Amtrak
Amtrak was created in the early 1970s to rescue America's failing passenger rail system by bringing it under the control of a single quasi-governmental authority. Trains had been the primary means of intercity travel up to World War II, during which gasoline rationing filled many trains to standing-room-only. But passenger volume rapidly fell once the war was over, the automobile assuming primacy as a symbol of prosperity and mobility, a necessity for commuters in brand-new suburbs inaccessible by rail, and a commodity whose manufacture was central to the postwar industrial boom.
Nevertheless, a number of railroads continued to run passenger trains at a loss so long as they had a robust freight traffic to subsidize them. But by the end of the 1960s competition from truck freight, combined with inept management, spawned numerous bankruptcies (such as the New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroads, which merged to form the Penn Central in a last ditch but unsuccessful effort to avoid insolvency). In 1970, when President Nixon signed the Rail Passenger Service Act creating Amtrak, fewer than 10 percent of intercity travelers were riding the rails, on a total of only 450 scheduled trains a year—and three-quarters of the scheduled trains had discontinuance petitions pending before the Interstate Commerce Commission.
Passengers boarding an Amtrak train.Many government officials in Washington were skeptical of Amtrak because they saw the new agency as an instance of throwing good money after bad, but the relatively modest appropriation passed by Congress included $40 million from the federal government plus another $100 million in guaranteed loans. A number of unprofitable routes were to be eliminated immediately, in return for which private railroads buying into the system would ultimately contribute $192 million in monthly installments over three years.
On May 1, 1971, Amtrak ran its first trains. At first, these were the same as before, but now run by the original railroads under contract (as some cities' commuter-rail systems, notably Boston's, would continue to be into the 1990s); later, the trains were motley assemblages of aging steam-heated cars in a rainbow of different companies' colors behind engines newly painted with Amtrak's red-white-and-blue arrow logo. An immediate and visible change, however, was in advertising. With such imagery as a frustrated Paul Revere on horseback surrounded by stalled bumper-to-bumper car traffic, and a one-way Boston-New York fare of $9.90 (and a round trip for just a dime more), Amtrak appealed both to the mind and the wallet.
And to a great extent the strategy worked. Students and young adults on tight budgets found the cheap fares irresistibly attractive, and enjoyed the camaraderie and adventure of train travel, even on antiquated equipment prone to failure (although, to its credit, Amtrak shops in Boston, Wilmington, Delaware, and elsewhere were reconditioning the old equipment as fast as they could) and with only a modest likelihood of on-time arrival. Thanks in large part to rebounding ridership, profitability was soon restored to the Washington-to-Boston corridor, most of which was bought outright from the bankrupt Penn Central in 1976.
Although the mingling of train travelers was arguably a social force for democratization, a second factor in the recovery of the Northeast Corridor was its first-class service. Although parlor cars were nothing new (complete with spacious seats and obliging service staff—mostly black, a holdover from the heyday of the Pullman sleepers), Amtrak sought to attract more affluent customers by introducing its priority Metroliner trains, which cut three-quarters of an hour off the Washington-New York run and whose interiors, reminiscent of airplane cabins, featured headrest-backed seats equipped with folding tray-tables, high-tech stainless-steel chemical toilets,and even on-board telephones. A fleet for ordinary coach service, with similar styling but no telephones, was gradually introduced to replace the rebuilt "Heritage" cars as well. As the quality of service improved, so did ridership among older citizens, many of whom were attracted both by the nostalgia of train travel and by affordable excursion and senior fares.
Amtrak's first decade saw a race of capital improvements against deteriorating infrastructure, for the earlier railroads had spent little on upkeep as they sank deeper into debt. In the Northeast Corridor, several hundred miles of worn track on deteriorating wooden ties were replaced by long sections of continuous-welded rail bolted to concrete, and roadbeds were regraded to allow higher operating speeds. A daily trip by a prototype turbo-train, the "Yankee Clipper"—the name borrowed from a former Boston and Maine train to Bangor, discontinued in the mid-1950s—was introduced on an experimental basis between Boston and New York for several months in 1975. (However, the turbo trimmed only a half hour off the time of the fastest conventional express run, the "Merchants' Limited," and wobbled alarmingly at its top speed of 90 miles per hour. It was quietly withdrawn from service several months later.)
Meanwhile, Congress was becoming increasingly uneasy about its allocations to Amtrak's budget, since it could not see the analogy between such subsidies and the less visible public underwriting of the competition—the highways and airports—through such self-perpetuating taxation schemes as the Highway Trust Fund. Amtrak managed to beat back challenges to its funding by pledging to become a break-even business by the turn of the century, a deadline subsequently extended to the year 2002.
In 1981, Amtrak declared that its policy would be to set fares "at a level designed to produce the highest possible revenue." Ceasing to try to compete with intercity bus prices, the company eliminated most excursion fares. By 1998, a round trip by train between Boston and New York cost more than twice the fare charged by the principal bus carrier, Greyhound; not surprisingly, many students and the urban poor now shunned the train as prohibitively expensive, so that even as Amtrak crossed the $1 billion mark in its annual revenues, it had for all practical purposes ceased to be passenger rail for all the people, and was now affordable only by the middle and upper classes.
Further Reading:
Dorin, Patrick C. Amtrak Trains and Travel. Seattle, Superior Publishing Company, 1979.
Edmonson, Harold A., editor. Journey to Amtrak: The Year History Rode the Passenger Train. Milwaukee, Kalmbach Publishing Company, 1972.
Gärtner, Michael. Riding the Pennsy to Ruin: A Wall Street Journal Chronicle of the Penn Central Debacle. Princeton, Dow Jones Books, 1971.
Hilton, George Woodman. AMTRAK: The National Railroad Passenger Corporation. Washington, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1980.
Miller, Henry W. Trains of the Broadway Limited Route, 1922-1977. Washington, Railways of the Americas, 1977.
National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak). Amtrak 20th Anniversary Source Book. National Railroad Passenger Corporation, 1990.
National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak). 1997 Annual Report. Washington, National Railroad Passenger Corporation, 1997.
Pindell, Terry. Making Tracks: An American Rail Odyssey. New York, Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.
United States: Task Force Steering Committee, Executive Office of the President. Transportation in the Northeastern Megalopolitan Corridor. Washington, Executive Office of the President, 1962.
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