Fighting a bad law and bad federal transportation policy

to restore affordable Amtrak commuting

to the Northeast Corridor.

Today's Internet Radio Broadcast

Today I'll be the featured guest on the Internet radio talk show "Let's Talk Trains" broadcast at www.worldtalkradio.com. I'm scheduled to be on from 1:40pm to 4:00 pm EST.

To listen live, go to the www.worldtalkradio.com website during the show (which actually starts at 1:00pm EST with 40 minutes of other matters) and click on the "Listen Now" link next to the show title.

To listen later, visit the show's archives where the show will be stored indefinitely. It may take several days, though, for the show to appear in the archives.

I'll be talking about my 20 months of Amtrak-related rail advocacy, starting with keeping the Cornwells Heights station on Amtrak's Northeast Corridor line, and continuing through my lobbying efforts in Washington to repeal the law Congress passed in November, 2005, to actually force Amtrak to raise fares sky high on Amtrak's Northeast Corridor job commuters.

As a key addendum to the show, I strongly recommend also listening to the departing interview Mr. David Gunn gave on NPR just after he was fired from Amtrak's presidency by the Amtrak Board. It's available here: David Gunn on NPR.

What happened to the Amtrak daily job commuters was a clear case of bad politics messing up America's national railroad. I'm looking forward to telling the story. Things can still be changed.

Thanks for your interest.

–       Rick Booth, rick@senatorsonatrain.com

NEW AMTRAK REPORT SECTION ADDED: State-by-state, station-by-station ridership reports for 2003 through 2006

If you would like to take action to reverse the unjust "commuter-killer law" described in the above video, and help save Northeast Corridor Amtrak job commuting in the process, please write to President Bush and request the following:

A few e-mails could go a long way toward getting this country's railroad back on track. ;-)

See also:

The AMTRAK "Who Needs To Go To College?" Calculator	The August, 2006, Senators on a Train "Protest Ride" Pages	The White House Website Spelling Correction Campaign

And...

This site's early December, 2006, "relaunch" explanation

The National Association of Railroad Passengers' recommendations on how to lobby your representatives in Congress

An explanation of how $5 per U.S. citizen per year keeps inter-city Amtrak passenger trains running

How Amtrak's job commuters pay their own way at 18.7 cents/mile, and abandon trains and jobs at 32.9 cents/mile

And you can always fax the White House at (202) 456-2461 or send e-mail there.

And here is the letter I mailed and faxed to President Bush requesting no more "interim appointments" to the Amtrak Board, and also requesting that he sign his "illegal" (i.e. sold in violation of Congress's dirty little "commuter-killer law") tickets for charity:

4641 Yates Road
Bensalem, PA 19020
December 25, 2006

President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

I am writing to you to request that you not make any “interim appointments” to the Amtrak Board of Directors in 2007. For the past three years, Mr. Floyd Hall and Mr. Enrique Sosa have been appointed by you on an “interim” basis each individual year, allowing them to serve on the Amtrak Board without having to undergo Senate confirmation. Continuing to reappoint these men or, for that matter, any other persons, while Congress is out of session violates the spirit of Amtrak’s terms of Congressional oversight.

I am particularly concerned about the reappointment of these two men because neither has any known background in the transportation industry, let alone the rail industry, and neither has made any public statement that I can find regarding their beliefs on rail or transportation policy.

Both men were serving on the Amtrak Board in September, 2005, when one of the worst conceivable anti-social actions ever sanctioned by a government transportation agency was approved: a 67% hike in job commuting fares for the men and women of the Northeast Corridor who were just trying to get to work. I believe that abysmal ignorance of the effects of such a fare increase (about $20 a day, typically, which drove about half or more of the job commuters off Amtrak, with generally poor or unsustainable alternative ways for them to get to work) on the part of these inexperienced appointees may have played a major role in destroying Northeast Corridor Amtrak job commuting, putting a major stain on your administration’s transportation record in the process. Amtrak’s total Northeast Corridor ridership has actually been forced down by the Board’s actions in the midst of rising gasoline prices which should have been driving ridership the other way. The situation is a disgrace, and I’m writing a book about it even now.

