All U.S. Train Service to End Next Month?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

The problem, IMHO:

  1. Most Amtrak routes lose money - often spectacular amounts. Even with the prices Amtrak is charging, several of the long-distance trains lose some $300 per ticket.

  2. With a few small exceptions, Congress has not let Amtrak cut money-losing routes. The most Amtrak has been able to do is cut frequency.

  3. Congress is equally unwilling to provide a steady, annual subsidy to maintain these money-losing routes. It’s much cheaper to fantasize that “better management” can cut the losses, and in the meantime force Amtrak to subsidize these lines itself using the profits from the few routes that do make money. (It used to be that the DC-NY Metroliner was the only real cash cow, but that’s been replaced by Acela. Don’t know if that 's making $$$. The slower Northeast Direct trains lost a little money, but not spectacular amounts. I’m not sure what the status was of the California and Chicago-area trains, which were also considered to be at least possible non-money-losers.)

  4. Congress has indulged in a persistent fantasy that passenger rail travel can be self-sustaining. I know of no place in the world where that is currently true, and it was true in the United States for only the briefest periods - generally during wars. Even a cursory glance at the history of most railroads provides a nice overview of the evolution of American bankruptcy law - almost every line has been bankrupt at some point or another, and often several times. The only part of American rail that’s profitable is freight service; that industry has thrived since it dumped its passenger routes on the government.

  5. The main virtue to letting Amtrak collapse is that it would force Congress to make some real decisions - like, why should we subsidize inefficient, expensive, long-distance travel when we have infinitely superior alternatives? Where does it make sense to provide rail travel?

  6. Likelihood that Congress will arrive at the correct answer: low, because the high-density corridors that could reasonably support train travel don’t cover enough districts.

  7. What will happen for travellers, short term: probably not much. A temporary solution in the Northeast might be that the states would intervene to preserve intercity service. That’s not a bad solution, really; those states have the greatest interest in getting traffic off of Interstate 95. We’ll see.

Fun, huh?

22

So what is your solution, Oxy? Are you suggesting that passenger rail service in the U.S. should be eliminated? Hope I’m dead before that happens . . .

23

NO NO NO NO! Heavens to betsy, I didn’t mean to suggest that.

I’m saying only that Amtrak isn’t the way to keep our train service–that we’re in a position of having to destroy the village in order to save it.

What probably shouldn’t survive, other than as occasional, “land-cruise” jaunts, are the long-distance trains. And by that I mean the old, romantic trains like the Empire Builder (Chicago-Seattle), Crescent (NY - New Orleans), California Zephyr (SF-Chicago). The economics of these never worked well in the first place, and have been disastrous since the jet and the interstate.

But the dense inter-city lines in the Northeast, Chicago and California are needed, if only because the roads in those areas don’t have the capacity and airports are more vulnerable to weather and attack. But the regions may well be able to continue the service themselves, with federal subsidies in much the same way that roads get federal subsidies.

I can’t find the articles now, but I recall reading in the Washington Post that the jurisdictions from DC to Massachusetts have already been coordinating with each other in the event Amtrak finally keels over.

24

“They’ve been getting gov’t. bailouts for years and the situation just seems to get worse and worse, and more lines get cut.”

That’s because they’ve been given JUST enough “bailout” money to keep going, and no more. Sometimes, not even enough to keep running what they have, and hence the cuts. Certainly not enough to improve or expand service. Lawoot has hit this issue right on the head in his posting.

Amtrak gets $521 million a year in the Federal budget. It sounds like a lot of money, but it is not. Not just in comparison with the overall Federal budget but with the Federal transportation budget. Not only the highways (more is spent on clearing snow and garbage from Interstate and Federal highways than on Amtrak altogether) and airports and air traffic system. Transit systems have received more than that for a single (admittedly large) capital improvement!

“What probably shouldn’t survive, other than as occasional, ‘land-cruise’ jaunts, are the long-distance trains. And by that I mean the old, romantic trains like the Empire Builder (Chicago-Seattle), Crescent (NY - New Orleans), California Zephyr (SF-Chicago). The economics of these never worked well in the first place, and have been disastrous since the jet and the interstate.”

Pardon my bluntness, but this is nonsense!

  1. The trains are NOT land cruises. It’s true that the coach seats are not the contortionist’s delight that airline seats are, that the diner serves real food on real plates at a real table, and that sleeper passengers get free meals and access to a shower. But the diner food is good solid restaurant food and not luxury meals, the sleeping compartments are small and utilitarian, and the washrooms and shower are TINY. The American Orient Express runs a REAL land cruise, a luxury compared to Amtrak’s mere comfort.

  2. The long-distance trains are filled or close to filled. Try to buy a sleeper during the summer or late December with a week or less notice!

