What's Going On With This Weird Moment In U.S. Passenger Rail? (Jim Mathews)

Kea Wilson29min

Kea Wilson00:08

Kea. Hey guys, it's Kea. Welcome to the break. So it's no secret that the new circle has been a bit of a whirlwind lately, but almost every day, there seems to be a story about one topic, the transformation of the passenger rail system in the United States, whether it's secretary Sean Duffy withholding grants for our country's first high speed rail line, or Congress surprisingly showing up for Amtrak in its annual budget, the narrative has been confusing, complex and a little hard to follow unless you are plugged all the way in. So I thought it'd be nice today if we took a step back with the most plugged in rail expert I know, and the first person I call when a story about this essential mode crosses my desk, and that is Jim Matthews, the president of the national rail passengers Association today, Jim helped me break down some of the biggest rail headlines from the first months of the new Trump administration, and a few that you might have missed, like a major freight rail merger that could massively shake up the experience of riding a passenger train in our country. There's a lot to unpack and more links in the show notes, if you want to dive deeper, but let's just get into it. Here is my conversation with Jim Matthews of the national rail passengers Association. Jim Matthews of the national rail passengers Association, welcome to the break. How are things in Maine today?

Speaker 101:36

Oh. Maine is beautiful. How can you not love Maine? It is just gorgeous. I'm sitting here. I honest to goodness, I really am working, but I'm right now looking across the peaceful waters of molasses pond and the neighbors across the pond on a kayak. And, you know, boy, internet's a great thing, isn't it? I get to sit here and do my job and sit at a pond while I do it

Kea Wilson02:02

well, thank you for all the hard work you're doing to extend train lines in Maine. I've gotten a little bit of a teaser of that during our pre show, but we're here to talk about a bigger topic, which is basically the state of passenger rail in America is particularly under this very interesting Trump administration that we find ourselves under right now. Why don't you start by telling me a little bit about your work, what the national rail passengers association is, what you want folks to know about it, and maybe we can segue then into how you're navigating this interesting political moment. Is the state of the rail union strong right now?

Speaker 102:39

Okay, so the rail passengers we've been around since 1967 so we predate Amtrak, and we were created when passenger rail in the United States was in danger of completely winking out of existence, and it brought together grassroots advocates from across the country to save passenger rail. And our founders and original members helped to create Amtrak. They were pivotal in creating the legislation, which in turn created Amtrak. And so a lot of our original members, who we still have today, have a kind of proprietary interest in Amtrak, they kind of feel like, hey, we we created you, so we care about you, and that that is one of the sort of lingering effects of the fact that we did this, and we've been so involved in passenger rail advocacy across the country for so long. We work in obviously supporting Amtrak and Amtrak programs, but also commuter rail, transit, busses, connections to and from rail. And we care very much about first mile, last mile, types of connections. So we care about how you get to and from the station and bike shares and those kinds of things. We have 127,000 members, donors and supporters around the country, and we're always looking for more, whether it's people who join us, people who, you know, want to just make financial contributions, or people who volunteer. We're always, always hoping to grow so the State of the Union in terms of rail, I guess I'll say, is cautious and confused. Over the past eight years or so, passenger rail has had and continues to have, honestly, a lot of Republican champions, especially in the Senate, people like Senator Danes of Montana, or Senator Moran of Kansas, Senator wicker Mississippi, just to name a handful. So the picture has always been a little bit more nuanced than Democrats love trains. Republicans hate trains. Now, having said that, has the tone shifted a little. Yes, it has. The house especially is really amped up the rhetoric around Amtrak shortcomings, and we had a Senate hearing a couple of months ago that. Into Senator Moreno, the freshman senator from Ohio who, surprise, owns a car dealership spending more federal money to make sure that teenagers could buy cars. So we've definitely seen a shift. And of course, Elon Musk didn't help early on in the administration talking about how much better passenger rail is in China, which, honestly, it is. But then he went to use China as an example to make a case for privatization, which is completely absurd. I mean, for more than a decade, China was building 1500 miles of new high speed rail every single year with government money and government planning. So looking ahead a little bit, Senate appropriators working on the fiscal 26 budget came up with $2.4 billion in Amtrak operating money for next fiscal year, and that's basically what the administration asked for. And that number that the administration asked for was basically workable and not a terrible number. We were very surprised by that and very pleased by that in the in the whole pantheon of things that could have happened. And even better, the Senate stripped out an incredibly foolhardy move that the House made last month to claw back $4 billion of rail grant money that we got through the investment in infrastructure and Jobs Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law, the House tried to claw back money from the a grant program called the Fed state partnership program, that's the biggest rail grant program in the i j A, and they wanted to use that to fund the Amtrak operational appropriation. And the Senate reversed that, and they just fund Amtrak in a straightforward way. So that was that was good. The rhetoric has become weirder, and certainly a lot of the previously appropriated and not yet obligated billions of dollars from the bipartisan infrastructure law remain in in real jeopardy. But the pictures decidedly mixed, and honestly, that's because grassroots advocates our organization, but lots of others as well, they've done a really good job of making sure that members of Congress understand that their constituents want passenger rail. They want good passenger rail. And so we've been able to kind of hold off the worst of it, I think, and kind of hang on, and that's kind of encouraging in the state where we are right now. Absolutely.