I have posted a YouTube video on the Internet, explaining the plight of the Northeast Corridor job commuters and also explaining my personal opposition to the continuing “interim appointments” of Mr. Hall and Mr. Sosa. It is available at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Apn5xlaQ5RI. If you wish, however, to appoint either or both of these men on a more legitimate basis wherein they would undergo Senate confirmation hearings, I have no objection to your doing so, other than that these men demonstrated horrendous social and moral judgment when they participated in the September, 2005, decision to destroy Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor job commuting communities. Not only did Amtrak lose hundreds of thousands of riders per year, they also appear to have lost revenue as well. As I said above, this was without a doubt one of the most ill-conceived, anti-social actions I have ever seen a federally-controlled agency take. (I realize that Amtrak is technically a private company, but its dependence on your personal governance of its Board and large federal subsidies makes it virtually an arm of the government.)

I have personally spent thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars of my own money to try to reverse the fare increase and its effect: the horrendous abandonment of Amtrak’s job commuters. The people who were dependent on Amtrak to get to work were already paying at least their own, unsubsidized marginal cost of carriage before the fare increase came along. Philadelphia-to-New York City job commuters who were paying a fair $569/month to get to their jobs at the start of 2005 are now paying $1,079/month for the same commute, a full 90% increase in a little over a year. That’s a couple of kids less that these parents can put through college, you know. This has devastated lives and families, ruined budgets, and forced many to quit their jobs and/or move out of state to keep their jobs. Though you may not be personally behind it, it is widely believed on Capitol Hill that someone in your administration wished to bankrupt Amtrak so that its more profitable Northeast Corridor operations could be sold off to private industry. And private industry only wanted top-fare riders for best return on investment: hence the secret order to destroy the Northeast Corridor job commuters via the Amtrak Board’s actions and a dirty little piece of secretly planted Congressional legislation violating every moral principle of government this nation was founded upon.

I ran a series of “protest rides” last summer to try to draw media attention to the horrible administrative action taken by the Amtrak Board (see www.senatorsonatrain.com). Someone in the Senate (most likely a “hatchet man” taking orders from one of your administration’s insiders) had also subsequently “snuck” the fare increase into Amtrak’s FY2006 subsidy law as well (so that Amtrak wouldn’t have to justify killing off its commuters – which it couldn’t!). Though very broadly and badly written, the“commuter-killer law” was only initially enforced against Amtrak’s job commuters, and not against other riders being offered even steeper discounts for joy rides, in clear violation of the law. To demonstrate the hypocrisy of the selective enforcement of the“commuter-killer law,” I even bought you, personally, nine different tickets with your name on them, demonstrating Amtrak’s violation of the law. You and the rest of the world can see them in my YouTube video (entitled "Amtrak Whac-a-Mole” :-) mentioned above.

For each of the nine tickets I bought for you, I also bought similar tickets (same train, same day, same ride) for Senator Specter and Senator Santorum, my Pennsylvania senators. As it happens, the station I commute from is situated on land once owned by the one and only Roman Catholic saint ever born a U.S. citizen, Saint Katharine Drexel, whose body lies enshrined about a hundred yards from the station parking lot. She was canonized a month before you won the 2000 presidential election, and nuns who knew her in life still use the station. I count some of them among my friends.

I realized, after buying the tickets for you and the two Pennsylvania senators, that the names “Specter” and “Santorum” are both Latinate terms, and the phrase “Specter Santorum” means, literally, “ghost of the saint.” I don’t know if you believe in miracles, but I do. And so do many millions of others throughout America and the world. I would therefore appreciate it if you would agree to sign your nine tickets so that I can sell them on eBay along with the matched “Specter Santorum”/“ghost of the saint” tickets as“three-ticket miracle” sets, with the proceeds of the auctions to go to charities related to Saint Katharine Drexel’s life and work. (Three of the nine ticket sets even start or end at Saint Katharine’s very station.) These tickets, sold to me by Amtrak in clear violation of the “commuter-killer law,” can no longer be purchased under such unusual terms of sale, since Amtrak finally did decide to comply with the law after I bought them. They truly are “three-ticket miracle” collector sets, and the mold has been broken.

