Protections for long-distance train routes, like the Southwest Chief, are chugging through U.S. Congress.
The Southwest Chief runs from Chicago to Los Angeles and back again, completing the route every 4-5 days. It passes through a swath of rural southeastern Colorado and northern New Mexico.
In 2019, the former CEO of Amtrak planned on replacing an over 500-mile stretch that passed through Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico with a bus service, known as a bus bridge. The plan never came to fruition, and the CEO was replaced shortly after by the Amtrak board.
Now, New Mexico Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich has added language to an appropriations bill for Housing and Transportation that would require congressional approval for major route changes or discontinuations. The bipartisan Senate Appropriations committee passed it. It now heads to the full Senate for consideration.
Sean Jeans-Gail is the vice president of policy and government affairs at the Rail Passengers Association, an advocacy organization with 125,000 members nationwide.
He said the association has been working to protect these long-distance routes, which he said are particularly important to rural communities.
“Its real purpose is to connect the smaller cities in between its end points,” Jeans-Gail said. “And so for that reason, it is pretty important to a lot of those smaller towns that it serves in.”
Headed west, Amtrak's Southwest Chief passes through Lamar, Trinidad and La Junta before heading over Raton Pass toward Albuquerque. After the failed attempt to replace this section of the Southwest Chief with buses, the Rail Passengers Association commissioned an economic study that said the line puts $49 million a year into Colorado's economy
Local and federal officials came together to put bipartisan pressure on the board to maintain the Southwest Chief, and made it a sticking point when appointing a new Amtrak leadership.
“(They) let Amtrak know both in statute and in confirmation hearings for members of Amtrak's board, that the Southwest Chief is important to them, it's important to their constituents, and that they expect Amtrak as a recipient of federal funds to run a network that serves all Americans, including Americans out west and including Americans in rural communities,” Jeans-Gail said.
Sen. Heinrich is the only senator from the states where the bus bridge was proposed on the Senate appropriations committee. His office has not returned requests for an interview, but released a press release saying that despite what the problems he has with the appropriations bill, the continuity of Southwest Chief was being protected.
That bill still has to be approved by Congress at large. A similar bill in the House doesn't include the same protections for long-distance Amtrak routes.
Jeans-Gail said the biggest risk to Amtrak right now is deferred maintenance and getting new cars and equipment in operation.
“We're in a race against time, a race against entropy,” Jeans-Gail said. “Amtrak's mechanical and maintenance crews are going to have a really hard time keeping these trains running smoothly over the next 8 or 9 years until we have new equipment coming.”
Amtrak asked Congress this year for hundreds of millions of dollars to address backlogs in the train system.