Kea Wilson07:27

And I think something that you've helped me understand over the course of me interviewing you over the years and getting to know your work is just how much the rail community can be a model for advocacy across the modalities, and the success that you've had, particularly with like, winning support across the aisle, even in very contentious political moments, is really, really fascinating to me, and is something that I feel like I'm becoming a student of. But there are exceptions, of course, and we're gonna get the big, messy one out of the way first, because this is the big news story in the real space that probably everybody's heard of, which is, of course, California High Speed Rail, right? So our colleagues at streets California have been the ones covering this. Not so much me. So catch me up to speed. What's going on with us? Co T's withdrawal of California's high speed rail grant and the lawsuit that quickly followed from California. How has your organization been responding? And how should advocates who care about this project and America having a high speed rail line be answering this right now?

Speaker 108:34

Well, well, look, I mean, we've been writing support letters, as most of the organizations have, and we've been working particularly to ensure that the support remains strong within the California legislature. I think that's going to be critical right now, because getting California through this period when the program is under attack, it's going to have to come from within California. And you know, thank goodness, California has the world's fifth largest economy. I think it may have actually gone up to fourth largest so if any state can absorb this kind of thing short term, it is California. California has put up 85% of the money to do this so far, which is unheard of, and frankly, I think it's bad policy. This is a program of national significance, and it deserves national support. But we knew as soon as the administration started that, that California was going to be the target for purely partisan reasons. And so none of this should be surprising to anybody. But again, that said, you know, we saw this week that the Federal Railroad Administration has agreed to set aside the $4 billion that they're trying to claw back while the case is pending in the courts. And that sounds like a so what, but you know, rather than just spending it, which is their intent, they're going to set it aside while the court case is pending. And I'll kind of take that as a sign. That even as this dispute kind of unfolds, everyone involved is allowing the right kinds of legal processes to play out. Let's not sugar coat it. I mean, that the California project was born with a lot of original sin, but where we are now, we're so close to true high speed service it would be a policy crime to kill it off. Now, I mean, yes, it's true, the post covid Inflation has made everything more expensive, and that includes the cost to deliver high speed rail. But look, high speed rail is not the only thing that's become more expensive and and the cost to build anything has gone up. And you know, most of the credible engineering estimates suggest that if you were to pull the plug on high speed rail and have to build something else, you're going to build 4200 highway lane miles, 91 airport gates, two more airport runways, and that's going to cost almost twice as much as what's on the table today for rail. So if you choose to spend $87 billion more on on highways and airports instead of rail, what do you get for that? Well, you know, building highways and runways does nothing to address road congestion, does nothing about lost time, does nothing about highway safety. We know that driving is 17 times more hazardous than taking a train or flying. It does nothing about greenhouse gas emissions and more roads and more runways do nothing to address congestion, which anybody who drives in California will tell you is is a mess, and it does nothing to address the congestion on the existing rail corridors. Because you California is pretty good. State rail network is operating at 125% capacity during peak hours, and besides that, you're going to forego all the private capital investment that comes along in retail and restaurants and housing around the stations if you don't build this. So the Trump administration, in this case, seems to be advocating spend more, get less. Well, that's pretty unsound public policy. And, you know, I think one of the things that annoys me the most is when I hear people say that it's a train to nowhere because it doesn't connect Los Angeles and San Francisco in the first go around. You know, as if Merced and Bakersfield are nowhere, you know, if you took Merced or Bakersfield and you put them in almost any other state in the United States, they'd be the first or second or third largest city in that state. They may be small by California standards, but they're not small places, and they're not insignificant populations. And the idea that those people don't deserve to have decent, transformative service, it's kind of a joke. I mean, we are so close we've got to get this thing done and prove what's possible.

