Hotline #957 - November 22, 1996

Rep. Bob Livingston (R.-La.) has been reappointed chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and Frank Wolf (R.-Va.) as chair of the Transportation Subcommittee. The new full committee chairman in the Senate, Ted Stevens (R.-Alaska), said this week his priorities are increasing defense spending and ending the budget deficit.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee held a hearing November 19 on the proposed takeover of Conrail by CSX. Chairman Bud Shuster's (R.-Pa.) district has a large Conrail maintenance facility at Altoona. Shuster noted that Congress has asked Amtrak to reduce its dependence on federal support, and that might be reason to consider new access fees to the Northeast Corridor for freight trains.

Amtrak is vacating the former Southern Pacific station in San Antonio today. Amtrak is moving into a temporary building in the parking lot of the SP station. The street address is the same, and the change does not affect train movements. A new hotel is being built that will use the old building. Amtrak says that a permanent replacement station will be built. The station has a long and checkered past. The City of San Antonio had worked out a plan with SP and Amtrak back in 1981 to renovate the building, but never came up with its share of the funding. The local transit agency bought the building from SP in 1990 and had announced plans to make it an intermodal terminal.

Amtrak has renamed its popular All Aboard America fare plan. The new name is the Amtrak Explore America Fare. All the prices, zone boundaries, and other rules remain the same. The stopover limit is still three.

Amtrak corridors are gearing up for Thanksgiving. In the Northeast, 60 additional trains and 100 extra coaches are planned. The two busiest travel days of the year for Amtrak will be Wednesday (November 27) and the following Sunday (December 1), with traffic 50% above normal. Therefore, when traveling on corridors, try to avoid the two busiest days, buy your tickets ahead of time, arrive at the station early, be prepared for crowds, and consider riding in club or custom class for a guaranteed seat.

The Missouri DOT and Amtrak reached an agreement in late October to bring the IC3 Flexliner to the St. Louis-Kansas City route for a month in the spring of 1997.

RoadRailers are now on Amtrak's Silver Palm, carrying first-class mail between Philadelphia and Jacksonville. The trailers go over the road to points in Pennsylvania, northern New Jersey, and Florida. To accommodate this traffic, RoadRailers have been removed from Chicago-St. Louis trains -- but that mail is still carried on Amtrak trains. RoadRailers also run on Amtrak from Philadelphia to Chicago.

A task force made up of local officials, Amtrak, and SEPTA on November 15 proposed building a new transportation center in Paoli, Pa. It would be just west of the existing Amtrak and SEPTA station, in the former Paoli rail yard. It will be several years before such a site can open, however, since it is a designated Superfund site that must be cleared of hazardous PCB's, a chemical once found in electrical equipment. The Pennsylvania Railroad first opened the yard for maintaining electric commuter trains in 1915, so the chemicals built up over a long time.

A truck on a shuttle in the Eurotunnel caught fire late on November 18. Rescuers evacuated 31 people, including train crew and truck drivers who may not ride in their trucks and were riding in a separate restaurant car. Trucks on the shuttle ride on open flat cars. Automobiles ride in enclosed cars, with their occupants inside. The fire damaged three-eights of a mile of one rail tunnel, and it is unclear when it will reopen. The other, undamaged tunnel was to reopen November 20, but that has been delayed except for limited freight traffic. Passenger trains may resume soon. This was the first such incident since the tunnel opened two-and-one-half years ago.