Dear <<First Name *>>,

In some ways, the need to focus on and fund passenger rail advocacy is now even more urgent. Some members of Congress, even pro-rail members in both parties, are getting cold feet about new spending. Rail is an easy cut to make. And those members are getting whispered in their ear by freight railroad interests who would be just as happy to see passenger rail go away rather than get a boost of public investment that would help ordinary riders in hundreds of communities all across America.
 
It’s no coincidence that we started to see anti-passenger rail articles come out this Spring in major press outlets within weeks or sometimes days of each other. Politico, Forbes, an op-ed in the New York Times. It was all a rapidly coordinated PR response rolled out about 30 days after the Biden Administration unveiled plans for billions of dollars of public investment in passenger rail.
 
Our pockets here at Rail Passengers are nowhere near as deep as those of the Class I railroads. And we’re a 501(c)3 nonprofit, which means we can’t – and won’t, ever – contribute to political war chests to get someone’s attention. The reality is, we’re a small staff of five people, cut more than 40% from where we were in 2019, working every day to carry your voices into Congress, the U.S. Dept. of Transportation, the Federal Railroad Administration, the Surface Transportation Board, the National Transportation Safety Board, local government offices and into the executive suite at Amtrak.