Budget cutter are off track in effort to end funding

A hundred years ago this month -- on June 12, 1905 -- the westbound Pennsylvania Special steamed out of Harrisburg's train station, then thundered across the Rockville Bridge and into railroad history.

It was the Pennsylvania Railroad's premier luxury overnight New York-Chicago train. Locked in a speed war with a train from a rival railroad, it fell 26 minutes behind schedule in Ohio, then made up time in a burst of speed that was reported to have hit 127.3 mph, setting what many claimed was a record for a steam-powered train in America and pulling into Chicago three minutes early.

Eighteen hours. It was the state of the art for a New York-Chicago trip, and well-heeled passengers gladly paid extra fare for the privilege of speed. As with the Concorde supersonic commercial transport jet decades later, riders were as eager to savor the experience as they were to save time.

Nowadays, intercity train travelers aren't concerned so much about how fast they're going as they are whether the train will be running at all. The future for long-haul railroad travel in this country is murkier than at almost any time since the 1960s. Amtrak, the federal intercity rail passenger service agency, is struggling under the multiple burdens of past mismanagement and deception, a marquee high-speed train that doesn't work and, more chronically, a 34-year legacy of consistent underfunding by Congress. It may not survive in its present form.

Amtrak has been threatened before and squeaked through, but times are different now, for two reasons.

First, President Bush, riding a wave of conservative support, has proposed a zero budget for Amtrak. One of his staunchest allies, U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., is caught between his ideology and his constituency. A seemingly anti-Amtrak vote he cast on an amendment earlier this year drew criticism that he'd flip-flopped on Amtrak. He explained -- some would say backpedaled -- by saying that proposed funding wasn't guaranteed to actually go to Amtrak.

In any case, his choice is to stick with the president or to represent Pennsylvania. Amtrak employs more than 3,000 people in Pennsylvania who take home $149.6 million in wages annually. It operates 120 daily trains in the state, and it serves 24 stations from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and Erie. Its Pennsylvania ridership stands at 4.8 million passengers annually. The Boston-Washington Northeast Corridor line through Philadelphia is the nation's busiest, carrying half of the railroad's 20 million annual riders.

Amtrak and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation are spending more than $100 million to upgrade Harrisburg-Philadelphia track, stations, equipment and service. Any Amtrak shutdown or transfer to another agency could jeopardize that.

Although privatization -- one option the Bush administration favors, as it does with Social Security--- has been tried elsewhere, its benefits usually fall far short. Also, no intercity rail passenger system anywhere in the world fully covers all of its costs -- why should we think that Amtrak or a successor can do so? Highways and airlines require billions in subsidies that we as a nation willingly pay, yet somehow passenger trains are expected to cover all of their costs.

They do not. They preserve mobility and civility, but because those qualities lack a quantifiable dollar amount, critics and ideologues find them an easy mark. Amtrak serves most states, and most elected officials know that voters want to retain the service. But politically speaking, the cards have never been stacked so heavily against it.

The second hint that Amtrak is in trouble is this: In March, the railroad discontinued the Three Rivers, its sole remaining New York-Philadelphia-Harrisburg-Pittsburgh-Chicago train. As a result:

·  For the first time in at least 125 years, and probably longer, Harrisburg or Philadelphia passengers can't ride through to Chicago without changing trains. The Three Rivers was the last successor to the Pennsylvania Special/Broadway Limited and others of an East Coast-Midwest fleet that once numbered more than 60 trains a day just between here and Pittsburgh. Amtrak has dropped all full-service dining cars and all sleeping cars from the route. What's left is coaches with a snack car.

·  For the first time in 151 years, except for a few months in 1979-80, only a single daily passenger train is operating on the former Pennsylvania Railroad (now Norfolk Southern) main line across the state. We are just one Amtrak-train discontinuance away from a situation in which only freight trains cross Rockville Bridge and round Horseshoe Curve, another railroad landmark near Altoona.

Since it started in 1971 as a means of preserving intercity rail service when the private freight railroads were getting out of that business, Amtrak has always run at least two daily trains across Pennsylvania. Now the sole survivor is the Pennsylvanian, a New York-Pittsburgh train that once was a poster child for state-supported Amtrak regional trains. Started at PennDOT's request and with state subsidy in 1980, it became so popular within 10 years that Amtrak finally told the state it no longer needed to pay a subsidy -- that Amtrak would take the train into its national system. This was unprecedented.

When Amtrak last year began the process of dropping the Three Rivers, it asked PennDOT to consider paying a subsidy again to keep two daily trains running. Caught short on the budget cycle and presented with what it said was a high tab for the service, PennDOT declined.

So after 34 years, Amtrak no longer exhibits the will to continue running a long-haul New York-Chicago train via Philadelphia, Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, despite a century-plus proven market for it. (Amtrak celebrated its first anniversary in 1972 by rolling out a newly redone Broadway Limited as its first completely refurbished train nationwide.) And the regional train that PennDOT started and that had performed so well is now downgraded to serving as an inconvenient connection at Pittsburgh to and from a Washington-Chicago train.

As gasoline prices edge toward $3 a gallon and automakers sell record numbers of sport utility vehicles, reality must soon set in. We need a balanced national transportation policy, but Congress has so far been unwilling to go there. Amtrak must learn or re-learn how to listen to its state partners.

If you've been planning an Amtrak trip west of Harrisburg to ride over those landmarks, Rockville Bridge and Horseshoe Curve, you'd better buy a ticket soon. Unless elected officials and state and federal transportation policymakers get their heads together, the Pennsylvanian may end up in Strasburg, permanently parked on display inside the state railroad museum.