WASHINGTON - Whatever financial rescue package is patched together this week for Amtrak won't solve the underlying problem: Most passenger trains can't make money in the age of the automobile and the airplane.

Amtrak needs more than $1 billion a year in subsidies to operate a nationwide network. The national railroad has never been given a chance to succeed, because funding from Congress has been unpredictable and at times barely enough to keep Amtrak alive, let alone enough to build a world-class passenger rail system. Lawmakers also have pressured Amtrak into providing service that didn't always make economic sense.

Now, the long-term question for policy-makers is whether supporting Amtrak is a good use of taxpayers' money for a service that today carries the American people less than one mile of every 100 they travel.

Most economists say no. They advocate abandoning nationwide service and keeping just a few passenger lines between cities in densely populated regions, such as the Boston-to-Washington corridor. Other routes could connect cities in Florida, California, the Pacific Northwest and a multistate area radiating out from Chicago to St. Louis, Milwaukee and Fort Wayne, Ind.

But a nation that was transformed by the railroad has found it hard to let them go. Rail advocates argue that trains provide a viable alternative to planes and buses, and that more federal investment, not less, is needed to improve and expand service. For three decades, lawmakers have kept Amtrak afloat with federal subsidies, insisting that the rail line must keep serving stations in their districts.

"There are societal benefits that are not fully reflected in a private market test," said John Spychalski, a railroad expert at Pennsylvania State University's business school. "I'm not saying the service as it exists is ideal, but the fact of the matter is people are using trains. And for many communities, it's come down to about the only choice - except for the automobile - these communities have."

Passenger rail use declined sharply in the 1950s and 1960s. Though it bounced back slightly in the 1980s, the 5.5 billion passenger-miles Amtrak recorded in 2000 were less than one-fifth the level of its predecessors in the mid-1950s.

Airplanes surpassed trains as people movers in 1957, and in 2000 they racked up 515.4 billion passenger-miles, more than 90 times Amtrak's amount, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. And automobiles carried people five times further than planes that year, 2.5 trillion passenger-miles.

The Nixon administration created Amtrak In 1971 to relieve freight-rail companies of their failing passenger lines.

"The rail-passenger business as a practical matter is long gone," said Richard Barsness, a transportation expert at Lehigh University's business school in Bethlehem, Pa.

In part, rail's demise is a symptom of postwar affluence. As people get richer, they can afford to own cars and take planes.

Even in Japan and Europe, where rail use is more prevalent because of higher population densities and higher costs to drive and fly, rail has been losing ground to competitors, according to a U.S. Congressional Research Service study.

"It's just a fact of economic life," said Steve Morrison, a professor of economics at Northeastern University in Boston. "As people get richer, they fly and drive."

One issue is whether rail service should be preserved for those who can't afford to own a car and live in isolated communities where airfares can be high. Some transportation economists say that subsidizing bus service would be a more economical and flexible way to serve these people, since buses can travel on America's extensive network of roads.

But rail advocates say government transportation policy should seek to offer a broad range of transportation alternatives, not determine how people travel. The advocates blame government in part for the decline of rail use through polices that spend tens of billions of dollars a year on roads and air traffic control, while failing to do similarly for the railroads.

The one area where rail is making something of a comeback is in crowded urban corridors, where highways and airports are so congested that many travelers opt for trains. The most notable example is the Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Washington corridor, where the Metroliner and faster Acela Express trains make up one of only two profit-making routes for Amtrak, according to a report from the U.S. General Accounting Office, the auditing arm of Congress.

A 1990 study by Northeastern economist Morrison concluded that the economic value to citizens of maintaining rail service in the Northeast corridor and between cities such as Chicago-Milwaukee, Los Angeles-San Diego and Portland-Seattle far outweighed the cost to government of running those lines.

While conditions may have changed since 1990, the basic principle still holds, Morrison said. Rail service works for large cities that are within a few hundred miles of each other. In fact, Morrison found that the overall economic value of rail service to consumers was so great that it more than made up for the shortfall on other Amtrak routes.

Shrinking the system to a few select routes is not as simple as it might seem. Scott Leonard, the assistant director of the National Association of Railroad Passengers, notes that some lawmakers might stop supporting money for Amtrak if it no longer served their districts.

"If you think strategically the Northeast corridor can go it alone," he said, "what's the realistic chances of it getting federal funding after that?"

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(c) 2002, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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