Meeting Report: NARP Regional Conference

Thanks to PVACR supporters Michael Galvagni (also group Treasurer) and Susan Winholz for this report:

Susan and I attended the March 21, 2009 meeting of the National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP) in New London , CT.

I thought the highlight of the event was speaker Jim Cameron. Mr. Cameron formerly worked for NBC news. He is now self-employed and writes a blog called Talking Transportation )

Here is his posting in Talking Transportation about the meeting (Susan is one of the “…dutiful wives along to support their husbands’ hobby, knitting all through the meeting.”). I see no free mittens coming from Susan anytime soon!

While I enjoyed Cameron’s presentation there were two downsides. First, most of his discussion was about Metro North and the arrival of new trains on that line. More importantly was his prediction that Hartford and Springfield would not see commuter rail service for 8 more years. Mr. Terry Hall, who was representing Mr. Bruce Becker, NARP’s Northeastern Division Leader, disagreed with Cameron on when we would see commuter rail. Terry predicted we would see service in a few years but that it would be brought in on a phased manner. The phased in manner would be advertised as a step toward full implementation - which he predicted would never happen. In other words Susan and I basically heard two conflicting reports both of which were pessimistic.

I will largely defer to quoting Mr. Cameron for much of the rest of this report because he covered the meeting as well as I could hope to. Ross Capon, President of NARP spoke on the current situation of Amtrak and the stimulus package. As Cameron says in his posting, “Capon gave a great speech about the many changes in Washington breathing new life into rail: increased funding for Amtrak, new initiatives to force freight rail lines to expedite passenger trains, even discussions about ten new high-speed rail corridors across the country.”

Having lived in Texas for 25 years Mr. Capon put a smile on my face when he took a poke at Lone Star State for wanting to build another highway ring around Houston with little or no consideration for Mass Transit.

Again I quote Mr. Cameron, “Another NARP officer (Mr. Al Papp, NARP’s Vice Chair for Legislative Policy & Strategy) spoke of the crazy plans by NJ Transit to build new tunnels under the Hudson River which would dead-end at a new underground station for Garden State commuters instead of continuing on to Grand Central.”

Mr. Papp’s basic point here was that the Amtrak high speed rail between Washington DC and the Northeast would be unable to (or have limited use of) Hudson River tunnels. He passionately referred to the plan by NJ Transit as “holding 50 million people hostage.”

There was supposed to be someone at the meeting to discuss the status of rail in Massachusetts but he must not have made the meeting.