Accurate editorial from the folks at RESQ:
Doesn't it make you sick to know that Dick Davidson pocketed $34 million in bonus money alone in the past two years...and left taxpayers to sort out his mess
Editorial: Union Pacific struggles
Auburn to Sacramento commuters fume
Published 2:15 am PDT Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Back in March, when we last checked in with the disgruntled passengers aboard Capitol Corridor trains that run daily between Auburn and Sacramento, things were bad. Train 527, which is supposed to arrive in Sacramento by 7:37 every morning (in plenty of time for people to report to work at downtown offices by 8), rolled in late routinely.
Union Pacific, the railroad company that owns the tracks on which Capitol Corridor trains run, promised to do better and did so for a while. But in a letter to UP officials last week, passengers complained the trains "are running slower and more unpredictably than ever before." Last month on time performance had dropped to a dismal 62 percent of the time.
The railroad doesn't duck responsibility. UP has had some serious operational problems not just on its Auburn to Sacramento corridor but across the country. Railroad officials guessed wrong a few years back when they closed up some railyards and encouraged a slew of early retirements without hiring a sufficient number of replacements. That miscalculation, coupled with a sudden surging economy, has left the nation's largest railroad with a crippling shortage of equipment and crews. Clogged tracks and stalled trains are scattered from Oakland to Chicago, Laredo to Duluth.
UP's Roseville yard is just one bottleneck in a rail network littered with traffic jams. Some days there are not enough crews or locomotives at Roseville to move idle freight trains onto sidings. So the trains are parked on one of the two main lines. That leaves only one track available to move freight and the frustrated passengers to work and home again.
Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars state taxpayers have invested to upgrade tracks along the Capitol Corridor and buy priority for passenger trains, the 527 commuter train that comes down from Auburn every morning and the 538 that goes back at night are regularly shunted to sidings to allow slow moving freights to move ahead.
Riders threatening to mount public demonstrations to highlight Union Pacific's failure are right to complain but they will have to get in line. UP's freight customers are howling too. The same bottlenecks that slow passenger trains are causing shipping delays that have cost them millions. A recent Wall Street Journal article reported that UP's problems are so serious they risk stalling the nation's economic recovery.
UP is scrambling to hire and train more crews and buy more locomotives but that will take time. Meanwhile, as the pre-Christmas shipping season heats up, things are expected to get worse before they get better.
While the news is mostly bad there is some hope for relief. Plans are under way to make $6.5 million in track improvements that will relieve congestion at Roseville and allow the addition of two more passenger trains out of Auburn every day. That will help but it's not enough.
A lack of public investment in rail is plaguing the country. While Congress has poured billions into roads and airports and even ports, the nation's railroads have been left to finance their own massive infrastructure needs. Frustrated passengers stranded outside of Auburn are only a symptom of a larger problem, the failure of the federal government to invest in rail.
