Southwest Chief News & Future Operations

[ohle]

Long-distance ridership IS up, and is at its highest levels ever.

Am not referencing a single year, but the recent years where, of course, ridership varies, as do sales of any business.

Of course, the nit-pickers will continue to nag about this.

 

[cpotisch]

Long-distance ridership IS up, and is at its highest levels ever.

Am not referencing a single year, but the recent years where, of course, ridership varies, as do sales of any business.

Of course, the nit-pickers will continue to nag about this.

Dude, you can't get pissed and claim that people are nit-picking, just because they're pointing out flaws in your logic as well as contradictions in your claims and the statistics you're linking to. That's on you.

 

[railbuck]

The words "increasing and at record levels" in combination with a graph showing 2011-2017 imply that 2017 is the record level, which it obviously is not. If the intent is to say is that 2011-2017 taken as a whole are record levels, a graph showing long distance ridership for a longer period (maybe even back to 1971) would be an appropriate way to support that claim.

For example:



Source: http://www.realtransit.org/nec8.php

 

[JRR]

It is being reported that NMRX has received funds from Uncle Sam to get PTC up and running, so this would be good news for Amtrak's operation in New Mexico. It would not surprise me to hear that Mr. Anderson is very annoyed with this turn of events.

True.This crummy CEO's idea of "improved service" is to replace vital and successful long-distance trains with BUS ROUTES.

Turns out, substituting buses for the trains will ... eh... be more expensive than running the train.

Bus travel is also far more dangerous, compared to trains.

Every week, 167 people die on the roadways. Passenger trains? Maybe 10 a year.

Who figured.

Guess it took a genius CEO who only knows how to cut, cut, cut to know that.

Ohle,
167 people EVERY WEEK? Actually, the highway news is even worse than that. According to one web site I just looked at, 40,200 people lost their lives in traffic accidents last year. That comes out to 110 people EVERY DAY ! Or, over four people every hour. To me, those numbers are unacceptable. If it were a war, terrorism or school shootings, the whole entire country would be in a state of uncontrollable outrage. But traffic deaths? Oh well? So what? I guess nobody has any idea what to do about it so we just try not to think about it and the news media ignores it. So, I agree, Anderson's safety concerns where their is no PTC are overdone. (See Ross Capon's take on this earlier in this thread).

Regards,

FMC

Actually, the numbers have, believe or not, improved. The year I was in Vietnam on an all expenses paid tour courtesy of the US Govt, more people died on the highways in the US than were killed in the entire Vietnam war.

 

[Palmetto]

Anyone got popcorn?

 

[jis]

The words "increasing and at record levels" in combination with a graph showing 2011-2017 imply that 2017 is the record level, which it obviously is not. If the intent is to say is that 2011-2017 taken as a whole are record levels, a graph showing long distance ridership for a longer period (maybe even back to 1971) would be an appropriate way to support that claim.

For example:

nec20.png

Source: http://www.realtransit.org/nec8.php

There is a good news/bad news story in that graph, which BTW is very well presented, as is the rest of the article from which it is excerpted.
First the good news - Amtrak total ridership has grown some 45% over that period, over which US population has grown only 23%. So overall Amtrak is ahead of the curve in that it is attracting a higher growth rate in ridership than population. So people are indeed riding more.

The bad news is that LD ridership has not kept pace with population growth. There may be many explanation for this phenomenon but for whatever of the multitude of reasons LD ridership is falling way behind population growth. Unfortunately this does play into the narrative that Anderson and Co are apparently trying to peddle regarding the non-viability of LD trains over the long haul. Note that I personally don't agree with the conclusion that they are trying to draw from the narrative, but we have to rationally address the one core fact on which that narrative stands.

Given this data, if one reaches the conclusion that Amtrak should concentrate on growing short and medium distance service while demphasizing the long distance sector, at least the conclusion is not entirely capricious. The reason for keeping the LD sector going is because it is part of the mission to run a "National System", or justify it by observing that it provides a series of overlapping mid-distance segments and acts as a significant feeder into the growth sectors, Wish there was some concrete data available on the feeder aspect of the LD sector.