Kea Wilson12:44

You know, thank you for pointing out the big numbers itis we tend to suffer from when we talk about highway projects versus rail projects. I think that that distortion has been really, really like in my face this entire story, and it's, it's exciting to see that there's so many people waking up to how little we get in exchange for our highway investments, and particularly how much we could get, even on a project that is over budget, even on a project that has problems for investing in rail. In this way, I want to turn to another story that you've been tracking, that I know a little bit less about but it sounds like it has some kind of sneaky, big implications for the passenger rail space. And it's actually out of the freight rail sector. This is the merger of Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern. Norfolk Southern is the freight carrier that we all remember from the east Palestine, Ohio disaster. In a nutshell, this sounds like it's going to be a historic merger. It's going to create the first cross continental freight corridor that we've ever had. What does this mean for passenger rail, for folks who aren't as familiar with how the freight and the passenger rail networks intersect, what is this going to mean for folks who just want to be able to get on a train and go visit a relative, a friend somewhere else in the country.

Speaker 114:02

Well, to really understand that, we have to do just a little bit of scene setting. Well, a lot of people don't realize that Amtrak does not own the track that it runs its trains on, except in the northeast corridor between New York and Washington. Yes, they own the Northeast Corridor, and that's because early on in Amtrak's life, they bought what was a defunct, bankrupt Penn Central Railroad. But other than that, Amtrak runs on what are called Host railroads, and Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern are host railroads, and Amtrak pays a charge per mile to run their trains on those tracks, and it's a pretty advantageous rate. And the reason that that happens is because the agreement that created Amtrak back in 1971 the legislation that created it, it was basically a bailout of the freight rail industry. And a lot of people don't realize this, that Amtrak represents a bailout of the freight rail industry. Me, Amtrak took on all of the liability, all of the responsibility for running passenger trains that the private railroads once had, took over, the labor took over, the pension plans, took everything off their books, and in exchange, the freight railroads agreed to give Amtrak trains preference in dispatching, which means, simply, if I've got a passenger train and a freight train looking to use the same spot, I gotta let the passenger train go first. That preference clause has been on the books for half a century, and it's been tough to actually have that enforced in real life. Union Pacific has been in a proceeding before the Surface Transportation Board on late trains, lateness of the Sunset Limited. Amtrak Sunset Limited. And then Norfolk Southern has been in federal district court. The Department of Justice took Norfolk Southern to court for late trains and bad dispatching on Amtrak's Crescent train. So now that those two railroads want to merge, you're taking two railroads whose performance on passenger rail was bad enough to land them into legal trouble, and you're going to put them together. That's potentially a very bad thing. So interestingly, Union Pacific settled its late train case with Amtrak this week, and Norfolk Southern is supposedly in the final throes of a settlement agreement with the Department of Justice. So they're clearly they're trying to clear the decks before this merger and get all that out of the way. So I don't know what you what is in Union Pacific's settlement agreement with Amtrak, as near as as we've been told, they Union Pacific made promises about on time performance. They made promises about accepting consequences if they're late. They made promises about training employees to make sure that the Amtrak trains really do go on time and go when they're supposed to go. And so that's fine if that happens, but you know that has not really been enforced very well in the past either. Now Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern have to go before the Surface Transportation Board to get the deal approved. That's the rails federal economic regulator and Union Pacific does not expect to put the formal application before the board probably three months from now, maybe even more likely, sometime in January next year, that formal application is going to be the first time that any of us who care about what happens will get to see the details on what The merger actually looks like. And those details will probably maybe include plans for concessions related to passenger rail concerns, and those are going to be really critical. It's the point of maximum leverage for getting some of those concessions in place. Any new class one merger proposal like the Union Pacific bid for Norfolk Southern going to be viewed through that lens. So, I mean, look, I think America's passengers and shippers have pretty good reason to treat this news with some skepticism. We're going to be very actively involved in protecting the rights of passengers as the proposal moves through the STV process. I mean, the past decade, I mean, we've seen class one railroads steadily lose market share to trucking while they try to chase shareholder dividends. That's been great for Wall Street, but it's terrible for rail service, for passengers and for shippers in the rest of the country. But I think everyone who cares about sustainable transportation, and I'm assuming that's everybody listening, really needs to watch this case closely, and they need to pay attention to the details that come out during the public hearings. It's STB decision. It's not Congress. But people can do a lot worse than you know, letting their members of Congress know how they feel about this merger, once we all know more about what it's going to look like and probably call for concessions at least as good as what we saw when Canadian Pacific tied up with Kansas City Southern thank you for

