CHICAGO - If Congress and the Bush administration are going to get serious about developing a national rail passenger system - and that's a whopping big if - they might take a long look at the 20,000 passengers who crisscross the vast belly of America every day. Most of them are middle-aged to senior citizens and a little more than half of them have jobs.

And each of their trips is heavily subsidized by taxpayers, contributing mightily to Amtrak's chronic financial troubles.

They aren't the only reason why Amtrak staggers from crisis to crisis, but as Congress and the White House search for ways to stem the 31-year-old system's prolific bleeding, they probably will follow the money and find that a lot of it passes through isolated locales such as Minot, N.D., and La Plata, Mo.

"What does the administration want us to be?" asked Donald Saunders, the senior vice president for Amtrak Intercity, the sprawling 34-state rail passenger region headquartered in Chicago. "My frustration is . . . there are some people wanting us to be a public service and others wanting us to run it as a business. We're being told to do both."

As evidenced by Amtrak's threatened shutdown last week - three months before the end of its budget year - the company obviously can't do both.

Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta worked with the railroad officials to piece together yet another financial Band-Aid. With the anticipated assistance of Congress, a combined cash infusion and loan guarantee of as much as $270 million was announced Friday and is intended to keep the trains running into the autumn.

But $100 million of that package is a loan from the administration that must be repaid by Nov. 15, barely getting Amtrak past the midterm election. Mineta called for "fundamental, long-term reform," and Amtrak committed to improving management and accounting practices. Next year, Amtrak said, it will need $1.2 billion to stabilize the system. That's roughly twice the appropriation Congress approved for the current year.

This back-from-the-abyss rescue effort has generated hopes that Washington, which created the transportation stepchild in 1970 to help the struggling Penn Central Railroad divest itself of passenger duties, finally will get around to defining a mission for Amtrak and providing enough money to carry it out.

The history of Amtrak and its relationship with Washington since its launch in the Nixon years suggests otherwise. Most members of Congress have wanted passenger trains on the cheap and, if at all possible, running through their districts. Amtrak, which reported a record $1.1 billion deficit last year, is a monument to that desire.

Two types of events consistently shove Amtrak into the news: derailments and regular financial crises. In the wake of last week's near collapse, the rail system's long-term future is not at all clear because Washington has never seemed particularly interested.

"In this town they only deal with big problems. I figure that now Amtrak is a big problem," said Amtrak President David Gunn, a veteran railroad executive who was lured out of retirement recently to save the system. "Our problems are so severe now, we are running out of cash. They have to deal with us or we're gone."

Congress has funneled about $25 billion to Amtrak in the past 31 years, a comparatively tiny amount annually compared to the $22.6 billion President Bush proposed spending for highways next year alone.

Amtrak's failure to meet performance expectations has elevated its political profile and prompted many of its critics to argue that Amtrak be put out of business.

In an era of superhighways, comparatively inexpensive gasoline and airline deregulation, getting large numbers of people to ride trains is a challenge. Amtrak carries about 64,000 passengers a day, 20,000 of them in the heartland between the coastal corridors. Ridership has grown more than 11 percent since 1997, according to the Department of Transportation.

"It is important to keep in sight the fact that even if Amtrak is successful in becoming operationally self-sufficient, it will still rely heavily on the federal government for funding of its capital needs," the department said in a January report.

Who rides the trains and where is important. Riders on the East Coast corridor are affluent business travelers. West Coast passengers are younger and moderately affluent. Living in densely populated areas, they represent a growth market, part of the political imperative demanded of Amtrak.

"This is such a bizarre situation," said James Coston, a Chicago lawyer and member of the Amtrak Reform Council, which has recommended a substantial restructuring of the rail system. "Every form of transportation that matters in this country requires a substantial and ongoing federal investment."

The same holds true around the world, where nearly every rail system has yet to enjoy profitability. Two days before Amtrak was scheduled to shut down if it didn't get $200 million from Congress, United Airlines asked for a $2 billion loan guarantee from Congress.

Ian Savage, a Northwestern University economist who specializes in transportation, said the "big problem here is not economics but politics. There clearly are Amtrak services that are viable and the nation would want to support.

"However, there is also all the rest," Savage said, referring to the patchwork quilt of rail services between the East and West Coast corridor services.

"It's crunch time," Savage said. "Am I hopeful? I somehow doubt it . . . I don't see people having the will or the consensus to do something here."

The Amtrak Reform Council, a government-created commission, said in February that there is a "bright future" for passenger rail in America but that Amtrak, "as it is structured, managed and operated under existing law, cannot achieve that promise."

The promise of Amtrak rolled out of New York's Penn Station in May 1971 during the Nixon administration. But the ultimately crippling political reality saw routes diverted to home bases of powerful congressmen.

"In order to get widespread support for Amtrak, Congress ran these pointless trains through as many districts as possible," Savage said.

In 1997, Amtrak promised Congress it would be self-sufficient by the start of 2003. To deliver on that pledge, the rail service all but stopped repairing rail cars at its repair site in Beech Grove, Ind., where 40 damaged cars await attention. Maintenance money was plowed into operations. When it became clear early this year that Amtrak would not meet its goal, Amtrak President George Warrington quit.

Significantly, the Amtrak Reform Council recommended allowing competitive bidding by private companies to operate the costly long-distance routes.

"This is the moment of truth," said council Vice Chairman Paul Weyrich. "At the end of the day, we will either have a reformed Amtrak that is much less of a burden to at least the federal taxpayer, or we will have business as usual."

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(c) 2002, Chicago Tribune.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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