About SaveCornwellsHeights.com

This is a website set up by Rick Booth (hereafter I/me) of Bensalem, Pennsylvania in order to help save and even improve Amtrak service at Bensalem’s Cornwells Heights train station. Although the name might seem to imply that some democratic group is afoot, in fact it is just me running the site as best I can, and hoping to accurately represent the best interests of Amtrak riders at Cornwells Heights. I am solely responsible for its content, and I am solely to blame if anything found on this site rubs anyone the wrong way.

Concerned by the rumors of imminent station stop shutdown I was hearing in early August, I wrote to Amtrak’s public relations office to ask their true intent for the station, making plain that I intended to take their answer to politicians in order to maintain and hopefully improve service. What I received back on August 12 was a simplistic statement to the effect that Amtrak intended to abandon service to Cornwells Heights in October. In response to a long heated note detailing my objections to their planned station abandonment, I again received a short reply indicating that the decision had already been made.

Following that exchange, I did everything I could to save the Cornwells Heights Amtrak service – and not just because the next 15 or 20 years of my ability to hold a New York City job was at stake. The fact of the matter is, it is simply wrong-headed to close the station over a low ridership excuse when, in fact, Amtrak appears to be responsible in many ways for damaging ridership and stunting its growth through a series of nearly incredible missteps.

Bensalem’s Cornwells Heights station is, in my opinion, at least as good a New York City commuting location as Trenton, Hamilton Station, and Princeton Junction, if not even better in some ways (like having Philadelphia in our back yard). We can and should be a thriving New York City commuter stop. That was the original intent of initiating service here in 1997 when the 1,600 parking space park-and-ride at Cornwells Heights was opened. The park-and-ride still only fills up half way each day, and about 800 parking spaces go unused at all times. Secretly shutting it down for all the wrong reasons, seriously damaging many lives which have been structured around the notion that Amtrak was here to stay, would have been morally wrong. Getting rid of the commuters by changing the Amtrak decades-long policy of offering monthly passes at affordable prices is just a morally wrong. That’s what I’m fighting now.

Anyone can write to me at rick@savecornwellsheights.com, or call me on my cell at 215-837-6557 anytime. The more I hear from others, the better I can take on Amtrak over its immoral fare increase, while trying to support its funding and future health and reform as well. I look forward to hearing from you.