# Ideas for Additional "Night Owl" Train Service



## Philly Amtrak Fan

"Fantasy Thread" (so I don't get any "we can't do that" complaints)

I have on various occasions expressed my desire for overnight trains where I can board late at night and wake up at my destination as opposed to spending all day on a train. The NEC currently has a route between Boston and Washington DC/Virginia (66-65/67) that serves that purpose. There are also parts of LD trains where this trip is possible. Assuming we had the equipment and host railroad cooperation to do so, what other routes would this work well? I consider the graveyard shift to be midnight-6am so trains should not leave either endpoint after midnight nor arrive at the other before 6am. So the route has to be a minimum of 6 hours. Ideally it would be more so the endpoints can be stretched to 11am-7pm. Also, if there is a big city as an intermediate point close to an endpoint, effort would be to keep that city out of the graveyard shift. These schedules are in addition to the current trains and not reschedules.

The two I wish for the most are...

Pittsburgh to Philadelphia/New York: (Using Pennsylvanian schedule)

West NYP 9:52pm, PHL 11:42pm, PGH 7:05am

East PGH midnight, PHL 7:25am, NYP 9:20am

Ideally the eastbound would leave Pittsburgh earlier but you want Philly after 6am and don't want to hit the New York/New Jersey tunnels during the graveyard shift (also the later for Harrisburg the better).

Bay Area to Los Angeles (Using Coast Starlight schedule)

South SAC 7:35pm, Oakland 9:50pm, SJC 11:07pm, Santa Barbara 7:02am, LAX 10:00am

North LAX 9:10pm, Santa Barbara 11:40pm, SJC 7:11am, Oakland 8:24am, SAC 10:59am

Other possibilities:

Dallas to Austin/San Antonio (Texas Eagle)

South DAL 11:50pm, FTW 2:10am, AUS 6:30am, SAS 9:55am

North SAS 10:00pm, AUS 12:31am, FTW 4:58am, DAL 6:20am

I'd rather Austin be outside the graveyard shift than Ft. Worth because they can go to Dallas easier than Austin area passengers can go to another station.

New York to Buffalo/Niagara Falls/Toronto (Maple Leaf)

West NYP 10:15pm, ALB 1:00am, SYR 3:43am, ROC 4:57am, Buffalo Exchange St 6:14am, Niagara Falls, NY 7:26am, TOR 10:41am

East TOR 6:20pm, Niagara Falls 10:27am, Buffalo Exchange St. 11:05pm, ROC 12:13am, SYR 1:28am, ALB 4:55am, NYP 7:50am

New York to Montreal (Adirondack)

South: Montreal: 11:20pm, ALB 6:55am, NYP 9:50am

North: NYP 8:15pm, ALB 11:10pm, Montreal 7:11am

Chicago to Minneapolis/St. Paul (Empire Builder)

West: CHI 10:15pm, Milwaukee 11:52pm, MSP 6:03am

East: MSP midnight, Milwaukee 6:07am, CHI 7:55am

Chicago to Kansas City (Southwest Chief)

West: CHI midnight, KCY 7:11am

East: KCY 11:43pm, CHI 7:15am

New Orleans to Houston/San Antonio (Sunset Limited)

West: Use current 1 schedule

East: SAS 4:25pm, HOS 10:10pm, NOL 7:40am

Feel free to suggest other routes.


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## ScouseAndy

For me personally night trains could run slower then the day trains on the same route so leaving earlier in the evening and arriving later - this might also appease the freight companies as if they ran at freight train speeds would cause less issues for them perhaps,

One issue I'd see with your train arriving at 9:20 at NYP would be that this is prime commuter times and the lines are more likely to be congested- but of course this is just fantasy


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## CraigDK

The Pittsburgh to New York overnight might work. I can vaguely recollect reading an article about such service in the days before Amtrak. An evening departure and morning arrival followed by the ability to have a full work day at the destination might appeal to business travelers. It would spread out some of the cost of operating service between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh.

Slotting it into the morning arrivals in New York might present a challenge (one that should be partially alleviated by completing the Hudson River Tunnel project portion of Gateway), at least it is not traveling against the current. As far as equipment goes, it would only require two trainsets. I would guess each one would include a viewliner or sleeper or two (if/when the Vii order is finished I think that could be done), an amfleet cafe as a lounge (and possibly a BC section), a coach or two, and maybe a baggage car.

I would guess that it would require the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to support it though....


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## Seaboard92

If I remember right our New York Nightmare long distance train we had here a long time ago would have connected New York with a plethora of thru cars going to Montreal, Toronto, Cincinnati, and maybe even Detroit. But the switching enroute would be a major pain but not terrible.

Albany cut and add the Montreal cars.

Buffalo cut and add Toronto and potentially a Buffalo Cut away.

Cleveland cut and add Cincinnatti

Toledo cut and add Detroit and let it terminate in Chicago.

Equipment needs one sleeper and two coaches per section. So your looking at five sleepers per train and ten coaches. Without counting a cafe.

Which would end up being too long for some platforms causing a headache on operations. The required five locomotives one for each section. You would end up with a total of ten sleepers being required to run daily without a protect car and twenty coaches. And seven locomotives minimum but even those wouldn't be at home terminal which would create issues.

All in all that train is a pipe dream because of operations being a large problem before the class ones get involved.


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## jis

Not to mention the additional staffing and stabling facilities required at places such as Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati etc.


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## west point

In the past there were two major airline night hubs that carried many connecting passengers and might again do the same with trains/. That is CHI and ATL. Leave it to others to determine possible destinations.


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## jphjaxfl

CraigDK said:


> The Pittsburgh to New York overnight might work. I can vaguely recollect reading an article about such service in the days before Amtrak. An evening departure and morning arrival followed by the ability to have a full work day at the destination might appeal to business travelers. It would spread out some of the cost of operating service between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh.
> 
> Slotting it into the morning arrivals in New York might present a challenge (one that should be partially alleviated by completing the Hudson River Tunnel project portion of Gateway), at least it is not traveling against the current. As far as equipment goes, it would only require two trainsets. I would guess each one would include a viewliner or sleeper or two (if/when the Vii order is finished I think that could be done), an amfleet cafe as a lounge (and possibly a BC section), a coach or two, and maybe a baggage car.
> 
> I would guess that it would require the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to support it though....


The Pennsylvania Railroad's PITTSBURGHER from New York to Pittsburgh was one of the last all Sleeping Car trains that ran up until early to mid 1960s. It carried Sleeping Cars including a 6 BR lounge car that served snacks and cocktails out of New York and Pittsburgh at night and light breakfasts the following morning. I believe it operated through 30th Street Philadelphia instead of the direct route. At that time business travelers were still familiar with overnight train travel. Today most business travelers outside certain corridors have no clue about train travel for business. I remember being on a drive with 2 business associates from my company. One of them grew up in Providence, RI and was very familiar with business train travel in the NEC and in Southern California where he was located then. The other associate, from Milwaukee, was very surprised that anyone would take a train for business travel.


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## CraigDK

jphjaxfl said:


> The Pennsylvania Railroad's PITTSBURGHER from New York to Pittsburgh was one of the last all Sleeping Car trains that ran up until early to mid 1960s. It carried Sleeping Cars including a 6 BR lounge car that served snacks and cocktails out of New York and Pittsburgh at night and light breakfasts the following morning. I believe it operated through 30th Street Philadelphia instead of the direct route. At that time business travelers were still familiar with overnight train travel. Today most business travelers outside certain corridors have no clue about train travel for business. I remember being on a drive with 2 business associates from my company. One of them grew up in Providence, RI and was very familiar with business train travel in the NEC and in Southern California where he was located then. The other associate, from Milwaukee, was very surprised that anyone would take a train for business travel.


Thanks. I should have remembered the name, it is that obvious. The fact that many business travelers in New York today are very familiar with using the train would be a positive for this as a potential route. I don't think a modern incarnation would skip Philly though...


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## jphjaxfl

CraigDK said:


> jphjaxfl said:
> 
> 
> 
> The Pennsylvania Railroad's PITTSBURGHER from New York to Pittsburgh was one of the last all Sleeping Car trains that ran up until early to mid 1960s. It carried Sleeping Cars including a 6 BR lounge car that served snacks and cocktails out of New York and Pittsburgh at night and light breakfasts the following morning. I believe it operated through 30th Street Philadelphia instead of the direct route. At that time business travelers were still familiar with overnight train travel. Today most business travelers outside certain corridors have no clue about train travel for business. I remember being on a drive with 2 business associates from my company. One of them grew up in Providence, RI and was very familiar with business train travel in the NEC and in Southern California where he was located then. The other associate, from Milwaukee, was very surprised that anyone would take a train for business travel.
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks. I should have remembered the name, it is that obvious. The fact that many business travelers in New York today are very familiar with using the train would be a positive for this as a potential route. I don't think a modern incarnation would skip Philly though...
Click to expand...

As I said, the PITTSBURGHER did operate through 30th Street Station Philadelphia and did not skip Philadelphia.


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## west point

Did any overnight trains either pass thru or originate from PHL Broad street station ?


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## ParanoidAndroid

It would be great if the Spirit of California were resurrected. It would create great overnight service from LA to Bay Area and Sacramento.

I modified the schedule a bit, and added a segment to San Diego.

SAN 4:50pm

LAX 7:40pm/8:05pm

SBA 10:28pm/10:35pm

SLO 1:17am/1:30am

SNS 4:23am

*Detraining only SJC to SAC weekdays*

SJC 6:06am/6:18am

OKJ 7:19am/7:29am

EMY 7:39am/8:04am (let #710 (7:45am), #723 (7:50am), #524 (7:55am), and #525 (8:00am) pass by here) I did this to let it connect with leeway to #6

MTZ 8:46am

SAC 9:59am

These stations have sophisticated announcement technologies, so with good forewarning, mass confusion should be avoided between it and the other 3 trains (2 on weekends), unless the passengers are stupid or deaf.

Emeryville has 2 tracks with platforms. This one can sit on one track, while the others pass by on the other one.

*Receiving only SAC-OKJ*

SAC 5:15pm

EMY 6:50pm/7:00pm

OKJ 7:10pm/7:20pm

SJC 8:25pm/8:37pm

SNS 10:18pm

SLO 1:37am/1:50am

SBA 4:25am/4:32am

*Detraining only LAX to SAN*

LAX 7:30am/7:50am

SAN 10:40am

I think getting into LAX earlier is good, at the cost of leaving Santa Barbara at 4:30am.


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## Philly Amtrak Fan

I love maxbuskirk's idea for the Spirit of California. If this a fantasy new train I'd like to have it go from San Jose to San Fran on the Caltrain track so you can directly serve the city.


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## west point

The proposed Spirit could combine split at SJC. Then one section to downtown Frisco and other to Sacramento.


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## ParanoidAndroid

Would it then have 2 engines from SAN to SJC? Also, a fast split would be needed at SJC to let it go ahead of #524. How many minutes would it take?

What about a dedicated connection train with a cross platform transfer?

How fast would it go? As fast as a Baby Bullet, or an Express, or Local?


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## neroden

I have proposed my favorite schedule before.

*TWO A DAY *

*Chicago-Toledo-Cleveland-Buffalo-Syracuse-New York City*

(Eastbound)
Chicago 10:00 AM
Toledo 3:50 PM
Cleveland 6:20 PM
Buffalo 9:21 PM
Syracuse 11:48 PM
Albany 4:15 AM
New York 6:53 AM
_(schedules are approximate and indicative only)_

(Westbound)
New York 11:40 PM
Albany 3:05 AM
Syracuse 5:49 AM
Buffalo 7:59 AM
Cleveland 11:45 AM
Toledo 2:15 PM
Chicago 5:45 PM

This provides overnight service between NYC and anywhere from Syracuse to Cleveland. Which I think is pretty good.

It also provides daytime service from Chicago through the Midwest as far as Buffalo (Syracuse going eastbound). Also pretty good.

I strongly believe that the synergies from having TWO A DAY will give great results. I don't know how to do the financial modelling in a form acceptable to Amtrak, or what input data to use, and I wonder if someone else does know -- if they do I can construct the model myself (I know more than enough math and CS). I strongly suspect that this would be financially positive or neutral on operating costs, though equipment costs are another matter.

Oh. Also, I never came up with a name for the train for marketing purposes, apart from TWO A DAY. Anything which might help pitch it would be welcome.


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## WoodyinNYC

A couple of times I have reported another member's solid explanation of why some Amtrak trains closely track each other, notably the Lake Shore and Capitol Limited, and the Star and Meteor thru Florida.

The Class 1 freight hosts complain that the Amtrak trains ruin their schedules, not just in each train's slot, but *for a couple of hours on either side of the slot*. The Lake Shore disturbs the host for four hours, two before this Amtrak slot and two hours after the Lake Shore is scheduled to pass thru. Two trains a day Cleveland-CHI means eight hours of disruption. When the Lake Shore runs only two hours different from the Cap Ltd, two of the Lake Shore's hours of disruption overlap and ruin the same two hours of freight time as the Capitol Ltd. Say the Lake Shore disrupts two hours behind its slot. Then the Cap Ltd disrupts two hours ahead of its slot. Overlapping, they are the same two hours from the host's point of view. That way the host's freight trains are disrupted 'only' six hours a day instead of eight hours. So the 2-hours apart schedules for the two Amtrak trains are set to minimize inconvenience to the hosts.

Tell me what sweet things we gonna say to NS to get a third train out of CHI to the East Coast, with a morning departure, disrupting the freight schedule *twice* a day?

Simple solution: Build South of the Lake, CHI-Porter, IN, and then build another dedicated 110-mph track for passenger trains on this corridor to Toledo and Cleveland, and beyond to Pittsburgh-Philly-NYC/DC and to Buffalo-Albany-NYC. Simple solution if Congress would pay for it.


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## neroden

The Water Level Route is an all-double-track mainline which primarily carries high-speed intermodal freight. Passenger operations are, bluntly, not disruptive at all.; they're averaging the same speed. Complaints to the contrary are best described as "****". We all know the freight railroads aren't scheduling their freight trains properly anyway (some precision railroading would help a lot here). The LSL and CL follow similar schedules largely due to their need to run overnight out of Chicago and in the daytime at the east end; nothing more.

As I stated in my flyer, NS and CSX would probably both ask for passenger sidings so that trains stopped at stations do not block the mainline; this is actually a reasonable request and we should be doing it anyway. It also allows for making ADA-accessible platforms without obstructing high-and-wide freights, so it's desirable for that reason anyway.

On the whole, NS has been very cooperative, allowing additional Amtrak trains on single-track lines which carry slow freight (such as Virginia and North Carolina and Michigan), where the passenger trains are *much* more disruptive.

However, if they did decide to be obnoxious: Norfolk Southern is under an over-100-year-old legal obligation to provide passenger service, which is currently enforced by requiring them to provide access to Amtrak on reasonable terms. If they don't want to comply with their legal obligations, NS can have their license to operate a railroad revoked. The STB has shown that they are willing to enforce these obligations.

Frankly, I think the problem of finding rolling stock is much more serious than the problem of getting a slot.


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## west point

[quote name="neroden" post="701236"

As I stated in my flyer, NS and CSX would probably both ask for passenger sidings so that trains stopped at stations do not block the mainline; this is actually a reasonable request and we should be doing it anyway. It also allows for making ADA-accessible platforms without obstructing high-and-wide freights, so it's desirable for that reason anyway.

Frankly, I think the problem of finding rolling stock is much more serious than the problem of getting a slot.Station tracks and platforms really are the best for any location needing high level platforms or has a large passenger turn over. those stations with just occasional ADA passengers a lift would seem best choice.

Rolling stock is a very serious problem . As of now more rolling stock seems problematic ?


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## Philly Amtrak Fan

west point said:


> Frankly, I think the problem of finding rolling stock is much more serious than the problem of getting a slot.Station tracks and platforms really are the best for any location needing high level platforms or has a large passenger turn over. those stations with just occasional ADA passengers a lift would seem best choice.
> 
> Rolling stock is a very serious problem . As of now more rolling stock seems problematic ?


If west point's statement is true then hopefully now you see why I suggest killing one train to resurrect another (or cannibalism as it has been called) or the fact that I claim Byrd killed the Broadway/Three Rivers. We're competing for equipment. The fact that both LD trains killed in 2005 (Silver Palm downgraded and terminated in Savannah) were both Viewliners doesn't seem coincidental to me (to this day Viewliners are still in short supply). You can now say we can't get the slots back but if we still had them we wouldn't have to get them back now.


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## CCC1007

Philly Amtrak Fan said:


> west point said:
> 
> 
> 
> Frankly, I think the problem of finding rolling stock is much more serious than the problem of getting a slot.Station tracks and platforms really are the best for any location needing high level platforms or has a large passenger turn over. those stations with just occasional ADA passengers a lift would seem best choice.
> 
> Rolling stock is a very serious problem . As of now more rolling stock seems problematic ?
> 
> 
> 
> If west point's statement is true then hopefully now you see why I suggest killing one train to resurrect another (or cannibalism as it has been called) or the fact that I claim Byrd killed the Broadway/Three Rivers. We're competing for equipment. The fact that both LD trains killed in 2005 (Silver Palm downgraded and terminated in Savannah) were both Viewliners doesn't seem coincidental to me (to this day Viewliners are still in short supply). You can now say we can't get the slots back but if we still had them we wouldn't have to get them back now.
Click to expand...

