Mr. President, I’d like to start this afternoon by thanking Chairman Murray for her tireless work on the Budget Committee on which I serve, to develop and pass a bipartisan budget, a budget that sets us on a path to return to regular order.
Senator Murray has also been a tireless advocate for transportation and infrastructure programs and has chaired the Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee on which I also serve. She has fought tirelessly to include adequate funding for Amtrak back in the FY2014 omnibus and moving forward.
The topic I’d like to take up today is the role of Amtrak in our communities, in our country, and its appropriate role as a central piece of federal transportation policy going forward.
Senator Murray has been a terrific advocate for investing across a wide range of transportation modalities and as a member of the Appropriations Committee, I look forward to working with her and with our leading full committee chair, Senator Mikulski, to make sure that we are successful in fighting ardently, steadfastly for Amtrak this year and in the future.
I come to talk on the floor today about the importance of our national passenger rail system, Amtrak, because this isn’t just about getting people from point A to point B. Investing in Amtrak also means creating jobs, making our whole economy more dynamic, and making America more competitive.
Amtrak is performing better and better each and every year and as the presiding officer knows, all too well, ridership over the last decade has steadily increased. In fact, 10 of the last 11 years have seen record numbers, and last year we broke through 31.6 million riders on Amtrak. The trains are more and more crowded but they’re arriving more and more frequently on time and the quality of the train sets and the quality of the service provided by the conductors and the other folks who work for Amtrak has steadily increased.
As the value proposition of Amtrak has increased, so has ridership, and though record ticket sales and other revenues have made this possible, Amtrak today covers nearly 89% of the cost of operating their trains, by far the best of any passenger rail operation in the United States. They are, in fact, on track to cover 90%, through revenues, of their total operating costs in 2014. And because of this success, since 2002, Amtrak has decreased its debt by more than half.
My home state of Delaware and your home state of New Jersey, Mr. Presiding officer, is part of the oldest and most critical section of our national passenger rail system, the so-called Northeast Corridor, which goes from Boston to Washington. And this Northeast Corridor produces, if it were its own separate economy, this Northeast Corridor would produce $3 trillion a year, 20% of our nation’s total economic output, which would make it the fifth largest economy in the world if it were on its own.
But it’s not.
It’s an integrated part of our nation and its passenger rail infrastructure is an integrated part of our national commitment to efficient and effective transportation.
In this region in particular, though, Amtrak isn’t a luxury. It’s a fundamental and critical part of our economy and of moving our community and our people forward.
If Amtrak service were cut off in the region for just a day, it would cost our economy $13 million. And one-third of all the jobs in the Northeast Corridor, or seven million jobs, are within five miles of a station.
Amtrak’s impact on my home state of Delaware is particularly large because Amtrak employs over a thousand men and women in the state of Delaware. Many of them work in two maintenance facilities in Wilmington and in Bear where they repair everything from train seats to the heavy trucks to the cars themselves. And I’ve had a number of chances to visit them on a number of occasions and let me tell you, it is incredible to see the work ethic and the capabilities of the men and women of Amtrak.
These shops have been there a long time and they have worked hard to modernize and to be relevant and to contribute to the strengthening bottom line of Amtrak overall. Let me just mention ‘Irish’ John, a good friend of mine who’s been a leader in the Sheet Metal Workers for a long time. Sheet Metal Workers with Amtrak were one of the unions that worked with management to find ways to significantly save costs on overhaul work on the Acela sets that resulted in Amtrak choosing not to farm out the service work and instead do a $125 million job to overhaul 20 Acela sets in house.
This is union labor, this helps support good middle-wage jobs, this helps support good middle-class families and middle class communities in Delaware and our region. This particular work on this Acela overhaul will last more than three and a half years and sustain dozens and dozens of jobs at our Bear repair facility.
My friend Bill with the IBEW Amtrak union is another friend who has helped me understand the critical role that the employment that Amtrak provides, provides to our whole region, not just to Delaware, not just to the Philadelphia area but to the whole Northeast Corridor.
So when we talk about investing in Amtrak, we’re not only investing in new options for commuters and businesses, we’re talking about investing our communities, in workers who will build and maintain the next generation of American rail. These are as I’ve said, great high skilled jobs, and by investing in Amtrak’s present and giving them a predictable future, we’ll preserve and continue these important skills, these important workers, and their families in our communities.
