From: utzoo!decvax!cca!hplabs!menlo70!sytek!msm@sri-unix Newsgroups: net.railroad Title: (From fa.railroad) W.U.T. Article-I.D.: sytek.172 Posted: Thu Jun 10 08:51:53 1982 Received: Sun Jun 13 04:09:10 1982 >From menlo70!ucbvax!Weinstock@CMU-20C Thu Jun 10 05:15:46 1982 Date: 9 Jun 1982 1646-EDT From: Charles B. WeinstockSubject: W.U.T. To: Railroad at MIT-MC BC-UNION By BEN A. FRANKLIN c. 1982 N.Y. Times News Service WASHINGTON - In the annals of federal fiascos, there is now perfect bipartisan agreement here, there is no more classical list of government blunders than those that befell Washington's Union Station. According to Amtrak, 20,500 passengers will have boarded or detrained here by the end of the Memorial Day weekend. Most of them will have found it a bruising experience. The good news is that the Department of Transportation is stepping in to undo what has been done. The bad news is that it may take years. Congress decided more than a decade ago to convert the great Beaux Arts Union Station into a national visitor center. But the droves of visitors never came, not even at the Bicentennial in 1976, for which the project was hurriedly completed. One night in January 1977, guests at one of President Carter's inaugural balls burned $20,000 in cigarette holes in a carpet laid by the visitor-center planners over multilevel platforms built on acres of marble floor. The Interior Department spent more than $100 million converting the station, which has two concourses, each large enough to receive the Washington Monument lying down. The National Visitor Center included a ''hall of flags,'' a ''national book store'' and rows of patriotic and historical displays and information and souvenir booths. There were two movie theaters and a giant mauve-carpeted ''pit'' cut into the main waiting room for a musical slide show that turned out to have technical bugs and few viewers. The Interior Department labeled the multiprojector display PAVE, for ''primary audio-visual experience.'' After the slide show broke down, rail passengers regularly rode escalators into the pit in pursuit of their trains. The passengers' ''replacement station,'' less than one-tenth the size of the original, was tucked under what was planned as a 4,000-automobile parking garage and a bus terminal. In lavishing largesse on the visitor center, the Department of the Interior failed to fix the leaky roof. And when water finally rose over the acres of scorched carpet, the center was closed, in February 1981. Today the 75-year-old structure is neither a passenger terminal nor a visitor center. It is neglected, boarded up, leaking, moldy and derelict. Through the grimy glass of its locked and chained front doors, strangers peer into a cave littered with fallen plaster. Water has damaged large areas of ceiling and there is danger of falling debris. Toadstools flourish. ''Where are the trains?'' ask countless would-be passengers, approaching across the heroic white and gold Columbus Plaza. The answer is a hike of a third of a mile around the perimeter to the Amtrak basement. The so-called ''replacement station'' has been reviewed by critics here as suggestive of ''Hitler's bunker'' and ''a hospital emergency room entry.'' Fixing responsibility for the disaster is not easy. However, it has been shown that former Rep. Kenneth J. Gray, D-Ill., who was chairman of the Buildings and Grounds Subcommittee of the House Public Works Committee, conceived and promoted the visitor center plan in 1967. It can be demonstrated that thereafter officials of the Department of Transportation and the Department of the Interior's Park Service engaged in a furious struggle. And it is indisputable that when the center began to crumble and government planners finally united in 1978 on plans to transfer control back to transportation specialists, former Rep. Harold T. Johnson, D-Calif., until 1980 chairman of the Public Works Committee, repeatedly blocked such bills. In December, after Johnson's defeat, the Reagan administration gave its approval to restoring the defunct station to roughly its original form. The Department of the Interior must still provide $7.5 million to finish patching the roof. But the future of the building as a train station is now in the hands of the Department of Transportation. It has congressional approval to dip into the Northeast Corridor Rail Improvement Fund for up to $29 million in restoration money. The District of Columbia is to divert unused highway construction money to complete the garage and bus terminal. And by December, Department of Transportation consultants are to complete detailed proposals for handling trains and passengers. nyt-06-01-82 1052edt -------