The withdrawal of the last of the heritage sleepers is what caused the three rivers to loose its sleeper service, and the loss of mail and express traffic led to there being not enough of a need for four trains NEC to Chicago at that time. The three rivers was effectively killed off by David Gunn and the FRA requirements that a retention tank be installed on the passenger cars.


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## jphjaxfl

Philly Amtrak Fan said:


> west point said:
> 
> 
> 
> Frankly, I think the problem of finding rolling stock is much more serious than the problem of getting a slot.Station tracks and platforms really are the best for any location needing high level platforms or has a large passenger turn over. those stations with just occasional ADA passengers a lift would seem best choice.
> 
> Rolling stock is a very serious problem . As of now more rolling stock seems problematic ?
> 
> 
> 
> If west point's statement is true then hopefully now you see why I suggest killing one train to resurrect another (or cannibalism as it has been called) or the fact that I claim Byrd killed the Broadway/Three Rivers. We're competing for equipment. The fact that both LD trains killed in 2005 (Silver Palm downgraded and terminated in Savannah) were both Viewliners doesn't seem coincidental to me (to this day Viewliners are still in short supply). You can now say we can't get the slots back but if we still had them we wouldn't have to get them back now.
Click to expand...

The Sliver Palm was coach and business class coach when it was cut back to Savannah. It had not had a Sleeping car for several years. I rode it in both directions from Jacksonville in the early 2000s


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## A Voice

Philly Amtrak Fan said:


> west point said:
> 
> 
> 
> Frankly, I think the problem of finding rolling stock is much more serious than the problem of getting a slot.Station tracks and platforms really are the best for any location needing high level platforms or has a large passenger turn over. those stations with just occasional ADA passengers a lift would seem best choice.
> 
> Rolling stock is a very serious problem . As of now more rolling stock seems problematic ?
> 
> 
> 
> If west point's statement is true then hopefully now you see why I suggest killing one train to resurrect another (or cannibalism as it has been called) or the fact that I claim Byrd killed the Broadway/Three Rivers. We're competing for equipment. The fact that both LD trains killed in 2005 (Silver Palm downgraded and terminated in Savannah) were both Viewliners doesn't seem coincidental to me (to this day Viewliners are still in short supply). You can now say we can't get the slots back but if we still had them we wouldn't have to get them back now.
Click to expand...

You don't think an equipment shortage could have been solved in *twelve* years? Actually, had plans went as intended, it already would have been. Amtrak _should_ have had the Viewliner II order by now; That includes no more coaches or lounges, but the Midwest states _should_ have also been receiving their (apparently stillborn) bi-levels, releasing Horizon cars for other service.

But neither the _Cardinal_ nor a potential _Three Rivers_ really requires that many cars or equipment sets anyway; There is simply no reason to pit one train against another in a completely self-defeating strategy. Who needs the John Mica's and Ernest Istook's of the political scene when rail advocates suggest similar dead end and discredited policies. Lack of equipment is indeed a longstanding and significant problem, but its not what has stymied new service.



CCC1007 said:


> Philly Amtrak Fan said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> west point said:
> 
> 
> 
> Frankly, I think the problem of finding rolling stock is much more serious than the problem of getting a slot.Station tracks and platforms really are the best for any location needing high level platforms or has a large passenger turn over. those stations with just occasional ADA passengers a lift would seem best choice.
> 
> Rolling stock is a very serious problem . As of now more rolling stock seems problematic ?
> 
> 
> 
> If west point's statement is true then hopefully now you see why I suggest killing one train to resurrect another (or cannibalism as it has been called) or the fact that I claim Byrd killed the Broadway/Three Rivers. We're competing for equipment. The fact that both LD trains killed in 2005 (Silver Palm downgraded and terminated in Savannah) were both Viewliners doesn't seem coincidental to me (to this day Viewliners are still in short supply). You can now say we can't get the slots back but if we still had them we wouldn't have to get them back now.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> The withdrawal of the last of the heritage sleepers is what caused the three rivers to loose its sleeper service, and the loss of mail and express traffic led to there being not enough of a need for four trains NEC to Chicago at that time. The three rivers was effectively killed off by David Gunn and the FRA requirements that a retention tank be installed on the passenger cars.
Click to expand...

Amtrak had a waiver on the retention toilet issue, though eventually failed to renew it and the Heritage sleepers were, indeed, withdrawn (the _Three Rivers_ switched to a Viewliner, but car supply was tight).


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## fairviewroad

I know the OP offered the caveat that this is fantasy, but I still think the OP is over-estimating the demand for overnight short/medium haul services. What business traveler is going to spend the night on a train when there is a plethora of short, non-stop flights between the most of the city pairs suggested?

Likewise, what leisure traveler is going to travel overnight between NYP-Montreal or LAX-Bay Area (for example) when doing so means they'd miss the scenery that the route is known for? And while the scenery isn't perhaps as noted on some of the other routes, there is still something about "the view" that makes train travel appealing, and overnight trains erase that appeal.

The reason the NEC "night owl" service works is due to the incredible population density along the corridor, along with the relative lack of scenery. In fact I think with some re-jiggering you could effectively run two night owl trains each way...you almost have that northbound already with the 0315 departure from WAS supplementing train 66.


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## A Voice

fairviewroad said:


> What business traveler is going to spend the night on a train when there is a plethora of short, non-stop flights between the most of the city pairs suggested?
> 
> Likewise, what leisure traveler is going to travel overnight between NYP-Montreal or LAX-Bay Area (for example) when doing so means they'd miss the scenery that the route is known for?


For business travelers needing to depart after the business day and arrive reasonably early the next morning, they generally have two alternatives: an evening flight with late arrival at a hotel or else get up in the middle of the night from home for an early a.m. flight. Neither option in often particularly appealing. The idea behind "overnight" trains (particularly sleeper, with good food service) is to board of the evening and get a full nights rest at normal hours while en route to your destination.

If we follow the "who is going to take the train when there are flights available" theory to its logical conclusion, then all passenger rail service nationwide - except commuter - can be discontinued tomorrow morning. Nobody asks why Chick Fil-A builds a new restaurant when there is already a burger joint next door. Nor does anyone question why Uber bothers to conduct business in a city which has public transportation. But dare to suggest a new passenger train route, and sure as trains run on rails, someone will question it by stating there is already an airport and (faster) interstate between those points.

Hence, even with leisure travelers, most aren't taking the train just for the scenery. Is the only reason people fly because its faster? Or others take the car because they all enjoy driving? People choose a given mode of transportation for widely varied reasons.


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## Philly Amtrak Fan

A Voice said:


> Hence, even with leisure travelers, most aren't taking the train just for the scenery. Is the only reason people fly because its faster? Or others take the car because they all enjoy driving? People choose a given mode of transportation for widely varied reasons.


I am afraid of flying and I don't want to drive more than about five hours at a time. So that's my reason to take a train. I see it as a form of transportation. I'm not saying I don't enjoy the scenery but do I want to be stuck in a train for 8-10 hours as opposed to an overnight train? I also take NJ Transit to New York most cases I want to go in because I don't want to drive/park in New York.


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## fairviewroad

A Voice said:


> If we follow the "who is going to take the train when there are flights available" theory to its logical conclusion, then all passenger rail service nationwide - except commuter - can be discontinued tomorrow morning.


I didn't say no one would take the train between those destinations. The fact that there is already daytime rail service proves otherwise. I'm just positing that the demand for overnight rail service would be blunted by the fact that travelers have faster, more frequent options that don't require sleeping in a train overnight. Certainly there may be places where it could work.


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## ParanoidAndroid

Wait . . . but sleeping in trains is a good thing!

Yeah, let's get this overnight train to go to SFO.


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## jis

maxbuskirk said:


> Wait . . . but sleeping in trains is a good thing!
> 
> Yeah, let's get this overnight train to go to SFO.


Between sleeping in a bed that dose not bounce around every which way in a spacious room, vs. in a bed that bounces around in a closet? Well, I guess everyone has different ideas about what is good.


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## ParanoidAndroid

Which section (SFO or SAC) should get the lounge?

Maybe get a system where the pax going to SFO order a small breakfast box online, and they stock it, while the lounge goes to SAC? Or structure it like 27, where only the sleeper pax get it to SFO, and the lounge goes to SAC? Maybe put in 2 lounges :blink: ? Or nothing at all :unsure: ?

Maybe bring back the platform-side vendors, shouting at pax to buy their stuff? :lol:


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## Philly Amtrak Fan

jis said:


> maxbuskirk said:
> 
> 
> 
> Wait . . . but sleeping in trains is a good thing!
> 
> Yeah, let's get this overnight train to go to SFO.
> 
> 
> 
> Between sleeping in a bed that dose not bounce around every which way in a spacious room, vs. in a bed that bounces around in a closet? Well, I guess everyone has different ideas about what is good.
Click to expand...

As I said in a previous post, the alternative is spending 8-10 hours stuck on a train during awake hours when you can be doing a lot of other things instead (like posting to this board). They still don't have wi-fi on Superliner trains, right?


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## jis

Philly Amtrak Fan said:


> jis said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> maxbuskirk said:
> 
> 
> 
> Wait . . . but sleeping in trains is a good thing!
> 
> Yeah, let's get this overnight train to go to SFO.
> 
> 
> 
> Between sleeping in a bed that dose not bounce around every which way in a spacious room, vs. in a bed that bounces around in a closet? Well, I guess everyone has different ideas about what is good.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> As I said in a previous post, the alternative is spending 8-10 hours stuck on a train during awake hours when you can be doing a lot of other things instead (like posting to this board). They still don't have wi-fi on Superliner trains, right?
Click to expand...

No. The alternative is a less than two hour flight which is usually quite cheap followed by a hotel room at a price point of ones choice, for most people.

I routinely do these sort of trips even for attending day long meetings in the NY/NJ/Washington DC area, from Florida. SFO to LAX is actually even more attractive for doing something like that, or when the HSR starts running to use the HSR instead of the plane. That is what has essentially killed off most of the sleeper service in the EU.


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## keelhauled

I also think people overstate the comfort of Amtrak sleeping accommodations. The mattresses really are nowhere remotely near as comfortable as a hotel, and the ride can be too rough for many people to sleep soundly. I'm sure many travelers would find four hours in a hotel to be better sleep than eight in a sleeper.


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## A Voice

jis said:


> No. The alternative is a less than two hour flight which is usually quite cheap followed by a hotel room at a price point of ones choice, for most people.


A great deal depends on the individual circumstances of a particular trip and one's personal preferences, obviously, but to reiterate, there are often downsides to that inexpensive two hour flight and hotel which make the rail option more attractive. The business person with a morning meeting but who cannot leave work early faces an evening or (very) early morning flight; Head to the airport after work, and possibly not be in your chosen hotel room until midnight or 1 a.m. (maybe five hours sleep). Or, you can go home to your own bed, up at 2 or 3 to catch your flight. You still prefer to fly; That's fine, but you have to realize there are many - perhaps most - people who would possibly be interested in another option (but usually, there isn't one).

Again this all varies from person to person and trip to trip; Sometimes the train is a better alternative, and other times you would be better off flying. That's a big reason to have different modes of transportation and a strong argument in favor of expanded rail service.


----------



## jis

Absent any concrete evidence to the contrary I shall cling onto my belief that the circumstances under which a rocking and rolling sleep is more desirable than a short flight and a steady sleep even of a shorter duration in most cases is found to be better by many. I am not denying that for some the case for overnight trains may be good. the question is, is the number of such large enough to justify subsidizing such service over something else. I don't know the answer for certain, to that, but as should be obvious, I suspect not. I am willing to be be disabused of that impression.

As you can see, i challenge you to show that "perhaps most - people who would possibly be interested in another option". There is considerable evidence in Europe that such is not the case. I doubt that it is any different in the US. It is a pipe dream of rail lovers IMHO, and of course I am entitled to one.


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## fairviewroad

jis said:


> I am not denying that for some the case for overnight trains may be good. the question is, is the number of such large enough to justify subsidizing such service over something else.


Precisely. On the vast majority of short to medium haul routes, I'd think there should be at the very least 2x/day "daytime" service before an overnight run would merit serious consideration.


----------



## A Voice

jis said:


> I am not denying that for some the case for overnight trains may be good. the question is, is the number of such large enough to justify subsidizing such service over something else.


Between most any two business destinations, there range from several to several dozen flights to choose from, each with perhaps hundreds of seats. Even in a railfan "pipe dream", we are generally talking about being able to sell _one_ "overnight" train on each route (in many cases, this would double frequencies from the current one train per 24 hours!). You don't need a megapolis such as the Northeast Corridor to fill some 236 coach seats and 15 sleeper rooms (typical eastern capacity). Virtually everyone could stick to the airlines and you would still have a sold-out train. You don't even need to make a significant dent in market share; You just need enough passengers to fill your 250 or so seats. Amtrak's existing overnight long-distance trains already do this, and they are only _incidentally_ "overnight services" between major (business) destinations.


----------



## A Voice

jis said:


> As you can see, i challenge you to show that "perhaps most - people who would possibly be interested in another option". There is considerable evidence in Europe that such is not the case. I doubt that it is any different in the US. It is a pipe dream of rail lovers IMHO, and of course I am entitled to one.


Europe is not a valid comparison, and we cannot draw meaningful conclusions about what would or would not work in the United States from such observations (that doesn't stop many persons from making the comparison, of course). There are too many fundamental differences between American and European transportation infrastructure (lack of high speed rail, auto usage, generally poor public transportation, extent of transportation mode integration, etc.) to draw any real conclusions, let alone societal, cultural, and geographic differences (among others).



fairviewroad said:


> On the vast majority of short to medium haul routes, I'd think there should be at the very least 2x/day "daytime" service before an overnight run would merit serious consideration.


I don't disagree at all. In fact, I would assume this would ordinarily be a prerequisite for regional short/medium distance corridor operations. When there is currently but a single train (per 24 hours), however, I would expect that a second train would attract some intermediate point passengers regardless of the time scheduled (as current overnight long-distance trains already do).


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## jis

Oh I agree that Europe is not the best comparison. But then in US there is zero tradition for using trains for too much of anything outside a few corridors, and those are mostly daytime. So there is nothing to compare with except for us railfans warm and fuzzy feelings based on our nostalgic experiences.


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## neroden

jis said:


> Between sleeping in a bed that dose not bounce around every which way in a spacious room, vs. in a bed that bounces around in a closet? Well, I guess everyone has different ideas about what is good.


When a comfortable fixed-in-place room costs a minimum of $300 (I'm looking at NYC here), and you have to fly into one of the infamous NYC airports, and get a taxi to get back downtown?
I know people who *couch-surf* on stranger's apartments in order to afford to visit NYC. I think their own *Amtrak seat* overnight would probably be preferred!

If your alternative is to fly into in NYC the day before and get a hotel room, it's cheaper to take the train overnight *by sleeper* and quicker too!

Yeah, lots of people will take a sleeper from upstate NY (or Ohio) to NYC if they can arrive in NYC in the early morning (NO NYC HOTEL) and leave in the late evening (NO NYC HOTEL).

I do think NYC is special in this regard, due to the very high hotel prices. Boston also has very high hotel prices, but (for example) Chicago and LA don't. This is why doubling the LSL *in particular* on a 12-hour-reversed schedule has a stronger overnight market than other overnight suggestions.

Daytime service in Ohio, of course, has its own (strong) market.

The schedule I proposed is flexible enough to adjust to a rerouting over the Michigan Line should that be deemed appropriate.


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## jis

Yup, the typical hotel price is a key parameter.

I can believe many people would take the train overnight to NY specially from many places en route which has no convenient access to air service. But given the hotel prices around airports in the NY area, I doubt that many would from places that have conveniently scheduled air service for typical high density air corridor prices.

Still that makes considering the provision of overnight trains desirable, specially in areas where such conditions arise. But only after daytime demand has been adequately met.

Also to note, we were originally talking about a San Francisco to Los Angeles night train over the Coast Line. Again, that would work well for mid point locations to either end point area. But I suspect that ridership end to end will not be as robust as one would hope. Spirit of California, while it ran, suffered from that problem too. The rich connectivity with other services including California Amtrak Thruway also enhances the usefulness of such.


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## fairviewroad

A Voice said:


> You don't even need to make a significant dent in market share; You just need enough passengers to fill your 250 or so seats.



Filling those seats (and bunks) is not the problem. You could price everything at $10 and sell out the train every night. The challenge is doing it in a way that makes sense fiscally. Perhaps it can be done. I suspect it's a hard sell, but I would be happy to be proven wrong.


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## Philly Amtrak Fan

fairviewroad said:


> A Voice said:
> 
> 
> 
> You don't even need to make a significant dent in market share; You just need enough passengers to fill your 250 or so seats.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Filling those seats (and bunks) is not the problem. You could price everything at $10 and sell out the train every night. The challenge is doing it in a way that makes sense fiscally. Perhaps it can be done. I suspect it's a hard sell, but I would be happy to be proven wrong.
Click to expand...

