Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 16, 1993 TAG: 9305160244
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID L. LANGFORD ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: ABOARD THE PALMETTO LENGTH: Long
Folks who ride this poky old train often pack along a picnic lunch, and dinner, too, if they're going all the way to Florida.
Thus the nickname "Chicken Bone Express," a vintage Amtrak passenger train that snakes out of the tunnels of New York's Penn Station at 7:17 a.m. Seventeen hours and 6 minutes later, the timetable says, it will arrive in Jacksonville, Fla., after 25 stops along the way, in places like Rocky Mount, N.C., Dillon, S.C., and Jessup, Ga.
The 3 1/2-hour ride from New York to Washington is smooth and on time, on an improved, electrified track shared these days with the snout-nosed X2000, the Swedish "tilt train" showing off its speed in trial runs, a harbinger of the future.
But in Washington the Palmetto switches to a diesel engine that must work its way through the swamps and pines and farmlands of Dixie on tracks battered by freight trains, some of them 150 cars long, hauling coal from the mines of Virginia, orange juice and phosphate from Florida. It whistles its way at top speed through grade crossings in small towns to make the schedule.
Clint Heflin of Stafford, Va., the conductor of the Palmetto on a recent Saturday run, knows these Southern tracks as well as anyone. He started out as a freight train brakeman 22 years ago. He's proud of his train, but wishes it could be better.
"It's a shame that compared to Europe we don't have any type of real passenger train service in this country," drawls Heflin, who looks like Sean Connery playing a sea captain.
Help may be on the way.
The X2000, which began daily test runs between Washington and New York in February, is the trailblazer in the Clinton administration's efforts to put more zip in train travel and get more cars off the highways.
Congressional hearings have begun on the administration's proposal to spend $1.3 billion over the next five years to expand high-speed passenger train service, including $300 million to develop a prototype of the futuristic magnetic levitation trains which literally ride on air.
Most of the money, though, would be used to upgrade existing tracks, with the states putting up matching funds.
In announcing the plan in late April, Transportation Secretary Federico Pena called it "a bold step into the future."
"I'm glad we've finally got a president who's for the railroad," says Dianne Bowie, a gregarious train attendant on the Palmetto who has been working on the railroad for 15 years and describes herself as a "ghetto girl" from Washington, D.C.
The Transportation Department's immediate goal is to put a new generation of fast trains on a half-dozen improved high-speed corridors linking major metropolitan centers.
A fast train the "Chicken Bone" is not. Top speed is regulated at 79 mph, against the X2000's 155 mph, the French TGV's 180 mph, the Japanese bullet train's 200 mph, or the 300 mph for the maglev jobs being tested in both Germany and Japan.
The Palmetto not only lacks the speed, it lacks the luxury: microwaved barbecued chicken sandwiches ($3.95) from a snack bar instead of barbecued lamb shanks in a dining car with white linen tablecloths, china, stemmed glassware and a chef trained at the Culinary Institute of America. Beer comes in cans ($2.50) and wine in plastic cups ($3.00).
"Hey, Sister, he's nuking the sandwiches!" exclaimed a man who looked to be about 65 and said he'd never ridden a train before. "This ain't like them dining cars on TV, with the swinging chandeliers and all."
But fast or slow, luxury train or the "Chicken Bone," riding the rails is no bad deal.
The chemical toilets may get rank on the journey from New York to Jacksonville, and the air conditioning may be erratic, but the Palmetto does get you there, safely and cheaply. A recent round trip from New York to Wilson, N.C., halfway to Florida, cost $100.
Be that as it may, Amtrak, the national passenger railroad corporation, says ridership nationwide was down slightly in 1992, 21.3 million passengers as compared to 22 million in 1991 and 22.2 million in 1990, a drop the company attributes to the economy.
But Heflin and Larry Hull, a conductor from Claremont, Va., who works the Palmetto on different runs, both say their trains are running full, albeit with fewer cars. They wonder why they can't get more coaches.
"You can't put enough people on this little train here to pay the bills," says Hull, a veteran of 25 years on the rails. "This train six years ago used to run six cars. Now it has three."
If Amtrak is cutting back service on some runs, it's expanding others.
They are trains like the Sunset Limited, which in late March began transcontinental service from Los Angeles to Miami, via New Orleans, a three-day trip.
Amtrak official Jim Larson said at the inauguration of the Sunset Limited expansion, "We not only stand at the threshold of improved rail service, but at the threshold of high-speed rail service."
Some threshold.
Amtrak President W. Graham Claytor Jr. told a congressional transportation subcommittee in March that following the operational and marketing testing of the X2000 and the planned testing of the German ICE train this summer that Amtrak expects to buy 26 new-generation high-speed trains to replace the Metroliner fleet that runs in the Northeast Corridor between Washington, New York and Boston.
The X2000, which runs on existing, electrified track at speeds of up to 150 mph, consists of a locomotive, four passenger cars and a cafe car. Built by ABB Traction, a Swedish conglomerate, it will cost Amtrak from $15 million to $20 million a set.
Thanks to an innovative suspension system and body-tilting mechanism, the X2000 can whip around curves at 90 mph. A conventional train must brake to 75 mph. That could cut an hour and a half off the New-York-to-Boston timetable.
Amtrak also is looking ahead to the era of ultrahigh-speed, the 150-300 mph range.
One option is the wheel-on-rail systems used successfully by the French Train a Grande Vitesse, or TGV, and the Japanese bullet trains. But that would require construction of special track systems.
