WASHINGTON — Amtrak President Richard Anderson took repeated opportunities Thursday to highlight how a failure of aging Northeast Corridor infrastructure near New York “would effectively shut down economic activity in Manhattan” and “cut off (rail travel) from Maine to North Carolina and down to Florida.”
But testimony from other panel witnesses and questioning from members of Congress at a day-long House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing made it clear that passenger rail investment of any kind will compete with equally pressing highway, waterway, port, and airport needs.
Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) called the event, the first for the committee in the new Congress, “The cost of doing nothing — why investing in our nation’s infrastructure cannot wait.” Besides Anderson, committee members heard from former U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, and representatives from the Charlotte, N.C., water board, Washington State port system, United Parcel Service, Spokane International Airport, transportation labor, and the Aerospace Industries Association discussing urban air mobility.
Anderson, along with discussing the need to address funding to replace New Jersey’s Portal Bridge and the 1908-vintage North River tunnels under the Hudson River, also raised questions about the future of Amtrak’s Beech Grove (Ind.) Heavy Maintenance facility during his testimony.
Rep. Robert Gibbs (R-Ohio) — who voted in September 2017 for legislation that would have cut Amtrak funding — wondered, “How did Amtrak let an asset like [the Portal Bridge] get depleted … and didn’t take care of it, (or) put a new bridge in?” The bridge over the Hackensack River has become a frequent cause of delays for Amtrak and NJ Transit trains. [See “New Jersey officials ask Coast Guard for relief from rail-bridge problems,” Trains News Wire, Nov. 5, 2018.]
Anderson replied that the federal government has never had “an appetite to invest in the infrastructure up and down the Northeast Corridor. When you look at the [age of] the asset base we have, the winner is the Baltimore tunnels that were dedicated by President Grant in 1873. That’s typical of what we see in the Corridor, the spine of the Northeast.”
Anderson added, “We are ready with designs and environmental approvals [to replace] the Portal Bridge and have preliminary construction underway.” On the tunnels, he said, “we have continued the design process and the environmental approval is right now at the Department of Transportation. We are fortunate at Amtrak to have as our [board of directors)]chairman Tony Coscia, who is also chairman of the Gateway Development Corp.” That non-profit organization was created to oversee the tunnel replacement and other infrastructure work, known collectively as the Gateway Project.
Anderson said Coscia and Amtrak Senior Executive Vice President Stephen Gardner, “who knows more about this project than anyone on Earth, are the leaders of that effort for Amtrak. There’s an inevitability that this is going to get built … so why [do] we spend all this time gyrating around? It’s not a Republican or Democratic issue, it’s an American issue, and what we ought to do is just fund it.”
Anderson’s comments about Beech Grove came in response to Rep. Andre Carson (D-Ind.), whose district includes the Amtrak facility. “Over time, we have to re-fleet the Amtrak rolling stock,” Anderson said, “… and over the longer term we have to figure out where we are going to do our maintenance work.” He said that the P42 locomotive fleet is being replaced and “it is maintained there.” [This isn’t completely true; Beech Grove handles wreck repair and complete overhauls; prime mover replacement and periodic maintenance is generally done in Chicago and at regional facilities.]
Anderson told Carson that Amtrak has major maintenance facility construction going on now at Seattle; Oakland, Calif.; New York’s Sunnyside Yard; and Washington’s Ivy City Engine Terminal. “I think the footprint is going to change over time,” he said, “because we’re moving to more modern equipment.” But he said there are no plans to close Beech Grove or institute layoffs.
“There are changes we need to make in our network and the way we do business to modernize from a ‘70s railroad to a railroad that will meet the demand of Millennials today,” Anderson said, “but as we go down that process we have to be very mindful of its impact on our people.”
Most of the 20 House members who questioned witnesses on Anderson’s panel asked about deficient highway bridges, deteriorating municipal water systems, lack of trained air traffic controllers, and inadequate harbor maintenance funding.
