Rail: The little engine that doesn't

From here at Washington's Union Station -- the symbolic if not the busiest hub of tourist and business passenger rail service in America -- the future of train travel looks a little bleak.

Although the ground beneath this refurbished, historic railroad station rumbles with East Coast train traffic, most of it from the Washington-New York-Boston corridor, the story of the nation's rail network is a troubled one.

Lack of capital, lack of congressional interest and, mostly, lack of a national policy to rebuild the nation's railroads have left a potentially major transportation option for the U.S. travel industry in disarray.

The long-sought -- and long-fought -- advent of high-speed rail connecting major U.S. cities, at least outside the Northeast Corridor, is stalled on a siding with no funding and no mandate to go forward.

Passenger rail itself, along with all its potential contributions to travel and tourism suppliers in the U.S., is becoming an endangered species, even as fast trains thrive and expand across Europe and Asia, drawing tourists and business travelers by the millions.

Despite the urgings of travel-related interests, including state and regional tourism agencies, economic development groups, tourism councils, travel agents and lodging interests, no national agenda for passenger rail has evolved in Washington to designate a path for the future of train travel in U.S.

There is a certain irony to all that, said Rick Harnish, director of the Midwest High Speed Rail Association in Chicago.

"Outside the Northeast Corridor, out here in the boonies, rail passengers are being turned away in larger numbers," Harnish said. "But that is a story you never hear reported. It's because there is no real ... policy on rail transportation, and there never has been."

The result, say critics, is that the nation's air carriers are losing money trying to serve regional airports and smaller communities that could be served by rapid rail.

Meanwhile, highways across the country continue to become more congested from overdue capital improvements, especially in major metro areas and in major tourist destinations.

Travel agents say they seldom raise train travel as an option unless a customer specifically asks for it. But an informal poll of more than 100 corporate travel executives shows overwhelming support for high-speed rail development and re-establishment of passenger rail.

Amtrak: More with less

Amtrak, the federally subsidized passenger rail service, has gotten accustomed to doing more with less and again is struggling to win minimal support in Congress for its annual appropriation, a problem that has plagued it since it began operating in 1971.

Rail analysts said funding has barely covered operating costs over the past decade, and promises of weaning Amtrak from public subsidies -- a standard position of Amtrak through the 1990s -- were misleading. Little money has gone into planning or development of new rail corridors, and tracks remain largely incapable of handling high-speed trains.

Yet Amtrak has seen a steady rise in ridership over the past few years -- specifically on its Northeast Corridor Acela service -- with a record 24 million passengers last year. It also set records for ridership for four straight months over the summer, with 2.25 million passengers in July alone.

Critics of the nation's passenger rail service, and there are many, said those numbers are small compared with the number of people who travel by air or by highway, frequently comparing train riders with the number of Americans who walk to work.

And organizations like the Cato Institute have argued for the past several years that funding of Amtrak through special appropriations and assistance should have put the government entity into a position to become self-sufficient.

A market for rail travel

But rail advocates, and there are many of those, as well, both in and out of the tourism industry, said there is a strong market of willing train passengers, if the infrastructure to support train travel was restored.

With that restoration, they said, could come a host of additional marketable services to travelers, such as car rental, public transit, accommodations and tour operations.

"Passenger rail brings some tremendous options [for the industry]," said Hank Phillips, president of the National Tour Association. "You have convenience, comfort and the experience of train travel. When you combine those, I think you see a great promise for rail."

But Phillips, like others, said the travel industry has not gotten behind political efforts to help set an agenda for U.S. rail service.

"My ... recollection is that when Amtrak is encountering a funding crisis, as has been the case over the years, then it tends to get some pretty good support from the travel industry," Phillips said.

"But outside of the crisis mode, I'm not sure that the industry has gotten together in support of rail services, and perhaps it should."

With Amtrak facing challenges just to meet operating costs -- no new trains or cars outside the North-east Corridor have been purchased by Amtrak in more than a decade, rail analysts said -- there is not much on the horizon to encourage sophisticated rail development in the U.S.

Under current budget proposals by the Bush administration -- some $900 million of the $1.2 billion that Amtrak said is the minimum it must have this year -- the passenger rail authority could be forced to shutter ticket windows and file for bankruptcy protection sometime in February.

