MURDER OF THE SUNSET LIMITED

MURDER OF THE SUNSET LIMITED WHO IS KILLING THE GREAT TRAINS OF AMERICA? FRANK BROWNING Four men gathered above a Sacramento hardware store in 1860 to listen to a California dream. The dreamer...

...Glorious machinery...
...Two, the Federal Government, with the aid of the highway and airline lobbies, gave away vast subsidies to build highways, airports, and air control systems for planes and buses while it continued heavy taxation of rail lines...
...Even more to the point are the figures for fuel efficiency among cars, buses, planes, and trains...
...In a word, corridors...
...Or the train will derail...
...Later he helped Seymour Hersh break the story of the My Lai massacre, and he told tales of espionage and adventure in his whistle-blowing book, The Secret Team...
...That happened quite a lot in the late 1940s and the early 1950s when the railroads^decided they could get more profit and productivity if they doubled the weight of their cars to 90- or 100-ton capacity and also doubled the length of their trains to 100, 150 cars, and more...
...An intercity bus carrying forty-four passengers at freeway speeds can provide 200 passenger miles per gallon...
...Most elected to contribute their capital "in kind...
...But the Southern Pacific could not be moved...
...The average freight car moves about twenty-three miles per day in this country...
...The delays and compensatory expenses occasioned by the Southern Pacific derailment cost Amtrak a considerable sum...
...Since the railroads were granted their lands for the explicit purpose of providing the public with fast, safe transportation, since it would cost a fraction of the $100 billion the Federal Government invested to build the interstate highways system (or the $800 billion required to rebuild it), and since the railroad rights-of-way are already ideally located with appropriate grading, Americans might be able to build a new national rail system more cheaply than either the Europeans or the Japanese have...
...Chicago to Cleveland...
...But the Southern Pacific won't hear of it...
...That leads to yet another point of confusion: Except in the northeastern states (where Amtrak bought the Boston-Washington "corridor" from Con-rail after the bankruptcy of the Penn Central), Amtrak does not operate trains...
...An especially officious dining car steward (who claimed to run a Los Angeles bistro where Barbra Streisand supped each week) bustled back and forth in a jeep, urging passengers to listen to no one except him, because he alone represented "management...
...And they bore the names of a nation in love with its own myths: the Empire Builder, the Hiawatha, the South Wind, the Twentieth Century Limited, the Super Chief, the Sunset, and a dozen others...
...A more sophisticated objection is that even if Amtrak covers all its direct costs, the railroads are' still losing because they are not making a real profit for the use of their personnel and equipment—never mind that the taxpayer is footing the lion's share of the bill...
...That is, they unEven river boats have won fatter subsidies than railroads railroads stopped any innovative engineering or design for passenger cars even before World War II, then stopped building them altogether soon after the war, and it is easy to see why America is known for operating the worst passenger trains in the world...
...We can't afford to be frittering away money on bonbons when there's not enough money for hamburger—and as Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis sees it, Amtrak is a very sugary bonbon...
...Then one day they lifted the order...
...And the eastbound Sunset No...
...Forty years ago it and the equally famous Twentieth Century Limited drew photographers from across the nation as the two trains "raced" out of Chicago's suburban Englewood Station for the sixteen-hour overnight, ride to New York...
...Private railroad conductors, who are generally sympathetic to Amtrak, have many stories of that kind...
...It carried 107,000 passengers that year...
...The paradox is that passenger trains are undergoing fantastic resurgence in public demand...
...Boeing's 747-200B comes in at sixty-two passenger miles per gallon...
...Boeing's 727-200, the most popular plane in the history of commercial flight, has a top efficiency of just over thirty-six passenger miles per gallon...
...Amtrak people counter that the Southern Pacific and all the freight railroads are fully compensated for their "avoidable costs," the costs that would be avoided by not running passenger trains for Amtrak...
...Pounding their way west, the trains swept through the vast and empty lands once held by the Indians and built the foundation of industrial America...
...By dawn the westbound Sunset No...
...At one point in the late 1960s, all diners and sleepers were removed from the train...
...Krebs paused, and answered bluntly, "Yes...
...When a train bound from Miami to New York crashed head-on with a Seaboard Coast Line (SCL) freight last spring in North Carolina, headline writers across the country wrote that the Amtrak engineer had disregarded signal warnings and caused the wreck...
...2 remained stationary until noon the next day...
...No, not 'absolute,' " he admitted...
...Thirteen hours and twenty-four minutes behind schedule, our engineer pulled his whistle cord and we again began to move...
...Without high-speed track, you can't run highspeed trains...
