It’s a typical weekday morning on the expressways heading north toward Milwaukee. The cars are backed up for miles, creeping forward a few feet at a time.
Instead, Amtrak recently announced plans to decrease runs and increase fares on the Chicago-Milwaukee service known as the Hiawatha. “It’s almost as though Amtrak doesn’t care if the Hiawatha fails,” says Jim Coston, a Chicago lawyer and train advocate who would like to serve on Amtrak’s board of directors. “And if they keep running it the way they do, it will fail.”
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Coston’s part of a coalition of railroad supporters here and in Milwaukee that’s trying to pressure Amtrak into rethinking its policies. Using their influence with Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson and Milwaukee mayor John Norquist, they persuaded Amtrak to abandon its original plans to eliminate the Hiawatha. But the activists want to go beyond the bare-bones service Amtrak agreed to maintain. They want Amtrak to upgrade rail lines, use the fastest equipment, and increase the number of runs.
But Amtrak never received as much government support as the highways and airports; indeed the Reagan and Bush administrations, as well as the new Republican Congress, proposed eliminating its budget. “When you hear people like Newt Gingrich talk about trains they use words like hemorrhage and waste–like the system is draining our economy dry,” says Coston. “You never hear them talk like that about highways or civil aviation.”
It’s as though the public has been brainwashed, says Plous: “They have discovered in laboratory experiments that people regard what they see through the windshield of a car as their property. There’s an impression of control. You own that wheel and that window. On a train, all you have is the seat. Americans are not trained to use public space.”
The result was an outpouring of protest, particularly from Wisconsin, whose governor is one of the few prominent Republicans willing to buck the party’s antipathy to train transportation.
To prove his point, Coston compares the Hiawatha with the run between Philadelphia and New York.
