The Sad State of the Passenger Train

By Frank Trippett

Certain public services are so obviously desirable that they are beyond debate in modern urban societies. The thought of doing without schools, parks, hospitals, street lighting and such could scarcely enter a civilized mind. The ever wandering human species recognized roads as obvious necessities soon after man began meandering across the earth. Later, mechanical wonders that aided travel were put in the same category. Today every ranking industrial nation nurtures the use of cars, buses and airplanes. Along with these, railroads are treated as indispensable in every well-developed country--except one.

The amazing exception happens to be the U.S., a nation that pioneered in railroading with more vigor and daring than any other in the 19th century. It also did so on a grander scale, binding an immense continent with tracks and producing trains of such magnificence that they moved Nathaniel Hawthorne to exclaim: "They spiritualize travel!" Most Americans once agreed, and even today travelers lucky enough to wind up on a good train find this way of traveling superior in every way to the fumes and peeves of the throughways and the sardine-can intimacy of the time-rupturing jet planes. Yet, in spite of the heroic past, the U.S. has let its passenger rail travel system fizzle and sputter down into a national embarrassment, Today service is scant, schedules are unreliable and amenities are often sparse. The equipment includes, in the forthright phrase of Amtrak President Alan Boyd, "a lot of junk." The situation might be called ridiculous if only in light of the universal recognition of the passenger train as the most expedient mode of moving large numbers of people from city to city. In an energy-short era, the railroad, fully exploited, offers the most fuel-efficient means of public transport.

The plight of U.S. passenger travel is downright humiliating when it is compared with the superb services of, say, Japan, France and Britain. British trains run so close to the mark that passengers carp about a five-minute overdue arrival. Japan's celebrated bullet trains, at up to 130 m.p.h., make the U.S. counterparts seem like earthworms. Naturally such service does not come free. Britain subsidizes its trains at a yearly rate of $728 million, Japan (with less than half the U.S. track mileage) at $4.1 billion and France at $930 million.

When Amtrak was created eight years ago there was hope for improved U.S. passenger trains, and there was even some progress. But now, with the country still needing to do a great deal better, it stands at the verge of deliberately doing worse. Reason: a Department of Transportation plan that would amputate 12,000 miles from Amtrak's 27,500-mile system. It would also wipe out some popular trains, including the Washington-New Orleans Crescent and New York-Canada Montrealer. This would be accompanied by slashes in Amtrak funds, forcing the company into offering truncated services at higher fares.

Though the plan would likely reverse the recent trend of growing ridership, Transportation Secretary Brock Adams insists that it is constructive. Still, he has pushed it in Congress mainly as a handy device for saving perhaps $300 million a year. Congress, which must reject or acquiesce in the scheme by May 22, has so far seemed woefully ready to let it go into effect without substantial changes.

Rail travel advocates fear that, on top of the sudden loss of almost half of Amtrak's system, the plan might mark the beginning of the end for all significant intercity rail services in the U.S. Even if it may be too late to stop the DOT plan, it is not too late to examine how the U.S. came to such a shabby pass.

The amputation plan embodies a whole bundle of questionable notions that have long clouded the prevalent American view of passenger rail service. A conspicuous one among them was evident in the chartering of Amtrak, which was directed to function as a profit-making organization. The cold fact is that no national passenger system, in the final accounting, ever pays its own way. Amtrak's succession of deficits ($600 million this year) was inevitable, and the DOT reaction rested on yet another flawed notion: the remedy for an insufficient passenger system is to cut it back and make it even less sufficient. These and other peculiar notions -- including the specious belief that Americans do not really like to ride railroads -- add up to a sort of official mythology of passenger travel in the U.S.

The odd thinking that has long held sway in national rail travel policy springs out of a stubborn resistance to rail travel as a public service justified not by profits but by its contribution to social convenience and wellbeing. After all, municipalities everywhere subsidize local mass transit and recognize the obvious need to do so. Washington still thinks of automobile transportation as strictly private, even though the Federal Government alone has invested some $48.6 billion in roads since 1971. Airlines are similarly considered private, even though they would be as financially strapped as Amtrak if they were billed for only the nearly $2 billion the public pays each year for the air traffic control systems. Every attentive citizen, finally, becomes aware of the inextricable public-private money mix that sustains all transport. But the strangest thing -- and perhaps the most revealing -- is that nobody gets worked up about it except when the issue of railroads comes up.

This peculiar official sentiment is linked, underneath, to a mental picture of the railroad industry that lingers from the past. The trains that used to inspire novelists and songwriters were contrivances of freebooting laissez-faire capitalism, and they became symbolic monuments to a time that believed that any enterprise that could not make a profit deserved to die. In fact, though, an extensive passenger-train network tenuously survived into the 1940s, when, suddenly needed for war duty, it worked profitably at capacity. Then, in the postwar period, when the nation lavished attention and money on the development of air and highway transport, rail travel sank into the red. One reason was that the mail subsidies that used to help pay the basic cost of a passenger train were increasingly handed to truckers and airlines. Passenger trains fell into the trend of continual service cutting that both reduced chances for a comeback and encouraged Americans to turn more and more to cars.

Despite this unfortunate history, the nation that has so superbly cultivated highway and air travel could plainly do just as well by rail travel if it chose. The energy crunch alone, which is already creating a surge of new riders on Amtrak's long-run trains, is good cause for so choosing. But there are many other reasons for doing so, not least that train travel at its best, in addition to being highly efficient, is perhaps the most attractive form of travel for millions. Before any obviously desirable passenger system can be built, however, the country will have to realize that it is not the passenger train, but only its thinking about it, that is obsolete.

--Frank Trippett

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