Oh well. I can't see where any more than 25% or so goes towards infrastructure. I just don't see that even spending $66B on Amtrak is going to improve the experience enough to build back ridership.
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$66 billion for Amtrak
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Biden will have a public signing ceremony in the next few days. Such bills usually involve media coverage and a crowd for pictures. I imagine the other half of the infrastructure bill will soon follow at least that is what I read. Maybe it was Tuesday's elections maybe not but I think everyone is ready to move on from that drama. As far as the Amtrak dollars go, of course capital projects will take time new / expanded routes will be years down the road but the important thing is that much will be in the pipeline. The government generally does not claw back money so even if there is a change of administration in 2025 plans will be in place and be moving with this money. On the short term side I expect this will allow Amtrak to invest in operational upgrades both in hard and soft product. Seeing as they will not have to budget current revenues to cover future capital improvements they can allocate some of the internal money for refinement. I would imagine dining service will return quicker now as well as potential other amenities and various other convenience improvements. I expect to see a faster turnaround of refurbishing old equipment in addition to new orders for new equipment for replacement and future service. We saw this on the municipal level with the various Covid related bills over the last 18 months. New money was earmarked to certain categories but in effect what that did was free up money for other things as a domino effect.
Ziv
Conductor
I am not sure if it is possible, but given the delivery timeline that new build cars would have, I almost wish that Amtrak would add another 20 or 30 sleepers and 10 or 15 additional coaches to the contract with CAF. The new VLII's have had a few problems and delivery has been slower than molasses, but they are actually getting delivered this year, not sometime in the late 2020's. Maybe.
Amtrak is going to be coming into a decent amount of money. The one thing that would make an immediate impact (i.e. around mid-2022) would be getting more sleepers on existing trains, thereby driving up supply and hopefully allowing for low bucket prices a bit more often. New tunnels, tracks and stations (and new design railcars) would take years for just the planning, let alone for these improvements to actually arrive.
Amtrak is going to be coming into a decent amount of money. The one thing that would make an immediate impact (i.e. around mid-2022) would be getting more sleepers on existing trains, thereby driving up supply and hopefully allowing for low bucket prices a bit more often. New tunnels, tracks and stations (and new design railcars) would take years for just the planning, let alone for these improvements to actually arrive.
jis
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This bill is good for a few reasons, chief of which is that it ensures Amtrak’s survival for the next decade or two.
I do concede it’s possible that 66B might not bring about gargantuan improvements, but it does help with new equipment, fixing some basic but crucial infrastructure problems, and keeping daily service a thing. All of these points build towards keeping Amtrak relevant and running, which is important!
So yes, this bill is important, and far more important than you give it credit for.
Dakota 400
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Agree, that my Representative ought to have some explaining to do with others in his District who have worked for many years to get Amtrak service re-started since this Bill has the best possibility of getting that service begun.
Today in my local newspaper, I read that Representative Young, who has served 25 terms in the House of Representatives, along with 4 of his Republican colleagues, said that they voted for the Bill because infrastructure Bills have traditionally been supported by Republicans as well as by Democrats.
Ziv
Conductor
But it's not just Amtrak. There is something for everybody in the bill which is by design. I am sure there will be plenty of road and bridge projects in your district he'll be happy to tout when the time comes, while trying to explain why he voted against it.
CNN says $66B is for freight and passenger rail combined.
AmHope
Train Attendant
Think they'll bring back a full dining experience with that much money?
We are not too large for long-distance passenger rail in view of the size of China, Brazil, India, Europe.
They are already planning to do that - once they get the staff they need ready (hired/trained).
Hold on, is anyone expecting Biden to go for another term and be re-elected? He's going to be 81 years old and is already the oldest person to assume the presidency.
Well, maybe not full dining, but some form of traditional dining has been intended to come back to all routes for quite some time now. This infrastructure bill will definitely do some good, just probably not as much as we'd like.
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Biden himself might not run again but I was thinking of a party change to an administration that might not be Amtrak friendly. The hope is that whomever is President on January 20, 2025 there are enough Congresspeople from both parties to sustain the investments. Amtrak has always had to fight for funding. Congress always seems to be more willing to throw money at the airlines even though they are an endless pit as anything else is.
Who knows what's gonna happen, let's just hope that Amtrak does well over the next four years with this new funding and recovering from the pandemic.
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I would say more than decent like a level unthinkable in years past. I truly could be transformative.
At this point I think the bigger question is from a capital expenditure basis can CAF actually build cars at a reasonable speed to accommodate such an expansion of service ? Or would Amtrak have to open a second bid with another company just to achieve volume. Then you have to deal with the freight lines.
