Passenger Rail Reform and Investment Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. Chairman, let's just back up for a minute. What the gentleman would do, he says, well, they could keep operating the Northeast corridor. Well, that is good, because three-quarters of the people going from Washington, D.C., to New York are choosing rail over air, and I don't know where we would fit that many more airplanes in the already congested skies. But that is actually, unfortunately, not true because of the other routes, particularly across-country and Western routes, the obligations under their contracts to their existing employees who would lose their jobs, other obligations they would have for abandoned lines and stations, and all that would total billions of
dollars.

So even if they theoretically--and you would have to do further changes in the law rather than just taking away the money--could operate the Northeast corridor, they couldn't because of these other obligations. Any money would have to go there, and they would be immediately bankrupt because it would exceed their revenues.

So that is one, perhaps, unintended effect of the gentleman's amendment, because he does seem very sympathetic to the fact that three-quarters of the people going between Washington, D.C., and New York are choosing rail over air, and it is a growing percentage. He doesn't seem to be cognizant of the fact that ridership is up 14 percent--that is actually 4 million people in 1 year--that revenue is up, and the operating losses have been cut in half. They are down 48 percent.

Mr. Chairman, there is no passenger rail system that operates like Amtrak across a continent as large as ours without assistance from the government. Now, if you want to disconnect the country--as I recounted earlier, on 9/11, I had a Federal official who had to get back for meetings in the Northwest. He took the train. We have an aging society. I tell you, when I don't have to get on an airplane every week and I can take a little more time to get somewhere--and I think a lot of other people, as they are aging, would like to avoid the hassles of air travel. I believe ridership will continue to grow.

In the Northwest we are in a cooperative arrangement--and I pointed that out earlier--with Amtrak, where they operate our train, an Acela train which was purchased, and the ridership is up to about 1 million people a year. And it is growing quickly to avoid the already overly congested I-5 between Eugene and Seattle and avoid the hour and a half you are going to spend somewhere 60, 70 miles south of Seattle sitting in your car. So he would deprive Americans of all this for ideology--not for good reasons, but for ideology.

We should be going the other way. We should be investing more and building out a robust, 21st century rail system like every other industrial country in the world. Why do we have to be Third World?

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