Amtrak

Temporary Solutions for Metrolink's TAP Issue Shelved

Now that the Governor has signed the bills to allow local stakeholders to take over management of the Pacific Surfliner and San Joaquin Amtrak intercity rail routes the next steps are the formation of the joint power authority boards and in the case of the Surfliner the selection of a managing agency from among the members of LOSSAN (aka the Los Angeles-San Diego-San Luis Obispo Rail Corridor).

In my recent piece on the proposed local takeover of the Pacific Surfliner inter-city rail route the pivotal question I poised multiple times was which agency would take on the responsibility of managing the service.

Some 14 years after administration of the Amtrak Capitol Corridor intercity rail service was transferred from the state to a local association of transportation agencies along its corridor; two bills (Senate Bill 1225 and Assembly Bill 1779) have reached the Governor's desk that would allow similar transfers for (respectively) the Southern California coastal Pacific Surfliner and central valley-bay area San Joaquin.

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has examined the question of whether the GOP plan to privatize Amtrak’s most valuable corridor is constitutional – and it’s determined that it is not.

A powwow between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, President Obama, and House Speaker John Boehner last night failed to yield a compromise that would put a budget in place before the government shuts down at midnight tonight. The failure of yet another attempt to negotiate makes a government shutdown all but inevitable.

When President Obama and Secretary LaHood talk about their bold new vision for high-speed rail, you don’t hear them mention the country’s very own train company, which just celebrated ten years of providing the closest thing this country has to high-speed rail service, in the Northeast Corridor.

A new Republican proposal would eliminate federal subsidies to Amtrak; kill New Starts, the primary federal transit funding program; and make painful cuts to dozens of other federal programs. It’s a plan by the Republican Study Committee, which is trying to keep alive House Speaker John Boehner’s campaign pledge to reduce the budget by $100 million. Boehner himself has been backing off from the pledge, given the popularity of many of the programs the Study Committee is now proposing to axe.

A few years ago I joined Amtrak's Guest Rewards program, which every month sends an e-mail showing my current point total. These also include a few tidbits of the latest Amtrak news. This is how I learned Amtrak's Customer Advisory Committee (ACAC) is currently recruiting new committee members to fill impending vacancies from several areas, including the Pacific Northwest, Southern California, North Carolina and the New York Empire Corridor along with regular riders of the the Sunset Limited® or Empire Builder®. The ACAC was formed in 1997 to represent the needs and concerns of the traveling public to Amtrak management.