Hotline #22 - February 20, 1998

Amtrak announced an order for eight new train-sets of five cars each to be used on the San Diegans, on February 18. The order for $100 million is the single-largest investment every made by Amtrak in California. The order was awarded to GEC Alsthom, a French company that is also involved in the Florida high-speed rail project and in supplying the propulsion systems for Amtrak's American Flyer trains. The cars will be built at the former Morrison-Knudsen plant in Hornell, N.Y., with at least 75% U.S.-content including materials and labor. This will provide about 140 new jobs at Hornell.

The new trains will start service in early 2000. They will be bi-level cars, like the Superliners and California cars. Each set will include a Custom Class car, a Coach-Cafe car, two coaches, and a cab car with both a coach and baggage section. Each train will be pulled by F-59 diesel locomotives.

Public events were held in Los Angeles and San Diego to commemorate the new car order.

The order was made possible by Amtrak's gaining access to the $2.2 billion in Taxpayer Relief capital funds. While this car order was not part of the initial cut of investment projects using TRA money and announced by Amtrak last week, Amtrak was able to use the TRA money as a means to leverage private financing for these cars.

For its part, California has invested almost $1 billion of its own money since 1990 alone for every imaginable aspect of passenger train operations and capital investment. Ridership on the San Diegans is up 13% in the last three years, and can be expected to increase even more with the arrival of new equipment replacing the worn-out, poorly designed, 25-year-old Amfleet I cars now used there.

A renovated and upgraded Pacific Parlor Car for the Coast Starlight was unveiled at a ceremony at Los Angeles yesterday.

One of the partner firms in the Florida high-speed rail consortium has quit the project. Odebrecht Contractors have said the project is proceeding too slowly. Florida DOT said it wasn't concerned, as it had other, private contractor companies that could step in.

The Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe announced an agreement on February 13 to place the ex-Southern Pacific main line between Houston and New Orleans under joint ownership and joint dispatching by the two companies. Under the terms of the 1995 merger between the UP and SP, BNSF had been given trackage rights from Houston to Lake Charles, and full ownership from there to New Orleans. This is the route of Amtrak's Sunset Limited. The UP had made some progress in late 1997 in relieving serious congestion on that and other main lines under its control, but the backlog of stalled freight trains had been rising again in January and February.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain (R.-Ariz.) wrote to the Surface Transportation Board last week about the on-going UP problem. In the letter, which was co-signed by Surface Transportation Chair Kay Bailey Hutchison (R.-Tex.), McCain brought up the subject of open access. He said, "Some believe that providing open access, forced access or competitive access in the rail industry would stimulate competition and help to address the concerns of shippers in general."

Open access has been anathema to most of the rail industry. It is not clear how far McCain would be willing to go, but there are many who believe that having rail rights-of-way in the public domain, with private companies providing transportation services over them, would put rail on a more equal legal footing with highways and aviation in the U.S. It would bring the U.S. closer to what is being done in several European countries, and could even bring benefits to the area of passenger rail.