...Most of the time...
...A Conrail engineer told me his superiors run a constant war against Amtrak...
...Nonetheless, delays on the Sunset are as regular as the clacking of the rails...
...The National Transportation Policy Study Commission, a joint creation of both houses of Congress, estimates that the Federal Goverment must spend between $800 billion and $1 trillion in the next fifteen years just to prevent the system from disintegrating into rubble...
...The price tag for all that automotive freedom is doubling every two years...
...White-haired and still trim, he is a squarish-looking man who favors meeting friends in Washington's private clubs...
...I fail to see how eliminating nearly half the nation's passenger rail system would have been responsive to the call for safe and efficient transportation...
...It has no value if it only serves the individual...
...Add in the money spent on roads by state and local agencies, however, and "user fees" cover only two-thirds of the price tag...
...And so it seemed to Fletcher Prouty eight years ago, when he came to Amtrak as special agent for cage rattling and trouble shooting...
...Their wheels are locked into the straight forward position and beveled somewhat like cones...
...If All across the nation, people are clamoring to get aboard Amtrak trains...
...At midnight the time had been pushed back to 1 p.m...
...The wisdom of his choice is evident from the time he settles himself in a luxuriously upholstered seat in the train . . . until he reaches the journey's end...
...For the public this arrangement creates perpetual confusion...
...Inside the Sunset, most of the 125 passengers turned to drink, poker, tale-swapping, circumspect dope-smoking, and the discreet seductions that ocean liners and passenger trains were made for...
...I can't understand what's going on in Washington...
...The rest work for the same private railroads as always, and are assigned to Amtrak trains...
...And, more importantly, because the private railroads have flatly refused to allow fast, frequent passenger trains to run on their tracks...
...Thus the steam power could not be hooked up and the air conditioners would not work...
...It had left Los Angeles the night before and was not a second late as it pulled away from the dilapidated mausoleum that had been a handsome Texas railroad station...
...Even the best possible projections for this decade would raise that figure to no more than ninety...
...It is a peculiar way to run a railroad, or any business,not dedicated to economic suicide...
...Even worse, under the terms of Amtrak's contract with SCL—the same basic contract it carries with all private railroads—Amtrak was required to assume all liability for the accident even though its personnel had nothing to do with causing it...
...The average for freights is twenty miles per hour...
...When you plan to move trains, you must plan to move millions of people----One train a day anywhere can be little more than a costly curiosity, like the circus which comes to town each year...
...Such considerations were not of particular interest to the Southern Pacific, however...
...Department of Transportation analysts, the average number of passengers per car in the United States works out to about 2.2...
...For trains that operate on electrical power, the efficiency is even greater...
...Amtrak trains waited while freights proceeded...
...New York to Buffalo...
...Three, oil was so underpriced, largely through American political and economic control of the Middle East, that the private car, traveling on publicly subsidized highways, offered transportation so cheap that nothing could compete with it...
...At first the Southern Pacific told Amtrak the rails would be clear by 6 a.m...
...Justice Department lawyer Robert Patterson questioned conductor Roland Guidry (father of Yankee baseball pitcher Ron Guidry) about the history of Southern Pacific service...
...As to Gianturco's plan to run new service from Sacramento to Oakland to San Jose—a strip housing more than four million people—the Southern Pacific considers it out of the question...
...Passenger trains had priority, and we were strictly accountable to the superintendent if we delayed the trains...
...There were "other delays along the route...
...Mostly, however, the railroads dislike Amtrak because it makes them no money, or at least very little...
...In America, some railroads have been nationalized, too—but only after they went bankrupt and the Government was forced to pick up the tab...
...Of late, journey's end has been the only thing passengers could hope for on the Sunset...
...Nothing, however, quite compares with the grandiloquent Sunset Limited, once billed by the Southern Pacific as its "grand hotel" on rails...
...Given that the French, the Italians, the English, and the Japanese have already built comparable lines, it should be a cinch for Amtrak to create its own version...
...As a consolation, all meals for the balance of the ride were on Amtrak, which could have been fine but for one detail: The diner, like all the other cars, had turned into a sweat box...
...Alan Boyd, who once ran a freight railroad, the Illinois Central, prefers not to describe his model project as a fraud...
...Shortly before noon three Greyhound buses arrived, carrying 133 passengers from the westbound Sunset...
...It is not the way to do things from anyone's point of view...
...More than 84 per cent of intercity travel in the United States is in automobiles on the open road, not on airplanes...
...Alfred Perlman, one-time head of the New York Central and now chairman emeritus of the Western Pacific, best exemplifies the attitude of the freight haulers...