Germany and Japan both have successfully operated maglev trains, which are whisked along suspended 6 inches into the air by magnetic fields.
It's perhaps not coincidental that Jolene Molitoris, the woman Clinton appointed in April to head the Federal Railroad Administration, was the 1989 and 1992 recipient of the High Speed Rail-Maglev Association President's Award for Outstanding Achievement. Molitoris, a former executive director of the Ohio Rail Transportation Authority, also has been active in the National Conference of State Rail Officials.
Claytor says the two most promising candidates for ultrahigh-speed rail in this country are a proposed TGV wheel-on-rail system between Houston, Dallas and San Antonio and a 15-mile magnetic levitation system planned to link the Orlando International Airport in Florida with Walt Disney World.
He says Amtrak has been designated as the operator of the Orlando project and plans to work with the sponsors of the Texas TGV project.
Of broader interest, though, is the Transportation Department's plan to develop five new high-speed rail corridors with trains running up to 125 mph to serve urban areas that have congested highways and airports.
In the East would be a 478-mile corridor linking Charlotte, N.C., Richmond, Va., and Washington, D.C., a 647-mile route joining Detroit with Chicago, St. Louis and Milwaukee, and a 358-mile Florida run between Miami, Orlando and Tampa.
Out West would be a 464-mile linkup between Eugene and Portland, Ore., Seattle and Vancouver, B.C., and a 655-mile California corridor linking San Diego and Los Angeles with the San Francisco Bay area and Sacramento.
The Northeast Corridor from Washington, D.C. to Boston and a route from New York City to Albany, N.Y., already are high-speed tracks with trains running up to 135 mph, and Amtrak expects the speed to be raised to 150 mph in the next four years with the installation of more concrete ties and continuous-welded rail.
But if high-speed rail service is to develop outside the electrified Northeast Corridor, Claytor says, a new generation of nonelectric locomotives capable of high acceleration and sustained speeds of at least 125 mph must be developed.
"Until recently there has been no market in this country for high-speed rail," he says. "Consequently, there has been no incentive for industry to invest research and development money for high-speed locomotives."
Congress has appropriated some $14 million for Amtrak to develop such a locomotive, one that can tilt, and Claytor says one of the most promising is a turbine engine, similar to that used to power a jet engine. The latest version of the turbine locomotive, Turbomeca's Makila, he says, should enable a train set of two locomotives and three passenger cars to operate at 125 mph.
Another obstacle to high-speed train travel is the condition of the existing tracks. The tracks must be upgraded, switching and signal systems improved and grade crossings replaced by overpasses and underpasses.
That will require tons of money and the cooperation of the freight carriers that own most of the nation's 175,000 miles of railroad tracks outside the Northeast Corridor.
Edwin L. Harper, president of the Association of American Railroads, said in February the freight companies are willing to talk "on condition they pay the costs of adapting the freight network for fast passenger trains and insuring against risk."
While the federal government is expected to provide substantial funds for new Amtrak rolling stock, Claytor says, eliminating the grade crossings and upgrading signals on the freight network probably will need additional financing from such sources as highway funds, state railway commissions, high-speed rail consortiums and other regional bodies.
Back on the northbound Palmetto, conductor Larry Hull is well aware of the poor condition of much of the track and the danger at the crossings.
"You can't run a train over all these crossings so fast, through these towns," he says. "Some places we go through at 79 mph now. I have some questions about that, really. You hit somebody occasionally."
Conductor Heflin, who was involved in several derailments in his freight train days and once on an Amtrak train, is skeptical that a fast train and a freight train can ever share the same track across the swamps and marshes of the South.
"You're just kidding yourself if you think you're going to maintain a 100 mph-plus speed on a track with freight trains running on it down here," he says. "The first freight train to come along would destroy it. All that tonnage - bumpity, bumpity, bump - beats it to death."
Heflin says railroading down South is different in other ways as well.
"We've got a lot of problems to deal with down here that they don't have up there - signal problems and switches, you name it," he says. "The nearest maintenance man is 100-200 miles away and they don't work Saturdays and Sundays, you know. If you have a problem, you damn well better be able to deal with it."
Instead of a faster train, Heflin would settle for a dining car.
"On almost any given day about 30 or 40 people will ask me about a dining car," he says. "The class of people riding the train these days is not like the people who used to bring along a box of chicken from home, which is why we called it the `Chicken Bone Express.' I honestly believe a dining car would pay for itself."
In the heyday of railroads in the 1920s and '30s, there were more than 1,742 diners in tow. In 1992 there were only 67 nationwide, mostly assigned to the long-haul luxury trains.
Hull laments that on this run his train is equipped with coaches designed for commuter trains, not long trips of 17 hours or more. There is less leg room, no footrests, and the chemical toilets can't be flushed out on the open track.
"The toilets tend to get a little ripe by the time you get to where you're going," he says.
But unlike Heflin, he sees hope in the fast train.
"Oh yes, definitely," he says. "It's too expensive to fly and there's too many places that can't afford to put in airports.
"If you can make it fast enough to compete with the automobiles, then you're getting people off the highway. Besides, railroads are cheaper than highways and we've already covered up enough land with concrete and asphalt."
Hull pauses, looking out the window at a vista of apple blossomed springtime in the South.
"Well," he says. "I hope they keep this stuff going, because it's all I know how to do."
by CNB