I would say to have a "cheaper" overnight train, you could go no sleeper (Night Owl works without sleepers) or have sleepers and no diner car (the Three Rivers to my knowledge never had one). Do diner cars pay for themselves? How about sleepers?


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## fairviewroad

I don't know what types of car pays for itself, but one of the arguments on this thread is that some business travelers would prefer to spend the night in a sleeping car and arrive at their destination city in the morning, rather than flying in the night before and spending $300 (or whatever) on a hotel. If you remove the sleeping car from the equation, the target market really becomes leisure travelers, who would be more price-sensitive.


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## WoodyinNYC

Philly Amtrak Fan said:


> fairviewroad said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> A Voice said:
> 
> 
> 
> You don't even need to make a significant dent in market share; You just need enough passengers to fill your 250 or so seats.
> 
> 
> 
> Filling those seats (and bunks) ... The challenge is doing it in a way that makes sense fiscally.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> ... you could go no sleeper (Night Owl works without sleepers) or have sleepers and no diner car (the Three Rivers to my knowledge never had one).
> 
> Do diner cars pay for themselves? How about sleepers?
Click to expand...

Say, are you new around here?  We've had exhaustive discussions on these matters. Diners make no money. Amtrak uses diners because of the hallowed railroad tradition to supply better food service for the passengers paying more to ride in sleepers on the overnight LD trains.

The sleeping cars apparently do make money. Neroden has made calculations that each additional Viewliner II sleeper will clear something like -- iirc -- a million a year, or half a million for sure (all that from my steadily declining memory). Meanwhile we wait and wait for the CAF order of 25 V II sleepers plus 10 bag dorms (equivalent to another 5 full sleepers). What will 30 more sleepers do for Amtrak?

The Silver Meteor, Silver Star, and Lake Shore Ltd are all at or close to the break-even point -- and the Crescent and our favorite, the Cardinal, are getting closer. Sharing $15 million a year, or more, in added revenue among the five single-level Eastern LD trains could bring them to break-even as a group. Then what would be the excuse to cut LD trains that are not losing money?


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## Alex

Is there a link for this calculation somewhere?


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## neroden

Oh, God, I made that calculation so many years ago,... back when the Viewliners were ordered... that I would need to redo it with current numbers. Both costs and ticket prices have changed. Sorry, haven't the time right now.

It's buried deep in the Amtrak Unlimited Archives somewhere.

-----

The big political issue is those damn "fully allocated" costs. If you use true avoidable costs, most of the long-distance trains are profitable already. But when you "allocate" a portion of the costs from the central backshops, reservation system, etc. to them, then they look "unprofitable". This is bogus because if you cancelled these trains those costs would just get reallocated to Acela & Northeast Regional, making *them* look unprofitable.

What Amtrak needs is more train service to spread those fixed costs out over. And politically, Amtrak needs to report the "allocated" fixed costs and the real avoidable costs *separately*. Which they were tasked by law to do in 2008 but they have somehow not bothered to do.


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## neroden

jis said:


> Yup, the typical hotel price is a key parameter.
> 
> I can believe many people would take the train overnight to NY specially from many places en route which has no convenient access to air service. But given the hotel prices around airports in the NY area, I doubt that many would from places that have conveniently scheduled air service for typical high density air corridor prices.
> 
> Still that makes considering the provision of overnight trains desirable, specially in areas where such conditions arise. But only after daytime demand has been adequately met.


Which it generally has in the Erie Canal Corridor of upstate NY, at least at current train speeds, with the Empire Service... but not in Ohio and Indiana. Which is why I like my idea so much. For marketing it to Amtrak it needs a better name than "TWO A DAY" though, I suspect.



> Also to note, we were originally talking about a San Francisco to Los Angeles night train over the Coast Line. Again, that would work well for mid point locations to either end point area. But I suspect that ridership end to end will not be as robust as one would hope. Spirit of California, while it ran, suffered from that problem too. The rich connectivity with other services including California Amtrak Thruway also enhances the usefulness of such.


Ah, yes. I think California is a much less fertile area for overnight service.


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## Anderson

neroden said:


> Oh, God, I made that calculation so many years ago,... back when the Viewliners were ordered... that I would need to redo it with current numbers. Both costs and ticket prices have changed. Sorry, haven't the time right now.
> 
> It's buried deep in the Amtrak Unlimited Archives somewhere.
> 
> -----
> 
> The big political issue is those damn "fully allocated" costs. If you use true avoidable costs, most of the long-distance trains are profitable already. But when you "allocate" a portion of the costs from the central backshops, reservation system, etc. to them, then they look "unprofitable". This is bogus because if you cancelled these trains those costs would just get reallocated to Acela & Northeast Regional, making *them* look unprofitable.
> 
> What Amtrak needs is more train service to spread those fixed costs out over. And politically, Amtrak needs to report the "allocated" fixed costs and the real avoidable costs *separately*. Which they were tasked by law to do in 2008 but they have somehow not bothered to do.


Try the attached report on for size. It's almost three years old but I got some _very_ good numbers to work with at the time. I think the average profit per car comes in a little below what you're estimating, but this was in a very specific context as well (VA-NYP/BOS service). I think there's a good case that my collaborators and I also used almost farcially lowballed yield estimates.

Edit: Ok, so I apparently cannot upload .docx files, and a slapped-on copy-paste always looks like crap. Short version: We looked at three options for service using Viewliners. In general, on a load factor of about 60% you ended up with about $650-850k in net contribution on a service needing two "active" cars and possibly one spare. This presumed that you could do a little better than the Capitol Limited in terms of pricing (and such prices were, and still are, not much higher than Regional Business Class and substantially better than Acela First...to say nothing of walk-up prices at airports).

Edit 2: @Philly Amtrak Fan, I think your definition of "works" in re 66/67 is fairly loose. When the sleeper came off about fifteen years ago, revenue crashed so hard that my understanding is that the train was nearly lost. Yes, the train does get business, but my understanding is that it's a stinker in many respects but survives in the context of Amtrak needing it as part of comprehensive-ish service.


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## ParanoidAndroid

Should the sleeper return to 66/67?


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## neroden

maxbuskirk said:


> Should the sleeper return to 66/67?


Definitely.


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## Anderson

neroden said:


> maxbuskirk said:
> 
> 
> 
> Should the sleeper return to 66/67?
> 
> 
> 
> Definitely.
Click to expand...

Definitely. It was only cut when the Cardinal got switched to being a single-level train and needed two sleepers...and that was about the only place to get them.


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## Philly Amtrak Fan

Anderson said:


> neroden said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> maxbuskirk said:
> 
> 
> 
> Should the sleeper return to 66/67?
> 
> 
> 
> Definitely.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> Definitely. It was only cut when the Cardinal got switched to being a single-level train and needed two sleepers...and that was about the only place to get them.
Click to expand...

Yet another train that got screwed over by Byrd Crap. I used to say if you're wondering where your train is, it's in West Virginia right now. In this case, if you're wondering where your sleeper car is, it's in West Virginia right now. Considering how much Cardinal traffic is not overnight (CHI-IND, CVS-WAS/NYP), you can argue the Night Owl had more overnight passengers per train.


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## dlagrua

Night trains were very popular for business travelers going between major cities back in the day. The issue is that not everyone along the route gets to board at 10 or 11PM. Some along the route would need to board at 3 or 4 AM. Way back when there were multiple departures of the same train each day this was not a problem but IMO today it would be. I believe that's one point that holds back the Cardinal from profitability on its long 28 hr trip NYP to CHI. It does leave in the morning but by nightfall you are not even out of WV.


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## WoodyinNYC

Let's get back to a useful discussion. Anderson found paperwork supporting an estimate that a single-level sleeper could be good for $650,000 to $850,000 contribution to Amtrak's operations.

Let me take the midpoint of that range, so $750,000 per single-level sleeper. From CAF we expect to get, eventually, 25 Viewliner II sleepers and 10 bag-dorms (half sleeper modules, half baggage space), for an equivalent of 30 new sleepers.

That should add one more sleeper to equip 4 Silver Meteor, 4 Silver Star, [correction: 4, not 6] Crescent, 3 Lake Shore Ltd, and 2 Cardinal consists now in use, for a total of [correction: 17, not 19]. Then 1 or 2 more to take the Cardinal daily with another consist. And 2 more for the 66/67. That leaves few spares on standby for protection, or to cover ongoing annual servicing. Maybe one of the trains will have to settle for adding a bag-dorm or two to each consist.

(I'd really love to see at least 5 more Viewliner sleepers tacked on to the production, er, run, but 10 more would be even better.)

With [correction: 20, not 22] added Viewliners in revenue service, each clearing roughly $750,000 a year, I'm hoping to see the Eastern trains as a group reducing their operating losses by some [correction: $15,000,000, not $16,500,000].

No point in killing off LD trains that are not even losing money.

[[Edit: Corrected overcount of Crescent consists. Thanks, jis.]]


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## jis

Crescent has four consists, not 6. So total 17 not 19.


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## Anderson

@Woody:
First of all, you're off by a factor of two on net income: We projected $650-850k over a two-car service (so $325-425k/car), which (as part of the report) suggested that the investment would pay off in about six to eight years for the cars in use. Granted, we intentionally made sure to be conservative with our estimates (I think we could have safely estimated closer to $500k/yr per car, particularly if we presumed some pax "cascading" upwards and freeing up space as well as some turnover at Washington).

With that said, you're over-simplifying a far more complex picture. The net income situation which we projected had as much to do with controlled costs (we were looking at the Shoreliner, Palmetto-with-sleeper, and Three Rivers-with-sleeper as comparisons) as it did with revenue. We were looking at trains with vaguely comparable runtimes and no dining car, and there isn't a "dead end" on the train revenue-wise nor lots of "away time" for the crews, etc. For example, the Crescent and Silver Star both run around 30 hours each while the Meteor and Cardinal run 27 hours each. The Shoreliner would run about 16 hours each; the only vaguely comparable run is the LSL, and even it runs close to 20 hours NYP-CHI/22 hours BOS-CHI.

I'm sort-of reverse-engineering the work we did here, but what I'm thinking is the following:
-I will presume that the added car will generate per-sleeper revenue at 80% of the prevailing rate on each train per the December 2016 Monthly Performance Report. This is to account for the fact that Q1 of Amtrak's fiscal year is usually quite strong as well as some downward pressure on overall fares from added capacity.
-I will presume that we're looking at a load factor of about 60% of space occupied in a Viewliner II, with 1.5 passengers per roomette and 2 per bedroom (so, 13.5 pax/sleeper). I'm going to presume about 1.4 sales per space available as well, except in the case of the Star: In the case of the Star I am presuming 2.0 sales per space both due to what I've observed (lots of turnover at RVR) and in light of the fact that the Star is, through December, running at 85% of the Meteor's sleeper pax count despite running with around 70% of the space.

This would give us the following:
-Lake Shore Limited: FY17's PPR was $248, so we're looking at $198.40/passenger times 13.5 pax/sleeper times 1.4. Revenue per frequency is thus $3750, or $2.737m/yr (or $912k/car).
-Crescent: FY17's PPR was $288, so we're looking at $230.40/passenger. Per the above math this gives us $4355/frequency or $3.179m/yr (or $795k/car). NB I think this may be a bit high due to extreme pricing pressure north of Atlanta.
-Silver Meteor: FY17's PPR was $317, so we're looking at $253.60/passenger. Per the math above this gives $4793/frequency or $3.499m/yr (or $875k/car).
-Silver Star: Starting figure is $190, giving us $152/passenger. Per the adjusted math above this gives $4104/frequency or $2.996m/yr (or $750k/car).
-Cardinal: Starting figure is $236, giving us $188.80. Per the math above this gives us $3568/frequency; presuming that we're sticking with 3x weekly, this gives overall revenue of $1.116m (or $558k/car). I suspect the Cardinal's space turnover may be a bit higher as well, but I also suspect that per-passenger revenue may take a little bit more of a hit due to pricing pressure.

So, across 17 sleepers we'd generate $13.527m in additional revenue on these figures (or about $796k/car). Costs are a lot harder for me to estimate, and I'd have to treat all of the trains a little differently in theory...but the bottom line is that said costs won't be $0. In our report, I think we came up with $300k/year in maintenance costs, but that was split over two cars, and there's also arguably adding an SCA to the mix. I'm thinking we'd be looking at $400-500k/car in overall costs (depending on how much is actually incremental; again, we were having to look at work being done at BOS/NPN, not NYP/CHI/MIA which already do a lot of this work), so this would bring the total overall costs to around $6.8-8.5m. This leaves a net of about $5-7m (or a little under what we came up with in our report on a per-car basis...but that's largely down to the Cardinal sandbagging the overall numbers, which in turn is down to its operational situation). There's still the question of spares, etc., too.

Now, do I think there are ways to massage those estimates? Of course I do: There's nothing saying that you have to run every car on every train, and a coordinated schedule of not running a few cars (say, in the middle of the week or in the deep off-season) could help trim expenses (if not improve overall revenue by allowing another few cars to be deployed overall). The 80% figure is also strictly a spitball number since I'm working with a three-month period, etc. Bumping that to 90%, increasing presumed turnover, or adjusting load factors could help. On the other hand, we also might have a lousy estimate on costs and that could break either way.

Edit: One downside not considered above is the per-passenger cost of added OBS expenses. I simply don't have a good way to estimate that sort of thing. It's not likely to be _that _much, but it's also not $0.


----------



## west point

Anderson -----Generally you have a pretty good handle on the costs and revenues. However

1. On all my travels on the Crescent south of ATL there never has been even one sleeper full of Passengers. Granted have never traveled on it during Thanksgiving, Christmas holiday, or Mardi Gras. Now did not ever check BHM <> ATL.

2. If Crescent could have 3-4 sleepers north of ATL and cut all but one that help on costs.

3. Several years ago someone calculated the per mile costs of a car to be about $4.00 + per mile. That believe came from the extra sleepers figures of PRIIA for Meteor ?

4. The extra costs of having to maneuver cut off cars probably be less in ATL than running them to NOL ?

5. There had been plans for Amtrak to assign one OBS per 2 V-2 sleepers and V-1s once they are modified to allow the non obs to call the OBS. Still the plans ? ?


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## jis

Atlanta is a hot mess right now, and there is absolutely no chance of dropping/picking up cars there on a regular basis until significant track work revision is done around Peachtree Station or the station is moved somewhere else.


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## brianpmcdonnell17

jis said:


> Atlanta is a hot mess right now, and there is absolutely no chance of dropping/picking up cars there on a regular basis until significant track work revision is done around Peachtree Station or the station is moved somewhere else.


Yeah, I think it would take a long time to make up the initial investment of building the facilities to drop cars, especially considering the only benefit would be lower operating costs. However, if Atlanta did ever get a new station with potentially more trains and a yard and servicing facility, then it would make sense to drop cars off of the Crescent.


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## Philly Amtrak Fan

The PRIIA for the Crescent suggests cut off cars but can't be implemented because of the hot mess there.

Are there any places that cut off cars work and where are the cutoff points? Are there places cut off cares should be but can't be implemented (like Atlanta)?


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## west point

jis said:


> Atlanta is a hot mess right now, and there is absolutely no chance of dropping/picking up cars there on a regular basis until significant track work revision is done around Peachtree Station or the station is moved somewhere else.


Absolutely it is a mess. If you want to seethe main problem click on the link below and zoom in about 10-12 times to Atlanta Peachtree station. Then follow line WSW to Howell interlocking. Study the track layout and note how CSX crosses the NS two double tracks. CSX fouls this CP because of yard work at their Atlanta Tilford yard + old SAL line.

http://fragis.fra.dot.gov/GISFRASafety/

Station work at the Amtrak station would probably take $1,4 - 2.0 M to fix


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## railiner

I think the most successful addition of an overnite train, would be on the Empire route.

There is fairly frequent service over it during the day, but a pretty significant gap between the last train of the day, and the first of the next day. People on that corridor are constantly moving around, there are a huge number of colleges and universities that contribute heavily to the traffic, and if there was an extension on to Toronto, it would do very well....

I do recall they ran a weekly overnite train, with a connection to Toronto some years ago, but for some reason, it didn't last very long...perhaps people did not like transferring at Niagara Falls...

People who use the bus on that corridor much prefer the overnite for thru travel....


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## WoodyinNYC

Anderson, Great thanks for these calculations and explanations.

I'll have questions and points to make, soon, I hope. But it's too late at night now for me to make any sense!

Thanks again.


----------



## ainamkartma

west point said:


> jis said:
> 
> 
> 
> Atlanta is a hot mess right now, and there is absolutely no chance of dropping/picking up cars there on a regular basis until significant track work revision is done around Peachtree Station or the station is moved somewhere else.
> 
> 
> 
> Absolutely it is a mess. If you want to seethe main problem click on the link below and zoom in about 10-12 times to Atlanta Peachtree station. Then follow line WSW to Howell interlocking. Study the track layout and note how CSX crosses the NS two double tracks. CSX fouls this CP because of yard work at their Atlanta Tilford yard + old SAL line.
> 
> http://fragis.fra.dot.gov/GISFRASafety/
> 
> Station work at the Amtrak station would probably take $1,4 - 2.0 M to fix
Click to expand...

