WASHINGTON – Amtrak has a new booster club.

More than 50 chambers of commerce and other business groups on the East Coast, including some in Maine, have joined together to lobby Congress to fully fund the railroad’s $1.8 billion budget request.

The Bush administration has sent Congress a $900 million request for Amtrak. Amtrak President David Gunn said that amount eventually would force a shutdown of the system. The railroad urgently needs capital investments, he said – warning that “time is running out” for some of its aging infrastructure.

The newly formed Amtrak Business Coalition sent a letter Wednesday to congressional appropriations leaders urging them to meet Amtrak’s full funding request for fiscal year 2005.

The group announced its efforts at a boarding gate in Union Station as passengers disembarked trains in the background. Union Station was the third-busiest station in the Amtrak system last year, behind Penn Station in New York and 30th St. Station in Philadelphia.

John D. Porcari, a member of the transportation committee of the Greater Washington Board of Trade – and a former Maryland transportation secretary – called Amtrak the “lifeblood” of the northeast’s economy. He said the railroad served more than 6 million riders and employed nearly 4,000 people in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia.

“If Amtrak were not to run tomorrow morning, imagine the incredible congestion we would experience throughout the Northeast corridor,” said Sen. Paul Sarbanes, D-Md. “You’d have absolute gridlock.”

The Amtrak Business Coalition has members in Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Virginia.