Political fight over Amtrak funding heats up after crash

Amtrak is scheduled on Monday to resume limited service between New York City and Philadelphia, the site of the Tuesday night derailment that killed eight people. Full service should resume on Tuesday.

Amtrak has transported the mangled passenger cars to a facility in Delaware, Md., where officials will continue to examine the wreckage. Federal investigators are still trying to determine exactly what happened, but officials said the train derailed while speeding at 106 miles per hour around a curve with a 50 mph limit. In addition to the eight who were killed, one of whom wasn’t found in the wreckage until Thursday morning, 200 people were injured. Several remain in critical condition.

The crash quickly became politicized, sparking a debate over public transportation funding. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told reporters the crash might have been prevented if Republicans hadn’t cut Amtrak’s funding. Schumer said it was lack of funds that delayed the installation of a safety measure, called Positive Train Control (PTC), that forces a train to slow down if it’s speeding. But a report by Amtrak’s Office of Inspector General found that when Amtrak submitted its five-year financial plan to Congress in 2012, it did not include its estimated costs for PTC. “As a result” of this oversight, “Amtrak is at risk of not having adequate funds to complete PTC installation,” the report concluded.

On Thursday, Amtrak President Joseph Boardman said PTC was in fact installed on the rails in Philadelphia but wasn’t functioning because it needs more testing. He promised it would be installed along the entire northeast corridor by the end of this year.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said linking Tuesday’s crash to funding deficits was “stupid.”

“Obviously it’s not about funding,” he told reporters. “The train was going twice the speed limit.”

Schumer disagreed: “To deny a connection between the accident and underfunding Amtrak is to deny reality.”

On Wednesday, one day after the crash, Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee pushed to nearly double Amtrak’s budget to $2.4 billion next year, citing the derailment as proof the additional funds were needed. Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, told Democrats on the committee it was “beneath” them to use the derailment to try to get more funding. The Republican-controlled committee defeated the measure. Instead, the committee voted to cut Amtrak’s 2016 budget by $252 million. The cuts will affect Amtrak’s capital spending but won’t dip into safety or operations budgets.

The Northeast Corridor, between Washington, D.C. and Boston (including New York and Philadelphia) has historically been the nation’s busiest route. Although Amtrak is consistently plagued by annual deficits, income from northeast corridor riders rose more than $100 million in 2014 compared to the year before. But according to The Wall Street Journal, that uptick in income has mostly been used to subsidize struggling routes elsewhere in the country instead of on its own maintenance and improvement.

According to The New York Times, officials with the National Transportation Safety Board will soon interview 32-year-old Brandon Bostian, the Amtrak engineer who was driving the train at the time of the crash. Officials said they don’t know yet whether Bostian sped up the train manually. His lawyer said Bostian doesn’t remember much from the crash because he suffered a concussion. But he was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time, and he remembers trying to slow the train down before the crash.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.