Hotline #89 - June 4, 1999

With Congress on Memorial Day recess, it is still a good time to contact your U.S. Representative and urge him or her to work against any efforts to cut Amtrak funding. House Appropriations Committee consideration of fiscal 2000 transportation funding is tentatively scheduled for June 9. While so far -- in both the House and Senate -- Amtrak's request for $571 million and permission to spend these funds on maintenance-of-way and maintenance-of-equipment has been fulfilled, the House Appropriations Committee could still cut the Amtrak amount.

Also, please ask your Senators to co-sponsor S.1144, which is the Voinovich-Chafee bill to give states the flexibility to spend some of their federal transportation funds on intercity passenger rail.

Canadian press reports say that Transport Minister David Collenette has reversed his plan to privatize VIA by dividing it into three separate franchises. He said here was a "fiasco" in Britain "where you have 25 separate franchises, chaos and a public outcry with only a few real successes." However, he said VIA's long-term operating grant is fixed at $170 million a year, so the private sector must finance new equipment, and might also manage and maintain it.

An Acela high-speed train set began tests this week in Philadelphia. The train will stand in the 30th Street Station yard for the next few weeks while engineers prepare for moving tests. These further tests will start with low-speed running on the Harrisburg line, then night-time running on the Northeast Corridor.

There was an agreement this week between New Jersey Transit, Norfolk Southern, and CSX on a plan to sell the former Conrail line between Trenton and Camden to NJT and operate diesel light rail on it. In response to Federal Transit Administration objections to a previous plan, the parties agreed to restrict freight to 10:00 pm - 6:00 am, similar to what is done in San Diego and Baltimore. Also, NJT has given a $600-million construction contract to Bechtel. This is good news for the nation's first diesel light rail project, which New Jersey Association of Railroad Passengers strongly supports, and local NIMBY's strongly oppose.

Passenger service in the Southeast was severely disrupted yesterday evening and overnight, when lightning struck the CSX control center in Jacksonville. Signals from Florida to Maryland went red at about 5:30 pm, with some outages fixed by about 8:30 pm, but others not until 6:30 am today. There were severe delays to eight VRE trains, eight MARC trains, and nine Amtrak trains. In some cases, passengers were unloaded and bused to their destinations.

In general, this week's process of integrating the pieces of Conrail into CSX and Norfolk Southern went pretty smoothly. However, last night's episode shows a major weakness in CSX's highly centralized signal system, which now has been spread to many other rail routes in the Northeast and Midwest.

The extension of the Cape May Seashore Line into Cape May City, N.J., is scheduled for June 12, with the completion of a project to rebuild a drawbridge that had been inoperable for many years. The railroad will provide four daily round trips between the city and Cape May Courthouse.

Ground was broken for a new Amtrak station at Rensselaer, N.Y., serving the Albany capital area, on June 2. It will be directly south of the current station, which is 20 years old. The new station will be two stories tall with four times the floor space. It will cost $43 million and include high-level platforms, retail space, meeting space, a new street and sidewalk bridge over the entire track area, and a new parking garage with 1,300 spaces.