Amtrak threatens shutdown unless feds come up with cash

Amtrak passengers who have already purchased tickets may have to scramble to find an alternative means of travel.

The company has threatened to shut down nationwide if the federal government does not bail it out of a $200 million budget shortfall.

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Pattaraporn Thamprabit has already purchased tickets to travel to South Bend on July 6 with her daughter. Even though she can get a refund if Amtrak does shut down, she said there is limited time to arrange an alternative.

“I hope that everything will be alright,” said Thamprabit, a doctoral student in Curriculum and Instruction from Thailand.

Amtrak needs the $200 million by the end of the week in order to keep operating, said Howard Riefs, spokesman for Amtrak.

“If we’re not able to receive the necessary funds, we’ll have to shut down the system across the board,” Riefs said.

If the trains do stop running, many passengers who have come to rely on Amtrak will have to face traveling by car or bus or staying home.

“I wouldn’t be seeing people this summer,” said Megan Devenport, a sophomore in psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who said she does not own a car. Devenport said she uses the train to come home to Carbondale on the weekends and holidays and to visit friends in Chicago during the summer.

Julia Pyatetsky, a philosophy and pre-law major at the University of Illinois Chicago, said she just started using the train since she went away to college. Pyatetsky, who had used the train to come to Carbondale to visit Devenport, said an Amtrak shutdown would be “really bad.”

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“Amtrak has a lot of good deals,” she said. “Financially [a shutdown] would be a problem.”

The service between Carbondale and Chicago carries about 273 passengers daily and 100,000 to 110,000 passengers annually and stops at nine intermediate stations, said Mike Monseur, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Transportation.

Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta pledged Monday to take action to head-off a shutdown, but Amtrak President David L. Gunn said that while the pledge is appreciated, it would only delay a shutdown, since it does not address the fact that Amtrak is running out of cash.

The State of Illinois already provides Amtrak with $10.3 million to subsidize passenger trains in Illinois, Monseur said.

“We need some sort of rail service in Illinois,” he said.

If Amtrak does shut down, Monseur said the state might look into having the Chicago-based Metra take over some routes.

“What we are doing now is waiting to see what happens,” Monseur said.

Gunn told the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Transportation and Related Agencies on Thursday that Amtrak will run out of cash in July and that if they cannot get an immediate loan guarantee or some other source of cash to cover the budget shortfall, he will have “no choice” but to shut down Amtrak nationwide.

Gunn said Amtrak is a little less than $4 billion in debt, and he is requesting Congress appropriate $1.2 billion for 2003.

Passenger train service for Carbondale is provided by the Illini, which runs between Chicago and Carbondale, and another train, the City of New Orleans, which stops in Carbondale on its way between Chicago and New Orleans.

The National Railroad Passenger Corporation, known as Amtrak, was created by the 1970 Rail Passenger Service Act and initiated service on May 1, 1971. It has a seven-member board of directors who are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.