...It was more than human warmth that had brought comfort to the night...
...That happens quite a lot these days...
...Theoretically, trains make obvious sense...
...In fact, the wreck had happened at 3:01 CST the afternoon before, two hours before the Sunset Limited had arrived in El Paso...
...Unlike cars, locomotives do not have steering wheels...
...We had a lot of responsibility and almost no authority as we operated on other people's track with other people's employes and often at omer people's convenience...
...Right now, roughly half of Amtrak's passengers nationwide ride the twenty-six daily trains running each way between New York and Washington...
...We also could have hiked ten miles north to the Rio Grande for a mid-morning swim, but we were advised that the Border Guards were sometimes known to shoot uninvited bathers...
...Only a Federal court order later that month forced the Southern Pacific to honor its contractual obligations to run the Sunset on schedule...
...It is a peculiar way to run a railroad...
...Nowhere else in the world is there a stretch of urban clutter so well suited to high-speed train service...
...Corridors are those great long blotches of red or yellow on population maps—the urban sprawl that Americans supposedly want to escape...
...No question about it," Prouty insisted the first time we met to talk trains...
...Admittedly, he says, "There is no way we can run adequate passenger service on the existing track network designed to accommodate very heavy freight operations...
...The Sunset Limited lost $9.8 million in 1977, according to a recent study of Amtrak operations...
...As with most simple questions, the answer is infinitely complex, suitable for graduate economics seminars...
...We, the taxpayers, were given their liabilities, the money-losing passenger system, and they, the railroads, were to keep their prize assets, the highly profitable freight lines plus vast holdings of land, timber, mining, and oil, all of which the loaded on Amtrak all of their dilapidated passenger cars, most of which were twenty to thirty years old...
...The train had no air conditioning, not because of equipment failure but because most old Amtrak trains operate their heat and air conditioning units on steam power, piped through hoses from the locomotives in an archaic system inherited from another century...
...One, the private railroads in the 1950s initiated a rail reconstruction program that made smooth, highspeed train travel virtually impossible...
...In order for the train to turn, the wheels must ride up into each curve of the track much the way race cars do at Daytona...
...Magnificent nostalgia...
...We could start a second train tomorrow and fill it up," Caltrans director Adriana Gian-turco says...
...After all, they add, look at the number of railroads that went bankrupt trying...
...As soon as they noticed their freight cars wobbling off the tracks on the super-elevated bends, they made the obvious adjustments: They flattened out the track...
...Yet even if tomorrow Superman should arrive bearing magic wear-proof metals from Krypton, Amtrak could not provide modern passenger service over the freight lines that now exist...
...At one point during the hearing, John Ramsey, Southern Pacific general manager-assistant vice president for operations, declared, "I think the Southern Pacific has, and does, accord absolute priority to the Sunset...
...Today the trip is eighteen-and-one-half hours...
...A standard Amtrak train with six modern coaches, two cafe cars, and one engine, loaded to capacity with 600 riders, will produce 400 passenger miles per gallon...
...Or, as the president of the coal-hauling Norfolk and Western Railroad put it, "People like to watch trains but they don't like to ride them, so Amtrak is not providing a system of transportation but a form of kinetic art...
...More than half of that goes to the private automobile...
...What use, after all, did a freight hauler have for passenger cars...
...There is no mystery to the demand for these trains...
...The Sunset, which operates only three days a week, is more like the overnight carnival...
...Amtrak reimburses the railroads for their labor costs, but it has no power to discipline the crews for poor or incompetent work...
...Passengers who had missed their connections were offered free hotel rooms or plane tickets...
...For the balance of the year, the Sunset ran on time only one trip out of three...
...I don't give a good God damn about your passenger trains," the Southern Pacific executive declared, according to Larson's sworn testimony...
...Amtrak has no Shinkansen...
...The freights don't want Amtrak on their lines for many reasons...
...The Northeast corridor is a fraud," Amtrak's own Fletcher Prouty says...
...Patterson: "What happened when Judge Penn issued the consent order giving priority to the Sunset...
...In those countries the railroads have been nationalized since the end of World War II, or before...
...lists...
...His obsession was to build the most spectacular piece of technology America had ever known: the transcontinental railroad, two ribbons of steel which when spiked to the earth would rush millions of Americans to the end of the Western frontier and open the door to the glittering promise of Oriental commerce...
...It leaves every ten minutes...
...Yet the people who screamed loudest and longest about subsidies paid to Amtrak carefully screen the fact that since World War II, buses, airlines, ocean liners, and even river boats have all won far fatter subsidies than the railroads have...
