Volume II Version 4 - This Was The Week That Was - An Amtrak Saga

January 15, 2002

There is a midweek lull going on after the excitement of last Friday’s ARC seven hour meeting.

One of your humble correspondent’s coconspirators in United Rail Passenger Alliance earlier this week passed along a more exact pedigree regarding the union of Amtrak and the NEC. For historical purposes, it is reproduced here, with the permission of the author, E.P. Hamilton, Ph.D. of Flugerville, Texas.

Dr. Hamilton is the principal in an engineering firm which specializes in railroad construction. As his story will tell, he has been involved with URPA from the very beginning.

The first time the idea of separating the Northeast Corridor from the rest of Amtrak was brought to the attention of the public in a major fashion was by the late Joseph V. MacDonald (Vice President of Continental Can Company), when he was serving on the Amtrak Board as a consumer representative in the 1974-1976 time period when Congress was setting up the sale of the NEC assets to Amtrak and the commuter agencies under 4R in light of the collapse of the Penn Central Railroad.

MacDonald, you may or may not remember, had been snooping around in Amtrak’s books and discovered (among many other travesties) that they were charging the Montrealer excessive crew costs sufficient to staff each train with 26 enginemen and crewmen (not OBS personnel) on one division south of New Haven.

Upon further and more intensive study (and against many roadblocks thrown up by then-current Amtrak management) of the NEC purchase, he informed the Board that Amtrak was “buying a bottomless pit” and became an extremely vocal proponent of divorcing the NEC infrastructure from Amtrak, and he created a major public flap over the issue, including articles in Trains and other publications.

He advocated separating the NEC infrastructure and operations until the day he died.

Unfortunately he was opposed by other northeastern interests (If I recall correctly, Joe was from Connecticut) and management on the Board, and the rest is history.

Shortly after Joe’s untimely death and proximate to the 1978 DOT study, I wound up inheriting much of his correspondence and materials from Charlie Luna [A longtime member of the Amtrak board who represented organized labor.] and others, due to my work with the Austin, Texas Chamber of Commerce (Amtrak had done us dirty on a station).

In 1979 we wound up publishing what became a heavily publicized study which concluded exactly the same as Joe had found, identifying millions in infrastructure costs solely necessary for operating a 125 mph high density operation which were being billed to the occasional long distance trains using the corridor.

This study is attributed to having created a major national debate on the subject, initially associated with the 1979 Amtrak crisis during the Jimmy Carter administration, and continuing up to the mid-1980’s. I met Andy Selden sometime in the post-1979 period, and we started working together.

Andy and I raised the same issue over ICC Docket 417, where it was clear that virtually the full infrastructure cost of the NEC necessary to serve the regional transit operations was being dumped on Amtrak with their assent.

For example, the ICC had ruled that on the section north of Trenton, New Jersey, into New York Pennsylvania Station, which at the time had over 1,400 New Jersey Transit commuter operations per day, Amtrak was the “dominant user,” and thus paid the lion’s share (almost all, if not all) of the infrastructure necessary to accommodate the transit operations. We determined that this was so on the rest of the corridor segments hosting transit operations which Amtrak owned.

Andy Selden, [the late] Byron Nordberg, [the late] Adrian Herzog, many others, and, I, have simply been the messengers and follow-up people who have run with Joe MacDonald’s original discovery and very public vocalization of the issue. It would be fitting to give him the credit, because it’s really due him.

It may be worth it to pass along some of this history to your readers, as it indicates that this problem has been festering publicly since a lot earlier than 1986.

It goes to show that there are powerful interests in the northeast (and a few other places) who have much to gain politically and fiscally by a back door subsidy for local operations.

This is not unusual in American politics - special interests do it all the time - but generally not under the “for profit” mandate Amtrak has been stuck with. In fact, I have a copy of Progressive Railroading magazine from about 1966, which deals with Alan Boyd and the original high speed rail program for the NEC, where the subject of massive infrastructure costs is broached.

Joe, I’m sure, would be ecstatic that the ARC is finally paying attention to what he said almost 30 years ago.

- Bill Hamilton

Dr. Hamilton and Mr. Selden have continued working together, and, as mentioned in last Friday’s edition of TWTWTW, in 1986, the two gentlemen co-authored an article in Trains magazine pointing out the many flaws and problems in Amtrak’s accounting system and called for the splitting of the NEC infrastructure away from the rest of Amtrak.

URPA has been working for a long, long time to seek better solutions for the healthy operation of passenger rail in North America.

Through the years, two heavy hitters, Byron Nordberg, and Adrian Herzog have been lost due to their untimely deaths at an early age. Some of the other “young turks” of the group have grown into middle age, and a few have now slipped into retirement years.

It’s been a long struggle for many. It’s reassuring to see a light at the end of the tunnel, and it not be an oncoming headlight of a speeding train bearing down on an unsuspecting group of people.

The Amtrak Reform Council is completing its mandate. Now, it’s up to the United States Senate and House of Representative to finish the job of creating the New Amtrak.

If you want to be part of this process, contact your local congress person and senators and express your concern that the New Amtrak be more than just a skeleton system as it is today.