John W. Olver: “I am going to express some of my frustration... It is silly to think they even could have operated within $900 million…”

“I am going to express some of my frustration... It is silly to think they even could have operated within $900 million in this year without ending up in a shutdown situation, or without leaving us with an ever-worsening deferred maintenance problem. I want to use this time to point out that Amtrak is a hybrid program. It runs on 600 miles of the Northeast Corridor roughly, which is owned by Amtrak and is the direct responsibility of that governmental agency. That 600 miles of trackage takes more than half of all of the passengers that are being dealt with by Amtrak. Now that is the part that we have direct responsibility for. The rest of the Amtrak lines operate on some 20,000 other miles of trackage that is run by private freight carriers and Amtrak has contracts with them and has priority to use that trackage. But we do not have specific direct maintenance of those.”