...Until the track could be cleared, we would wait...
...To keep passengers from starving on the two-and-one-half-day trip, the Southern Pacific installed vending machines stocked with cold sandwiches...
...Add to all this the fact that the taxpayers had given them long ago in the expectation that they would provide perpetual full rail service...
...Already the national interstate highway system is collapsing far faster than state maintenance crews can repair it...
...By December 1979, Amtrak asked the Department of Justice to sue Southern Pacific for sabotaging its service by consciously and illegally running freights ahead of Amtrak trains...
...It has no conductors...
...Truckers in the Middle West complain that roads there are so bad on some stretches that they can barely control their rigs and keep up schedule...
...And that is not a one-time expense...
...More than half of U.S...
...Six trains operate daily each way between Los Angeles and San Diego, and California State Transportation Department planners claim there are enough potential riders to double the service...
...The fact is, however, that planes are not the real competitor to trains...
...In August 1980 alone, Amtrak turned away 400,000 requests for tickets on just three of its Western routes...
...railroad policy have been the private freight-hauling roads and the gaggle of transportation industries that have long been lined up at the trough of taxpayer subsidy...
...Consider, for example, the magnificent Broadway Limited...
...It is accorded a high priority, however...
...There wasn't anything wrong with the track before, and they didn't work on the track while the order was on...
...For the time being, however, there remains a third way: The millions of acres of land owned by the railroads are more than adequate to provide the rights-of-way necessary for new, exclusively passenger railroads to be built in those congested corridors where they are most needed...
...Caltrans and Amtrak would jointly finance the train and pay the Southern Pacific to operate it...
...The track was clear, but the Southern Pacific would only permit freights to use it until further inspection...
...From an average speed of seventy-five miles per hour in the mid-1950s, American passenger trains have dropped to a nationwide average of forty-four miles per hour...
...The dreams had been preferable...
...Instead it runs a cellophane tape and baling twine concoction of trains that resemble rusted flintlocks far more than speeding bullets...
...On this train, a Southern Pacific freight locomotive without steam attachments had been run in front of the two Amtrak engines on the westbound train...
...In short, trains are not just for old folks any more...
...His railroad has steadfastly refused to run any Amtrak trains on its spectacular Feather River route where the California Zephyr used to run: "If they came to me with any of their contracts, I'd tell 'em to go peddle their papers...
...Quaint anachronism...
...As the Japanese are fond of noting, the Shinkansen saved the nation more than 40 million barrels of oil in a single year, which today would cost some $1.2 billion...
...CST— and then it chose to call Amtrak's Washington office...
...Besides facing national bankruptcy as a result of oil consumption, the nation will continue to pay spiraling costs for highway maintenance unless there is a decisive shift to alternative transportation modes...
...The dreamer was a young engineer...
...In a model of understatement, a recent Amtrak corporate report acknowledged the near hopelessness Amtrak faced at birth: "Our beginning was not auspicious...
...That means that last year, for example, they spent $6 billion to achieve an overall speed of twenty miles per hour...
...A study compiled by the U.S...
...The penalty they paid for abandoning passengers was an agreement to allow Amtrak (the public) to pay them for the trains that would run over their tracks for the twenty-five years following Amtrak's creation...
...That is, after all, what the French, the Italians, and the Japanese have done...
...The second-heaviest demand for trains comes from the great, golden automobile state, California...
...Operating crews on both trains worked for the SCL and were running on SCL tracks under SCL orders...
...The national cost of all that driving is enormous...
...Southern Pacific naturally claimed that it bore no responsibility for Amtrak's trouble, even though its two-hour delay in notifying Amtrak prevented the Sunset from being rerouted over Santa Fe tracks...
...Last year it added $750 million to the $1.6 billion already budgeted for improvement of the Northeast corridor, Amtrak's showcase...
...Last year, at the height of the gas lines, Jimmy Carter proclaimed National Transportation Week and then announced plans to cut Amtrak by 43 per cent...
...Add another engine, another cafe car, and nine more coaches, and the figure rises to 500...
...This exchange followed: Provost: "About April 1979, freights began to get positive meets with Amtrak...
...Which leads to part two of the Prouty Thesis: The regular use of 90-to-100-ton freight cars destroys track so fast— actually flattens it out like silly putty— that steel rail often lasts only one-tenth as long as it does in countries where fifty-ton freight cars are used...
...The engineer, Theodore Judah, has settled into the shadows of history...
...For a hundred years the glamor, the ingenuity, and the unbridled energy of American enterprise revolved around such individuals and their railroads...
...I pushed up the shade for a glimpse...