Isn't the obvious place to drop cars from the Crescent not Atlanta, but Anniston, AL, where the cars could sit for seven hours before being picked up by the northbound Crescent and there is what appears to be an unused two ended siding with existing turnouts right next to the Amtrak station?

(Or Birmingham, for that matter, where there would only be a two and half hour layover for the cars, but there are scads of idle platform tracks. I imagine Amtrak could not reliably make a two point five hour connection, though.)

Ainamkartma


----------



## ainamkartma

Anderson said:


> This would give us the following:
> 
> -Lake Shore Limited: FY17's PPR was $248, so we're looking at $198.40/passenger times 13.5 pax/sleeper times 1.4. Revenue per frequency is thus $3750, or $2.737m/yr (or $912k/car).
> 
> -Crescent: FY17's PPR was $288, so we're looking at $230.40/passenger. Per the above math this gives us $4355/frequency or $3.179m/yr (or $795k/car). NB I think this may be a bit high due to extreme pricing pressure north of Atlanta.
> 
> -Silver Meteor: FY17's PPR was $317, so we're looking at $253.60/passenger. Per the math above this gives $4793/frequency or $3.499m/yr (or $875k/car).
> 
> -Silver Star: Starting figure is $190, giving us $152/passenger. Per the adjusted math above this gives $4104/frequency or $2.996m/yr (or $750k/car).
> 
> -Cardinal: Starting figure is $236, giving us $188.80. Per the math above this gives us $3568/frequency; presuming that we're sticking with 3x weekly, this gives overall revenue of $1.116m (or $558k/car). I suspect the Cardinal's space turnover may be a bit higher as well, but I also suspect that per-passenger revenue may take a little bit more of a hit due to pricing pressure.


Maybe this is completely naive, but is not the obvious conclusion from your figures that the best* use of the new sleepers would be to:

1) Add cars to the LSL until you can't fill them any more without dropping prices;

2) Add any cars left over to the Meteor until you can't fill them any more without dropping prices;

3) And so on down the line?

Thanks,

Ainamkartma

* Where "best" is some combination of transporting the most passengers and adding the most operating profit to Amtrak's bottom line.


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## Eric S

Philly Amtrak Fan said:


> The PRIIA for the Crescent suggests cut off cars but can't be implemented because of the hot mess there.
> 
> Are there any places that cut off cars work and where are the cutoff points? Are there places cut off cares should be but can't be implemented (like Atlanta)?


I believe Amtrak has, at times recently, dropped/added cars at Denver (to/from Chicago), Reno (to/from Emeryville), St. Louis (to/from Chicago), and St. Paul (to/from Chicago).


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## A Voice

ainamkartma said:


> west point said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> jis said:
> 
> 
> 
> Atlanta is a hot mess right now, and there is absolutely no chance of dropping/picking up cars there on a regular basis until significant track work revision is done around Peachtree Station or the station is moved somewhere else.
> 
> 
> 
> Absolutely it is a mess. If you want to seethe main problem click on the link below and zoom in about 10-12 times to Atlanta Peachtree station. Then follow line WSW to Howell interlocking. Study the track layout and note how CSX crosses the NS two double tracks. CSX fouls this CP because of yard work at their Atlanta Tilford yard + old SAL line.
> 
> http://fragis.fra.dot.gov/GISFRASafety/
> 
> Station work at the Amtrak station would probably take $1,4 - 2.0 M to fix
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> Isn't the obvious place to drop cars from the Crescent not Atlanta, but Anniston, AL, where the cars could sit for seven hours before being picked up by the northbound Crescent and there is what appears to be an unused two ended siding with existing turnouts right next to the Amtrak station?
> 
> (Or Birmingham, for that matter, where there would only be a two and half hour layover for the cars, but there are scads of idle platform tracks. I imagine Amtrak could not reliably make a two point five hour connection, though.)
> 
> Ainamkartma
Click to expand...

How much does it really add costs, though, to just let the "extra" cars tag along all the way to New Orleans? Anniston as a drop point is thinking outside the box, and Amtrak could do with more of that, but of course the idea is the additional capacity is only needed north of Atlanta. Amtrak has previously had cars basically just 'along for the ride" all the way from Chicago to New Orleans when the _Empire Builder_ used to run through as southbound train 59. Given that cutting equipment anywhere from Atlanta or beyond would only save one partial set of cars (of four required), it does seem an open question just how much effort should be put into this.

The _Gulf Breeze_ used to provide a remedy for all this; Rather than look at ways to reduce capacity nearer the Gulf coast, perhaps the better option regardless is to find a way to use or market these excess seats to carry more passengers or serve more destinations again (split at Meridian as proposed, or alternately even to Mobile again).


----------



## Seaboard92

The Crescent Star is your most likely new service that would come in the SE. Partially because it's cash positive in Amtrak's study and you should be some sort of Amtrak equipment on that route this summer. With the new route being Meridian to Fort Worth.


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## Anderson

@West Point:
I'll run down these in order:
(1/2) I can't comment on load factors there from a position of data, but this is consistent with a lot of things: Amtrak's ticket pricing, reading between the lines on some reports, observations, and the fact that Southern only ran the Crescent daily as far as Birmingham (only running it through to New Orleans on days that connected with the Sunset via the overnight sleeper). As you indicated there are probably seasonal exceptions.

(3) I'd have to look through the report, but IIRC that proposal was to add a coach. Moreover, I'd be curious as to what they were looking at in terms of those costs...was this in terms of direct costs? Was this covering maintenance, etc.? Did this involve adding a crew member and was that rolled in? FWIW I don't find that number to be /utterly/ unreasonable...it feels a bit high but I cannot quantify my feeling any further. One thing to bear in mind: The Meteor uses four sets, and those four sets travel a combined 1,013,970 miles/year...so each individual car travels a shade over a quarter-million miles per year.

(4) Cutting cars in Atlanta would make sense. You'd still need three cars allocated (the NB Crescent doesn't get into NYP in time to return the car south on the same day) but that's still a savings of a car and a crew member. At present, you'd probably be better off looking at dropping part of the crew at Anniston or Birmingham (I'd vote for ATN over BHM due to timing...1000 to 1600 is a lot safer than 1150 to 1424) and just running the cars through. In this context you could probably drop an SCA and at least one diner crew member. You might also be fairly well-off by cutting a car in Washington, where IIRC you've got quite a few boardings due to the presence of the Capitol Limited as your "acceptable connection" westbound: 0953-1830 wouldn't be too far off of the "old Meteor" timings for NYP (which allowed a same-day turn), but there are obvious logistical issues there.

(5) The plan was actually to go to two attendants per three sleepers (though I think this effectively meant one attendant on the Crescent since the Crescent has only two sleepers and some of that space has to go to crew). Is that still the plan? Hell if I know.

@Ainamkartma:
The answer to this is complicated. Basically, the LSL and Meteor are arguably your best trains for this. However, the LSL is space-limited in New York due to the track configuration (IIRC the train can only be about ten or eleven cars long but it has been a while since I looked at the track diagrams for NYP). Right now I think the train runs nine cars and the locomotive into NYP at peak season, so it's close to capacity.

Moreover, there's the question of the impact of /massively/ adding capacity on a given train. The Meteor is not so constrained, so let's assume that we just dumped all of the sleepers onto the Meteor as a thought exercise. The Meteor, which presently runs with three sleepers, would now be running with 8-9:
(1) It isn't clear how much demand there would be for throwing that many cars at the train all at once, so you'd ding your yield factors (probably pretty heavily).
(2) Let's say you've filled eight sleeping cars with pax, at about 22 people to a sleeper. All of those passengers are owed a dinner. That is 176 passengers, give or take. With full use of a 48-seat diner you'd need four seatings to have a shot at feeding them all. Now, you could probably use cafe space for some spill-over and pack it down to three (very full) seatings but I don't even know if the diner could fit that much food.
(3) Even if you manage that side of things, with eight or nine sleepers you're either burying the dining car deep in sleeper-land or you've got some sleeping car passengers who have a heck of a walk (and I can say from doing this on the Canadian that nine-car walks suck).

Realistically you would probably need a second dining car for such a train. We had a discussion on here a while back and IIRC the practical limit for a single dining car is somewhere in the range of 4-5 sleepers. Back in "the day" trains could run with more sleepers per diner, but that's because the the meals weren't included (which meant that some pax would take a pass), the sleepers had a lower capacity (a 10-6 sleeper had a passenger limit of 21 while a Viewliner I has a limit of 30 and would be able to fit 32 if you didn't need the shower; a Viewliner II has a limit of 28 due to the restrooms), and the crews were held to more aggressive standards (witness the Pullman manuals, which gave highly detailed instructions on how to, for example, serve a martini.

The result is that Amtrak's best bet is probably to add a car to each train and then see where the demand settles out. It is very possible that after doing so for a season someone does the numbers and figures out that the car on the Star isn't yielding as much as the one on the Meteor (or the Crescent) and that switching them out would make sense.

Edit: "Splitting the damn train" is another valid option IMHO. The problem is that IIRC when the Gulf Breeze ran the service was something of a bust (Wikipedia cites ridership in 1994 as 7,737, or about 10.5 pax/train). Now, this might have been down to the train terminating at Mobile instead of New Orleans (which may have had operational reasons for being the case) but basically on those numbers the train wasn't even running with a single car full most of the time.


----------



## WoodyinNYC

Anderson said:


> ... there's the question of the impact of /massively/ adding capacity on a given train.
> 
> ... throwing many cars at the train all at once, you'd ding your yield factors (probably heavily).
> 
> The result is that Amtrak's best bet is probably to add a car to each train and then see where the demand settles out.


Seems the bag-dorms could be used to add capacity by half steps. That is, add half a sleeper's worth of roomettes, then when the added bag-dorm is filling up pretty well, replace it with a full sleeper. (Another reason to build the 10 bag-dorms before the 25 full sleepers. Amtrak could add these half-sleepers to the trains first, then replace them with full sleepers as they are accepted.)

Meanwhile, to complicate our calculations and speculations, I'm expecting that the new Viewliner II cars will attract more riders by simply being new and better, and out of service less. How many more riders from 'shiny and new' and how many more riders from 'it's not sold out every time I want to ride' are imponderables to me. But I'm sure a nice number of passengers will be coaxed into giving the new stuff a try.


----------



## Bob Dylan

Eric S said:


> Philly Amtrak Fan said:
> 
> 
> 
> The PRIIA for the Crescent suggests cut off cars but can't be implemented because of the hot mess there.
> 
> Are there any places that cut off cars work and where are the cutoff points? Are there places cut off cares should be but can't be implemented (like Atlanta)?
> 
> 
> 
> I believe Amtrak has, at times recently, dropped/added cars at Denver (to/from Chicago), Reno (to/from Emeryville), St. Louis (to/from Chicago), and St. Paul (to/from Chicago).
Click to expand...

The Texas Eagle and Sunset Ltd. currently drop a Sleeper and Coach in San Antonio on the three times a week Sunset days, and there usually is a protect Sleeper and Coach on the siding by the Station on most days that the Sunset Ltd. doesnt run.


----------



## Eric S

Bob Dylan said:


> Eric S said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Philly Amtrak Fan said:
> 
> 
> 
> The PRIIA for the Crescent suggests cut off cars but can't be implemented because of the hot mess there.
> 
> Are there any places that cut off cars work and where are the cutoff points? Are there places cut off cares should be but can't be implemented (like Atlanta)?
> 
> 
> 
> I believe Amtrak has, at times recently, dropped/added cars at Denver (to/from Chicago), Reno (to/from Emeryville), St. Louis (to/from Chicago), and St. Paul (to/from Chicago).
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> The Texas Eagle and Sunset Ltd. currently drop a Sleeper and Coach in San Antonio on the three times a week Sunset days, and there usually is a protect Sleeper and Coach on the siding by the Station on most days that the Sunset Ltd. doesnt run.
Click to expand...

I guess I didn't think about mentioning the places where trains are split/joined - Albany, San Antonio, Spokane.


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## Bob Dylan

I didn't include Spokane and Albany since the cars don't layover, they are switched almost upon arrival and leave fairly quick.

One other thing about the 321/322 Coaches is that lately they run deadhead between St. Louis and San Antonio on the Eagle and are not switched in St. Louis.


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## Anderson

WoodyinNYC said:


> Anderson said:
> 
> 
> 
> ... there's the question of the impact of /massively/ adding capacity on a given train.
> 
> ... throwing many cars at the train all at once, you'd ding your yield factors (probably heavily).
> 
> The result is that Amtrak's best bet is probably to add a car to each train and then see where the demand settles out.
> 
> 
> 
> Seems the bag-dorms could be used to add capacity by half steps. That is, add half a sleeper's worth of roomettes, then when the added bag-dorm is filling up pretty well, replace it with a full sleeper. (Another reason to build the 10 bag-dorms before the 25 full sleepers. Amtrak could add these half-sleepers to the trains first, then replace them with full sleepers as they are accepted.)
> 
> Meanwhile, to complicate our calculations and speculations, I'm expecting that the new Viewliner II cars will attract more riders by simply being new and better, and out of service less. How many more riders from 'shiny and new' and how many more riders from 'it's not sold out every time I want to ride' are imponderables to me. But I'm sure a nice number of passengers will be coaxed into giving the new stuff a try.
Click to expand...

I'm sort-of ignoring any "shiny" effects from the new sleepers, etc. It's probably worth a few riders here and there but nothing worth really taking into account.

On the other hand, I _do_ think less sold-out sleepers (or less horridly unaffordable sleepers) will have a positive impact on ridership...but I suspect that will also play into some modest downward pressure on PPR (hence my presumptions in my earlier post). Overall I figure that load factors will be fairly steady or drop slightly...but that is in the context of sleepers going for very high rates and frequently selling out at present, so I figure that if we're not maxed out there at present we're close to it on many routes.

As to the bag-dorms, I really wish Amtrak had been able to order a full slate of them so they could make the Transdorms into full "normal sleeper" cars, moving most of the relevant crew members into a bag-dorm.


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## Seaboard92

Well there is another private passenger lesson that could be applied in a way. Certain trains has dining cars but they didn't run the entire route. That would basically be like giving the Silver Star a Hamlet Washington dining car and removing it in both cities. Which saves you space in the crew dorm. But the switching of the consist makes it impractical. But a lot of trains back in the day did switching like that


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## Anderson

Seaboard92 said:


> Well there is another private passenger lesson that could be applied in a way. Certain trains has dining cars but they didn't run the entire route. That would basically be like giving the Silver Star a Hamlet Washington dining car and removing it in both cities. Which saves you space in the crew dorm. But the switching of the consist makes it impractical. But a lot of trains back in the day did switching like that


The Crescent would be a particularly good candidate for this...an "enhanced cafe" along the lines of the LSL-Boston section would be sufficient south of Atlanta (traffic on the southern end being fairly coach-heavy as far as I can tell). A variation on this, based on what I saw in Queensland, would be to vary the crews on a given portion of a route based on the on-board traffic load (e.g. the California Zephyr probably does not need the same level of crewing between Grand Junction and Reno that it needs on either end of the route, while the Starlight is probably in the same boat between the Bay Area and Portland).

FWIW, I remember seeing the consists of some Florida trains (and indeed I think some of Southern's were the same way), and there would often be some Miami-Washington equipment. Especially given the interchange between the Cap and these trains, cutting off some cars at the same time as the locomotive gets pulled would not seem to be a stretch.


----------



## A Voice

Anderson said:


> Seaboard92 said:
> 
> 
> 
> Well there is another private passenger lesson that could be applied in a way. Certain trains has dining cars but they didn't run the entire route. That would basically be like giving the Silver Star a Hamlet Washington dining car and removing it in both cities. Which saves you space in the crew dorm. But the switching of the consist makes it impractical. But a lot of trains back in the day did switching like that
> 
> 
> 
> FWIW, I remember seeing the consists of some Florida trains (and indeed I think some of Southern's were the same way), and there would often be some Miami-Washington equipment. Especially given the interchange between the Cap and these trains, cutting off some cars at the same time as the locomotive gets pulled would not seem to be a stretch.
Click to expand...

It is only another 225 miles up to New York (where equipment sets rotate), and the first car behind the locomotive you're changing is generally the baggage car. Lot of effort to switch cars out of the train, in a strong passenger rail market, to save merely a few hours.


----------



## west point

A Voice said:


> How much does it really add costs, though, to just let the "extra" cars tag along all the way to New Orleans? Anniston as a drop point is thinking outside the box, and Amtrak could do with more of that, but of course the idea is the additional capacity is only needed north of Atlanta.


The timetable distance between ATL <> NOL is listed as ~ 519 miles. PRIIA listed operating costs of a car is $4.00 + a mile.

A present day Crescent is usually 9 cars = 1 bag, 4 coaches, Diner, lounge 2 sleepers. If the ATL <> NOL segment was changed to 1 bag, 2 coaches, diner or lounge, 1 sleeper that would be 3 less cars every day.

3 cars x 519 x 2 directions x $4.00 = 9 = $12,456 saved per day

Now if Crescent goes NYP or WASH <> ATL 5 coaches and 4 sleepers = 12 cars then cutting them off at ATL saves another $12,456.

so regular consist saves in a 30 day month $$373,680. Proposed consist save double that in a month = $747.360. Those figures are only car operating costs. Operating savings per year ~ $ 4.2 - $8,4 M per year.

