PADUCAH, Ky. -- Paducahan Charles Corder spent half his 72 years with the Illinois Central Railroad, including 25 of those 36 years of work as a carmen's union local chairman trying to help his fellow rail workers, the Paducah Sun reports.

He worries about the wives whose pensions are drastically cut if their husbands die. Backed by 17 unions, legislation to more than double the pension amount overwhelmingly passed the U.S. House of Representatives, but is taking a back seat in the Senate to the sweeping effort to combat terrorism.

"I'm concerned for my wife's sake, although she's very sick and bedfast," said Corder. "It would boost her pension several hundred dollars a month if something happened to me first." Corder is among 1,000 or more railroad workers and retirees in western Kentucky and southern Illinois with a big stake in what happens on Capitol Hill. Nationwide, railroads employ about 245,000 people and have more than 673,000 pension beneficiaries. Rail unions estimate there are more than 16,000 railroad retirees, spouses and survivors receiving benefits in Kentucky.

Under current law, a retired employee and spouse get 145 percent of the retiree's pension. When the retiree dies, the spouse is left with 50 percent of the benefit, a cut of almost two-thirds. So many widows are left pinching pennies, especially with the soaring cost of health care.

"My wife's medicine has gotten higher and higher," Corder said. "It's hard on us. We have some savings and a little interest, but it's hard to pay a premium of $ 600 a month, plus all this medicine."

Retired rail workers with at least 30 years' experience get an average of almost $ 1,800 a month. Survivors, mostly widows, get about $ 800 a month with more recent beneficiaries receiving about $ 1,000.

The bill would increase surviving spouses' pensions an average of about $ 300 a month; cut the retirement age from 63 to 60 for rail workers of 30 or more years; reduce from 10 to five years the work time needed for pension vesting; and let some of the pension fund be invested in stocks rather than just in government bonds.

On July 31, the bill passed the House 384-33 with support from Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Hopkinsville, and the rest of the Kentucky delegation. But it is idled in the Senate Finance Committee as Congress deals with many issues spurred by the events of Sept. 11 and later. The committee approved similar legislation last year, but the Senate never gave a final vote.

Despite being co-sponsored by Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Louisville, and roughly 75 percent of the Senate, the current bill has a few key critics. Prominent is Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, a Finance Committee member who thinks the $ 15 billion retirement fund would go bankrupt faster than Social Security because it has three times as many retirees per worker paying in. Gramm wants to keep the full pension at age 62 instead of lowering it to 60.

Unions say Gramm's worries about solvency are unfounded because -- unlike Social Security, from which funds will be heavily tapped by retiring baby boomers -- the railroad pool will swell. That's because dramatic job cuts since 1980 have left fewer retirees to draw annuities.

Investing part of the fund in the stock market should more than compensate for the increased payout, said Dennis Yates, legislative liaison for Lodge 6291 of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen. "He (Gramm) keeps wanting to compare us to Social Security and we're not Social Security," said Yates, a Paducah & Louisville Railway employee.

The fund has two parts: Tier 1, similar to Social Security, and Tier 2, providing more benefits and similar to a private, defined pension plan. To support the fund, workers and employers share 36.3 percent of taxable payroll, a much higher ratio than other industries.

Major railroad companies, which back the bill, would get a 3 percent reduction in the retirement taxes they pay, Yates said. "They've agreed to make up any funding shortfall in the future if the investments don't work out."

Bob Reynolds, president and general chairman of International Association of Machinists District 19, said the legislation would guarantee Tier 2 funding to remain at least four times the amount paid in the previous calendar year.

"The best we understand, (critics) ... consider the trust fund to be part of the surplus because it's not paying out money that Congress can use," Reynolds said. "But not one cent of the trust fund money in the railroad retirement system is taxpayers' money. Every penny in the trust fund was put in by employees and their carriers."

Reynolds, who worked at the former Illinois Central shop for 14 years before spending the last 23 years as a union official, said many retired shop workers draw from the fund. Few current shop workers qualify because their employer, VMV Enterprises, which took over in 1986, is not affiliated with any railroad, he said.

Yates, a 28-year railroad worker, said he and the 250 people employed by P&L Railway fall under the pension plan, as do many current and former workers of several rail lines in the Paducah area.

Established in the 1930s, the fund is the only industry retirement program under government control. It grew from legislation in the 1920s to prevent a major rail strike that would disrupt transportation. There were several hundred railroads then, but 1980s deregulation led to mergers and closures that have pared large rail lines to a select few.

"I haven't seen anything good come out of a merger," said retiree Harold Grace of Marshall County, who worked 31 years for Illinois Central. "When railroads started consolidating, that's when they started going down."

Grace, who has kidney trouble and plenty of medical bills, worries what would happen to his wife if his pension check, which nearly doubles hers, went away.

"I thought it was already in effect," he said of the bill's intent to boost survivors' benefits. "It was my understanding all along that my wife would get what she was drawing and mine."

Margaret Fonville's husband, Gene, drew a pension for 14 years after a 33-year career with Illinois Central. Together, they had received 145 percent of his annuity, but that stopped when he died in 1996, having suffered with cancer since his retirement.

"When he died, I got about a $ 250-a-month raise," she said. "Everybody told me I'd get half his pension, but I didn't. I've only gotten a $ 400 to $ 500 raise in those five years."

Although she worked many years and paid into Social Security, she gets no Social Security check because of receiving railroad retirement. Fonville, 73 and disabled, said it would help considerably to have the extra money the legislation seeks.

"Gene provided well for me, but I have to live pretty close to the budget to take care of myself," she said. "I have to squeeze a dollar as long as I can."