In this last session of Congress, Rep. Phil Gingrey, a Republican from Georgia, introduced a bill that would prohibit any federal dollars from being used to subsidize food and beverage service on Amtrak trains.
Good heavens! It’s hard to know where to begin in dealing with that lunacy.
Does Amtrak lose money on its food service? Well, an accountant would probably say yes, and Congressman John Mica (R-Florida) has been ranting about it for years. But it’s not that simple. After all, serving an estimated 10,000 meals a day in rolling restaurants all over the country is just a wee bit more complicated and costly than serving up burgers and fries in your favorite local restaurant.
Typically, passengers on Amtrak’s long-distance trains are aboard for about 18 hours and that translates to four meals. Let’s start with the obvious: Amtrak can’t simply stop having food available for these paying customers.
I’ve traveled a great many miles on Amtrak’s long-distance trains and can tell you that most of the patrons in the dining cars are sleeping car passengers. And for a very good reason: the cost of their meals is included in the fares they paid. Even taking that into consideration, however, it still costs top dollar to book space in an Amtrak sleeping car.
For example, if you were to travel from Chicago to Albuquerque on the Southwest Chief in the middle of next month, a coach seat would cost you $140. But if you step up to a roomette, the cost of your ticket jumps to $484. That includes your room, a dinner on the first night, and breakfast and lunch the following day.
But what if your hamburger at lunch cost $18.95 instead of $10.50? Or if the price
of the roomette were raised to $550? Or, carrying this to an opposite, but equally
absurd extreme, what if there were no food service at all?
Here’s the unvarnished truth, put in the simplest possible terms by a respected authority on passenger rail: “If the dining cars go, the sleepers go. If the sleepers go, the big revenue goes. If the big revenue goes, Amtrak goes.”
So what are these people thinking … the Phil Gingreys and the John Micas and the other anti-Amtrak Republicans in Congress? Some of them know perfectly well that proposals like this would mean the slow but inevitable death of Amtrak’s long-distance trains … probably almost everything operating outside of the Northeast Corridor from Boston to New York and on through to Washington. Others might actually believe that Amtrak can be badgered and threatened and bullied into profitability. Still others are the ideologues who oppose any subsidy on philosophical grounds no matter the consequences.
The kindest thing we can say about most of those people is that they haven’t bothered to learn enough about passenger rail to understand what makes it work or why it’s important.
Then there are those who clearly understand the implications of what they’re proposing, but do so anyway because it’s a position that’s popular with their ignorant and misinformed constituents.
That’s not much of a choice when it comes to deciding the future of our national passenger rail system, is it?
(Photo) The Angus burger is a regular item on the luncheon menu in dining cars on Amtrak’s long-distance trains. It’s priced at $10.50.