Additional costs in no special order. Since the cars are laying over and will be originating there may be 2 additional car knockers required for the FRA required daily originating inspections. ATL already has an unknown number for the 1000 mile brake check. Probably 2 switcher crew men. Then there probably would be some additional NS track charges ( wild guess not more than $5.000 ? ) Hotel power connections $1,000 month ? One time costs for additional spare parts, storage. & another vehicle.

Costs for 2 additional siding switches, tracks HEP connections, additional NS signaling, etc $1.4 - $2.0 M.

The problem with Anniston would be the additional car knockers and loss of savings of 200 miles a day. BHM looses 320 miles of savings.

As pointed out ATL <> NOL ridership is much lower part of Crescent's load. The Crescent has always been capacity limited ATL <> WASH even during SOU RR's operation. ATL <> NOL much less demand although BHM is adding more riders to train now both thru ATL and to NOL. Amtrak PRIIA stated more cars would be added ATL >? NOL whenever demand calls for extra seats. Good use for Horizons if they are ever removed from 1st line service.h


----------



## Anderson

A Voice said:


> Anderson said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Seaboard92 said:
> 
> 
> 
> Well there is another private passenger lesson that could be applied in a way. Certain trains has dining cars but they didn't run the entire route. That would basically be like giving the Silver Star a Hamlet Washington dining car and removing it in both cities. Which saves you space in the crew dorm. But the switching of the consist makes it impractical. But a lot of trains back in the day did switching like that
> 
> 
> 
> FWIW, I remember seeing the consists of some Florida trains (and indeed I think some of Southern's were the same way), and there would often be some Miami-Washington equipment. Especially given the interchange between the Cap and these trains, cutting off some cars at the same time as the locomotive gets pulled would not seem to be a stretch.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> It is only another 225 miles up to New York (where equipment sets rotate), and the first car behind the locomotive you're changing is generally the baggage car. Lot of effort to switch cars out of the train, in a strong passenger rail market, to save merely a few hours.
Click to expand...

The thing is, that 225 miles still totals about seven hours of runtime...and it has the same general impact as an Atlanta switch-out in spite of that saving about 22 hours on 522 miles.

Moreover, at least as of late the baggage car has been running on the back of some of those LD trains (as have the sleepers). While cutting the rear-most car may involve a more complex yard move to get it where it needs to go, doing so isn't horridly impractical (like cutting a mid-train coach would be) and it _is_ possible to arrange a train in such a way that a cut-off coach and sleeper are next to one another.

I'll agree that doing this for a single car is potentially of limited value, but doing this with (say) a car each on the Meteor and Crescent gives you two cars. If you could find a logic to doing so on the Star as well (I'll happily grant that said logic may end up being a bit thin in Washington; Tampa would make the most sense but the timing doesn't work), or elsewhere on one of the single-level trains you'd save three cars...and that's an extra sleeper on the LSL, or indeed another cut-off car on the Meteor or Crescent. Two cars alone might give you room to experiment and/or run an extra less-than-daily/"demand-based" car on a train. Really, don't underestimate the value of preserving scarce capacity.


----------



## Seaboard92

If you were going to remove the dining car in sections of the Silver Meteor. You could run it MIA-SAV remove it there. And add one WAS-NYP and even that leg you might not need it as many people prefer to go to eat once they arrive somewhere. If you cut the Washington-NYP diner you would only need two cars.


----------



## Anderson

Seaboard92 said:


> If you were going to remove the dining car in sections of the Silver Meteor. You could run it MIA-SAV remove it there. And add one WAS-NYP and even that leg you might not need it as many people prefer to go to eat once they arrive somewhere. If you cut the Washington-NYP diner you would only need two cars.


MIA-SAV might require some schedule tinkering NB, but I see what you're saying. On the northern end you'd probably need to put it on at RVR (or otherwise tweak the schedule) since you'd be pulling it at 1900 SB at Washington (and NB if the train is, say, an hour late things could get interesting). True, there are alternatives (one is to have some sort of meal package with an eatery in the station for WAS pax, the other is a Spirit of Queensland-type meal service) but that gets messy in some respects.

The Crescent is probably the best candidate for something like this: Have a diner WAS-ATL or WAS-ATN. The 1830 departure from WAS would allow for two full seatings (1830 and 2000/2015) while the timing into ATL/ATN would cover breakfast. Past ATL, traffic does drop off somewhat, and I think on this configuration you'd only need two dining cars. The next-best train for this would actually be a Cardinal on a slightly earlier schedule (presuming it had a diner): Run the diner NYP-Huntington and have some sort of "heavy Continental" service for sleeper pax on the way into Chicago. Depending on the timetable, doing the same thing with the LSL NYP-BUF would also be an option (and you've probably got a case for shuffling some cars at Buffalo...and as to the LSL's timetable? If they have to pad it out heading into NYP, they might as well get the benefit of optimizing equipment usage while they're at it...)

The real problem with doing this is that most routes are once a day. If there were, say, 4-5 trains on different routes, maintaining intermediate crew bases/turns would make sense. With that said, at some point we do get back to "drop off the crew, not the car" as being the preferable option (since you can at least in theory move a crew around to deal with something going haywire).


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## jis

As usual, I see that the trusty AU gang is busy exercising its brains trying to figure out how to cut service again


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## Philly Amtrak Fan

jis said:


> As usual, I see that the trusty AU gang is busy exercising its brains trying to figure out how to cut service again


Push another LD train under the bus so your train isn't the one (or one of the ones) that get(s) cut. I wish I was on this board in 1994 or 2004.


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## west point

Anderson The problem with these diner cut off cars is that it would cost more to cut off than continue on the train. Pre Amtrak the RRs could change out cars and add on cars using freight car employees to do the breaking of trains and combining them and doing the required brake test. Observed pre Amtrak trains usually do this in about 30 minutes with crews that usually had spare time anyway.

Now that is not possible with Amtrak needing at least 2 engine crewmen and 2 car knockers to cover the split. Then if timing is not correct you may have to double that number for a return train. 4 crewmen costs ? ? Not operating the diner at $4.00+ a mile can not save the costs of the additional Amtrak employees.

When figuring the costs of cut off cars at ATL it appeared that at least 2 - 4 cars cut off is a break even point for the Crescent's not taking cars <> NOL at 500 + miles.


----------



## Ryan

Philly Amtrak Fan said:


> jis said:
> 
> 
> 
> As usual, I see that the trusty AU gang is busy exercising its brains trying to figure out how to cut service again
> 
> 
> 
> Push another LD train under the bus so your train isn't the one (or one of the ones) that get(s) cut. I wish I was on this board in 1994 or 2004.
Click to expand...

Or, here's a crazy idea - fight to keep all of the trains.

Insane, I know.


----------



## Anderson

west point said:


> Anderson The problem with these diner cut off cars is that it would cost more to cut off than continue on the train. Pre Amtrak the RRs could change out cars and add on cars using freight car employees to do the breaking of trains and combining them and doing the required brake test. Observed pre Amtrak trains usually do this in about 30 minutes with crews that usually had spare time anyway.
> 
> Now that is not possible with Amtrak needing at least 2 engine crewmen and 2 car knockers to cover the split. Then if timing is not correct you may have to double that number for a return train. 4 crewmen costs ? ? Not operating the diner at $4.00+ a mile can not save the costs of the additional Amtrak employees.
> 
> When figuring the costs of cut off cars at ATL it appeared that at least 2 - 4 cars cut off is a break even point for the Crescent's not taking cars <> NOL at 500 + miles.


Jis: It's not cutting service if the cars are effectively deadheading, and all the data I have seen on the Star, Meteor, and Crescent suggests that there is at _least_ one car's worth of space running empty north of Washington (O/D at WAS for the Star is 49.5/train; for the Meteor it's 52.8 and for the Crescent it's 62.5/train). While I was poking around elsewhere, the most obvious candidate for cutting cars is still Washington, DC (where a locomotive has to be switched regardless), so cutting a sleeper and coach there as well really does make sense from the standpoint of "dead space" if doing so shakes enough cars loose to add something elsewhere (at least, presuming the trains each end up running with 3-4 sleepers) that's useful. The Meteor and Crescent are both timed such that this would work (the Meteor has a 12-13 hour overlap while the Crescent has a 9-hour overlap; interchanging the cars would give about 10-11 hours each, which is on par with what the Cap and LSL get in Chicago).

Washington is an odd case, however, and (again) that's why I raised the angle of tinkering with crew deployments rather than cutting out cars. There are trains where you can show that the relative pax load on one part of the route might justify full staffing but other parts clearly don't (I usually cite the Zephyr but I could probably cite the Builder instead...CHI-MSP has a very heavy load on that train but the crowd thins out a bit past MSP).

Edit: And to be clear, if $1m can either be saved or generated in incremental return through some changes like this (two well-utilized sleepers are probably worth close to $1m/yr)? That's $1m that can either go towards keeping a train around or towards equipment acquisition and so on.


----------



## neroden

WoodyinNYC said:


> With [correction: 20, not 22] added Viewliners in revenue service, each clearing roughly $750,000 a year, I'm hoping to see the Eastern trains as a group reducing their operating losses by some [correction: $15,000,000, not $16,500,000].
> 
> No point in killing off LD trains that are not even losing money.


The Viewliner trains, except the Cardinal, are already profitable before overhead allocation. This will make them more profitable.Cardinal needs to be daily to be profitable, though the Viewliners will help even while it's not daily. Amtrak needs to go ahead and figure out what needs to be done in capital upgrades to run a daily Cardinal with 3 consists (yes, Amtrak, it CAN be done)


----------



## Anderson

neroden said:


> WoodyinNYC said:
> 
> 
> 
> With [correction: 20, not 22] added Viewliners in revenue service, each clearing roughly $750,000 a year, I'm hoping to see the Eastern trains as a group reducing their operating losses by some [correction: $15,000,000, not $16,500,000].
> 
> No point in killing off LD trains that are not even losing money.
> 
> 
> 
> The Viewliner trains, except the Cardinal, are already profitable before overhead allocation. This will make them more profitable.Cardinal needs to be daily to be profitable, though the Viewliners will help even while it's not daily. Amtrak needs to go ahead and figure out what needs to be done in capital upgrades to run a daily Cardinal with 3 consists (yes, Amtrak, it CAN be done)
Click to expand...

Per the "Boardman Chart", the Crescent also loses money (I don't know where the Star is now; at the time it showed a loss). As I think I've said before, though, I'm pretty sure that (1) it's in the black from NYP-ATL but loses money past there and (2) part of the loss is simply down to a lack of sleeper capacity on the north end. Bear in mind that the 28,640 sleeper pax the train has on two sleeping cars translates into 39.23 sleeper pax/train. Ignoring any lost demand due to the usual winter/spring cutbacks due to trackwork (in many years there's about a six-week period where the train truncates in Atlanta about 4x weekly) and realizing that some of one sleeper goes to OBS, even when you account for some of those spaces turning over at ATL/BHM, that seems to be pretty close to the best you can hope to do on a train that isn't flipping spaces like the Star seems to be.


----------



## Carolina Special

I have no difficulty accepting that shutting down any or all of LD trains would leave OH that would not completely go away and have to be absorbed by whatever is left. It does bug me to ignore allocations altogether in evaluating LD: if the allocations are being done correctly, then those expenses belong to LD whether these are regular expenses or coming from corporate. (Looking at the 2016 Five Year Budget Plan, Exhibit 3-6).

For example, the credit card fees allocated to LD from corporate. If the LD routes go away, the company total credit card fees will go down proportionately, absent any volume discounts: this expense belongs with LD. I expect you could go down the expense column line by line and and find a similar story, assuming the Amtrak accounting department is doing their job. I'd like to think they are and those allocations are there for a reason.

I very much respect the work on the individual train revenue/expenses being done on this board, but I don't see how you can avoid looking at allocations. I do not want to see any trains shut down, especially the Cardinal. But Moorman and others are correct that LD loses money based on the financial reports: we can't ignore that.


----------



## Anderson

Carolina Special said:


> I have no difficulty accepting that shutting down any or all of LD trains would leave OH that would not completely go away and have to be absorbed by whatever is left. It does bug me to ignore allocations altogether in evaluating LD: if the allocations are being done correctly, then those expenses belong to LD whether these are regular expenses or coming from corporate. (Looking at the 2016 Five Year Budget Plan, Exhibit 3-6).
> 
> For example, the credit card fees allocated to LD from corporate. If the LD routes go away, the company total credit card fees will go down proportionately, absent any volume discounts: this expense belongs with LD. I expect you could go down the expense column line by line and and find a similar story, assuming the Amtrak accounting department is doing their job. I'd like to think they are and those allocations are there for a reason.
> 
> I very much respect the work on the individual train revenue/expenses being done on this board, but I don't see how you can avoid looking at allocations. I do not want to see any trains shut down, especially the Cardinal. But Moorman and others are correct that LD loses money based on the financial reports: we can't ignore that.


Oh, I accept that many of the LD trains lose money. What I (and some of the others here) primarily object to is the tendency of Amtrak to use the LD trains as a "dumping ground" for mostly-fixed overhead expenses which makes them look a lot worse than they probably should, and by doing so make it harder to add service. "This train will add 250,000 riders and directly add $5m to the operating deficit" is a much easier sell than "This train will add 250,000 riders and directly add $50m to the operating deficit": The former loss is small enough that connecting riders might well obliterate the loss, and the loss-per-rider is $20. The latter looks like a massive hole in the ground. By the same token, posting that on a current train makes it look like eliminating that train would save far more than it actually would.

Unfortunately, it's functionally impossible for most of us to separate out the "justifiable" expenses being allocated with the non-justifiable ones.


----------



## Philly Amtrak Fan

Rough guess on allocation of costs onto LD trains

Definitely onto the spectific train:

Equipment, fuel, labor

If only train using track, track usage fees

If only train serving station, costs to maintain station including labor and maintenance.

On trains which share equipment with other stations/trains, split the costs. Ex. the tracks/stations in Florida are the same for the SS and SM so the costs there get split, similar to the LSL and CL between CHI and CLE. This is the economies of scale argument.

Using the NEC is a bonus, you don't have to pay usage fees and you can go faster, cutting down on fuel and labor costs.

Trains which have a lot of overlap seem to do better financially while those with unique routes (many trains out west) do worse. This is why a BL revival and a second LSL would be relatively cheap to Amtrak since most of the infrastructure is already in place. You say you don't want to discontinue routes or part of routes that have no other service but there would be significant cost savings as opposed to killing a train that shares most of the infrastructure already.


----------



## Anderson

Well, and remember that the LSL is also sharing tracks with multiple non-LD trains from NYP-BUF while the Silvers are sharing with other trains all the way down into NC. Of course, the Starlight shares with other trains for almost the entire distance from SAC-LAX and Eugene-Seattle...

The counter is simply that yield factors on the Silvers and the LSL are higher...particularly on the Meteor. Taking the Meteor, the #3 ridership pair is NYP-RVR. Coach on that segment is priced at Northeast Regional prices...which often means that coach pax are paying almost as much as sleeper pax (and indeed, I can find days that a roomette is cheaper than a flexible ticket), though Amtrak seems to have generally resolved the "its cheaper to book past RVR/PTB" quirk [1]. That said, the RVR-NYP coach price ranges from $78 (saver) to $193 (flexible). RVR-MIA, by contrast, runs $114-313. More expensive, yes, but that's on 335 miles vs 1054 miles, so your yield per passenger mile is $0.233-0.576 on the northern segment versus $0.108-0.297 on the southern segment. The sleepers are a similar (if less propotionally dramatic) story: For roomettes, I can find $183-298 RVR-NYP (so a yield of $0.546-0.890/mile) versus $399-650 RVR-MIA (so $0.379-0.617/mile).

I'd note that something similar applies on the Crescent and the Palmetto, if I'm not sorely mistaken. The Silver Star is a surreal wreck in this respect (the RVR-NYP sleeper fares tend to be about on par with Regional Business Class and are usually far cheaper than the flex tickets), with northern-end coach fares providing a mounting share of the train's revenue (RVR-NYP is the #1 revenue pair for the Star while NYP-RGH is #3; by ridership, those two are #3 and #9, respectively).

[1] I think this was probably fixed when they started allowing local traffic on the NEC, since eventually somebody was going to figure out that the cheapest last-minute NYP-WAS ticket was actually a NYP-RMT ticket.


----------



## dlagrua

fairviewroad said:


> I don't know what types of car pays for itself, but one of the arguments on this thread is that some business travelers would prefer to spend the night in a sleeping car and arrive at their destination city in the morning, rather than flying in the night before and spending $300 (or whatever) on a hotel. If you remove the sleeping car from the equation, the target market really becomes leisure travelers, who would be more price-sensitive.


The solution would be the slumber coach for the single level routes, that offered 24 one person private rooms (w toilet and sink)and eight double rooms for a capacity of 40 at a price just a bit more than coach. Those sleepers had more capacity than the Superliners of today. You will never see this type of car again because of the two steps up to the top row rooms and the lack of ADA accommodations. It was a great idea for travelers on a budget that wanted privacy and their own single bed. While roomettes are nice I wish that we had this low cost sleeper option again. It must have been popular with business people. The only one that I ever walked into was in the Illinois Railroad Museum.