This is despite the fact that Amtrak charges high sleeper fares. Amtrak COACH fares are competitive with flying, but Amtrak has a shortage of sleepers (one or two sleeper cars on a train versus three, four, or even five coaches) and intentionally charges a fare that JUST fills the sleepers instread of charging less and having to turn people away.

If Amtrak had the money to buy more cars – both coaches and sleepers – they could run more trains and fill those by charging a lower fare. They fill the present sleepers at $250 a night (more or less), so how many more could they fill at $200 or $150 or $100 a night? But they can’t do that now because they don’t have the cars – the beds – to put the extra passengers in!

I’m not talking about hourly long-distance trains. Frequent service like trains every hour or two hours SHOULD be reserved to the densely populated areas. But increasing thrice-weekly trains (IMHO an almost-useless level of “service”) to daily service, and daily trains to twice or three times a day, would be a realistic improvement, were the money available for the train cars. If nothing else, people are more willing to take a mode of transport when it runs more often and they therefore know their wait if they miss a departure will be shorter.

  1. A train is not a plane. A plane from Chicago to Oakland serves only Chicago and Oakland. The Amtrak train from Chicago to Oakland is also a Chicago-Omaha train, an Omaha-Denver train, Denver to Salt Lake City train, a Salt Lake City to Sacramento train, every combination of the above, and etcetera for the stops I didn’t name. Coach seats are often sold two or three times in a single trip. Try that with a plane. :eek: Even if we take as a given that trains are only viable transportation for trips of 100-500 miles, it makes a lot of sense to run ONE train that effectively serves as a dozen or more “short-distance” trains.

  2. It’s easy to forget living in a decent-sized metro area that a lot of smaller communities have little or no scheduled air service and a lot of places are 100 miles or more from an Interstate. In these towns and villages, the only real choices are driving or the train.

Let’s look at the most common example, the Empire Builder. This Chicago-Seattle train serves a vast area of North Dakota and Montana with no real cities and poor air service at best. In good weather, the Empire Builder is considered basic transportation, and the yearly ridership at most stations exceeds the county population. When the snows come, with the airplanes are grounded and the highways impassible, the EB is considered by many to be a true lifeline. Tell someone in Williston or Cut Bank or Havre that the long-distance trains are luxurious cruise trains that serve no practical purpose! :rolleyes:

25

Um, I think we had a miscommunication. What I meant is that the long-distance trains should be replaced by land-cruises. Not that they currently are.

There’s an article on the New York Times website that’s worth looking at for what I have in mind - it just ran in this past Sunday’s Magazine. It provides a lot more detail about exactly how much of a disaster the long-distrance trains are. You have to register, but registration’s free. The article is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/16/magazine/16AMTRAK.html

As for particular points:

On the long-distance trains, Amtrak is losing hundreds–hundreds!–of dollars per passenger, even when the trains are full. It doesn’t matter how many passengers there are.

This is a bit of a non-sequitur. And it actually illustrates a great weakness of trains: the “benefit” you describe only works for people who want to go destinations along the same line. That just isn’t the case very often. Contrast a plane: Southwest turns its around so quickly that they can go in a bunch of completely different directions each day. The same plan hops from Islip to Memphis to Houston to Tyler to Dallas to Austin. That’s efficiency. In the example you give, all of those metropolitan areas have excellent air service not only to one another, but lots of other destinations as well. And that air service manages on subsidies that are orders of magnitude smaller. (According to the Times piece: “While taxpayers provide the average Amtrak rider with a subsidy of 30 cents per mile, the average driver or passenger on a plane or bus gets less than a penny, according to Wendell Cox, a member of the Amtrak Reform Council, overseers appointed by Congress and the president.” The ARC is actually largely pro-Amtrak.)

Agreed, the transportation choices are lousy in a lot of the country’s small towns. And as the child of a North Dakotan, I have two answers.

One is harsh: most of these smaller communities are doomed. If transport ain’t viable, probably the town ain’t either. My advice to the residents is to do what most North Dakotans are doing already: leave. (I fully expect that my grandmother’s home town, McClusky, will cease to exist in a generation or so - as the little towns surrounding it, like Goodrich, already have. Fargo is booming with all the small-town Dakotans moving in.)

The other is not as harsh, and consists of two points. The first is that many of these communities are served by bus, which is cheaper and much more flexible than train. (Frankly, in many parts of the country it’s also faster.) If the town can’t support bus service by itself, then a subsidy may be in order - at a much lower price than capital-intensive rail service.

Alternatively, there’s a federal program to subsidize air service to rural areas. Again, it’s flexible, but I’m less convinced because I believe it’s quite costly for the numbers of passengers served compared with buses.

And as for snow: snow blocks trains just as effectively as it does buses and planes. Chicago wouldn’t know about it because of the density of service, but go back and read about passenger service when it was at its peak: long-distance trains were constantly getting snowed in.