The identity of the President, or even the party of the President, is not as important (or at least critical) as some people think. Look at the Previous Guy, he sucked up to the ideas of the Heritage Foundation/Cato Institute types and proposed zeroing out Amtrak. That didn't happen, even when Congress was controlled by his own party.
There will, of course, be some difference between parties, as one of them seems to think that spending on passenger rail is a lower national priority, but even that party is not totally opposed to spending money on passenger rail. In many ways, it's more important who controls Congress. The President's main power is that he or she can start expensive, unwinnable wars that go on forever, and suck up so much money that it's harder to spend it on stuff like passenger rail.
I heard the President of Amtrak I think it was today saying how most of the money would go the Eastern states for upgrades. I don't know about others here, but I am a bit tired of paying taxes for rail and then having most of it continually go to the eastern lines. One thing I see mentioned here is about the diners. Even though I don't go east all that much I think all overnight trains and maybe some medium distance ones should offer the same quality of food as the western ones now do. What ever happened to the 50 new diners they hardly used at all? The money should be used equally among all areas of the nation, we ride trains too, even if there aren't many choices of how or where to go.
CCC1007
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CAF is likely to never see another penny from Amtrak, especially since the order for 130 cars has taken 9 years to get to this level of completion.
It is much more likely that Siemens will be receiving another order for LD cars, after negotiations are complete for the Amfleet 1 Replacement program.
In my mind, this order should (Ideally) be for a 1:1.5 seat for seat replacement of the Superliners, Amfleet 2's, and augmentation of the Viewliner fleet. This would allow nearly every train in the country to be almost the same type of equipment. Granted, this particular order would be around 1000 cars, (Coaches, Lounges, Diners, Sleepers, Dorms), costs somewhere around $4-5B for the base order, and the service contract would be somewhere in the $2-4B range.
As has been mentioned many times, they currently do not have the staffing for all the diners due to COVID-19, directly or indirectly. And before that there was the F&B requirement to break even.
They have stated that dining will improve on the eastern trains.
Best story I have seen yet with most detail on how the infrastructure bill impacts Amtrak, from the Washington Post.
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I understand you and largely agree with your point at least in terms of cutting off Amtrak completely. A lot like the argument that used to happen about privatizing SS it was happy talk for some but we all know that will never happen (any time soon). With that being said, government programs always fight for money but there is a difference from being aspirational and feeling the knife slide across your back on a regular basis. It seems like today's political climate is one of just trying to reverse what the previous guy(s) did just out of spite. That might be certainly true for a few controversial things but I would hate to find out that "wasteful" Amtrak spending becomes a campaign issue at any level. The stuff in the "hard" bill that just passed is almost completely non-controversial and historically would have passed by wide margins regardless of which party controlled the WH/Congress. Maybe some programs would have been tweaked, funding levels adjusted, differing priorities but its not inconceivable that this could have passed 2 years ago. I am sure the Previous Guy would have wasted no time taking advantage of the PR values...
One thing I am hopefully of, as being a fairly younger person yet at 41, the younger folks are more in tune with mixed travel arrangements. Mass transit, Uber, ride share, walking, bicycling, light rail (in my city Charlotte), and that could be extended to heavy rail if it is marketed right. (And you can still do it without eliminating traditional dining no reason to cut off your nose to spite your face).
They need to figure a way to get more hub cities so that every where you need to go doesn't means going mostly to Chicago which could be a day or more from you and then reversing on one of the few other western trains if you are lucky enough to be going to one of those cities on the line. And worse paying rail or room charges to go way out of your way to boot. People in say, KC shouldn't have to go overnight to Chicago in order to go to Minnesota or farther west.
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I hear you and do not disagree that there is a natural tendency to just throw money at the East especially the NEC almost by inertia. With that said, there are some legitimate business arguments for why that is happening the least of which is that the ROI for every $1 is high and IIRC the NEC is largely profitable. Getting Acela right is bookoo bucks like how the basketball team at UNC (my alma mater) funds a large part of the athletic department and pays for dozens of teams of more obscure sports that really have no hope of breaking even. With that being said, I am not sure about the diners there might issues with staffing/service where logistics are an overriding factor. While the $66B bill does not address amenities per se, with all that infusion of hard money I fully expect a byproduct of that bill will be all the Amtrak soft product upgrades, including dining, will accelerate now because they can afford to divert internal funds to it and replace capital funds with these new funds. I would be curious for someone to opine what the hold up is to Western services, lower demand? track availability? lack of buy in from the states? Part of the problem that I could see, at first blush, is LD western trains are likely not used for anything but leisure outside of the Pacific coastline areas. Large metro areas out west are few and far between and its hard to justify the time. LV to LA I can see. PHX to Tuscon of course, a lot of intraTexas but the airlines have traditional had good cheap service (aka why Southwest exists) between DAL HOU SAN ELP AUS etc.