----------



## CCC1007

dlagrua said:


> fairviewroad said:
> 
> 
> 
> I don't know what types of car pays for itself, but one of the arguments on this thread is that some business travelers would prefer to spend the night in a sleeping car and arrive at their destination city in the morning, rather than flying in the night before and spending $300 (or whatever) on a hotel. If you remove the sleeping car from the equation, the target market really becomes leisure travelers, who would be more price-sensitive.
> 
> 
> 
> The solution would be the slumber coach for the single level routes, that offered 24 one person private rooms (w toilet and sink)and eight double rooms for a capacity of 40 at a price just a bit more than coach. Those sleepers had more capacity than the Superliners of today. You will never see this type of car again because of the two steps up to the top row rooms and the lack of ADA accommodations. It was a great idea for travelers on a budget that wanted privacy and their own single bed. While roomettes are nice I wish that we had this low cost sleeper option again. It must have been popular with business people. The only one that I ever walked into was in the Illinois Railroad Museum.
Click to expand...

Check the math again, a superliner has five bedrooms, thirteen publicly available roomettes and the family and accessible bedrooms for a total capacity of 42.


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## WoodyinNYC

dlagrua said:


> The solution would be the slumber coach for the single level routes, that offered 24 one person private rooms (w toilet and sink)and eight double rooms for a capacity of 40 at a price just a bit more than coach. ... You will never see this type of car again because of the two steps up to the top row rooms and the lack of ADA accommodations.


Trying to picture this. You mean the one-person slumber rooms were stacked, in a lower row and a top row? So you couldn't stand up in them? Like sleeping inside an MRI scanning machine? Oy.

I'm thinking a single row of one-person slumber rooms, with sinks a la Viewliner IIs, toilets and showers down the hall, and stand-up-in ceiling heights.

Why wouldn't such slumber coaches meet ADA standards? Like, doors too narrow and not enuff space inside for a wheelchair? Then wouldn't, say, three or even two wider, accessible slumber rooms (in the space of four non-ADA slumber rooms), take care of ADA needs?

Guess that my idea is roomettes for single travelers, and wouldn't save enuff space to allow a good price cut from the regular roomettes.


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## jis

I had no problem standing up in Slumbercoach single rooms which were arranged in alternate upper and lower rooms. Look up information on Slumbercoaches. Amtrak ran them into the '90s.


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## Seaboard92

Here is the exterior of a Burlington Slumbercoach.


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## Anderson

Depending on the configuration you've got a few options:
(1) An all-roomette car. This is the simplest option (some of these were made in "the day"). I'm thinking the configuration would be 22 roomettes for sale, one for a crew member (or perhaps two attendants per three cars), and one for a pair of toilets (no shower). You might need to trade one more roomette off for some sort of ADA space, but 22 roomettes might well be doable.

(2) Slumbercoaches:
s1346.photobucket.com/user/VPayne1/media/USPat25561401945_zpsb4c24512.png.html
32 spaces, so you could arrange about a 25% discount and still come out ahead. Note that you _can_ stand up in a slumbercoach; the configuration is just wonky.


----------



## neroden

Anderson said:


> Per the "Boardman Chart", the Crescent also loses money (I don't know where the Star is now; at the time it showed a loss).


Yeah, I've basically been updating that chart each year by the following algorithm: I took the difference between the direct-costs loss and the fully-allocated loss that year (took us a while to get the years lined up, but we did it, I think it was 2012) and used that as the "allocated costs" number.(I updated the allocations total the last time I got a good number for the total amount assigned to the long-distance line as a group, in 2014. It had gone up, so I increased all the allocated numbers proportionally at that time.)

If you subtract this allocated costs number out from the current "fully allocated losses", you can figure out how the trains are doing this year. If the allocations have been increasing (which they appear to have been) then I'm actually underestimating their profitability.

The only two ways I could be overestimating is if (a) allocated costs went down significantly since 2014, which is highly unlikely due to inflation alone, or (b) there's been a systematic reallocation of costs away from the LD trains to the NEC, and I'm pretty sure there hasn't been yet.

Anyway, it looks to me like the Star and Meteor are now both *highly* profitable, while the LSL and the Crescent are *slightly* profitable (the Crescent is just this side of breakeven, less than a million a year by my calculations).

I wouldn't have to do all this calcuation if Amtrak would just release the direct cost numbers like they're supposed to (mandated by PRIIA 2008) but they haven't. I would really like it if they would because I do think I'm underestimating the profitability, and I think Amtrak could show some really good numbers.

I dunno, maybe Amtrak has some obscure political reason for not admitting that the Eastern trains are profitable. Maybe it's because the Transcons are still actually unprofitable on a direct costs basis? It is possible that publishing the numbers would cause a movement to leave the profitable trains alone and kill the CZ, SWC, and SL. On the other hand given the political situation I think it's worse to let Congress mistakenly believe that the LSL is unprofitable, when it's really profitable.

If you want to know the major cost drivers in the allocations, it is NOT stuff which is truly proportional like credit card fees; it's stuff like IT which isn't proportional at all, and the costs of operating the backshop, which is only *partly* proportional and is apparently simply not accounted for in enough detail to know which parts are avoidable (but most of them aren't; the workers are on staff regardless of how many train services are running). The last half-decent breakdown of these allocated costs was in the 2014 annual report IIRC.


----------



## neroden

Anderson said:


> Well, and remember that the LSL is also sharing tracks with multiple non-LD trains from NYP-BUF while the Silvers are sharing with other trains all the way down into NC. Of course, the Starlight shares with other trains for almost the entire distance from SAC-LAX and Eugene-Seattle...


If you do what I did and subtract out a reasonable underestimate of the allocations, you find that the Starlight is now the best-performing Superliner train. It might be tipping over into direct-cost profits in 2017 or 2018. This is not coincidental. Sharing tracks with those other trains is a big deal.
I should also note that the Crescent has overlap with the Lynchburg train and the Carolinian/Piedmont.

Honestly, when I sort the trains by estimated direct-cost profits/losses? With two exceptions, it looks like a list of how much overlap they have with other train services:

Auto Train

Silver Star

Silver Meteor

Palmetto

LSL

Crescent

Coast Starlight

Cardinal

Empire Builder

City of New Orleans

Capitol Limited

Texas Eagle

Southwest Chief

California Zephyr

Sunset Limited

The exceptions are, of course, Auto Train and Empire Builder (significantly better than you'd expect if you predicted by amount of overlap). You could also argue about the relative ordering of the Cardinal (slightly better than you'd expect) and the Texas Eagle (slightly worse than you'd expect), but you see my point.

This shouldn't be surprising, of course.


----------



## dlagrua

.. double post sorry


----------



## dlagrua

dlagrua said:


> CCC1007 said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> dlagrua said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> fairviewroad said:
> 
> 
> 
> I don't know what types of car pays for itself, but one of the arguments on this thread is that some business travelers would prefer to spend the night in a sleeping car and arrive at their destination city in the morning, rather than flying in the night before and spending $300 (or whatever) on a hotel. If you remove the sleeping car from the equation, the target market really becomes leisure travelers, who would be more price-sensitive.
> 
> 
> 
> The solution would be the slumber coach for the single level routes, that offered 24 one person private rooms (w toilet and sink)and eight double rooms for a capacity of 40 at a price just a bit more than coach. Those sleepers had more capacity than the Superliners of today. You will never see this type of car again because of the two steps up to the top row rooms and the lack of ADA accommodations. It was a great idea for travelers on a budget that wanted privacy and their own single bed. While roomettes are nice I wish that we had this low cost sleeper option again. It must have been popular with business people. The only one that I ever walked into was in the Illinois Railroad Museum.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> Check the math again, a superliner has five bedrooms, thirteen publicly available roomettes and the family and accessible bedrooms for a total capacity of 42.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> OK I am off by 2 but still a good point in the single vs double level comparison. Superliners need two levels to beat the capacity of the slumber coach by only 2.
> 
> 
> 
> WoodyinNYC said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> dlagrua said:
> 
> 
> 
> The solution would be the slumber coach for the single level routes, that offered 24 one person private rooms (w toilet and sink)and eight double rooms for a capacity of 40 at a price just a bit more than coach. ... You will never see this type of car again because of the two steps up to the top row rooms and the lack of ADA accommodations.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> Trying to picture this. You mean the one-person slumber rooms were stacked, in a lower row and a top row? So you couldn't stand up in them? Like sleeping inside an MRI scanning machine? Oy.
> 
> I'm thinking a single row of one-person slumber rooms, with sinks a la Viewliner IIs, toilets and showers down the hall, and stand-up-in ceiling heights.
> 
> Why wouldn't such slumber coaches meet ADA standards? Like, doors too narrow and not enuff space inside for a wheelchair? Then wouldn't, say, three or even two wider, accessible slumber rooms (in the space of four non-ADA slumber rooms), take care of ADA needs?
> 
> Guess that my idea is roomettes for single travelers, and wouldn't save enuff space to allow a good price cut from the regular roomettes.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> The slumber coach pictured in this thread ran on the lines with single level cars. The point being made is that they had almost the same capacity as the double level Superliners. We never rode or slept in a slumber coach (that was before we were riding trains) so cannot comment on the headroom but since the rooms were staggered high and low, I believe that headroom was adequate. Our visit to the Illinois railroad museum was the only opportunity we had to see one of these cars from the interior. I have picture somewhere and will try to post what the rooms looked like
> 
> As for single bed roomettes they took up about as much room as the double roomettes of today. You can see these in a You Tube video on a Santa Fe promotional film.
> 
> Its no secret that Amtrak makes more money on sleepers than they do in coach so more sleepers may be the road the to profitability that Congress so desperately wants. .
Click to expand...


----------



## Philly Amtrak Fan

neroden said:


> I dunno, maybe Amtrak has some obscure political reason for not admitting that the Eastern trains are profitable. Maybe it's because the Transcons are still actually unprofitable on a direct costs basis? It is possible that publishing the numbers would cause a movement to leave the profitable trains alone and kill the CZ, SWC, and SL. On the other hand given the political situation I think it's worse to let Congress mistakenly believe that the LSL is unprofitable, when it's really profitable.


In general trains that take approx. one day are in better financial shape than those that take approx. two days. That being said, I can't imagine Amtrak without the two Chicago-California trains and they have to travel through some areas in the middle of nowhere to get there. You're basically cutting California off from the rest of the US if you kill them (not to mention Denver and Salt Lake City if you kill the CZ and Albuquerque if you kill the SWC).

Those of us at AU know which trains are successful and which aren't but the government probably doesn't want us to know so they can just kill trains and say they weren't successful when they really were or they weren't but others were worse. They could easily say "who needs two trains to Florida, let's kill one of them" or "who needs two Chicago-New York trains, let's kill one of them" (good thing Byrd's not around anymore or Nate would be calling the Cardinal Byrd Crap too after the LSL gets killed in favor of it) while worse trains keep taking away our tax money.


----------



## Anderson

(1) The Auto Train effectively has 100% overlap in terms of tracks used. In terms of stations, I think it has the fewest unique stations of any LD train (two; the Meteor has 2-3 and the LSL has 2). So it's where I'd peg it at. The Builder is the biggest outlier in this respect (almost all stations are unique and it has a lot of them but it also has heavy traffic loads).

(2) IIRC the Meteor does better than the Star, not v-v, but that's at least partially a function of being able to run longer (4-5 coaches and 3 sleepers instead of 3 coaches and 2 sleepers).


----------



## brianpmcdonnell17

Anderson said:


> (1) The Auto Train effectively has 100% overlap in terms of tracks used. In terms of stations, I think it has the fewest unique stations of any LD train (two; the Meteor has 2-3 and the LSL has 2). So it's where I'd peg it at. The Builder is the biggest outlier in this respect (almost all stations are unique and it has a lot of them but it also has heavy traffic loads).
> 
> (2) IIRC the Meteor does better than the Star, not v-v, but that's at least partially a function of being able to run longer (4-5 coaches and 3 sleepers instead of 3 coaches and 2 sleepers).


The SM only has one unique station; Jesup, GA. The only way I could think you could get two is if you include Fredericksburg, VA because no other LDs stop there. However if you used that metric, the LSL would have far more than two in New York State alone. To add on, the only unique trackage for the SM is the east leg of the Auburndale wye; the SS passes by Jesup but does not stop under normal conditions.


----------



## brianpmcdonnell17

In a theoretical future Amfleet replacement program, I would really like to see slumbercoaches come back. If the prices were as low as everyone remembers them, it may make sense to only order replacements for Amfleet I and slumbercoaches and not for Amfleet II. For example, an LD train with 4 Amfleet II coaches at present could have 2 Amfleet Is and 2 slumbercoaches. Slumbercoach would be the default class for any overnight trip over x hours, and the actual coaches would have higher capacities for short distance riders during the day.


----------



## A Voice

brianpmcdonnell17 said:


> In a theoretical future Amfleet replacement program, I would really like to see slumbercoaches come back. If the prices were as low as everyone remembers them, it may make sense to only order replacements for Amfleet I and slumbercoaches and not for Amfleet II. For example, an LD train with 4 Amfleet II coaches at present could have 2 Amfleet Is and 2 slumbercoaches. Slumbercoach would be the default class for any overnight trip over x hours, and the actual coaches would have higher capacities for short distance riders during the day.


There's too much intermediate point (daytime) business; You need _more_ 'standard' coaches (not fewer) which are comfortable for longer journeys, as many passengers are going to be onboard nearly all day and perhaps just a portion of the overnight hours. More comfortable seating is one of the trains' selling points, and commuter style seating density is a bad idea. The Amfleet Ii cars are to be replaced first due to mileage, but regardless of what type(s) of future single-level cars are ordered, you'd still need the combined numbers - and arguably more - of Amfleet I and II.

A new economy sleeper is potentially however a very good idea, though an all-Roomette car might be the better (or just easier) choice. The old Slumbercoaches accommodated a theoretical 40 passengers. The modern Roomette car would similarly have around a 40 person capacity, depending on how ADA, attendant, and restroom/shower modules were configured.


----------



## railiner

If they ever built new Slumbercoaches, in a single level car, instead of the 24 Single, 8 Double configuration, they could build it with 24 Double's in the same space, yielding an incredible 48 berth's.

Or in a Superliner, they could replace the 5 deluxe bedrooms with 10 more roomettes, yielding 52-54 berth's...

The original duplex, staggered design of the Slumbercoach is good if you must have Single accommodation, but all double berth room design is even more efficient than the duplex design in utilizing the height of the car.


----------



## dlagrua

railiner said:


> If they ever built new Slumbercoaches, in a single level car, instead of the 24 Single, 8 Double configuration, they could build it with 24 Double's in the same space, yielding an incredible 48 berth's.
> 
> Or in a Superliner, they could replace the 5 deluxe bedrooms with 10 more roomettes, yielding 52-54 berth's...
> 
> The original duplex, staggered design of the Slumbercoach is good if you must have Single accommodation, but all double berth room design is even more efficient than the duplex design in utilizing the height of the car.


In the unlikely instance that Slumber Coaches are ever built again; I can't see any space to double the room size. The single rooms were staggered one high and one low and the bed space was accommodated by building a nook module that extended partly into the other room.

see this illustration:


----------



## Bob Dylan

And they had a toilet too! Rode many a mile in them on the Crescent before and after A Day, still the best deal ever on LD Trains!


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## Anthony V

I rode in a slumbercoach at the Illinois Railway Museum and even took a nap in it. While the room was small, It was still very comfortable when compared to airline seating. Legroom and headroom were plentiful. The bed was a bit cramped and narrow, but I still fit in it even at 5'8". If you're about my size or smaller, slumbercoaches should be no problem for you. Bigger people might have a problem with them however.


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## jphjaxfl

I traveled in Slumbercoaches many times on the CB&Q's Denver Zephyr, NP's Mainstreeter, SCL' s Miami to Northeast trains, New York Central Chicago to New York trains, Amtrak's Empire Builder and other Amtrak trains. They were very comfortable and priced right for my college and Air Force Budget. They were built by Budd so they were solidly built and didn't start running until the mid to late 1950s so they were as old as some of the Heritage Dining Cars that are still running. Unfortunately, they didn't have the retention toilets so I think they were retired prematurely.


----------



## brianpmcdonnell17

A Voice said:


> brianpmcdonnell17 said:
> 
> 
> 
> In a theoretical future Amfleet replacement program, I would really like to see slumbercoaches come back. If the prices were as low as everyone remembers them, it may make sense to only order replacements for Amfleet I and slumbercoaches and not for Amfleet II. For example, an LD train with 4 Amfleet II coaches at present could have 2 Amfleet Is and 2 slumbercoaches. Slumbercoach would be the default class for any overnight trip over x hours, and the actual coaches would have higher capacities for short distance riders during the day.
> 
> 
> 
> There's too much intermediate point (daytime) business; You need _more_ 'standard' coaches (not fewer) which are comfortable for longer journeys, as many passengers are going to be onboard nearly all day and perhaps just a portion of the overnight hours. More comfortable seating is one of the trains' selling points, and commuter style seating density is a bad idea. The Amfleet Ii cars are to be replaced first due to mileage, but regardless of what type(s) of future single-level cars are ordered, you'd still need the combined numbers - and arguably more - of Amfleet I and II.
> 
> A new economy sleeper is potentially however a very good idea, though an all-Roomette car might be the better (or just easier) choice. The old Slumbercoaches accommodated a theoretical 40 passengers. The modern Roomette car would similarly have around a 40 person capacity, depending on how ADA, attendant, and restroom/shower modules were configured.
Click to expand...

