Amtrak FY24-29 Five Year Service and Asset Line Plans

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Remember the hand wringing when Amtrak stop carrying private cars? Note this page 50.

Charter Trains and Private Cars
Amtrak offers the services of operating charter trains and moving privately owned passenger rail cars. Charter trains may use Amtrak cars and locomotives, or customer-supplied cars and locomotives, or any combination, moving as a non-regularly scheduled Amtrak train. Private Cars are privately owned railcars moved on regularly scheduled Amtrak trains. In the wake of the pandemic, both PrivateCar and Charter revenues rose significantly. Private car revenue dropped slightly in FY23but increases in charter revenue provided a compensating offset. In FY23, Private Cars contributed $1.5 million in revenue, while Charters added an additional $1.1 million. Amtrak anticipates in the FY24 Annual Operating Plan Private Car revenue of $ 2.4 million and Charter Train revenue of $ 2.5 million.
 
Remember the hand wringing when Amtrak stop carrying private cars? Note this page 50.

Charter Trains and Private Cars
Amtrak offers the services of operating charter trains and moving privately owned passenger rail cars. Charter trains may use Amtrak cars and locomotives, or customer-supplied cars and locomotives, or any combination, moving as a non-regularly scheduled Amtrak train. Private Cars are privately owned railcars moved on regularly scheduled Amtrak trains. In the wake of the pandemic, both PrivateCar and Charter revenues rose significantly. Private car revenue dropped slightly in FY23but increases in charter revenue provided a compensating offset. In FY23, Private Cars contributed $1.5 million in revenue, while Charters added an additional $1.1 million. Amtrak anticipates in the FY24 Annual Operating Plan Private Car revenue of $ 2.4 million and Charter Train revenue of $ 2.5 million.
I don’t remember them stopping the practice. Just that, I believe, the cars could only be put on and taken off at endpoints.

Lots of PVs have been on Amtrak trains the past few years.
 
I don’t remember them stopping the practice. Just that, I believe, the cars could only be put on and taken off at endpoints.

Lots of PVs have been on Amtrak trains the past few years.
Yeah, I rode Hickory Creek last May. It ran 3 or 4 days a week during the spring and fall, tacked on to an Empire Service train. Apparently. they're running it on a New York to Chicago resurrection of the 20th Century, tacked on to the back of Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited, I suppose.
 
This came out a few days ago. First, the link:
https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/...g/Amtrak-Service-Asset-Line-Plans-FY24-29.pdf

Second, there are some issues I see:
(1) Amtrak is logging 15 of 50 Viewliner Is and 22 of 130 Viewliner IIs as out-of-service. I know that one of the V-Is was written off after a derailment, but this ratio is a doozy. So it stands out in a bad way.

(2) Ridership and revenue projections just don't make sense, and while no one issue is fatal, the combination of them doesn't look great. A list of quibbles:

-Acela ridership is expected to surge, but per-passenger revenue never takes a hit. I've been saying this for a long time on here, but I fully expect that when the Acela IIs enter service you'll see about a 10-15% hit to this. Now, you'll still see a non-trivial bump in revenue since ridership will slide up to make up for it, but it is hard to see adding 50%+ seats north of NYP and far above that south of NYP (it would've been around/a bit over doubling pre-pandemic [doubling frequencies would have implied tripling capacity, but IIRC the plan was always to only go to twice-hourly around travel peaks], but with about four frequencies/25% of capacity struck off the timecard due to equipment availability issues, the surge will be even more substantial - possibly tripling current capacity). Notably, Amtrak's projections also imply somewhat lower load factors...so maybe they're just planning to run a number of trains mostly empty to defend fares, but their behavior over the last few months doesn't imply that.
--There's some clumsy phrasing, but the report mentions hourly service to Boston. Either Amtrak is planning to pull Regional frequencies north of NHV or...is there a plan to bump the number of slots Amtrak has along there?

-Virginia Regional ridership shows no increase for FY24, and the extra train going into NPN in 2026 or thereabouts is not accounted for (I'd expect a bump for FY26 or FY27). This is particularly glaring since an additional Piedmont and an additional Pennsylvanian pop up around that time.

