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Mr. Gunn will be on CNBC at 12:40 CDT today. I won't be able to watch, so perhaps other forum members can list their reactions to his comments below.
Posts: 506 | From: Wisconsin | Registered: Mar 2002
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I saw the show, it probably lasted less then five minutes. One question was about the long distance money losing trains. He did refute that claim and said the LD trains only contributed about 200 million to Amtrak's losses and we wouldn't even begin saving that for a year and a half due to labor rules. I sure wish he would have said something to refute the per passenger loss that the house is so infatuated with. What no one seems to have brought up is that the long distance trains carry about half of the total passenger miles of the Amtrak system. So, if it costs 200 million to carry the passengers on the long distance trains and another 1 billion to carry the same passenger rail miles on the corridor trains, its not hard to see where the big cash drain is. It's not the long distance trains. The per passenger figures are very misleading also because the average LD passenger travels considerably further than the corridor passenger. It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that since they travel much further, you could expect a larger per passenger loss.
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I like the following comments, from another source: "Typical 'do we really need rail service' interviewer. She asked if Amtrak was ever going to be able to stop asking for so much money. Gunn replied he'd gladly stop asking when the airlines did and they started paying for all their own infrastructure. She replied point well taken.
She then 'railed on' about the LD trains and how they were a drag on Amtrak. Gunn put her back on her heels by indicating that LD trains only account for about $300 million of Amtrak's $1.2 billion they are seeking, so it isn't really an issue except for politicians as he put it.
All in all, Gunn stood his ground well. I got the feeling the interviewer cut it short because she was being made to look bad."
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