According the Wikipedia, Amfleet Is hold 72 compared to 60 in an Amfleet II. In a current single-level four coach train, the current capacity is 240 in the coaches. Under this arrangement, there would be 144 coach seats and 80 Slumbercoach seats for a total capacity of 224. This means most almost 2/3 of the seats would still be in coach. This would work well for trains like the SS with heavy short distance ridership, but trains like the SM and Crescent may actually need more room space. 
I would be in favor of a slight increase in overnight fares to help pay for a loss of capacity. Of course, in ideal cases the train would be lengthened so as to actually increase capacity. Also, rooms could be booked for daytime trips at business class level charges, but only once the room is booked for the overnight portion. For example, once someone books a room for MIA-RGH, it can then be sold as an upgrade from RGH-NYP. If days prior to the trip the coaches are not sold out, then can be sold to overnight passengers for a signifigant reduction in cost.

As to the comfort levels, I would be more than happy to give up space on a daytime trip so I could get a bed on an overnight trip. I have seen many passengers swear off Amtrak after overnight trips in coach on the Silvers, but never on daytime trips in Amfleet Is. It is not like Amfleet Is have no legroom; it is still more than almost all busses and planes. Honestly, many daytime passengers probably wouldn't even notice, but it would be a big difference for overnight passengers. Nobody seems to have a problem with Amfleet Is being used from CLT-NYP, so why wouldn't it work TPA-MIA or ATL-NOL?


----------



## dlagrua

jphjaxfl said:


> I traveled in Slumbercoaches many times on the CB&Q's Denver Zephyr, NP's Mainstreeter, SCL' s Miami to Northeast trains, New York Central Chicago to New York trains, Amtrak's Empire Builder and other Amtrak trains. They were very comfortable and priced right for my college and Air Force Budget. They were built by Budd so they were solidly built and didn't start running until the mid to late 1950s so they were as old as some of the Heritage Dining Cars that are still running. Unfortunately, they didn't have the retention toilets so I think they were retired prematurely.


Glad that you were able to experience traveling in a Slumbercoach . The whole idea was to offer a small private room, with toilet, sink mirror and bed. at a cost just slightly more than a coach fare. They were small one person rooms but very good for a single person, I would guess 3 1/2-4' wide and 5- 5 1/2' long with the nighttime sleeping tunnel for extra length. During the day you had a 2 foot wide mini sofa with ample legroom and at night you slept in a bed. If a modern Slumbercoach could be designed with fares just a bit higher than coach, I have to believe that these small sleeper rooms would be popular and a solid revenue generator for Amtrak today.


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## Philly Amtrak Fan

Were meals included in Slumbercoaches? If so, was it one person's meals or two people's meals? The extra cost for paying for two meals even though you are a single traveler makes it a poorer deal (would they let you offer two breakfasts, two lunches, and two dinners for a one night stay because technically you did pay for them?)


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## Bob Dylan

No meals included in Slumber Coach Fares ( that was an Amtrak idea for Sleepers)but the Food was still very good and not that expensive.(a la carte)

I usually had Breakfast on the way North rolling through Virginia and Dinner on the way South. ( Most of my Slumber Coach trips on the Crescent were between Washington and Greenville,SC or Atlanta.)


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## west point

A night train NYP <> Richmond <> CLT might be an interesting one for two major end points. Those points being NYP - WASH & Raleigh - CLT.


----------



## railiner

dlagrua said:


> railiner said:
> 
> 
> 
> If they ever built new Slumbercoaches, in a single level car, instead of the 24 Single, 8 Double configuration, they could build it with 24 Double's in the same space, yielding an incredible 48 berth's.
> 
> Or in a Superliner, they could replace the 5 deluxe bedrooms with 10 more roomettes, yielding 52-54 berth's...
> 
> The original duplex, staggered design of the Slumbercoach is good if you must have Single accommodation, but all double berth room design is even more efficient than the duplex design in utilizing the height of the car.
> 
> 
> 
> In the unlikely instance that Slumber Coaches are ever built again; I can't see any space to double the room size. The single rooms were staggered one high and one low and the bed space was accommodated by building a nook module that extended partly into the other room.
> 
> see this illustration:
Click to expand...

You could put two double rooms in about the space of three single rooms. Even with the staggered layout, the beds were not end to end on both levels (separated by the walls, of course), as they are in double slumber rooms (or Superliner Roomettes).

In way of illustration the single level cars had the capacity of 22 Roomettes, as some were configured. The double slumber rooms were slightly shorter in length, so you could get 24 of them into the same car, and they each had two berths, one on top of the other...24x2=48 total berths....


----------



## Philly Amtrak Fan

west point said:


> A night train NYP <> Richmond <> CLT might be an interesting one for two major end points. Those points being NYP - WASH & Raleigh - CLT.


Flip 79 (M-F)/80 12 hours...

South: NYP 7:25pm, PHL 8:54am-8:49pm (why is arrival time later than departure time?), WAS 10:45-11:10pm, Richmond 1:24-1:34am, Raleigh 5:08-5:16am, CLT 8:44am

North: CLT 7:00pm, Raleigh 10:17-10:25pm, Richmond 2:05-2:12am, WAS 4:29am, PHL 7:00am, NYP 8:35am (would have to be changed to get into New York after 9am)

If you pushed the southbound back one hour you'd get an arrival after 6am but a departure from WAS after midnight. Push it back 2 hours to arrive in Raleigh after 7am and then it leaves WAS after 1am. If you pushed the northbound back one hour you would leave Raleigh before midnight but arrive in WAS before 6am. If you push back 2 hrs you'd get into WAS after 6am but leave Raleigh after midnight. Richmond would get screwed no matter what. I would push the southbound back one hr (NYP 8:25pm to CLT 9:44am) and the northbound back 2 hrs (CLT 9:00pm to NYP 10:35pm). The southbound train leaves WAS after midnight (12:10am) and the northbound leaves Raleigh after midnight (12:25am) but both would arrive in the other direction after 6am. Southbound the train is 5 hr, 58 min while northbound is 6 hr, 4 min between Raleigh and DC. If you want to have before midnight and after 6am, you could add some time in between stops. But I like the schedule.

If you could extend in both directions to ATL you'd make it better for CLT and Greensboro to get to/from ATL and add Raleigh-ATL service which doesn't exist now. Of course that requires you to fix the Atlanta mess. I know having trains serviced/stored in ATL is impractical as well as a split there but could a second train just go through ATL like the Crescent does and if so could you send it to/from ATL and Florida? Maybe ATL and Texas?


----------



## A Voice

brianpmcdonnell17 said:


> A Voice said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> brianpmcdonnell17 said:
> 
> 
> 
> In a theoretical future Amfleet replacement program, I would really like to see slumbercoaches come back. If the prices were as low as everyone remembers them, it may make sense to only order replacements for Amfleet I and slumbercoaches and not for Amfleet II. For example, an LD train with 4 Amfleet II coaches at present could have 2 Amfleet Is and 2 slumbercoaches. Slumbercoach would be the default class for any overnight trip over x hours, and the actual coaches would have higher capacities for short distance riders during the day.
> 
> 
> 
> There's too much intermediate point (daytime) business; You need _more_ 'standard' coaches (not fewer) which are comfortable for longer journeys, as many passengers are going to be onboard nearly all day and perhaps just a portion of the overnight hours. More comfortable seating is one of the trains' selling points, and commuter style seating density is a bad idea. The Amfleet Ii cars are to be replaced first due to mileage, but regardless of what type(s) of future single-level cars are ordered, you'd still need the combined numbers - and arguably more - of Amfleet I and II.
> 
> A new economy sleeper is potentially however a very good idea, though an all-Roomette car might be the better (or just easier) choice. The old Slumbercoaches accommodated a theoretical 40 passengers. The modern Roomette car would similarly have around a 40 person capacity, depending on how ADA, attendant, and restroom/shower modules were configured.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> According the Wikipedia, Amfleet Is hold 72 compared to 60 in an Amfleet II. In a current single-level four coach train, the current capacity is 240 in the coaches. Under this arrangement, there would be 144 coach seats and 80 Slumbercoach seats for a total capacity of 224. This means most almost 2/3 of the seats would still be in coach. This would work well for trains like the SS with heavy short distance ridership, but trains like the SM and Crescent may actually need more room space.
> I would be in favor of a slight increase in overnight fares to help pay for a loss of capacity. Of course, in ideal cases the train would be lengthened so as to actually increase capacity. Also, rooms could be booked for daytime trips at business class level charges, but only once the room is booked for the overnight portion. For example, once someone books a room for MIA-RGH, it can then be sold as an upgrade from RGH-NYP. If days prior to the trip the coaches are not sold out, then can be sold to overnight passengers for a signifigant reduction in cost.
> 
> As to the comfort levels, I would be more than happy to give up space on a daytime trip so I could get a bed on an overnight trip. I have seen many passengers swear off Amtrak after overnight trips in coach on the Silvers, but never on daytime trips in Amfleet Is. It is not like Amfleet Is have no legroom; it is still more than almost all busses and planes. Honestly, many daytime passengers probably wouldn't even notice, but it would be a big difference for overnight passengers. Nobody seems to have a problem with Amfleet Is being used from CLT-NYP, so why wouldn't it work TPA-MIA or ATL-NOL?
Click to expand...

Rather than replacing coach seats with Slumbercoach rooms the emphasis needs to be on overall expanded train capacity; Passenger counts are already often artificially constrained by the 'standard' four coaches (236 seats) on eastern trains. The Slumbercoach should be thought of as a complement to the coaches and (existing) sleepers rather than a substitute; It is a great option to have on a train, but makes a impractical 'day' coach. Years ago, the _Silver Meteor_ ran with sleepers, Slumbercoach, and _eight_ coaches; The Florida leisure travel market has greatly _expanded_ since then.

I've seen an Amfleet coach with a 108-seat configuration (3-2 seating) but that doesn't mean its a workable concept, even for short haul passengers. 'We have more legroom than a plane' isn't really a strong selling point. When you aren't competing on either price or travel time, the accommodations make a big difference.



railiner said:


> dlagrua said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> railiner said:
> 
> 
> 
> If they ever built new Slumbercoaches, in a single level car, instead of the 24 Single, 8 Double configuration, they could build it with 24 Double's in the same space, yielding an incredible 48 berth's.
> 
> Or in a Superliner, they could replace the 5 deluxe bedrooms with 10 more roomettes, yielding 52-54 berth's...
> 
> The original duplex, staggered design of the Slumbercoach is good if you must have Single accommodation, but all double berth room design is even more efficient than the duplex design in utilizing the height of the car.
> 
> 
> 
> In the unlikely instance that Slumber Coaches are ever built again; I can't see any space to double the room size. The single rooms were staggered one high and one low and the bed space was accommodated by building a nook module that extended partly into the other room.
> 
> see this illustration:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> You could put two double rooms in about the space of three single rooms. Even with the staggered layout, the beds were not end to end on both levels (separated by the walls, of course), as they are in double slumber rooms (or Superliner Roomettes).
> 
> In way of illustration the single level cars had the capacity of 22 Roomettes, as some were configured. The double slumber rooms were slightly shorter in length, so you could get 24 of them into the same car, and they each had two berths, one on top of the other...24x2=48 total berths....
Click to expand...

You'd never get as many rooms in a modern car given ADA and other requirements, but even if you could, there are very good reasons not to pack passengers in like sardines. I would suggest that about forty persons in a single-level economy sleeper is a reasonable objective which can then maintain slightly larger and more comfortable rooms.


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## railiner

Curious as to where you saw an Amfleet car with 3 and 2 seating?


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## Anderson

I'd be interested to see some comparisons between a Slumbercoach design, a Spirit of Queensland-style lie-flat seat design, and a straight "all-roomette" design in terms of capacity and features. My best guess, FWIW, is this:
-Slumbercoaches: Theoretical capacity and practical capacity of 40 or just under that.

-All-roomette: Theoretical capacity of 38-42 (depending on the presence/absence of a shower, where the toilets are, and if you have an attendant's room in every car). Practical capacity of about 30-34 (some people occupying a single, some a double).

-Lie-flat seating, 2-1 configuration: Theoretical and practical capacity of around 32-35/car (depending on some questions of ADA space, bathroom requirements, etc.).

The all-roomette capacity is replicated, roughly, for an all-section car...but that won't fly in the US as far as most of us can tell.


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## jis

I also wonder how a 2-1 herringbone lie flat setup would work on an NJT/MARC style multilevel. Do you get somewhat higher capacity and somewhat more spacious common facilities. There can be an ADA seat set at the middle level at one end with an ADA restroom.


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## Anderson

jis said:


> I also wonder how a 2-1 herringbone lie flat setup would work on an NJT/MARC style multilevel. Do you get somewhat higher capacity and somewhat more spacious common facilities. There can be an ADA seat set at the middle level at one end with an ADA restroom.


If we go with the "ususal" increase in capacity of about 15% (which I think you mentioned at some point in the past), that'd be another six seats or so. Not sure if that transfers "properly" under the circumstances, and I might not be accounting for any improvements from a herringbone configuration. Bottom line, though, is that you should be able to get close to or over 40 seats.

In such a scenario, however, my thought would be that you'd assign a "standard" single-level car to handle the ADA seats (perhaps have two rows of 2-2 for the ADA requirements; four slots for ADA accessibility plus a few more that're relatively accessible (standard seats with no stairs) might allow you to flog a bit more out of the bilevels). In this specific context, 1-3 of those cars on a train would make a bit more sense than "usual".


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## Big Iron

Anderson said:


> I'd be interested to see some comparisons between a Slumbercoach design, a Spirit of Queensland-style lie-flat seat design, and a straight "all-roomette" design in terms of capacity and features. My best guess, FWIW, is this:
> 
> -Slumbercoaches: Theoretical capacity and practical capacity of 40 or just under that.
> 
> -All-roomette: Theoretical capacity of 38-42 (depending on the presence/absence of a shower, where the toilets are, and if you have an attendant's room in every car). Practical capacity of about 30-34 (some people occupying a single, some a double).
> 
> -Lie-flat seating, 2-1 configuration: Theoretical and practical capacity of around 32-35/car (depending on some questions of ADA space, bathroom requirements, etc.).
> 
> The all-roomette capacity is replicated, roughly, for an all-section car...but that won't fly in the US as far as most of us can tell.


Budd built 50 twenty one roomette cars, primarily for the PRR, the "Inn" series. Delivery started in 1949, by 1964 all were converted to coaches. Seems like the 38-42 capacity for an all roomette car may be on the high side.


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## ehbowen

Big Iron said:


> Budd built 50 twenty one roomette cars, primarily for the PRR, the "Inn" series. Delivery started in 1949, by 1964 all were converted to coaches. Seems like the 38-42 capacity for an all roomette car may be on the high side.


 I think it would depend on how the design specifications were written. The Budd cars were built with traditional roomettes which only accommodated one passenger. Recent Amtrak roomettes have been built for two passengers. The big question is how much space is set aside for the attendant, toilets, and showers.

ETA: And the inevitable call for ADA accommodations. If you're going to install one wheelchair-accessible bedroom (and you probably have to), it's not a bad idea to add another pair of revenue bedrooms. So the current Viewliner design really doesn't look so bad....


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## Anderson

ehbowen said:


> Big Iron said:
> 
> 
> 
> Budd built 50 twenty one roomette cars, primarily for the PRR, the "Inn" series. Delivery started in 1949, by 1964 all were converted to coaches. Seems like the 38-42 capacity for an all roomette car may be on the high side.
> 
> 
> 
> I think it would depend on how the design specifications were written. The Budd cars were built with traditional roomettes which only accommodated one passenger. Recent Amtrak roomettes have been built for two passengers. The big question is how much space is set aside for the attendant, toilets, and showers.
> 
> ETA: And the inevitable call for ADA accommodations. If you're going to install one wheelchair-accessible bedroom (and you probably have to), it's not a bad idea to add another pair of revenue bedrooms. So the current Viewliner design really doesn't look so bad....
Click to expand...

That's going to depend on some questions such as demand (with and without the roomette toilets) for bedrooms. I'd have to check the schematics, but presuming that the 21 included an attendant room as part of the roomette count, a 21-roomette car would have a capacity of 40 with in-room toilets and no shower or 38 with either no in-room toilets but with a shower or with in-room toilets but no shower. If you need separate toilets and shower rooms that gives you 36. If the 21 roomettes are in addition to the attendant, add two to each of the prior count.

The ADA space requirement has multiple workarounds (TBH as long as Amtrak is running 2-3 normal sleepers and is willing to "take a bath" on the Accessible Room rates, you could probably get away without the "full" ADA room), but depending on demand adding the two bedrooms might or might not make sense. I think that depends on the route, frankly: On the Florida trains a 10-bedroom car might well sell while on other routes a 20-1 car might make more sense. If you're pitching these as part of some sort of "discount" option that increases the chances of being able to make a 20-1 sell.