-There seems to be no indication of the Airo trainsets entering service in terms of any impact on capacity, etc.; however, I find this kind of hard to believe as a zero-impact event on the NEC (especially since the dual-power configuration will save time at Washington, DC). Note that in the document, Amtrak indicates that they expect to have the NEC mostly transitioned to Airos by FY29, so this feels a bit glaring.

(3) Between pages 10 and 15, Amtrak can't make up its mind whether the system will be revenue-neutral or still posting a non-trivial loss.

Anyhow, I'm open to hearing other thoughts on this.
 
Anderson: Lets talk about the non operating capacity problems. Unless Amtrak can upgrade its on line reservation system how can it handle the higher ridership? There should not be as many glitches as keeps happening. Until the system can automatically generate every possible city pair when requested on line there will be lost potential riders. There will be many potential O & Ds that are only partially NEC.

Wait times when calling in are too long now. Is Amtrak willing to increase agents to decrease that to a reasonable 5 - 10 minutes? I think not. The call back option that some of the better national businesses have is a good feature that Amtrak needs as well.

Then Amtrak will need more station personnel to prevent excessive station stop dwell of trains. Cleaning staff for making turns will also need improving much like the Japan model..
 
Wasn't there an item indicating a desire to upgrade the resv system? Not a small $ number if I recall.
I'd love to see an enhanced kiosk that could be used in an unmanned as well as manned station scenario where you could push a button to request an agent assist and one could interact via a video like on a screen for an added level of services above what the kiosks do now.
 
We have always used Amtrak's call back feature and it worked extremely well. No need to add the feature.
I guess YMMV. I have tried it twice and NEVER received a callback, so I am now wary of using it. If I actually need to wait, I will wait. But, yeah, for those marginal or first time riders, they're going to give up having to wait 15 mores or more.
 
Anderson: Lets talk about the non operating capacity problems. Unless Amtrak can upgrade its on line reservation system how can it handle the higher ridership? There should not be as many glitches as keeps happening. Until the system can automatically generate every possible city pair when requested on line there will be lost potential riders. There will be many potential O & Ds that are only partially NEC.

Wait times when calling in are too long now. Is Amtrak willing to increase agents to decrease that to a reasonable 5 - 10 minutes? I think not. The call back option that some of the better national businesses have is a good feature that Amtrak needs as well.

Then Amtrak will need more station personnel to prevent excessive station stop dwell of trains. Cleaning staff for making turns will also need improving much like the Japan model..
I mean, I don't think Amtrak has net-added many stations in the last few decades. So I'm not sure if the system is /that/ much of an issue, though seat assignment clearly adds to the load.

Cutting agent headcounts (and AGR hours) is more of an issue, as they've fallen into the trap of cutting headcount and hoping to use tech instead. Even Brightline runs into issues with this (and the airlines are pretty lousy as well).

[Quik-Traks are also nearly useless anymore, at least in my experience.]

Remember the hand wringing when Amtrak stop carrying private cars? Note this page 50.

Charter Trains and Private Cars
Amtrak offers the services of operating charter trains and moving privately owned passenger rail cars. Charter trains may use Amtrak cars and locomotives, or customer-supplied cars and locomotives, or any combination, moving as a non-regularly scheduled Amtrak train. Private Cars are privately owned railcars moved on regularly scheduled Amtrak trains. In the wake of the pandemic, both PrivateCar and Charter revenues rose significantly. Private car revenue dropped slightly in FY23but increases in charter revenue provided a compensating offset. In FY23, Private Cars contributed $1.5 million in revenue, while Charters added an additional $1.1 million. Amtrak anticipates in the FY24 Annual Operating Plan Private Car revenue of $ 2.4 million and Charter Train revenue of $ 2.5 million.
Of course, IIRC before Amtrak slapped all of those requirements on the cars/cut stations served, wasn't the private car revenue line something like $10m/yr? [And of course, they also threw away Amtrak Express revenue even though that was essentially a no-cost-to-them revenue service.]
 
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The Equipment, Station and Infrastructure Appendices of the Asset Plan is a good reference to have handy, and contain some really interesting information. It is amazing how much Amtrak has become in documentation since the nadir of the Anderson years.:

https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/...g/Amtrak-Equipment-ALP-Appendices-FY24-29.pdf

https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/...ng/Amtrak-Stations-ALP-Appendices-FY24-29.pdf

https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/...rak-Infrastructure-ALP-Appendices-FY24-29.pdf
 
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