Kea Wilson19:02

putting this on our radar. This is a complex topic that is going to send some shock waves through issues that a lot of us care about. I will also include some links in the show notes to a great blog that Jim wrote about this topic, and more opportunities for action and engagement around it. We're going to keep barreling forward though to the future, which is, of course, the Surface Transportation reauthorization there is, as you know, Jim, as most people listening, a impending opportunity for folks to comment on the next Surface Transportation reauthorization bill that we're going to do. We're encouraging our readers to submit to it. We're giving them lots of ideas on what they might include in those comments. I'd be curious what your organization's top proposals are right now As concerns the future of rail, and how you're breaking them up into a message that can be distilled down into a comment for the D O T as they put together their proposal the House Transportation

Speaker 119:57

and Infrastructure Committee. Asked us to present our reauthorization ideas to them late this spring and and since then, we've added a few more proposals to the blueprint that we shared with Tni and with the with Senate Commerce Committee. Also, you can read all those on our website. We've We've published them at rail passengers.org/blueprint so look, obviously, we're going to ask Congress to reauthorize all of the core passenger rail programs from the the i j A, that's the investment in infrastructure and Jobs Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law at the levels in the original i j adjusted for inflation. So that's Amtrak's national network, the Northeast Corridor, the Fed State Partnership Program, the Crissy grant program, corridor ID program, all of those. But we also have a few other proposals in there too. We want fra and D O T to deliver some funds directly to states for rail planning and operations. We want to see a really powerful fra planning engine that that kind of recycles the development work that's already been done, slashing timelines, building expertise, getting past this study, study, study, some more mindset that we're in. We've also outlined what we think is a pretty bold $7 billion national passenger rail equipment leasing pool, because one of the things that stops us from getting new service is we're having equipment. You know, I if I wanted to start rail service today, where am I going to get the cars? Where am I going to get the locomotives? We just don't have the industrial base in the country to do this. And so one of the things we want to do is to create this equipment pool and fund it with government money to really bolster the industrial base in the United States that we can build the kind of equipment that we need. We've gotten a lot of interest in the leasing pool idea, especially in the Senate. So those are kind of the broad brush ideas that we have. But you know, they're also kind of related in some ways, to another piece of legislation that came out recently called the All Aboard act. And we liked a lot of those provisions too, and so we started sort of folding those ideas into our our reauthorization ideas. And I don't know if you want to talk more about the All Aboard act, because it certainly dovetails with some of what we had in mind for reauthorization.

Kea Wilson22:23

Oh, I definitely do. Yeah, I've been chatting with Senator monkeys office about this bill a lot. It seems really exciting, but why don't you give us the nutshell of what's in it and why your organization signed on?

