through Newark Penn Station was shut down on October 22 for nearly a half hour, when Amtrak received a bomb threat. Police found a package designed to look like a bomb, but it was not.

Amtrak will hold two open houses next week on their high-speed rail project, including on the new train sets and the Boston electrification. The open houses are at the New Haven Amtrak station on October 29, and the New London Amtrak station on October 30. The times are 11:00 am to 1:00 pm, both days.

The IC3 Flexliner train sets have been withdrawn temporarily from VIA Rail revenue service in Ontario. The sets have not been triggering the signal system and grade crossing circuits properly, and engineers are considering what to do. The same trains ran in revenue service for two weeks this summer on the San Diegan line, and we heard of no such problems there.

In Boston, Green Line service has been interrupted for a couple of days due to flooding in part of the area where the line runs underground. Shuttle services have run on either side of the flooded area, which is in the area of the Prudential Center in Back Bay.