...In France, freight trains average sixty miles per hour...
...But if the elegance of the old Sunset is a waning memory, so is the practicality of the automobile...
...The highway lobby, Amtrak's most bitter enemy, counters that so-called "user fees" have more than paid for the Federal expenditures...
...Lacking enough centrifugal force, it will simply quiver, go kaplunk, and tumble into the curve, like a beginning bicyclist who hasn't learned to pedal fast enough...
...Rail passenger service is really a wholesale operation," Boyd told a gathering of transportation planners last year...
...The cost in maintenance is going to be up to nineteen times what it should because the Department of Transportation mandated us to run Conrail freights on our tracks...
...If the train is moving fast but the elevation is too low, its wheels will bump into the lip of the rail and the passengers will feel as though they are in a lateral whiplash machine...
...What they're really doing is running the world's largest warehousing system, while we at Amtrak, running a passenger service, are caught in the middle...
...Stationary trains are notoriously free of bumps...
...It has no crews...
...Amtrak has no engineers...
...He has called for cuts of up to 75 per cent of Amtrak mileage, and according to Amtrak President Alan Boyd, the proposed budget would actually reduce the nationwide system to nothing more than a high-speed commuter service connecting cities along the Boston-Washington corridor...
...petroleum stock goes for transportation, moving people and things back and forth across the continent...
...The destruction of the railroads in this country is one of the worst scandals of the Twentieth Century...
...The star witness in the case for trains is the Shinkansen, the so-called Japanese bullet train...
...The Sunset left New Orleans just after noon.,A lunch of fresh Louisiana crayfish was served as the train lumbered across the Mississippi bound for Los Angeles and Oakland...
...Its trains interfere with freight operations...
...Prouty ought to be a character from one of Graham Greene's tales of civilized spying...
...Now the passenger trains run late, sometimes very late, and we have a terrible problem trying to soothe angry passengers...
...There is nothing like West Texas to remind the wayward traveler of just how desperate Judge Bean's desperados must have been to have holed up in such a place...
...Neither the Santa Fe, which owns the tracks south of Los Angeles, nor the Southern Pacific, which owns those to the north, have blinked an eyelash in their steadfast refusals...
...At 11:26 we were to leave Sanderson, Texas...
...11 Gasoline prices have almost tripled in the last five years, sending tens of millions of Americans in search of alternatives to driving: California, probably the most car-conscious state in America, posted a 5.6 per cent decline in the number of cars on its roads between the winters of 1979 and 1980...
...The $2.35 billion we're spending on corridor improvement is a fraud because you cannot create better track on the system that's being built...
...There is also the tricky matter of subsidies...
...Less efficient than cars are airplanes...
...Assuming fuel consumption of twenty miles per gallon, the fuel efficiency of today's cars is about forty-four passenger miles per gallon...
...So far, only a positive decision from the National Arbitration Board, which is currently hearing her requests, can compel the Southern Pacific to run the trains...
...The crew was ready to strike...
...For trains to ride smoothly, there must be both adequate speed and adequate track elevation...
...All that is required is that the railroads return the rights-of-way to the nation, which so generously provided them in the first place...
...It takes more workers to operate a train than to drive a bus...
...It's really sort of pitiful when people call up and ask what day the Sunset gets in, not what hour," remarked Amtrak President Alan Boyd...
...The Southern Pacific company, however, elected not to inform Amtrak of the derailment before 5:30p.m...
...Once the train had arrived at Sanderson, hardly a central switching center, there was no choice but to wait...
...We would be carted around the derailment to Del Rio, where the other train would be hauled in reverse back to New Orleans...
...Most railroads slowed down their trains...
...Provost: "The men in the Lafayette [Southern Pacific] office just laughed and said, 'It won't last!' " Coincidentally, in April 1979 Amtrak contract officer James L. Larson and Southern Pacific Assistant General Manager C.T...
...Two drinks after dinner (pan-fried frozen trout, B +) we retreated to the seclusion of my roomette, a tiny mauve-and-maroon cubicle with two great mirrors and a window, designed for an intimacy only slightly short of the claustrophobic...
...Southern Pacific demanded good work from us...
...Even before Amtrak's creation, the Southern Pacific did its best to kill off the Sunset...
...And that gave passenger engineers two choices: Rattle the riders to death and risk derailment, or slow down the train...
...That is true...
...Guidry: "When I started in passenger service in the early 1960s, passenger trains were a pleasure to work on...
...If the biggest economic problem in this country is inflation fueled by the rising price of petroleum and we're burning up 25 per cent of it in the gas tank, don't you think it makes sense to start working on a system that could cut consumption by 80 or 90 per cent...