Of course depending on the "National Network" phrase is fraught in and of itself , what with all the ambiguity that goes with the definition of that phrase. Congress has also carefully inserted the notion of "Intercity System" in its regulatory vocabulary of late, as if it may be OK to run an "Intercity System" rather than a "National System", which in and of itself is a disturbing development.

 

[Paul CHI]

I wonder whether the lack of growth in the LD segment may have to do with the communities served. U.S. population growth is, I think, found primarily in urban areas. Airlines are able to re-organize their routes to serve where population is growing, but the LD trains are pretty much locked into their existing routes. Note that a big component of growth is in the "short distance" category,, which I suspect is routes established within states to meet urban growth.

I suspect that if one made a list of areas with robust urban growth, we would find that Amtrak LD does not serve many of them. e.g. when I lived in Des Moines, I was somewhat nonplussed to discover that if I wanted to take the train to Denver, I would have to drive to Osceola. Look at North Dakota, where Bismarck is nowhere near the Empire Builder.

 

[ohle]

I wonder whether the lack of growth in the LD segment may have to do with the communities served. U.S. population growth is, I think, found primarily in urban areas. Airlines are able to re-organize their routes to serve where population is growing, but the LD trains are pretty much locked into their existing routes. Note that a big component of growth is in the "short distance" category,, which I suspect is routes established within states to meet urban growth.

I suspect that if one made a list of areas with robust urban growth, we would find that Amtrak LD does not serve many of them. e.g. when I lived in Des Moines, I was somewhat nonplussed to discover that if I wanted to take the train to Denver, I would have to drive to Osceola. Look at North Dakota, where Bismarck is nowhere near the Empire Builder.

Amtrak serves about 85 percent of the U.S. metropolitan areas.

The reason there's no service to Des Moines, or why most cities, ala Atlanta, Denver and Minneapolis, only have one train a day (in only one direction), is due to policy decisions.

Policymakers simply don't want Amtrak to succeed.

Of course, people travel in Atlanta to Florida, Texas and Chicago.

But they can't via Amtrak.

There is no rational reason one can't travel from FL to New Orleans and Texas (and California) via train.

It's entirely political.

America's passenger rail service should roughly parallel the taxpayer-subsidized Interstate highway system, with more frequencies.

Make no mistake about it, the decision to keep Amtrak small, and serve only limited markets, is deliberate.

Give it "just enough money to fail" is what congressional leaders have long done.

 

[railiner]

It seems that the only "national network" busline (Greyhound) has been following this model for the last couple of decades, eliminating one by one, many of its long routes with each new timetable, and instead, concentrating on serving busy hubs or corridor's wherever they prove lucrative. Their chairman stated they were going to do this back then, and they are doing it...

 

[ainamkartma]

That is a weird line of reasoning. What does an almost flat over ten years Amtrak ridership statistic have to do with a discussion of fatality rates - which is essentially the point being raised by keelhauled? I think a more cogent argument could probably be made in terms of fatalities per million passenger-km or some such reasonable derived metric that addresses keelhauled's concern. This argument certainly does not do so.

Also how is 4,698.5 thousand a record level when in 2012 and 2013 the numbers were over 4.7 million?

From some of the comments it is distressingly obvious that some cannot read a simple bar chart

This is something that should be applauded, how Amtrak (albeit slowly) has helped reverse the trend in declining train travel which began after World War II and continued through the 1980s.

Modern US train travel is totally dominated, both in terms of ridership and passenger-miles, by commuter rail. For example, New York's Metro North alone has over twenty times as many annual boardings as Amtrak.

It may well be true that Amtrak has "helped reverse the trend...", but that help has been a drop in the bucket compared to new, rebuilt, and revitalized commuter rail in the US.

Ainamkartma

 

[fredmcain]

I wonder whether the lack of growth in the LD segment may have to do with the communities served. U.S. population growth is, I think, found primarily in urban areas. Airlines are able to re-organize their routes to serve where population is growing, but the LD trains are pretty much locked into their existing routes. Note that a big component of growth is in the "short distance" category,, which I suspect is routes established within states to meet urban growth.

