Americans may have a short time left to take a long train ride.
The Amtrak trains that roll daily from the Bay Area to Chicago, Seattle and Los Angeles — as well as into the imaginations of the traveling public — might soon be rolling to the scrapyard instead.
Federal budget cutters once again have their eyes on long-distance Amtrak trains — the ones with bud vases in the dining car and picture windows in the lounge. If the Trump administration has its way, Amtrak will lose about half of its $1.4 billion budget and be forced next year to bump off all its long-distance runs, eliminating service to 23 states, primarily in the West and the South. Short-haul commuter lines such as the Capitol Corridor trains to Sacramento would be all that’s left.
Although Amtrak patronage was higher than ever last year, with 31.3 million passengers carried, President Trump’s budget cutters say long-distance trains carried only 15 percent of those riders.
The administration said its proposed budget for 2018 would redirect federal subsidies so Amtrak could “focus resources on the parts of the passenger rail system that provide meaningful transportation options within regions.” It said long-distance trains “have long been inefficient and incur the vast majority of Amtrak’s operating losses.”
Those operating losses totaled $227 million in fiscal 2016, Amtrak says.
Eliminating long-distance trains “would allow Amtrak to focus on better managing its state-supported and Northeast corridor train services,” the administration said. State-supported trains include California’s Capitol Corridor, San Joaquin and Pacific Surfliner lines, which are funded largely by Caltrans.
The proposed Amtrak cuts would end funding for 15 trains serving 220 cities. Gone would be the Sunset Limited (Los Angeles to New Orleans), the Lake Shore Limited (New York to Chicago) and the Empire Builder (Seattle to Chicago). Saying “Good night, America” for the last time would be the City of New Orleans, of Arlo Guthrie hit fame.
California would lose the Coast Starlight, which runs through the Bay Area twice daily on its way between Seattle and Los Angeles, and the California Zephyr, which departs every morning from Emeryville over the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies and on to Chicago.
At the Emeryville depot, passengers awaiting the departure of the diesel-powered leviathans were wailing like locomotive whistles at a grade crossing.
Trump “cuts everything people need, especially poor people,” said Walter McCain of Oakland, hunkered down in the waiting room the other morning. “Trains are a viable alternative to flying, as long as you’re not in a hurry. And there’s no need to be in a hurry. For what?”
Also not in a hurry were Mike and Marjean O’Neill of Cotati, which was a good thing because it would take them 51 hours to get to Chicago if their train left on time, which, being Amtrak, it didn’t. (The California Zephyr departed 23 minutes late, to allow the dining car crew to finish loading some chickens and the porters to take on bags of linens.)
A sleeping compartment on a train isn’t cheap, but, said Marjean O’Neill, you don’t pay extra for luggage. For their flights home from Chicago, she had calculated that the airlines would charge her $325 to carry the same five bags that Amtrak was carrying free.
“The airlines nickel and dime you for everything,” she said. “I’m tired of that crap.”
Paul Aubert of Mill Valley was heading to Los Angeles on the Coast Starlight, carrying his guitar, which he planned to play in the lounge car, and also carrying two large bottled beverages, which, he said, would surely have been confiscated if the Coast Starlight had been an airplane.
Threats to the operating budget are nothing new for Amtrak. Every year, foes say too few passengers take the long-distance trains and friends reply that the trains are more popular than ever. Every year, foes complain that trains gobble up federal transportation subsidies and friends reply that roads and airports gobble up even more.
In past years, particularly in 2002 and 2016, threatened Amtrak cuts were scrapped by members of Congress who realized their states could lose long-distance trains. But “it’s more dire this time,” said Paul Dyson, president of the Rail Passenger Association of California and Nevada. “This time, the Republicans control Congress and the White House. But this is a trivial sum of money in the scheme of things.”
Jim Mathews, president of the National Association of Railroad Passengers, said long-distance trains should fit in with Trump’s promised investment in the nation’s infrastructure. Instead, he said, “this is a budget that treats small towns and rural communities as flyover country.”
The effects of a shutdown would ripple all the way down to Maryam Ettehadieh’s snack bar inside the Emeryville station. If the big trains shut down, she said, she’s shutting down too.
“I’d have to close,” she said. “The people making the decision, what do they care? They only care about money. You think the president cares about people without money?”
She stepped outside the station as veteran conductor Dennis Hogg, ticket punch holstered at his hip, watched the last of the late linens get loaded, slammed shut the door on the rearmost car and mouthed, “Train number 6, all clear” to the engineer over his walkie-talkie. Seconds later, the California Zephyr commenced its 2,438-mile meander into the heartland.