...Acrobatics are not recommended...
...And, since 1978, the bus companies have been completely exempted from paying Federal highway taxes...
...To do that, their basic function must be to provide superior service at good speed, frequently, between dense population centers," Boyd maintains...
...No moving machine yet invented is remotely as efficient as the modern train...
...Electrically powered, it carried 124 million passengers in 1977 and consumed the energy equivalent of 4.4 million barrels of crude oil...
...The railroads have been spending roughly twenty-five cents of every revenue dollar on maintenance of way for the last quarter century," Prouty says...
...Amtrak was an enormous boondoggle, but not in the way it is usually described...
...At that moment the Sunset was preparing to pull out of El Paso, unaware of the trouble ahead...
...The $658 million that Amtrak "lost" in 1980 is an acknowledged Government subsidy...
...Some people thought we were created in 1971 to die soon thereafter...
...But he is better known among rail watchers as the creator of the Prouty Thesis...
...Later still he provoked press attention with his speculations about the CIA's role in Watergate...
...The era of the auto as we have known it, with helter-skelter construction of highways, the sprawl of our cities, and the dependence upon cheap liquid fuel, has ended," Alan Boyd argues...
...Everywhere else in the modern world—England, Germany, France, Italy, Japan especially—transportation planners are working night and day to build new rail systems...
...They are also the places where passenger trains make more sense than any other form of transportation...
...There are, of course, some standard responses: Americans love the freedom of the private automobile...
...1 had arrived at Del Rio, fifty miles east of the derailment, unable to advance...
...And that leads to the real crisis facing public transportation before the end of this decade...
...Not even Amtrak, however, argues that its future lies with congested urban nightmares, they are still the places where most Americans live and the places where most cars, planes, and buses burn their fuel...
...Scenery, time, comfort are all factors in determining the choice, and after carefully considering the points and carefully weighing them in his mind, the superior, up-to-date equipment and advantages of the Sunset Limited never fail to appeal to his better judgment and eventually decide for him...
...If the train is a long, heavy, slow-moving freight and the elevation is too steep, it will also derail on the curve...
...No one, neither Amtrak's executives nor the outspoken Adriana Gianturco, has proposed nationalizing railroads that are making money...
...Last year there were about 8,000 derailments, nearly all of them freight trains...
...With virtually no power of enforcement, it is a service company which pays private railroads to haul its trains over their tracks on their schedules with their employes...
...When we don't have crews out replacing the beat-up rails...
...Or at least we could have dabbled for a few hours in the dalliances of Juarez, across the border...
...Ridiculous, say the national transportation planners of the Reagan Administration...
...Alan Boyd, Amtrak's president, often tends to agree...
...It represents Government bureaucracy, which railroaders have always hated...
...Had the Shinkansen passengers made their trips in ordinary cars, they would have used 20.6 million barrels of gasoline— or about 46 million barrels of crude oil, the amount of crude required to distill the gasoline...
...Running time from Boston to New York will be three-and-one-half hours...
...It owns no rails outside the Northeast corridor...
...Are they all standing on their heads...
...Hours seemed to disappear once we lost our space in the lineup between the Southern Pacific freights...
...The 100-mile-per-hour Shinkansen runs 663 miles from Tokyo to Osaka, a rather long corridor...
...Washington to Boston...
...Seven hours later, after an uncommonly smooth and restful night, light squeaked in beneath the blind...
...I could see nothing except a hulking Cotton Belt boxcar...
...When the three locomotives were shuttled to the rear of the train to pull it backwards toward New Orleans, the freight engine was sandwiched between the Amtrak engines and the passenger cars...
...Conference of Mayors last year reported, "Federal highway spending has been nineteen times greater than rail funding, airways spending five times greater, and domestic waterways spending more than twice as great...
...We would be returned to El Paso...
...On that point, Secretary of Transportation Lewis agrees, having recently stated that the Northeast corridor improvements can never produce bullet-style trains as long as Conrail bounces over the tracks...
...Besides worn-out track—which caused most of those derailments— freight engineers face another problem...
...It improved on that record in 1979 and was 98 per cent booked last summer, but Amtrak's enemies cite trains like the Sunset...
...Our misfortune was to have been stuck behind the derailment of SP Freight No...
...According to U.S...
...It is a dilemma that leaves Prouty exasperated: "Oh, sure we can run a fast schedule...
...Patterson: "What is it like now...
...The sharper the turn, the steeper the "super-elevation" of the track must be to accommodate the centrifugal force of the train created by its greater speed...
...They hauled steel, brick, corn, cattle, and people...
