WASHINGTON — Federal Railroad Administration officials have briefed the Rail Passengers Association on a plan that would recast Amtrak as a holding company, overseeing separate entities responsible for operations, equipment management and leasing, and infrastructure and construction.
According to a statement on the RPA website, there are only cursory details of how the reorganized company would be structured, and no indication of how federal or state funding would be addressed. The proposal comes in a year when all current federal surface transportation authorizations expire.
A paywalled Bloomberg report quotes a Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen official who warns restructuring will be a first step toward privatization. Officials at other unions have also speculated to their membership about that possibility.
However, U.S. Department of Transportation spokeswoman Danna Almeida told Bloomberg, “The Trump Administration is considering ways to strengthen and modernize Amtrak for the future, but privatization is not under consideration.”
Based on discussions with the FRA, the Rail Passengers Association document contains an overview of its “understanding of the USDOT restructuring proposal” as well as a list of the association’s proposed “metrics of success for any restructuring.” Among those is a call for an explicit rejection of profitability as a system-wide goal: “Instead, the primary object should be for services, construction projects, and rolling stock to be delivered quickly, on time, and on budget.”
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