With the Senate considering an appropriations bill that includes funding for Amtrak this week, Senator Coons stuck up for the passenger rail service in a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday. Later in the day, he filed an amendment to the Transportation/Housing and Urband Development appropriations bill calling for additional investment in Amtrak to help it make progress on the nearly $6 billion backlog of deferred capital improvements to infrastructure assets already beyond their designed life.
The amendment would increase the appropriated amount by $113 million. While the Senate bill would already provide $862 million for capital grants (as opposed to the House’s $400 million), it is still not enough to perform any infrastructure upgrades, let alone start much-needed multi-year projects, like tunnel and bridge replacements.
“Now is not the time, in my view, given all these standards of progress that they have met, to gut Amtrak, as our counterparts in the House seem determined to do,” Senator Coons said. “Now is the time to help Amtrak build on its steady gains and continue to grow. Amtrak is a vital part of hundreds of communities across this country, so, in my view, to invest in Amtrak is to invest in those communities and their future.”
Senator Coons cited the work of the late Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, who fought tirelessly for Amtrak for decades in the Senate. “He fought harder than anybody to build Amtrak into what it is today because he saw that with our population steadily growing, we needed to be prepared and to provide reliable, safe, affordable transportation, in particular here in the eastern region.”