Southwest Chief route wins federal grant

I’ve talked about the Southwest Chief in this blog before. One of the reasons is that the Chief is the only Amtrak service to and from my home base, Albuquerque, NM. To reach other Amtrak service from my location, one has to either drive to El Paso, TX, to board the Sunset, or ride the Chief up to Trinidad and then bus it to Denver to pick up the California Zephyr.

Another is that the Southwest Chief is the historical descendant of the legendary Super Chief, the AT&SF’s flagship premium accommodation train. Inaugurated in May 1936 as an all-Pullman train, the streamlined version was started in May 1937 with some demonstration runs. The streamlined Super Chief made its first regular run on May 18, 1937, with diesel locomotive power. The regular power for the Super Chief thereafter never included steam for anything other than helpers or substitutes for failed diesels. The Southwest Chief of today follows the same routing as that of the original train.

The only reason the train isn’t called Super Chief today is that the rights to that name remained with Santa Fe (and eventually with BNSF Railway) when Amtrak started running the route.

The federal grant isn’t exactly something to turn handsprings over. All of its $16 million, from a Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery grant, is going to facilitate track repairs and maintenance. This is for stretches of track where the freight railroads no longer want to operate or, consequently, pay for repairs. Primarily in Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico, these orphaned (by the freight railroad) stretches are part of the old Santa Fe, built before the Transcon through Clovis and Belen, New Mexico, was put into service, and include long stretches where jointed rail still create that clickety-clack, and the ghosts of only-recently replaced upper-quad semaphores still haunt.

These stretches of mostly single track have been bad, repaired piecemeal, and allowed to get bad again for years.

Besides rebuilding with CWR (continuous welded rail) here’s what the route really needs: Two trains each way each day, or at least a second train three times a week. Real rail connections to cities now served by the Chief but only by bus. (Only a few would require new or rehabilitated rails.) Improved schedule keeping. A five-year plan. The grant will provide none of what Amtrak really needs.

A five-year plan for Amtrak might include ramping up new coach and sleeper construction to at least 1 a week for five years, a total of 250 to 300. New diner and lounge construction at least on a one-a-month pace, 60 total. At least one new route every six month, and at least one train added to existing routes on the same pace. That would be 10 new routes and more trains on 10 existing routes in five years.

To do this, Amtrak needs a permanent or multi-year funding solution that is understood to be legislatively binding and part of each successive budget process for at least the five years. If this doesn’t make the voters happy and buy some votes for even the most stalwart holdouts in Congress, no further five-year plans need be considered.

I’d be willing to bet that, five years down the Amtrak pike, everyone will be a lot happier with train service—and willing to pay more for it.

©2018 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com

(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Charles is a political conservative but believes in public funding of passenger rail as a part of the federal government’s constitutionally conservative obligation to provide for defense and public infrastructure so that private enterprise may flourish.)