Amtrak, hurt by airline fare wars, accidents and rising costs, is considering major cuts in service, the first since the early 1980s.
The railroad's board will meet today to consider how to make up a deficit projected at $200 million for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.
"Everything is on the table," said Clifford Black, an Amtrak spokesman, including eliminating some routes in places that have little service now, and cutting back the frequency of trains in the Northeast Corridor and on other busy routes.
The railroad, which covers 25,000 miles in 45 states, runs about 230 trains each day. Amtrak could make an announcement tomorrow on whether there will be cutbacks and where.
Last year, Amtrak reduced train service between Chicago and several cities in Texas to three days a week, rather than daily. A train from Denver through Wyoming and Idaho to Portland, Ore., was also cut back to three times a week from daily.
Some advocates of rail travel say Amtrak's revenue projections are unduly pessimistic.
"These folks are going to latch onto incompetent negative revenue projections, and use that to justify such big cuts in the system that nobody's going to want to save it," said Ross Capon, executive director of the National Association of Railroad Passengers.
The railroad, he said, was assuming that revenues would decline in the current fiscal year because of problems last year that were really one-time events.
Amtrak says it lost revenue last year when it banned smoking on most trains. Mr. Capon said that having lost some smokers as passengers, it would not lose them again, and that it would gain other passengers.
Amtrak also suffered through the tough winter in the Northeast last year when trains were canceled and passengers were stranded. While it picked up some riders from the airlines, Mr. Black said, "We had to buy a lot of hotel rooms and taxi rides, and cancel trips and refund money."
xTC But Mr. Black said the railroad continued to face long-term problems, including cheap airfares, and needed to balance its books "to get control of our destiny." On some routes, it is cheaper to fly than to take the train.
For example, Mr. Black said, Southwest Airlines sells one-way tickets between Chicago and Washington for about $50. The railroad's fare is $121 one way, with some $128 round-trip excursion fares available.
On other routes the railroad is cheaper. In the New York to Washington run, the one-way Metroliner fare is $98, compared with $140 on the two shuttle airlines.
Amtrak's passenger revenues for the last fiscal year were about $1.2 billion, said Mr. Black, about the same as the prior year. It also received congressional subsidies of $392 million for operations and $150 million for its contribution to the federal pension fund for railroad workers.
The government also provided $230 million for general capital improvements and $200 million for improving the Northeast Corridor.
Mr. Black said that the railroad was not anticipating a reduction in its federal subsidy, but that "we cannot anticipate a supplemental appropriation to bail us out."
The railroad, established by Congress in 1971, began layoffs or buyouts in September of 600 of its 2,100 managers. Amtrak's total employment is 25,000.
The railroad says ridership may have fallen off somewhat because of several accidents in the last 16 months.
But Mr. Capon of the passengers' association said people were probably less worried about train travel right now than they were about the safety of certain planes.