Speaker 122:34

So the onboard act, we were very excited for it too. It would expand passenger rail and high speed rail by investing $150 billion over five years across several successful rail grant programs that were already in the i j a So, $80 billion for the Fed state partnership for inner city passenger rail grant program. That's the one that the House tried to claw $4 billion from fund Amtrak, and the one that the Senate sort of kibosh, which was great, $30 billion for the Chrissy programs. That's the consolidated rail infrastructure safety and improvement program, and that's a very capital heavy program, and bridges and tunnels and tracks and signals and things like that. $30 billion for Amtrak. So we would finally fund Amtrak at a good, sustainable level. $10 billion for the railroad crossing elimination program, which is also very important, particularly if any of the listeners out there saw the story that the Miami Herald did about bright line and the number of deaths at grade crossings, where the train goes over, where the roads are. This is a really important program, and it's one that has never really been fully funded outside of the i j. So $10 billion for that would be really, really important. But a really exciting part of the All Aboard Act is that it establishes a dedicated rail formula program. It would, it would be $3.5 billion in rail formula funding for states to do rail planning and maintenance and operations and capital investment. This is really some similar to something we already outlined in our reauthorization blueprint. And I really think it's crucial to help states build capacity within their D, o, t, s, because in the absence of that, and we saw this when the i, j, A was signed and was starting to come together as a program the states that already had really good, mature rail programs were in the best position to get funding California and Massachusetts and New York and, you know, places where they had a solid rail office, and it was well staffed and experienced. They were in they were first in line. And there are a lot of states that don't really have a rail office. It's built into the highway department, or there's one rail person, and they just didn't have the capacity to even go get the grants that the state might have been interested in getting. So so the idea of having a formula funding flow to the states for rail in the same way that we now have formula funding. That flows through for highways and a little bit for transit. We think that's a really, really positive move, and we really support that. The other exciting thing in the all board act is it creates a green railroad fund, $50 billion over five years to electrify polluting rail yards would support electric high performance passenger rail projects, it would electrify the existing highest traffic corridors of freight and passenger trains, and even with today's stinky diesel the emissions for even stinky diesel trains are so much better than cars. It's transformative if you invest in rail, but the difference between diesel and electric just mind blowing. I mean, it just, you start looking at the numbers, and it's so clear that it would be a great thing to do. We'd love to see that happen as well. And so, you know, we really love to see the All Aboard act become a catalyst for some other reforms and and really the biggest one for me is, is speeding project delivery. You know, I don't know if you know this, but did you know if I wanted to start an airline today, I could do it in as little as six months, and I could do it for about the cost of a single rail car, 3 million, $4 million I could go wet lease some Boeing 737, for about $150,000 a month, I could go hire some contract pilots and crews and negotiate for some gate leases. And FAA will say, Okay, you're not a crazy person. Go off and do it. Six months later, I could be flying That's

Kea Wilson26:33

wild. I feel like we should interject here that Jim has a background in aviation, so if you're hearing things like wet leases and saying, Whoa, yeah, I appreciate your perspective on this, but that is wild. I didn't know that. Yep. So

Speaker 126:45

consider that next week, I'm going to be in New Orleans to celebrate the launch of the new Amtrak Mardi Gras service to mobile along the Gulf Coast, which is great. That took close to 20 years to make happen two decades running two trains a day on tracks that already exist, where trains already run today. And it's the same story with Amtrak's Borealis that launched last year between Minneapolis, St Paul and Chicago, and blew the doors off on ridership, by the way, 10 years of advocacy followed by another 10 years of planning and coordination with three states to run a small passenger train on tracks that already exist, serving stations that already exist, using equipment that already exists. It's insanity. It's just not going to get us where we need to go. So as part of our reauthorization blueprint, we're proposing things like capping some kinds of environmental reviews at one year, asking the Surface Transportation Board to enforce speed and transparency, mandating full and public cost disclosures by host railroads, or standardizing the specs, right, so that every project builds smarter and faster, And every project isn't some kind of bespoke, one off, unique project. These are the kinds of things that can really make a difference. Because if you think about it, every year that we don't do, it is a year when we're continuing to add pollution to our overall load. You know, we all know the numbers on the climate crisis, and we all know how close we are to the tipping point. And every year that it takes to delay train service is a year of delay of getting cars off the road, getting people onto the trains, and really making a difference in the environment. So we we've got to do this. We've got to stop making it take 20 years to do something as simple as start a new train, where trains already exist.

Kea Wilson28:46

Okay, that's our show. Thank you so much again, to the amazing Jim Matthews. He really is my go to authority on all things passenger rail. I had to cut this conversation a little bit for length, so I would really encourage you to take a look at the links in the show notes, and also to plug into the National Rail Passenger Association's work, to stay up to date on everything Amtrak and beyond. They really are an incredible resource. If you think that we're an incredible resource on this podcast, you can support us by making a tax deductible contribution to streets blog usa@usa.streetsblog.org, click any of the Donate buttons or by just leaving us a positive review on iTunes, Spotify anywhere else that you listen. The break is a production of streets blog USA. Our theme music is eggshells by Christina Johnson. I am your host and editor, Kea Wilson, and before I let you go. Same question as always, what is one thing you have done today to help end cardpendency? Let me know you.

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