By the way, since jis raised it for lie-flat seats, now I'm wondering about a possible room count with a one-person roomette plan on an NJT-style car. I can already eyeball some specification changes, actually (having a single door set at one end of the car should stretch the bilevel space by a few feet and/or consolidate the single-level space to one end of the car...I can't find a set of drawings that are detailed/high-res enough quickly to really ferret out the spacing, but presuming that you lose 22 feet to stairs, the single-level portion, and that you place the toilets on the single-level portion you would have space for 9 roomettes on each side of each level...so that's about 36 single rooms at seven feet [1] allocated for each I _think_ this is on par with a Viewliner, but I could be wrong. Call it either 36-1 (36 roomettes, one ADA room) or 32-1 depending on how some of the math shakes out.

FWIW, in theory you could probably flog a little bit more space out if you were to run "married pairs" and have only the top level go through while the bottom level terminated. Removing the lost space for stairs at one end of the car (and the doors, etc.) might get you another two roomettes upstairs (downstairs isn't going through) but I'd have to mess around a little bit with where the wheels go and so on. 20 upstairs and 16 downstairs might be the best to hope for.

Edit: Ok, now I'm pondering this...if you took one of these cars, is there a viable room layout for a "bedroom type" space downstairs? Obviously you can't stack the bunks (the clearance isn't there) but I'm pondering couchette-style fold-out seats (the beds going sideways vis-a-vis the car's motion) with the bunks having a similar width to a roomette bunk instead of the bedroom lower (so, 2'4" each...on a 6'6" space that gives about 2' in between the bunks for the pax to enter/leave at night). That would potentially give you a set of 20-8-1 cars, which isn't too far off of the 11-2-1 we're about to have with the Viewliner IIs. [2]

[1] 6'6" for the roomette and 6" for the walls, etc. Would it be possible to shave 2-3" each off of that "wall space" presumption for a little more slack on wheel space/stairwell requirements?

[2] It also seems possible to configure the last room on the bottom a little bit differently for a few inches of space-saving, etc. by having the door at one end. I might move some stuff around and pitch it as a "premium room", stuffing any "saved space" in the design downstairs into it (but potentially selling it within the last week or two as a "regular" bedroom).


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## jis

I have some more details from when I looked at this, back home. Right now I am in Kolkata, India and get back mid next week.

The bottom line as I recall was that it is advantageous to go with MLV configuration only if you are using airline style lie flat seats. When you use railroad style seats and berths in general single level with high ceiling is advantageous. In the extreme if you go to a three tier six per compartment European Couchette style layout you can maximize the capacity. But of course in the US all that capacity may not be effectively usable. For the same reason, in the US a multi-level airline style lie flat style seating may be the most efficient effective capacity than double roomettes in a single level layout; because the second berth in a third or more of the roomettes would not get used.


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## Seaboard92

What about the odd duplex bedroom cars that DBAG used to use for the City Night Line. I want to say ÖBB has bought those. But that design.


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## ehbowen

Anderson said:


> The ADA space requirement has multiple workarounds (TBH as long as Amtrak is running 2-3 normal sleepers and is willing to "take a bath" on the Accessible Room rates, you could probably get away without the "full" ADA room), but depending on demand adding the two bedrooms might or might not make sense. I think that depends on the route, frankly: On the Florida trains a 10-bedroom car might well sell while on other routes a 20-1 car might make more sense. If you're pitching these as part of some sort of "discount" option that increases the chances of being able to make a 20-1 sell.


To my understanding, the Viewliners were designed for interchangeable room modules. So, if you had enough of the right kind of modules, you could convert an existing Viewliner to an all-Bedroom car for the Florida trade or configure others in an all-Roomette layout. _If_ you had enough of the right kind of modules...and enough extra car shells to play with.

If I were appointed Amtrak czar and had enough funding to make a difference, one of the first things I would do would be to change the car building policy completely. I'm sick and tired of Amtrak placing One Big Order, putting all its eggs in that one basket, dealing with companies who have no recent experience building long-distance passenger cars, fussing at the inevitable delays and cost overruns...and then, once the assembly line finally gets clicking and the builder starts to "get it", declaring the order complete and then ordering _nada_ for another 20 years until another equipment shortage throws everyone into crisis mode yet again. Instead, I would issue orders for ten to twenty car bodies per year, every year, on an ongoing basis...a mix of Superliners and Viewliners. Keep the production lines hot, the skilled workers employed, and the companies and suppliers familiar with and ready to handle the unusual needs that long-distance passenger cars demand. And, incidentally, build up that inventory of Viewliner shells and modules....


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## Anderson

jis said:


> I have some more details from when I looked at this, back home. Right now I am in Kolkata, India and get back mid next week.
> 
> The bottom line as I recall was that it is advantageous to go with MLV configuration only if you are using airline style lie flat seats. When you use railroad style seats and berths in general single level with high ceiling is advantageous. In the extreme if you go to a three tier six per compartment European Couchette style layout you can maximize the capacity. But of course in the US all that capacity may not be effectively usable. For the same reason, in the US a multi-level airline style lie flat style seating may be the most efficient effective capacity than double roomettes in a single level layout; because the second berth in a third or more of the roomettes would not get used.


That's fair and I could see that. To be fair, I'm explicitly looking at _not_ putting two people in the roomettes (and a different layout in the bedrooms) but rather going back to the Budd single-occupancy roomettes with some variation (probably having the seat slide out rather than fold out, for example, to avoid a height/length crunch). I agree that couchettes probably wouldn't sell well in the US (if we can't make berths fly, even with potentially doing something like "pairing" uppers and lowers on a single-gender or single-reservation basis, couchettes are probably hopeless) though but for legal concerns I wish an attempt could be made to try them.

The key with what I was looking at is that you'd have, give or take, 16-20 roomettes upstairs...but you'd be selling them as 16-20 singles and so you'd actually get a practical capacity of the whole sum (rather than losing about 1/4 to 1/3 to singles in a double room). Add in the downstairs, either as bedrooms or roomettes and you end up with a car with a practical capacity of 35-37 versus a Viewliner II's 22.5.

What's worth asking is how a private room variant of the car with a _de facto_ 1-1 seating arrangement would compare with a lie-flat car with a mostly 2-1 arrangement. Some of that will be down to the mechanics of the seats, among other things, but I also wonder how much folks are prepared to pay for the presence of a door and the ability to turn off their lights (the latter complaint was probably the biggest issue with the Spirit of Queensland's service).

For the record, I'd also be tempted to look at whether some more capacity could be "shaken out" of a different room arrangement (e.g. running the hallway down one side of the car and arranging roomette beds the same as bedroom beds): Keeping the dimensions close to the same you could probably get close to 20 roomettes upstairs (3'6" wide roomettes would give you 20 in 70' plus the walls; if you go with the bedroom depth, you'd actually be able to add some net storage space at one end or something similar, and you might be able to shave a few inches off the width at the same time to dispose of the "wall problem"). Seat design becomes the real question (e.g. Is a 3' by 7'6" compartment a sellable proposition if you offer a 3' wide bed? It would beat the dimensions of most lie-flats out there in both dimensions but you'd have trouble looking out the window unless you did something funky with folding the bed down [1])...and you might be able to jam upstairs capacity up a bit more.

Downstairs/with a bedroom, it's time for a fun-but-serious question: Would two fold-out beds from the size that form a queen bed (60"x80" would compare favorably with the 78"x90" dimensions of an existing bedroom...18"/bedroom is a _ton_ of space in context) sell better or worse than two bunks? Presuming that you kept a wash-stand but chucked the separate shower and presuming that the 78" dimension is from the window to the door, knocking 18" off a room is a _lot_ (it's the difference between 10 bedrooms and 12 bedrooms in a dedicated single-level car at the price of moving a toilet opposite the attendant's room); even bumping off 12" (allowing for a wider bed and perhaps some sort of divider at pax request) would still give you an extra room and some extra space to work with.

[1] I can see some ideas here: If the bed folds from one side of the length-wise compartment you'd still have a 27" seat, room for overhead luggage storage, and possibly a place to hang a coat by the door.


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## railiner

The Pullman Company tried many different car plans thru the years...one of the types they tried was a car containing some "Duplex Single Rooms", which in their heirarchy, were between Roomettes and Double Bedrooms.

They were crosswise oriented beds, and staggered alternatively, floor level, or up a couple of steps, in the manner of Duplex Roomettes, or Single Slumbercoach Rooms.


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## WoodyinNYC

ehbowen said:


> ... the Viewliners were designed for interchangeable room modules. So, if you had enough of the right kind of modules, you could convert an existing Viewliner to an all-Bedroom car for the Florida trade or configure others in an all-Roomette layout. _If_ you had enough of the right kind of modules...and enough extra car shells to play with.
> 
> If I were appointed Amtrak czar and had enough funding, one of the first things I'd do would be to change the car building policy completely. I'm sick and tired of Amtrak placing One Big Order, putting all its eggs in that one basket, dealing with companies who have no recent experience building long-distance passenger cars, fussing at the inevitable delays and cost overruns...and then, once the assembly line finally gets clicking and the builder starts to "get it", declaring the order complete and then ordering _nada_ for another 20 years until another equipment shortage throws everyone into crisis mode yet again. Instead, I would issue orders for ten to twenty car bodies per year, every year, on an ongoing basis...a mix of Superliners and Viewliners. Keep the production lines hot, the skilled workers employed, and the companies and suppliers familiar with and ready to handle the unusual needs that long-distance passenger cars demand. And, incidentally, build up that inventory of Viewliner shells and modules....


In one of its fleet plans, Amtrak went on and on about this question, noting that the on-again-off-off-off-again practice had wiped out the domestic supplier base.

The fleet plan said the company had talked to several likely bidders, who told them than an order needed to be about 100 units a year to gain the better prices from economies of scale. The fleet plan went on with Amtrak planning to order 100 single-level cars for iirc 6 or 7 years, and starting a year later, 100 bi-level cars for 6 years or so. The orders were going to be strictly 1:1 replacements, no expansion included.

Larger orders -- to include equipment needed for future extension of service -- would run for more years, keeping the lines open for possible still further orders from Amtrak, or from some states. A sweet possibility is that VIA could add its own forthcoming order for new single-level trains, stretching that run by another year, or two.

I don't think changing Viewliner modules would be all so cheap. The sleepers would need to add plumbing to the modules for the wash basins, and the toilets and shower rooms. Anyway, the least costly to modify would be bag cars and bag-dorms.

Sadly, the CAF Viewliner order is shaping up as the perfect example of your complaint. It's on, but will soon be off again. From the order for 130 cars, Amtrak got 70 baggage cars, and now we wait for the 60 other cars. Of course, originally Amtrak wanted 200 cars, not 130, but had to cut back without enuff funding from Congress.

In a normal world, with 70 cars in hand, and 60 in the bush, Congress might put in a few more pennies now to order more sleepers, more bag-dorms, and more baggage cars.

More sleepers should make more money, later if not sooner. Looks from here like Amtrak has just barely enuff baggage cars, even with adding modules to them. More bag-dorms would give more flexibility when adding or adjusting capacity. And it could happen that Congress won't want to have two big orders, one for bi-level coaches and one for single-levels. In that case, Amtrak could switch the _Capitol Limited_, and perhaps the _City of New Orleans]/i], to single-level cars and use the freed-up Superliner equipment to fill out Western trains with another coach and sleeper where demand warrants it (like every train that has a lot of sold-out runs, like most of them)._

_ _

_But Amtrak is being strangled by its on-going capacity crunch. So any serious expansion -- the Broadway Ltd, the fabled 'day train' to Atlanta, or simply taking the 3/7 trains to daily 7/7 service -- seems out of the question. That may be just what too many in Congress want to see._


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## railiner

It's too bad that Amtrak,and the continent's commuter railroads couldn't share a basic single (or dual) level car body, and outfit them to order, to achieve that "economy of scale". Something like the Horizon car body, perhaps with a little more height, could probably work...


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## ehbowen

WoodyinNYC said:


> In one of its fleet plans, Amtrak went on and on about this question, noting that the on-again-off-off-off-again practice had wiped out the domestic supplier base.
> 
> The fleet plan said the company had talked to several likely bidders, who told them than an order needed to be about 100 units a year to gain the better prices from economies of scale. The fleet plan went on with Amtrak planning to order 100 single-level cars for iirc 6 or 7 years, and starting a year later, 100 bi-level cars for 6 years or so. The orders were going to be strictly 1:1 replacements, no expansion included.
> 
> ...
> 
> In a normal world, with 70 cars in hand, and 60 in the bush, Congress might put in a few more pennies now to order more sleepers, more bag-dorms, and more baggage cars.



I agree that economies of scale are desirable, and in a perfect world there would be enough orders from enough customers (more than just Amtrak) to achieve them. In the current environment I'd rather spend, say, 20% more per unit on my fifteen a year to get reliable equipment delivered on time by an experienced supplier with skilled employees than the current Viewliner charlie-foxtrot. But, as you correctly point out, as long as Amtrak's equipment budget is wholly dependent upon Congressional largesse, that may be difficult to achieve [my scenario did specify that I was 'Amtrak czar', with the sufficient funding to make a difference]. We may have to go back to the days of Lyndon Johnson spreading Apollo program patronage around all 50 states....


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## Anderson

ehbowen said:


> WoodyinNYC said:
> 
> 
> 
> In one of its fleet plans, Amtrak went on and on about this question, noting that the on-again-off-off-off-again practice had wiped out the domestic supplier base.
> 
> The fleet plan said the company had talked to several likely bidders, who told them than an order needed to be about 100 units a year to gain the better prices from economies of scale. The fleet plan went on with Amtrak planning to order 100 single-level cars for iirc 6 or 7 years, and starting a year later, 100 bi-level cars for 6 years or so. The orders were going to be strictly 1:1 replacements, no expansion included.
> 
> ...
> 
> In a normal world, with 70 cars in hand, and 60 in the bush, Congress might put in a few more pennies now to order more sleepers, more bag-dorms, and more baggage cars.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I agree that economies of scale are desirable, and in a perfect world there would be enough orders from enough customers (more than just Amtrak) to achieve them. In the current environment I'd rather spend, say, 20% more per unit on my fifteen a year to get reliable equipment delivered on time by an experienced supplier with skilled employees than the current Viewliner charlie-foxtrot. But, as you correctly point out, as long as Amtrak's equipment budget is wholly dependent upon Congressional largesse, that may be difficult to achieve [my scenario did specify that I was 'Amtrak czar', with the sufficient funding to make a difference]. We may have to go back to the days of Lyndon Johnson spreading Apollo program patronage around all 50 states....
Click to expand...

I don't think the CAF order (or the N-S order) would do much for Congress at this point. Both have been rather humiliating messes: CAF is running on seven years with only a batch of baggage cars (and a single diner) delivered while the N-S order failed crash testing (if only by a hair, per some rumors).

Additionally, my understanding is _not_ that Amtrak intended to/planned to/wanted to buy 200 cars: They had options on another 70 (IIRC it was 35 more bags and 15 more each of diners, bag-dorms, and sleepers). However while I could speculate on the utility of more sleepers and bag-dorms, I don't think anyone here could think of a use for more than a small number of those diners (let alone 35 baggage cars). I think it was jis who noted that the option was a planning tool that _might_ get used to shake a few spare cars out if we got lucky; as it was, it was used to switch some bags and bag-dorms within the order as things dragged on (I suspect to finish replacing some of the Heritage bags sooner seeing as I don't think there's a bag-dorm in sight).

Moreover I would argue that CAF is to blame for that option being unusable: IIRC the option expired _years_ ago (it had already expired when I approached VHSR about talking to the VA DRPT about exercising some slots on it) and CAF hasn't even delivered a single sleeper. If they had been able to churn out the sleepers first there's a chance that Amtrak could have "counted beans" and gotten an RRIF loan to thrown a few sleepers or bag-dorms on the back end (while the baggage cars were coming down the pike) but as it stands that's not likely.

Hindsight being 20/20, the Alstom-Bombardier bid was probably the smarter option...but my understanding is that _their_ bid was simply too expensive by comparison for Amtrak to justify. If more money were to come available, I'd be _mighty_ inclined to go with Siemens at this point (seeing as a Siemens-based order from AAF has gone from conception to delivery and, knock on wood, start of service entirely within the timeframe it's taken CAF to deliver a single sleeper).

Edit: To be clear, Amtrak's latest fleet strategy plans have all presumed something of a boom-bust scenario in this respect. Part of the problem, IMHO, is the "split fleet" situation: Amtrak basically has three fleets (Superliner/MSBL, Amfleet/LDSL, and Acela). The Acela split is somewhat unavoidable due to the nature of that stuff (orders for that will always be in batches, and the new federal standards don't require Amtrak to reinvent the wheel on new equipment there) but the single-level/bilevel split is a very real problem for a _bunch_ of reasons (not least being that a new railcar either "belongs" to the extended NEC/NYP-based portion of the network or it doesn't, but also because Amtrak can't just keep pumping out orders for cars in single body types with different, particularly modular, interiors).


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