Please do let me know whether or not you will agree to sign the tickets as a good will gesture for some very good faith-based charities. They may not represent the miracles you’ve been, perhaps, hoping for, but my humble suggestion to you would be to take whatever miracles you can get.

Thanks in advance for your attention to these matters.

Sincerely yours,

Rick Booth

Does this make sense? Normal fare: $90.00; Job commuter fare: $44.94; George W. Bush fare: $6.30

Does this make sense? Normal fare: $90.00; Job commuter fare: $44.94; George W. Bush fare: $6.30

Does this make sense? Normal fare: $58.00; Job commuter fare: $28.89; George W. Bush fare: $4.00

Does this make sense? Normal fare: $58.00; Job commuter fare: $28.89; George W. Bush fare: $4.00

Does this make sense? Normal fare: $79.00; Job commuter fare: $29.97; George W. Bush fare: $4.20

Does this make sense? Normal fare: $60.00; Job commuter fare: $29.97; George W. Bush fare: $4.20

Does this make sense? Normal fare: $52.00; Job commuter fare: $26.22; George W. Bush fare: $3.70

Does this make sense? Normal fare: $52.00; Job commuter fare: $26.22; George W. Bush fare: $4.90

Does this make sense? Normal fare: $66.00; Job commuter fare: $33.17; George W. Bush fare: $4.60

Why would I like for President George W. Bush to sign his tickets?

A wonderful old saint – the most patriotic and American of them all (and the only one ever born a U.S. citizen) – once built a convent on the hill above the Cornwells Heights, Pennsylvania, railroad station. Starting in the 1890s, she used the station to send the nuns of her order out into America to found missions and schools throughout the country in service to Blacks and Native Americans. She also used the station to bring the poor children of Philadelphia to her Holy Providence School at Cornwells Heights, just outside the city. And so it was that she pretty much single-handedly founded the American Civil Rights Movement long before it had a name. She was canonized by Pope John Paul II on the eve of the 2000 presidential election. And there's even a legend that says she would never let the station die. Her body and shrine lie next door. The land of the station was once hers as well.

Cornwells Heights is my home base, too. It was the fight to keep the Cornwells Heights station alive that led to Senators on a Train, Amtrak Whac-a-Mole, the funny tickets for President Bush plus the senators, and all that you see here.

On August 31st, 2005, I vowed (with sincere, but unusual, bravado) that I would try to help fix Washington's Union Station problems once I got Cornwells Heights saved. A year to the day later, on August 31st, 2006 – and trying very hard to be true to my word – I took the final ride of my ten-day series of Amtrak protest rides on the Northeast Corridor – from Washington's Union Station back home to Cornwells Heights. It was only after having bought the other ultimately unused tickets for that ride, though, including $4.60 tickets for President Bush and Pennsylvania Senators Specter and Santorum, that I realized that "Specter Santorum" is clearly a Latinate phrase meaning "ghost of the saint." And the ride was indeed returning to the home of the Saint – the station's Saint – Philadelphia’s Saint – America's Saint.

Hanging out with an honest-to-God (literally) saint has been quite humbling.  To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, the world will little note nor long remember what I say here, but it can never forget what she did here, at Cornwells Heights.  Though neither a Catholic nor a Fallen Catholic, I’ve come to regard with considerable awe what some might call the synchronicities surrounding the Saint, the station, and connections to myself.  There’s much more to it than I’ve written.  And some days it seems almost as if the Saint is still there, still working to save her station one more time again.

It seems to me like a win-win deal to offer the signed Bush/Specter/Santorum ticket sets for sale on eBay in support of the good works of Saint Katharine Drexel of Cornwells Heights.  A good cause can be furthered, and the attendant publicity (should it come to pass) might help save the Northeast Corridor Amtrak commuters from further economic destruction – and in so doing, allow the Cornwells Heights station to once again flourish.

The final ride ticket set is shown below.  I think Saint Katharine would be pleased. It’s all good.

 – Rick Booth