I suspect that if one made a list of areas with robust urban growth, we would find that Amtrak LD does not serve many of them. e.g. when I lived in Des Moines, I was somewhat nonplussed to discover that if I wanted to take the train to Denver, I would have to drive to Osceola. Look at North Dakota, where Bismarck is nowhere near the Empire Builder.

Doesn't equipment have something to do with poor L.D. growth too? Without citing any statistics, I believe from my own train riding experience that many LD trains are already at capacity. So, how can you grow that business if you cannot add more seats or sleeping car compartments? And as far as I know there are no immediate plans to buy more LD equipment. It's kind of a vicious circle. Amtrak management does not want to invest scarce resources in a business segment that is not growing but at the same time it cannot grow without more equipment.

However I also agree that gaps in the system need to be closed. The whole country is full of gaps. If nothing else, Amtrak should at the very least serve every state outside of Alaska & Hawaii.

Regards,

FMC

 

[cpotisch]

The reason there's no service to Des Moines, or why most cities, ala Atlanta, Denver and Minneapolis, only have one train a day (in only one direction), is due to policy decisions.

Policymakers simply don't want Amtrak to succeed.

Sorry, I'm in a nit-picky mood right now. What do you mean when you say that they "only have one train a day (in only one direction)"? Last I checked, they get one train a day in each direction.

 

[cpotisch]

Doesn't equipment have something to do with poor L.D. growth too? Without citing any statistics, I believe from my own train riding experience that many LD trains are already at capacity. So, how can you grow that business if you cannot add more seats or sleeping car compartments? And as far as I know there are no immediate plans to buy more LD equipment. It's kind of a vicious circle. Amtrak management does not want to invest scarce resources in a business segment that is not growing but at the same time it cannot grow without more equipment.

We're still receiving the new Viewliners, and it seems there are somewhat imminent plans for a pretty massive single-level car order. So it's not quite accurate to say that they don't have any new equipment coming soon, since there's no equipment coming as we speak, and the new single-level order is not far off.

 

[Amtrakfflyer]

The order wont be for western long distance trains, its a corridor order at best.

 

[fredmcain]

The order wont be for western long distance trains, its a corridor order at best.

Exactly. That's what I meant to say.

-FMC

 

[jis]

Then again, if the massive new order is delivered at the rate that the Viewliner order is, cpotisch would be married and looking forward to retirement and grandchildren by then

Juuust kidding. But I do hope that the next project for cars will be managed a little better than the last one.

 

[ainamkartma]

how is 4,698.5 thousand a record level when in 2012 and 2013 the numbers were over 4.7 million?

From some of the comments it is distressingly obvious that some cannot read a simple bar chart

Those numbers are the same.Like 1.9 million is very similar to 2 million.

Now YOU can't understand statistics?

Yeah they are 100,000 apart. Since you did not mention what error parameter was acceptable to you for this discussion, your accusations are neither here nor there.

The point that keelhauled made was that raw fatality numbers are useless unless they are looked at in the context of the size of the universe in which they are being measured. So his point was that unless you are talking of fatality rates it is a useless statistic, and I and at least one or two others agreed with that. So merely saying that you were not talking about fatality rates and that ridership is at an all time high (presumably in the Amtrak era?) does not address the issue raised by keelhauled.

It sounds like we have a case of alternative facts in here, with a side of attempted Gish galloping.

If there is rock solid verified information that bustitution will cost more than capital upgrade and maintenance of tracks then that argument can be used too, but I am skeptical about its validity without seeing concrete numbers.

I share your skepticism. Without having easy access to any facts, it seems beyond the bounds of credibility that a bus would be more expensive than train over the Raton route:

1) The right of way cost is 100% externalized for the bus, 100% internal for the train.

2) The vehicle capital and maintenance cost is much much less per passenger for a mass produced bus than an ancient custom built train.

3) The labor costs are to first order determined by the ratio of employees to customers, which is about the same for bus and train.

