Transit team calls on Trump for help with Amtrak

In hopes the train hasn’t already left the station, the Citizens’ Independent Transportation Trust is urging Amtrak to reconsider keeping its vow to use the depot that the state built for it in Miami and is asking federal officials for help.

The trust “is disappointed in Amtrak’s reversal to extend its passenger rail service to the [Miami Intermodal Center], where a more logical terminus for its service would better connect its passengers to an array of transportation modes, such as the airport, rental car center, Metrorail, Tri-Rail, and a host inter-city/interstate buses,” a memo accompanying the trust’s resolution said.

The memo asks for aid from the Trump Administration and the county’s congressional delegation in helping to ensure that “Amtrak’s long-standing commitment” to the intermodal center extension is fulfilled.

Amtrak, the national railway system, shocked local transportation interests in November when it said that it would not use the station that the Florida Department of Transportation completed to its specifications in 2016 and that has been sitting vacant waiting for Amtrak’s arrival ever since.

As Amtrak delayed coming to Miami, the state transportation department spent an additional $5.6 million several years ago to reconfigure nearby roadways to allow longer trains to use the terminal without blocking automobile traffic. Final terms of the agreement to use the station were being arranged when the railway cut short talks and said it wasn’t coming at all.

While specifics of Amtrak’s reasoning haven’t been made public, Robert Wolfarth, chairman of the transportation trust, had his own analysis.

“At the end of the day this is an FDOT [Florida Department of Transportation] owned and operated terminal,” he told trust members last week before they passed the resolution unanimously. “Amtrak wants certain costs to be covered by FDOT and FDOT is unable at this point to do that.”

“Do we have any teeth in passing this resolution?” Mr. Wolfarth asked rhetorically. “I don’t know.”

“We might be able to get it back on track again,” he said. “It was an urging to get the two parties to talk to each other again.”

The multimodal hub was agreed to in 1997 and Amtrak was a part of the planning to get all transportation modes to come together at an interchange to shift from one kind of mobility to another. But Amtrak never arrived.

“These tracks were built out specifically for Amtrak and to Amtrak specifications,” Mr. Wolfarth noted.

The concept, he says, was never “to have people come in to the mobility hub and then somehow finding their way to Hialeah so that they could take the Amtrak. The whole original concept was that this was going to be part of it. A tremendous amount of taxpayers’ money was spent on it.”

Amtrak, a federally chartered corporation, is run as a for-profit company but with the US government owning all preferred stock as controlling shareholder. The president appoints the board members and the Senate confirms them. The secretary of commerce is a board member.

Trust members asked last week about which local members of Congress hold transportation-related committee assignments and might be asked to help. The federal government appropriates Amtrak’s capital funds.

A November letter from Amtrak told the state that instead of coming to Miami, the railway will work for three years to make its current Hialeah station its southern terminus.

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