Amtrak CEO: Trump budget eliminates money to upgrade Northeast Corridor

Federal railroad officials said Thursday that they oppose President Donald Trump's budget proposal because it would eliminate Amtrak's ability to upgrade the Northeast Corridor and would block funding from going to the Gateway project.

"From a practical standpoint, the president's budget would effectively eliminate capital funding for Northeast Corridor, and that’s a bad thing," Charles W. "Wick" Moorman, Amtrak's president and chief executive officer, told the House railroad subcommittee.

John Pocari, the interim executive director of the Gateway project, said the budget would only allow construction grants for projects that already have agreements in place for full financing. That would exclude Gateway, which includes replacing the Portal Bridge over the Hackensack River and a tunnel under the Hudson River, both of which were built in 1910.

While the impact on Gateway has been discussed previously by budget critics, Moorman's testimony and details released by congressional committees in recent weeks show Trump's budget would cut more deeply into the Northeast Corridor than it appeared when the 2018 spending plan was first released.

The proposed cuts — which face an uncertain fate in Congress and have been criticized by some Northeast Republicans — come as service on the Northeast Corridor is due to be disrupted next month when Amtrak begins emergency repairs to tracks west of Penn Station.

The corridor runs from Washington, D.C., to Boston and is a vital New Jersey commuter route, as it bisects the state. Along with the cancellation of six Amtrak Northeast Regional trains, the repairs will require some trains on NJ Transit's Morris and Essex line to be rerouted to Hoboken, while some Long Island Railroad trains will go only as far as Jamaica. 

Moorman told the subcommittee that Amtrak's Empire Line, which currently runs from Albany to Penn Station, would operate out of Grand Central Station instead when repairs begin. But an Amtrak spokeswoman later said details about that service were still being developed.

When Trump's budget was released at the end of May, handouts from the Office of Management and Budget said the $235 million allocation for the Northeast Corridor in 2018 was the same as it was getting in 2017. But several weeks before the budget's release, Congress approved an omnibus spending bill for 2017 that increased funding for the corridor to $328 million. Therefore, the $235 million Trump allocated is actually a 28 percent cut over this year's spending level.

And Moorman told the subcommittee that cuts Trump proposed making in other parts of the country would further burden the corridor's finances.

The budget calls for eliminating money-losing long-distance lines on Amtrak's national network, with funding for that line-item to be cut from $1.2 billion to $525 million.

While the budget tells Amtrak to focus its efforts on the Northeast Corridor and other routes around the country that are supported by state transportation departments, eliminating the long-distance routes will increase costs for those routes.

That's because Amtrak allocates costs for shared services such as reservations and the legal department among all its lines, and more of those costs would be shifted onto the Northeast Corridor without riders on the long-distance routes sharing the load, Moorman said.

"The net result is we would stop investing in Northeast Corridor," Moorman said. "We would not have the cash."

And there's a lot of work to do. The Penn Station improvements were ordered after several derailments this spring led to complaints by Gov. Chris Christie that Amtrak was not prioritizing service to NJ Transit riders.

Moorman said that even with the repairs, the station will not have enough capacity to guarantee reliable service.

"While we will make progress this summer, huge needs remain, from our 1934 electric traction system to work in the 1920-era tunnels," he said. "We need to invest now to address not just condition issues, but capacity needs."

Rep. Donald Payne, a Democrat from Essex County, stressed the need to start work on the Portal Bridge. He described visiting the bridge, which swings open to accommodate river traffic, and seeing how workers sometimes have to use sledge hammers to ensure that tracks realign before trains can go over it.

ROAD WARRIOR: 'Summer of Hell' for Morris & Essex riders

Trump's budget proposal is now before the House and Senate appropriations committees, and it has come under criticism there even from some of the president's fellow Republicans.

At a transportation appropriations subcommittee last week, for example, House Appropriations Committee chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-Harding, told Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao that Gateway is "a critical project for our national economy."

"Rebuilding the Hudson tunnel is of vital importance to our region and certainly to my home state of New Jersey," Frelinghuysen said. "Given the clear benefits to these projects and disastrous consequences of inaction, I'm concerned about the fiscal year budget provision limiting funding for capital investment grants."