So some costs are competitive between the modes, but most are skewed in the bus's favor. This imbalance has been true since the construction of the national highway system by the public sector.

Ainamkartma

 

[ohle]

I seriously doubt most passengers would willingly want to disembark a train mid-route and board a cramped bus for a 10-hour overnight ride.

Again, it shows CEO Anderson's contempt for his customers.

This "plan" was clearly designed to destroy one of Amtrak's most successful LD trains.

 

[west point]

One would think that each train or multi train routes need separate analysis. Example what is the ridership growth (decline ) for only train route xyz vs population growth ? That way trends can be better analyzed as to what growth if any is occurring ?

As well the 95% or better times oe or more legs sold out ?

 

[cpotisch]

Anyone know where I can find a list of Amtrak's routes sorted by ridership? I'm trying to figure out where the Chief ranks among the other LDs routes.

 

[ohle]

P. 7

https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/corporate/monthlyperformancereports/2017/Amtrak-Monthly-Performance-Report-September-2017-Preliminary-Unaudited.pdf

 

[ohle]

This from Amtrak's presentation to lawmakers to discontinue the SW Chief.

Note how the trains with the biggest ridership "lose" the most money (according to Amtrak's rigged accounting).

More riders = more losses.

No successful business runs like that.

 

[ohle]

Some facts about the Southwest Chief:

Among Amtrak's 15 long-distance trains, the train is:
-7th in terms of ridership
-4th in ticket revenue
-2nd in seat miles
-2nd in passenger miles

It carries more passenger miles (length of trip) than any other Amtrak short-distance train outside of the Northeast Corridor and California's Pacific Surfliner trains.

At 63%, the train's load factor (percent of full seats) is higher than the 58% average for the long-distance trains and is higher than the Northeast Corridor's 57% average and the state corridor routes' 40%.

There's no rational reason for Amtrak's inept management to discontinue this vital route.

Source: Amtrak.

 

[fredmcain]

I seriously doubt most passengers would willingly want to disembark a train mid-route and board a cramped bus for a 10-hour overnight ride.

Again, it shows CEO Anderson's contempt for his customers.

This "plan" was clearly designed to destroy one of Amtrak's most successful LD trains.

Ohle,

Here’s my take on what I think might’ve transpired there with the Chief. First of all, I am going to assume that Anderson did not understand the ground transportation market very well. Then, he was confronted with that perfectly dreadful wreck on the Cascades line. Kinda like “trial by blood”. He felt he had to do something to reassure the public so he stated unequivocally that Amtrak absolutely and utterly will NOT operate its trains over tracks where there is no PTC after Jan. 1st. He probably made an error in making such a strong statement.

So, this possible “error” in judgement became seriously problematic for the Chief. Either he would need to pull a “Trumpian” switch and claim he never said that or, more expedient yet, (he thought) just scotch the train.

What happened next was that all those communities pushed back against this and pushed back HARD. They attempted to make the case that the Chief was their only public transportation connection to the outside world. Well, O.K., lacking a good handle on ground transportation, Anderson thought he could understand that. He resolved to continue providing those communities with a public transportation option: A bus. It might’ve made perfect sense in his mind’s eye but for people more familiar with railroads it makes absolutely no sense, no sense whatsoever.

By the way, dozens upon dozens of American cities tried this at the local level. They turned to buses to replace the first generation of light rail lines. They thought they would save bookoo bucks. But what happened was that Americans abandoned public transportation altogether. Now Anderson is poised to make a similar error. But I’m optimistic that he will not succeed in pulling it off. Could I be wrong? Absolutely. But here’s hoping for the best.

-FMC

 

[DSS&A]

Here is information on the just announced Federal funds to help install a PTC system on the NM commuter territory tracks and equipment. The Grant is for approximately $29.4 million towards an estimated $60 million project.

http://www.metro-magazine.com/security-and-safety/news/730965/n-m-s-rail-runner-receives-29m-for-ptc-project?utm_source=email&utm_medium=enewsletter&utm_campaign=20180822-NL-MET-Rail-BOBCD180816008&omdt=NL-MET-Rail&omid=1000025390