And the beat goes on – Amtrak decides whether the SW Chief rides

Amtrak will unilaterally impose the conditions under which it will provide TIGER grant matching funds for local- and state-supported upgrades to the route of the Southwest Chief. As reported in Trains News Wire, a letter from Amtrak submitted with the Colfax County, NM, application states, in part, “Before Amtrak will fulfill this contribution, a comprehensive financial plan and accompanying commitments by relevant states and BNSF for the remainder of the infrastructure investments and associated maintenance costs for this route in New Mexico must be completed.”

Read without an analytical eye, it would seem that Amtrak is asking the project participants to simply have their ducks in a row. However, what is really being asked is that all parties contractually agree, on terms agreeable to Amtrak and Amtrak alone, how the entire rehabilitation of the Southwest Chief’s route will be conducted, before the matching funds for any part of the work (that will not complete the entire rehab) will be released.

Since I have been seeing Amtrak with an ever more jaundiced eye lately, it seems to me that Amtrak doesn’t really want to go to the trouble of participating in a rehab, and would rather have the train re-routed onto BNSF’s Transcon through Amarillo, TX, and Clovis, NM, as has often been proposed as a fall back for failure of the parties to rehab the historically significant Raton Pass route through La Junta and Trinidad, CO, and Las Vegas and Lamy, NM.

As we have reported before, the fallback route would take Albuquerque off the direct route, or worse, require that both east- and westbound Chief’s back in or back out of Albuquerque on a move that would take an estimated additional hour to hour and a half. Those of us here in ABQ worry that the ultimate result will be a bus from Albuquerque to Belen, the closest point to ABQ on the Transcon.

As a corollary to Amtrak not handling private car movements, it seems the agency (for that’s what it is—it’s not a business) is also considering terminating its long-standing private car maintenance business.

Assuming that Amtrak was not doing private car maintenance at a loss, I don’t see how cutting off a revenue stream gets Amtrak a better bottom line. The reasoning stated is that Amtrak maintenance facilities can “narrow the focus” on maintaining only Amtrak equipment. On the other hand, if there was excess capacity before, how does this not spread fixed costs over fewer individual jobs, thereby making the maintenance of Amtrak’s cars seem costlier per car?

Perhaps that’s what Amtrak wants. The private railroads used such creative accounting tactics to justify train offs for passenger equipment back in the 1960s when they were trying to get out of the passenger business. Back then, it was failing to reduce shop sizes (or number of shops) to conform to the reduction in passenger trains and business, thereby making it seem costlier for the railroads to maintain the remaining fleet, ultimately resulting in the creation of Amtrak. Does Amtrak want to get out of the passenger business? If not, then why are they making such a good case for my suggestion that Amtrak get out of the long-distance business and let other, more innovative companies run the long-distance trains? Are we who love passenger trains fighting a losing battle?

To be fair to Amtrak, I should note that, since the above was written, Amtrak has decided to sit down with the parties and negotiate with the planners of the yearly special train through the New River Gorge. That they will negotiate suggests that the termination of handling all special movements is not a hard and fast rule. Since then, Amtrak has announces two special trains, both in Michigan and partly sponsored by the MDOT, so it appears that Amtrak can be flexible where the states are footing part or all of the bill.

©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.)