Now, Amtrak’s benefits go beyond just the immediate skilled workers and their families and the communities that benefit from them. In Delaware the services that Amtrak provides helps to keep and draw in new businesses through a ripple effect in our whole economy. In fact, just last week there was an announcement of a new company that’s spinning off out of Sallie Mae that’ll be locating its headquarters and 120 jobs in Wilmington. They’ve chosen a site specifically because it is walking distance from our Amtrak station. From the Joseph R. Biden Amtrak station in Wilmington, Delaware.
And in Newark, the University of Delaware is building a new campus, called the Science, Technology, and Advanced Research, the STAR campus, which will build partnerships between several important regional entities. Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, and what makes that partnership possible is that backbone of the Northeast Corridor, the connection between these different cities that is made all the stronger and better because of passenger rail.
I hope from these few examples it’s clear that passenger rail is also a critical component of economic development. Passenger rail tends to link downtown urban areas and tends to be absolutely essential to anchoring their revitalization as the presiding officer knows oh so well.
Now, passenger rail is critical not just in the Northeast Corridor but in communities across the country that rely on it to connect with other communities and our country’s major economic centers. State supported services have become a major source of ridership growth as well, with that ridership nearly doubling between 1998 and 2013. Long distance ridership across the great heartland of our country has also grown by roughly 20%. Without the introduction of any new services, frequencies or equipment and in FY2013 long distance ridership reached its highest point in 20 years.
We are though, at the proverbial crossroads or, I suppose I should say, crossing now, Mr. President, because ridership is soaring, Amtrak is more popular than ever before and demand will continue to grow, but we are not keeping up with the investment in infrastructure that we need to sustain this growth into the future. Right now for instance there is nearly $6 billion in outdated delayed investments that need to be made just in the Northeast Corridor to bring it to what’s called a state of good repair.
So let me focus on a few of the critical infrastructure needs in the Northeast Corridor; there are also needs across the whole country.
In Baltimore, a city I traveled through this morning on my way here to this Capitol on the Amtrak trains, in Baltimore, in Senator Mikulski’s home state, the B&P Tunnels have stayed open since 1873, and although they’ve undergone periodic repairs, none of them were built to be permanent.
We can’t be competitive if we continue to rely on tunnels that have been around since roughly the time of our own civil war. We need to invest in modernizing this infrastructure.
Between the presiding officer’s home state of New Jersey and the great state of New York, preliminary planning is underway on the Gateway Tunnel, a critical project that will ease the bottleneck under the Hudson that causes delays throughout the whole region, limits the options of travelers, and ends up costing the economy more in the short and long run. We need to invest in our infrastructure.
In Delaware we have a bottleneck around our most popular station, the Joseph R. Biden Station in Wilmington. The rail lines north and south of that station in the Mid-Atlantic slim from three lines to two, restricting service and preventing the addition of new rail service. Thanks in part to a federal high speed rail grant, construction will soon be underway to add a third track to alleviate this critical choke point, the main one just south of the station.
But without new investment, that choke point will continue north of the station. And that’s not to mention the hundreds of bridges and tunnels and other connection points, including the overhead catenary lines that require repair and replacement on the Northeast Corridor alone. M. President, we need to invest in our infrastructure, not just in the Northeast Corridor, but across this whole country.
We do spend a lot of time here on this floor as we should talking about our nation’s fiscal deficit and debt, but we should also focus on our physical deficit and debt.
The delayed repair of critical pieces of infrastructure that we rely on for our economy and for our communities but that we aren’t focused on, if we would invest in today would employ people in repairing them and lay the groundwork for our improvement of our economy for the long term. I recognize the reality that while the budget picture has improved, it is not yet as good as it should be. We are still facing real fiscal challenges.
But, Mr. President, as I ride between Wilmington and Washington nearly every day on Amtrak, our workers are responsible for repairing and retrofitting a lot of the trains and parts that I ride on, I’m impressed with their skill and with the caliber of their repair work. As a rider and as our state’s senator I see how critical Amtrak is to our economy, to our communities, and to our country as a whole. I hope that is clear to the rest of the members of this chamber. And I hope that anyone watching who has appreciated the value of Amtrak’s connecting power that links this country together from east to west, north to south, will communicate with your senator and convey the importance of strong and sustained investment in the Northeast Corridor yes, but across the whole reach of our country.
Only by strengthening Amtrak and ensuring the vibrancy of the entire nation’s system of passenger rail, can we really ensure that American rail will be there for years and generations to come.