Amtrak does the unthinkable, and not in a good way.

It looks like Amtrak is going to keep doing it, too. As long as there IS an Amtrak.

Specifically, the unthinkable is that, as of May 26, 2018, you cannot take a single train from Chicago to New York City for the first time in well over a century. Yes, there is no single train you can take. You can be ticketed through on Amtrak, but you must change trains in Albany.

Amtrak says it’s temporary and the result of having to both repair track on the route used by Amtrak to access Penn Station and repair the Spuyten Duyvil bridge that is a part of that routing. Those Empire Corridor trains that use Penn Station are routing into Grand Central, but not the long-distance Lake Shore Limited. If you’re going from New York to Chicago, you still must change trains in Albany. There will be only coach seating Albany-New York, and I haven’t been able to find out what Amtrak plans to do about baggage that formerly could be checked through to New York.

This action, which seems to single out the long-distance train in favor of state supported trains, is worrisome to many. Some think that, if Amtrak can find a good enough excuse, the Albany-New York section of the limited will not come back.

(To add insult to injury, Amtrak has now also announced the termination of dining cars for the entire Lake Shore routing.)

I use the phrase, “good enough,” because the rerouting excuse is a little weak to begin with. Once upon a time, railroads would only annul trains, or sections of trains, when particularly problematic wrecks or natural disasters occurred. When alternate routes or stations were available substitutes, those were used in preference to annulment. Whether or not a train was annulled, it was usually only for short periods, not entire summer travel seasons.

Joe Boardman, former Amtrak CEO, as much as I didn’t like some of his decisions, has stepped up to tell us all (Railway Age, May 23, 2018) that its not going to take anti-passenger train politicians or budget crunches to do in the long-distance passenger network. He says that efforts are underway “by Amtrak’s current leadership to dismantle our interconnected, intercity rail passenger network…” (Again, as quoted in Railway Age, see above.)

In a May 10 editorial in the same, Mr. Boardman stated, in part, “Amtrak management is engaged in ‘weaponizing’ safety to attack more broadly Amtrak’s long-distance network. Under a façade of ‘safety first,’ there are threats to discontinue Amtrak operated passenger trains by Dec. 31, 2018, wherever Positive Train Control is not installed and operating.” He adds that this is neither acceptable nor responsible.

Nothing brings up my ire like those who, as recently noted in a think piece on CTPost.com, believe that the Northeast Corridor is the only place in America where a national passenger rail system makes sense. The only thing that makes sense for America is a coordinated system of local, regional, and long-distance passenger routes that can do three things of equal importance: 1. Take overcrowded, fuel-guzzling, and increasingly inconvenient airliners out of the skies. 2. Take inefficient private passenger cars off the crumbling high-maintenance highways. 3. Provide efficient and reliable transportation on the ground in the event of emergencies that ground airliners or require closing of roads or both.

These are the same things that the freight railroads now do with freight, except that, despite pipe-dreams of the post-World War II era, it was never a given that airliners would be any good for heavy freight haulage. Oh, and under number 2, add pavement-scrambling trucks to inefficient passenger cars.

At the risk of repeating myself, railroads are the most fuel-efficient means of transportation for passengers and their reasonable luggage, bar none, for endpoints not separated by ocean. That you can’t travel from any town in the U.S. to any other town by rail is a grave error in public policy.

That you will be able to travel between even fewer city/town pairs if Amtrak has its way is a national disgrace.

©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.)