This week’s tragedy in India makes one wonder what New York and New Jersey’s senators are doing to avert a similar disaster here at home. Although they’ve spent recent months charging the Bush administration with cutting New York’s allocation of homeland security funding for things like policing, they’ve completely missed a key element of terrorism defense — improving infrastructure to minimize the impact of a terrorist attack. Sad to say, we have no unified approach to better protect train passengers in a terrorist attack, particularly in the Manhattan tunnels used by Amtrak and commuter trains from Long Island and New Jersey.

The explosions on Mumbai’s commuter trains, when added to events since 1998, add up to 184 successful attacks on rail targets worldwide resulting in 830 deaths and several thousand injuries. We know that terrorists have horrific designs on trains entering New York, as shown by the thwarted plan to attack the PATH system. So you’d think that Senators Clinton, Schumer, Menendez, and Lautenberg would take effective steps to ameliorate the effects of a terrorist attack.

Wrong. The Senators are determined to perpetuate the dysfunctional Amtrak system, overlook the railroad’s flagrant disregard for public safety, and allow Amtrak to shortchange infrastructure on the busiest route of all, that linking Washington with New York and Boston.

Responsibility for terrorist actions must be placed on terrorists themselves. However, hazards are exacerbated in the New York tunnels because Amtrak has skimped on basic safety since it took ownership in 1976. The Department of Transportation’s inspector general has documented Amtrak’s failure to upgrade tunnel emergency exits, ventilation and fire-safety systems. There are no standpipes to bring water to some tunnel locations. Several escape routes consist of single spiral staircases that are only one person wide, meaning passengers fleeing single-file would block first responders from reaching the scene. Bringing the tunnels, built around 1910, up to modern standards would cost $900 million.

Yet the senators heap criticism on the White House even though the Bush administration was the first to demand that Amtrak improve Manhattan tunnel safety. Work has begun under a $126.6 million contract, and $100 million in completed Penn Station improvements means we are better protected against bombs, chemical weapons, biological agents, and radioactive devices in the station and on the platforms.

To the extent improvements are underway, they’re underway despite our senators, not because of them. Mrs. Clinton fights to preserve Amtrak as is, saying the future without the railroad would be “devastating.” But she doesn’t mention that more than 50% of all Amtrak travelers use only 10% of the system, and under shutdown scenarios the Northeast Corridor would remain in operation. Worse, she has joined other pork-barrel schemers to spend billions of taxpayers’ dollars on the 90% of Amtrak that is useless (the long-distance trains). Considering that just one rush-hour Long Island Rail Road train carries more than ten times the 100 people who board Amtrak in West Virginia in an entire day, she should demand that Amtrak free up resources to benefit the half-million people — many of them her constituents and people who work in her state — who travel through Amtrak’s Manhattan tunnels each day.

Then there’s Senator Schumer. After the Amtrak blackout in May left thousands of people stranded in trains for hours, Mr. Schumer feebly called for a study into the railroad’s electrical system even though such work has already been done. In focusing on the electrical system, he missed the real warning in the difficulty of clearing the Hudson tunnels even when the trains inside were intact and the worst emergency was a loss of electrical power. When Amtrak mortgaged New York’s Pennsylvania Station for $300 million to cover three months’ operating expenses — not infrastructure improvements, mind you — Mr. Schumer did nothing to stop it.

Across the Hudson, Senator Menendez has been stunningly ineffective in representing commuters. He rejects every proposed Amtrak reform, innovation, suggestion or idea. But he has no solutions whatsoever except to lavish Amtrak with boxcars full of money. Last year, Senator Lautenberg protested when Amtrak’s board dismissed its president, David Gunn, after a scathing Government Accountability Office report outlined his dismal performance. But why defend Mr. Gunn? He launched fierce campaigns to save nearly useless long-distance trains while doing little to improve safety in the Northeast Corridor.

The four senators have supported legislation to subsidize Amtrak tunnel improvements, such as the bill to boost rail security funding by $1.1 billion that failed on Wednesday because it would break the budget bill’s spending cap. But after the loss, the senators didn’t demand that Amtrak take austerity measures and shift part of its $1 billion in annual funding to strategic chokepoints such as Penn Station’s infrastructure.

For too long, the senators have been all too willing to subsidize Amtrak but none to willing to criticize it. As a result, Amtrak has spent $30.7 billion in federal funds over three decades and the public is still left vulnerable to unsafe conditions, especially around Manhattan. Amtrak wastes its capital on lightly used trains, leaving the busiest lines poorly maintained. Efforts to spin off the Northeast Corridor to a subsidiary that would take better care of the asset, which constitutes the bulk of the relatively small amount of track Amtrak actually owns, invariably run into political opposition. Any effort from the senators to address that problem would be a real light at the end of the tunnel for New York’s commuters.

Mr. Vranich was president of the High Speed Rail Association and is the author of “End of the Line: The Failure of Amtrak Reform and the Future of America’s Passenger Trains.”