"The Bush proposal is a shutdown figure," Cliff Black, a longtime spokesman for the rail service, told Travel Weekly.

There have been showdowns, he admitted, over Amtrak funding before. But budget constraints, the war in Iraq and deficit spending are putting pressure on the rail subsidies.

Some say that Amtrak's president, David Gunn, who was brought onboard in 2002 to help Amtrak restructure, is less likely to sugarcoat the future of Amtrak on Capitol Hill than some of his predecessors.

"He is a no-nonsense, direct individual," Black said of his boss. "He is not a political person. He treats the employees here with the same deference as a U.S. senator."

That may make him popular among employees but may not help, observers noted, in an environment where opposition to Amtrak subsidies -- the underpinning for broader high-speed rail deployment -- has been growing in a Republican-controlled Congress.

Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), a fiscal and social conservative, angered rail advocates earlier this year with his public references to Amtrak as "Scamtrak," then upped the ante by introducing legislation to fight Amtrak's authorization, which could shut off government funding for the service.

And in Congress as well as in state legislatures across the country, rail interests said, both the airline and the automobile industries continue to bend the arms of conservative lawmakers with the idea that Amtrak should be mothballed, or at least privatized, and that high-speed rail projects should cool on the back burner if not in the freezer.

And while President Bush spoke in favor of high-speed rail networks during his last election campaign, his Amtrak funding proposals and other actions in office have led analysts and rail industry experts to believe that he wants to dismantle Amtrak -- and soon.

His brother, Jeb Bush, as governor of Florida, has adopted positions opposing subsidized passenger rail service.

In fact, Gov. Bush is actively engaged in fighting one of the most prominent of the nation's fast-train projects in his state in the upcoming state elections.

"The current administration has proposed a reform of Amtrak," said Black. "But at present, we still don't know exactly what that means."

Shrinking infrastructure

Amtrak's troubles are just one side of the fast-train ledger in the U.S. Across the country the fight to emulate European and Japanese high-speed rail systems, with trains running 200 mph or above on well-maintained, on-time rail networks, is going backwards.

Passenger rail supporters, which include environmentalists, urban planners and chambers of commerce across the country, say high-speed rail lines create a travel safety net for a fragile airline industry and make good economic sense.

They point to opportunities to serve business and leisure travelers with higher-speed rail alternatives to major cities, especially those within 300 to 500 miles of each other, and to link communities that stand to lose air service in the latest round of air carrier bankruptcies and service retrenchments.

But at the same time, the nation's passenger rail infrastructure is shrinking dramatically.

"Over the years, passenger rail service declined very rapidly, and now we are at a point where we have fallen back on only the very best routes nationwide," said Harnish of the Midwest Rail Association.

"Even those routes don't work very well because the freight lines don't have much room on their track."

He and others note that funds to build the kind of rail lines needed for high-speed passenger trains is far off in an indefinite future.

Political roadblocks

Opposition to the use of public funds for high-speed rail projects has surfaced in every place where fast-train proposals have been made: Florida, Wisconsin and Texas have all run into strong political opposition.

Even in California, where an innovation by rail advocates more than a decade ago tied transit development to highway funding and improving the state's passenger rail service, a major high-speed rail initiative is in trouble.

Yet advocates still cite California as the best chance to be the "harbinger" of development of high-speed rail to relieve stress on highways and to replace short-hop air service in regional markets, where congestion is a problem.

"California has led the nation before in transportation, building of highways and freeway systems, and there is some hope that it will take the lead in high-speed rail," said Amtrak's Black.

But recent political developments have raised questions about funding there, as well. Local editorials in California papers describe Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as "skeptical" about the future of the ambitious interstate high-speed rail plan.

And a vote to issue multibillion-dollar bonds for the first leg of the project, linking San Diego and San Francisco through Los Angeles, which was scheduled to go before voters this fall, has been postponed until 2006.

In addition to funding, high-speed rail projects require huge doses of political will. Los Angeles-Las Vegas, for example, is often cited as a likely candidate for high-speed rail service, but because of the complexity of interstate compacts required to build and manage a high-speed track across state lines, enhanced service on that route has been sidetracked.

For that reason, many rail travel advocates said the best hope for high-speed rail is intrastate, rather than interstate.