Senate Passes Legislation To Keep Amtrak On Track Bill Provides $3.4 Billion For Bankruptcy-Threatened Railway Through 2000

The Senate approved a bill Friday designed to save Amtrak from bankruptcy and to put the nation’s long-struggling subsidized rail passenger service on the track toward financial independence.

The voice-vote passage of a bipartisan compromise came after months of difficult negotiation. “Without the reforms, Amtrak has no chance to survive. None,” said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, who heads the Commerce transportation subcommittee.

While Amtrak officials hoped the rescue package would pass before they have to face creditors in December, House-Senate differences could still postpone final action until next year. Congress is on the verge of adjourning for the year.

The measure provides $3.4 billion in operating expenses for the railway through 2000 while requiring management and labor changes aimed at making Amtrak profitable and eventually ending its dependence on government subsidies.

It would free $2.3 billion for capital investment - including money to upgrade roadbed for higher-speed trains - that was set aside in the balanced-budget agreement reached earlier this year.

The package would repeal, after 2000, a law that prohibits Amtrak from contracting out jobs and set up a new private-sector panel to propose further reforms.

It would eliminate six-year severance payments for some Amtrak workers who are laid off. Labor and management would have six months to negotiate a new severance system, after which the old system would expire.

And it would set an overall cap of $200 million for all plaintiffs in accident cases.

The House last month gave up efforts to pass a similar bill because of disputes over provisions that reduce some labor protections.

Jeff Nelligan, a spokesman for the House Transportation Committee chairman, Rep. Bud Shuster, R-Pa., said the Senate bill was being scrutinized. He said Shuster prefers a stronger board of directors than the one in the Senate bill. But the biggest problem, Nelligan said, is scheduling - finding time to take up the measure on the House floor with lawmakers all eager to quit for the year.

A key architect of the Senate measure, the Commerce Committee chairman, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called the bill “long overdue.”

But, he said, “even with these reforms, Amtrak may not make it.”

Some $20 billion in tax money has been pumped into Amtrak since it was set up in 1971 as “what was to have been a two-year experiment,” McCain said. “Some citizens of my state used to rob trains; now the trains have decided to rob taxpayers of $2.3 billion with the help of this body,” he said.