A congressional committee approved deep spending cuts to Amtrak’s budget on Wednesday evening, the day after the deadly crash in Philadelphia.

The House Appropriations Committee voted to cut funding to the public-sector rail company by 18% – less than 24 hours after its Northeast Reginal train 188 came off the tracks at more than 100 mph, killing seven.

The Republican-controlled committee rejected Democratic attempts to boost spending on Amtrak by more than $1 billion, including $556 million for the busiest north-east corridor that links Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston.

It voted, during the passage of a budget bill, to cut passenger railway investment by more than $250 million from the $1.4bn invested last year, despite Amtrak warning that without increased investment, the nation’s crumbling rail infrastructure would be “vulnerable to a bigger, costlier and far more damaging failure than anything yet seen”.

The bill put forward by House Republicans proposes to cut Amtrak’s budget for the next fiscal year by 18% to $1.1 billion.

Democratic representative Chaka Fattah, representing Philadelphia, said that the majority of Amtrak’s passengers used the north-east rail corridor affected by Tuesday’s accident.

“These riders deserve safe, secure and modern infrastructure,” she said during the committee’s debate on Wednesday.

President Barack Obama has asked Congress for almost $2.5 billion for Amtrak, a large increase on previous years, with proposals to boost capital investment in track, tunnels and bridges.

One of Maryland’s Democratic representatives, Dutch Ruppersberger, said “We must pass a multi-year transportation funding bill that increases – not decreases – federal investment in highway, transit and rail programs before another disaster occurs.”

But the committee approved the cuts to Amtrak, with voting falling along party lines.

Fattah said it was not yet officially known what had caused the Tuesday’s derailment.

“But we do know, if we don’t now invest in the capital infrastructure of our country, there will be future accidents. Our continued failure to invest in road and rail infrastructure is not just unwise – it is plainly a public safety hazard.” Fattah’s proposal was voted down 21-30.

Well before Tuesday night’s deadly crash, Tony Coscia, Amtrak’s chairman, warned Congress that even the current levels of federal funding “put the Northeast Corridor infrastructure at increased risk of major failure with serious economic consequences for the nation”.



The crash occurred on the extremely busy Northeast Corridor railroad between Washington DC and Boston, which carries 11.6 million passengers a year.



Amtrak’s president and chief executive, Joe Boardman, wrote to the president of the Senate and the speaker of the House of Representatives in March 2014 to warn that unless Amtrak’s funding was dramatically increased, the Northeast Corridor railroad would “fall apart”.

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“Infrastructure deterioration and changes in business patterns have reached a point where something has to change,” Boardman said. “If America wants a modern intercity passenger rail system, the problems of policy and funding must be addressed. The nation cannot afford to let a railroad that carries half of Amtrak’s trains and 80% of the nation’s rail commuters fall apart.”



It is not the first time Amtrak executives have tried to warn the nation’s lawmakers about the parlous state of the country’s railroads, which have become a national embarrassment, with China having built 9,900 miles of high-speed railroad tracks compared to zero in the world’s biggest economy.



In 2012, Boardman said the north-east region was “facing a crisis” and warned that the region’s projected population growth to about 65 million by 2050 would “create additional travel demand and strain an already stressed network”. He set out a vision for a dedicated truly high-speed 427-mile track between Washington and Boston, which has been ignored. The current Acela Express service travels at an average speed of just 84mph, which decreases to 72mph including stopping time. Last month a Japanese bullet train achieved a top speed of 375mph. The Eurostar service between London and Paris travels at 186mph.

Boardman cried during an interview last month when speaking about the frustration of trying to run the nation’s railways on a shoestring budget. “Is this a frustrating job?” Boardman was asked by the reporter from National Journal.

“I guess it could be, and there are times it is. No question about that,” he replied. “We haven’t done everything right, and I don’t make all of the right decisions and, yes, I get frustrated. But you have to stay up.” As he spoke “a tear crawls down his left cheek”, the National Journal reporter Simon Van Zuylen-Wood wrote.



The White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, said on Wednesday: “There is clearly more that can be done when we’re talking about a railway infrastructure that is decades-old. If there’s an opportunity for us to make further investments in our infrastructure that would better safeguard the travelling public, then those are investments that we should make.”



Pennsylvania representative Ryan Costello said Congress should boost funding for Amtrak, rather than cutting into its budget. “If we’re not investing in our safety for the Northeast Corridor, we’re not doing what we should be doing down here,” he told CNN. “We need to continue to invest in our passenger rail system … a critical piece of the economy in the north-east part of the country.”

The cause of Tuesday night’s derailment, which is being investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board, is not yet known. The crash is close to the scene of one of the deadliest US rail disasters, the 1943 derailment of the Congressional Limited, from Washington to New York, which killed 79 people.

There were 1,241 derailments across the US last year, according to the Federal Railroad Administration Office of Safety Analysis. By way of comparison, there were 2,026 “significant accidents” , the vast majority of which were derailments, across the EU in 2012.