...Patterson asked Dassas Provost, another conductor, "When did you notice a change in preference in the Southern Pacific toward passenger trains...
...At 11:26 p.m...
...Fletcher Prouty never hedges...
...It's an aggravation...
...It seemed a safe bet...
...Once again I pushed it up, and there sat the same dirty red Cotton Belt boxcar...
...Guidry: "Things have changed...
...It was a sweet deal the railroads struck when Amtrak was created...
...Armageddon itself will probably arrive before private industries the size of the Southern Pacific are nationalized in America...
...But it fucked up Amtrak's schedule...
...Based solely on its continuing deficits—more than $650 million in fiscal year 1980—the case for Amtrak may seem weak...
...When the project is completed, it will zip high-speed metroliners from Penn Station in New York to Capitol Hill in two hours and forty minutes—a schedule that even the airlines can't beat...
...On the other hand, it might be well for such blustery giants as the Southern Pacific to recall that the magnificent empires they control were all made possible by the generosity of taxpayers who freely granted the lands on which the first transcontinental rails were laid...
...The fact is that Amtrak had no engineer on the train...
...For the same speed, weight, and volume, rail potentially requires less work than bus to go the same distance...
...The Denver Zephyr, a shiny, steel streamliner, once hurtled its passengers over 1,000 miles of prairie from Chicago to Denver in just fifteen hours—from Happy Hour to breakfast...
...Several minutes later he was asked, "Does the Sunset Limited have absolute priority on the Lafayette [Louisiana] Division...
...Now there wasn't anything wrong with that track, except we didn't need to run faster than fifty, and it was a way to put the screws to Amtrak...
...Way down...
...Some 645 Amtrak trains were completely sold out for this summer by April 1. More than 13,500 customers were put on waiting Frank Browning is an associate editor of Inquiry magazine and the author, with John Gerassi, of "The American Way of Crime...
...In an earlier life, he coordinated contract airlines for the Air Force and the CIA...
...Gianturco also wants to double the Los Angeles-San Diego service and extend it north to Santa Barbara...
...Every time a Conrail freight passes by with its ninety tons of taconite, it destroys the track...
...Since the mid-19708, Amtrak and the Eastern Airlines "shuttle" have each carried about the same number of people in the Northeast corridor—just under 1.2 million per month...
...In Amtrak's suit, Southern Pacific employes testified to their bosses' rising hostility toward passenger trains...
...We began operation with old equipment...
...To quote a Mitre Corporation study prepared in 1973 for the Department of Transportation: "Based on friction and aerodynamic drag considerations, rail always has an advantage over bus...
...Why then, it might be asked, have the trains of America been so terrible and why is Amtrak in such a financial hole...
...The crew was exhausted and at the edge of mutiny...
...A broken rail somewhere in the swamps east of Beaumont, Texas, cost an additional three hours...
...Back in California, where the Southern Pacific reigns supreme, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has been waiting for two years to initiate a second daily train between Oakland and Los Angeles...
...Even the jackrabbits stare out of their burrows with homicidal eyes...
...Claims of conscious sabotage by many private railroads are common...
...The people today don't have the time or the money for that kind of leisurely graceful travel...
...The Southern Pacific's deliberate delays in Texas were so notorious that Amtrak went to court...
...But the fraud is in the price tag...
...Fuel efficiency is best measured in passenger miles per gallon of fuel consumed...
...Telling reporters that "the Amtrak engineer" had failed to read the track signals properly, SCL representatives led the public to believe that the train was under Amtrak's control...
...Biased as he may be, he is probably right...
...As one kindly old Texas conductor said, "Sunset riders were people who were accustomed to having other people wait on them...
...At its simplest, the Prouty Thesis states that the nation's railroads have spent the last thirty years consciously downgrading their track for heavy freight operations in such a way that passenger trains could no longer operate on it safely and comfortably at high speeds...
...Late-night relief is also discouraged, as the plumbing is carefully stashed beneath the bed...
...No railroad in America is as hostile to passenger trains as the Southern Pacific, Amtrak officials complain...
...I remember when they posted a fifty-mile-per-hour slow order on a stretch of track south of Philly," he said...
...Later Southern Pacific's vice president for transportation, Robert Krebs, was asked whether there was "an unfavorable attitude toward the operation of passenger trains within the Southern Pacific...
...They were to board our train, which, crew and all, was to be pulled backwards all the way to Los Angeles...
...But in fact...
...H France, England, Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, Canada, and Japan, sizing up the phenomenal energy savings trains can provide, have embarked on such intense rail expansion programs that their own rail car factories are working at capacity production...
