The Government's Toonerville Trolley

In attempting to justify the dictatorship of Italy's Benito Mussolini, his supporters bragged that at the very least the pudgy El Duce "made the trains run on time."

After a round-trip on Amtrak, I wish we had somebody up there in Washington who could make a similar claim. Last week I spent an hour at the Deerfield Beach station waiting for a late Amtrak train to arrive. Along the way, the train lost another hour and a half, coming into DeLand, Fla., two and a half hours late. On the return trip, the train was two hours late arriving at DeLand and two and a half hours late arriving in Deerfield Beach.

Along the route, in both directions, the train made frequent inexplicable stops. Over much of the route it continually slowed down to a crawl and moseyed along at a blinding 10 miles an hour. Not once did any employee of this Toonerville Trolley of a railroad bother either to explain why the trains were late or to apologize for it.

As the Cato Institute's Joseph Vranich and Edward L. Hudgins wrote, airport shutdowns and fear of flying that followed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks gave Amtrak a boost in ridership. But that boost is unlikely to last as passengers experience what I went through – and the record shows they will.

Vranich is a former member of the Amtrak Reform Council, past president and CEO of the High Speed Rail Association, and executive director of the National Association of Railroad Passengers; Hudgins is director of regulatory studies at the Cato Institute. According to these two men, the government-owned and -operated passenger railroad, established by Congress three decades ago, will not likely be able to take advantage of a public demand for alternatives to air travel.

The railroad's horrible late record shows that my experience is the rule, not the exception.

According to the Cato experts: "One reason for Amtrak's abysmal showing is that many of its trains run late. Worse, the railroad obscures poor performance by measuring on-time arrivals only at selected "checkpoints." And just before those points, Amtrak builds lots of extra time in schedules so trains can officially arrive "on time" even though the trains were late at many stations along the line.

"In addition, some Amtrak trains are slower than trains our great-grandparents rode in the early 1900s. One train pulled by a steam locomotive in 1926 took 8 hours and 40 minutes to travel from Jeffersonville, Ind., to Chicago – 4 hours faster than Amtrak today. Amtrak averaged only 10 passengers daily on a slow Wisconsin train. When earlier this year Amtrak learned the empty seats were to be shown on NBC's 'The Fleecing of America,' bureaucrats suspended the route."

Aside from its inability to arrive on time, Amtrak's financial picture is at best murky. Cato reports that the publicly-financed railroad employs "creative accounting to disguise its financial problems," noting that Amtrak swallows up multiple subsidies from government agencies "and has recently abandoned standard accounting practices to hide operating expenses as capital costs."

Since Congress created it, Amtrak has received almost $25 billion in taxpayer dollars, and Cato warns that there is "no prospect that it will ever break even."

Shockingly, despite the fact that Amtrak has lost money in each of the 30 years since its creation, and its debt is at record levels with ample indications that Amtrak's financial hemorrhaging will continue, Congress is now proposing to throw billions of your tax dollars in new subsidies at Amtrak.

"Perversely," Cato reports, "under the guise of patriotism, some lawmakers want to lavish record-high subsidies on Amtrak. One bill would give Amtrak $3.2 billion in 'emergency' aid because its ridership increased. (Ironically, the airlines are receiving $15 billion because ridership decreased.)"

When Congress created Amtrak, it mandated that the railroad must break even by 2002. In the Amtrak Reform and Accountability Act of 1997, Congress ordered that if Amtrak is not financially self-sufficient by December 2002 it must be restructured and liquidated. Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta recently said that Amtrak would not meet that deadline.

Congress also established the Amtrak Reform Council to monitor the railroad's finances. Cato says that it's time for that council to recognize reality and declare that Amtrak cannot survive without continued federal operating subsidies. Should that happen, it could spark either a reorganization, privatization, or liquidation of Amtrak as mandated by Congress in the 1997 act.

In the face of this fiscal nightmare, Amtrak now wants to build "high-speed train routes more than a thousand miles long," leading Cato to comment that "not even the fastest train can compete with aviation for more than a 300-mile trip. Such absurd projects are guaranteed to become astounding burdens on public treasuries."

At its best, Amtrak leaves much to be desired, Cato notes, reporting that "Its fresh-out-of-the-factory Acela Express between Washington and Boston," for example, "is slower than high-speed trains that have been running for many years in Europe and Japan."

Concluded the Cato experts: "Rail travel could have a bright future, but only if Congress examines ways to sell or franchise Amtrak to private interests. Private companies do a more efficient job than government delivering commercial rail services. Britain privatized its system and the passenger increase alone exceeds Amtrak's total annual traffic. The privatized Japanese railroad is nine times more efficient than Amtrak."

I took Amtrak because there is no airline flying into Daytona where I was going. I thought I'd be grateful that I wouldn't have to cope with the absurd so-called security precautions now being inflicted on the flying public, which I wrote about last week. I was, but that's all I could find gratifying about my wretched Amtrak alternative.

The next time I'll drive.

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