By law, the Amtrak Reform Council has the power to do more than reform Amtrak -- it could help kill it by developing a plan to restructure the nation's inter-city rail passenger system.

With 6 of its 11 members selected by Republicans, the council aroused early suspicions that its mission was to dismantle Amtrak and turn the railroad's most promising operations, such as the Northeast Corridor, over to private companies.

Now, however, despite its complaints about Amtrak's accounting, the council appears inclined to help Amtrak succeed.

"As long as I'm chairman, I'm going to give Amtrak every opportunity to be successful," said Gilbert E. Carmichael, a former car dealer and federal railroad administrator who was appointed to the council by his fellow Mississippian, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, a Republican.

"This board may be diverse, but I think even just listening to it this morning, it's collectively pointing in the same direction," Carmichael said in a lunchtime interview at a council meeting last Monday. "It wants to see a successful national rail passenger system. And it wants Amtrak to be the winner."

Amtrak was born in 1971, created by Congress to take over the failing passenger operations of private railroads. Since then, it has spent more than $23 billion in federal subsidies.

Moving to close the spigot, Congress in 1997 passed the Amtrak Reform and Accountability Act. The law decreed that Amtrak must free itself of federal operating subsidies by the fall of 2002. Amtrak, whose board is appointed by the president with Senate approval, has pledged to do so.

Key to the railroad's financial plans are the high-speed Acela Express trains being built to run between Boston and Washington, with stops in Providence and several other cities on the way. By running between Boston and New York in about three hours, the trains are intended to compete with the airlines, generating millions of dollars in new revenue for Amtrak.

The sleek silver trains, which will operate at up to 150 mph, were supposed to start running late last year but have been delayed by design problems. Amtrak says they might debut at the end of next month, but no date has been set.

The 1997 act also created the Amtrak Reform Council to monitor the railroad's progress in balancing its bottom line. If the council finds that Amtrak cannot meet this goal, it then has 90 days to submit to Congress a plan for reorganizing passenger rail service in the United States. At the same time, Amtrak must prepare a plan to liquidate itself.

The council issued its first report last January, triggering a flap over how Amtrak is measuring its spending. It has been holding hearings around the country to seek the views of Amtrak and local officials.

The railroad and the council have reason to cooperate. The council, after all, is dependent on Amtrak for much of the financial information it needs to do its job. And Amtrak, which is working hard to improve its public image, does not need the council's sniping.

"On the whole I think it's a good process," James P. RePass, president and chief executive officer of the National Corridors Initiative, a passenger rail advocacy group, said of the council's work. "I think it can contribute to the revival of Amtrak's fortunes. I don't see it as a deadly attack on Amtrak's fortunes as some people do."

That's not to say that the relationship between Amtrak and the council is smooth.. At Monday's council meeting, members continued to complain about Amtrak's failure to give them information they want to assess the profitability of specific operations, such as the Beech Grove maintenance shop in Indiana.

They also urged Amtrak to be more aggressive in filling empty seats on its trains. Amtrak officials at the meeting said they are working on this.

William D. Ankner, director of the Rhode Island Department of Transportation, said the reform council initially had trouble finding a focus. Its first chairman, New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, resigned.

Since then, Ankner said, the council has settled on helping Amtrak improve its finances and is wrestling with what to do if the railroad fails to do so.

Because of the high-speed train delay, he said, there is concern in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states "that Amtrak may not make that deadline, and we don't know where Congress is going to go." One possibility, Ankner said, is to give Amtrak an additional year of federal operating subsidies.

Joseph Vranich, the Amtrak Reform Council member who resigned July 10, said the panel, with its five-person staff and $750,000 budget this year, lacks the resources to do its job.

"The staff has expertise in this field," he said, "but insufficient resources to adequately scrutinize Amtrak, particularly with Amtrak stonewalling requests from the council."

The author of Derailed, a book critical of Amtrak, where he once was public affairs manager, Vranich says the railroad is busy building political support for another federal bailout by running "pork barrel" trains through the home towns of politicians.

According to that theory, chuckled Carmichael, "Mississippi's the hub of the pork barrel," home to the reform council chairman, Majority Leader Lott and Amtrak board member John Robert Smith, the mayor of Meridian. Carmichael does not seem at all unhappy at the loss of Vranich, who was also appointed by Lott. No replacement has been named.

"Transportation's political," Carmichael told The Journal. "We got the four-lane interstate last. You guys got it first. . . .

"Politics is strong. We want inter-city rail passenger service down in our part of the country. We're getting congestion on our highways and our highways are wearing up and the trucks are overloading it and our truck companies down there want to use the rail service."

When he talks about the future of railroads in the United States, Carmichael can sound like former Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, the vice chairman of Amtrak's board.

Both say the time is right for a major effort to rebuild the national rail system, with an emphasis on fast passenger and express freight trains between big cities. Carmichael said Amtrak should operate like an airline, providing trains to run on rail corridors built by the state and federal governments on existing freight rail rights-of-way.

"The other three modes, the waterways, airways and highways, all carry freight and passengers," Carmichael said. "The railroad mode carries freight and does a pitiful job of carrying passengers. And we now know we can't let the railroad mode just be that way. . . . So now comes the new partnership between the states and the freight railroad people and the federal government. The question is, how do we build it? How do we fund it?"

Ankner, the Rhode Island transportation director, said the model of a profitable Amtrak providing the trains while the states and federal government build and rebuild the railroads makes sense. He also praised Amtrak for moving into the express business by carrying packages for the likes of United Parcel Service and Federal Express. This holds the potential for significantly boosting the railroad's revenues while reducing truck traffic on highways such as Route 95.

Passenger rail advocates give Carmichael high marks as a constructive voice in the debate about Amtrak's future.

RePass said Carmichael has done "more good for passenger rail in this country than almost any other person in the last 15 or 20 years."

"I have a lot of respect for him," Scott Leonard, assistant director of the National Association of Railroad Passengers said of Carmichael. "He's somebody who maybe didn't grow up loving trains but came to appreciate them as an adult."

Carmichael, who was head of the Federal Railroad Administration during the Bush administration, said he was puzzled by the delay in getting the high-speed trains rolling and blamed Bombardier, the Montreal-based company that is building them along with ALSTOM of Paris. "They ought to be ashamed of themselves," Carmichael said of Bombardier. "They should have had their train sets out there and running."

Whatever the Amtrak Reform Council does, Amtrak's future is also in its own hands as it introduces high-speed trains and tries to remake itself into a top-flight transportation company.

At Monday's meeting, council vice chairman Paul M. Weyrich, a Lott appointee, and Milwaukee Mayor John O. Norquist, who was named to the council by President Clinton, both complained about lapses in service that marred trips they took on Amtrak. Weyrich encountered a surly conductor; Norquist and other passengers had to wait to leave the train while a baggage car was dropped off.

Amtrak no longer has room for such shortcomings, Norquist said. "The service has to be delightful now."

Carmichael said he wants the council's second annual report next January to make "strong recommendations for organization of Amtrak and strong funding recommendations. If Congress accepts that and Amtrak responds to it, then our next report should be more detailed.

"I take the law seriously. We were supposed to do two things: make recommendations to Amtrak on how to reach self-sufficiency and, if they don't do it, then our job is to come up with a restructuring plan for a new national rail passenger system. . . .

"This country wants a national rail passenger system."

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(c) 2000, Providence Journal, R.I. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

Publication date: 2000-07-23