...First, because fast passenger trains would inevitably be stacked up behind the twenty-mile-per-hour freights...
...Sleek steel projectiles whistling through soft summer nights, they were the symbols of a young, blustery, arrogant nation bent on conquering the continent and bringing forth untold bounty for all the world to see...
...Food began to run out in the diner...
...Torpid lunch...
...Los Angeles to San Diego...
...We would be bused all the way to New Orleans...
...On the road to California, the Sunset was the nonpareil...
...It's just plain fantasy if people in this country think we can keep on going the way we have been," Gianturco says...
...At Amtrak, Prouty is called Senior Director for Corporate Communications, a role he has played under each of the railroad's three presidents...
...The only people on the trains who work directly for Amtrak are the cooks, stewards, waiters, porters, and service attendants...
...thus they assigned the irresponsibility to Amtrak...
...When the suit was filed, reporters were told, "Our operating rules require that preference be given to passenger trains, and we follow those rules...
...Trains must serve a lot of people...
...Trainside stories in Sanderson simmered...
...We were part of a system that had lost hundreds of millions of dollars each year...
...Within a few minutes we were bouncing along toward the barren land where Judge Roy Bean had consigned his enemies to the hanging tree...
...The average American automobile still gets less than twenty miles per gallon...
...Altogether there are ten major Eastern cities strung out along the 456-mile route...
...But trains—in the 1980s...
...But there is a catch...
...I awoke...
...The Prouty Thesis might also be called the Persecution and Damnation of the Passenger Train Rider as Directed by the Demented and Greedy Directors of the Freight Railroad Industry with the Blind Connivance of the Federal Government...
...The fortunes that accrued to his original four partners made them the richest men in the West—just as it made their railroad, the Southern Pacific, the most powerful corporation in California...
...Southern Pacific management has been predictably taciturn about its Amtrak relations...
...The real beneficiaries of U.S...
...Passenger trains have failed in America for three major reasons...
...No one wants to spend four days crossing a continent which can be crossed by air in six hours...
...For the first time since Amtrak's creation, Congress has begun to realize the extent of the problem...
...All of these are partially true but mostly false explanations...
...His dream, of course, was realized in 1869 with the driving of the famous golden spike at Promontory Point, Utah...
...1. Thirteen of its boxcars had tumbled off the track into a gulch and left the main line blocked in both directions...
...Had Amtrak been informed in time to hold the train in El Paso, a detour could have been arranged and some passengers could have been provided direct air passage...
...By 7:30 in the morning, those passengers possessed of any curiosity could have written doctoral dissertations on Sanderson, Texas—its motel, its two filling stations, the post office, the Main Street Cafe, and its speckled history of cattle rustling and banditry...
...The critics who claim that Amtrak is a boondoggle are not altogether wrong...
...Now the same trip takes just under twenty hours, offers "gourmet frozen" food (at least better than airline cellulose), and sometimes carries a lounge car...
...It is a simple matter of the rising price of energy, namely gas and oil...
...Years of railroading devotion have generated in me a subliminal sense of station scheduling...
...The anti-Amtrak lobby claims that passenger trains are a foolish waste of money because the railroads can never compete with airplanes for speed and efficiency...
...However much we may want to escape these great, the deficits as proof positive that the system is unworkable...
...They also agreed to contribute total capital to Amtrak of $197 million, calculated according to a variety of complicated formulas...
...Southern Pacific insists that the hidden maintenance costs of repairing passenger-grade track lose the railroad several million dollars a year...
...ridership has increased up to 1,000 per cent on certain routes...
...Babers met to discuss rerouting proposals to improve Amtrak service...
...Iboarded the eastbound Sunset in El Paso on a hot spring afternoon...
...The Southern Pacific offered a description in the first issue of its own Sunset magazine in May 1898: "When making a journey across the great American Continent a traveler in these enlightened days questions himself as to the facilities offered by the many routes now in existence...
...During the summer and fall of 1979, the Southern Pacific failed to operate the Sunset Limited on schedule even once in a five-month period...
...For decades the Century and the Broadway, both all-Pullman trains, boasted that they offered the fastest and the finest train service in the world, complete with showers, barber shops, elegant lounge service, and multi-coursed dining...
...The roar of their engines was the roar of limitless progress, and its echo reverberated throughout a rich and confident country whose people were certain of the glory that awaited them...
...A porter, distraught at missing a New Orleans rendezvous planned for that night, angrily kicked the car's front wheel, cursed, then hobbled back aboard to nurse his damaged toe...

Vol. 45 • June 1981 • No. 6


 
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