The Well-Dressed Hobo by Rush Loving

Author:Rush Loving
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2016-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

The Steadfast Colonel and the Unsteady Rock

ONE FIRST-CLASS PASSAGE

THE PASSENGER BUSINESS WAS FARING NO BETTER THAN THE freight railroads of the Northeast. By 1974 Amtrak had been operating for three years, and the general consensus held that the railroad was a total disaster. There were reports of coaches in the South that lacked air conditioning and trains in the Northeast that were overcrowded and late. So, I decided to take a look.

The National Passenger Transportation Corporation, which was Amtrak’s legal entity, had been created by Congress in the wake of Penn Central’s bankruptcy filing. Initially it was to take over that road’s passenger trains because John Fullum, Penn Central’s bankruptcy judge, had threatened to shut down all passenger service. The potential plight of passengers along the Northeast Corridor and thousands of commuters from Boston to Washington caused Congress to create the company and expand it to take over the passenger trains of all but three of the nation’s railroads. For various reasons those three opted to run their own trains.

I found Amtrak’s plight to be even worse than people claimed. The marketing department was run by a former vice president of Pan American World Airways who seemed to think only airlines knew how to run passenger service. Believing that the railroads had lost passengers because they had failed to market well enough, he launched an aggressive campaign to lure people back to the railroad. His campaign was so vigorous and so creative, Amtrak was taking on a surge of new passengers but did not have enough seats to put them in.

I saw the crowding firsthand the Friday afternoon before George Washington’s birthday weekend while I was in the nation’s capital researching my story. When I rode over to Union Station to go home, the place was mobbed. More than 5,000 people snaked their way across the gloomy concourse, four abreast in lines waiting for three trains. When the gates opened for the New York–bound Montrealer, a reserve-seat train, the crowd surged forward, filling the coaches and grabbing whatever seats they could. Reserved seats seemed to mean nothing. Those who failed to get in first were doomed to stand all the way up the Corridor. I decided to go back to the hotel and catch a train in the morning.

“What scares me is if they start running cattle cars with everybody standing like in World War II, it’s going to turn people off trains forever,” a staffer on the Senate Commerce Committee had told me. It looked as if his worst fears had come true.

Poor planning wasn’t the only cause of the problem. A lack of cash had a lot to do with it. Congress had appropriated funds to establish the company and provided some loan guarantees for new equipment, but it had appropriated no money for Amtrak to run on, and, despite more passengers, the company was losing $1.50 for every $2 it took in.

When I wrote the story, I blamed Roger Lewis, Amtrak’s chairman, for failing to stand up to the Nixon administration and demand more working capital.

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