You should email Bruce and tell him all this and see what he says!
URPA Newsletter
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This Week at Amtrak; October 1, 2009
A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
America’s foremost passenger rail policy institute
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203 • Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Volume 6, Number 42
Founded over three decades ago in 1976, URPA is a nationally known policy institute which focuses on solutions and plans for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota, California, Arizona, New Mexico, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and other cities. For more detailed information, along with a variety of position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at http://www.unitedrail.org.
URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from any outside sources.
1) They’re not going to take it lying down – Amtrak’s Pioneer route restoration report, that is. Republican Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho is not pleased with Amtrak’s initial Pioneer report, and has sent a letter to Amtrak outlining his thoughts. Additionally, several groups interested in the route restoration have gone to great pains to point out the many and various flaws in Amtrak’s initial report. These groups include the Cascadia Center, the Pacific Northwest Economic Region organization, All Aboard Washington (the Washington Association of Rail Passengers), and the Pioneer Restoration Organization.
Here is the Cascadia Center’s Alternative Vision, starting with the Executive Summary. Comments follow at the end.
[begin quote]
The Pioneer: An Alternative Vision
Cascadia Center for Regional Development
September 29, 2009
Executive Summary
Amtrak's draft feasibility study on the Pioneer train's restoration, released September 18, errs on numerous fronts. It neglects the many opportunities for making the Pioneer the backbone of a regional transportation network in the Denver-Seattle corridor.
– On scheduling and routing, the study's options include low-potential stops without asking if a better mix of stations exists. The schedules provide poor service times at key tourist stops. We present a higher-ridership scenario that includes northern Colorado's Front Range cities and responds to expressions of interest from many communities.
– On equipment, Amtrak's analysis calls for high-level cars that it says it doesn't have. Cascadia highlights the good sense of a single-level-equipment option which would not require the study's proposed purchase of more than $100 million of new equipment.
– Regarding public-transportation connections at the Pioneer's stops, the draft study falls silent, overlooking opportunities for new ridership. We show how the Pioneer could connect advantageously with resort destinations and off-route communities, bringing more and more people within the reach of public transportation.
– In spite of general population growth, the steady growth in travel on other Amtrak long-distance trains, and other factors, Amtrak assumes ridership will be less than it was on the Pioneer of the 1990s. The study offers no ideas for improving the numbers. We present numerous ideas - better connectivity, better scheduling, better routing.
– Regarding capital costs, Amtrak presents, without question, a list of proposed capacity improvements representing hundreds of millions of dollars. We believe the Pioneer's impact, on the existing high-quality mainlines, can be fairly compensated with far fewer investments. Freight infrastructure improvement yields public benefits, but should not be cited, in effect, to eliminate chances for passenger rail expansion.
– Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing funds are available to Amtrak at low cost. We raise the possibility of Amtrak utilizing this very substantial funding source - if a big infrastructure budget is ultimately determined to be necessary.
– On operating costs, the study again overlooks opportunities for economy, including private provision of some services. We highlight the fact that the Denver-Seattle option, which we favor, has the lowest operating cost per train mile - that cost representing the platform on which the service is built. Better ridership divides that relatively static cost out, improving farebox recovery and thus operating performance.
– The study's implementation timeline leaves room for improvement. A recently announced service plan for another Amtrak route uses a much shorter timeline for station improvements, and the single-level equipment scenario we advocate would use cars that are already in the fleet or are part of a procurement process already initiated.
The draft study makes tomorrow look like yesterday. Where it sees past failings, we see future opportunities. Wisely implemented, the Pioneer service will anchor an effective public transportation system across a vast and largely under-served swath of the country.
[End of Executive Summary; beginning of full text]
The Pioneer: An Alternative Vision
Cascadia Center for Regional Development
September 29, 2009
Amtrak's draft study on the feasibility of restoring the Pioneer train dismisses many exciting opportunities that this service restoration presents. In this analysis we attempt to elucidate some of those opportunities.
1. Scheduling and route
The draft study's set of schedule options contains nothing resembling the operating scenario that, in our opinion, offers the promise of highest ridership and greatest return to the public. We call for a two-night, stand-alone Pioneer running between Denver and Seattle. The westbound California Zephyr would follow its current schedule. Passengers transferring to the Pioneer in Denver would lay over there from morning until evening, when the Pioneer would depart on the BNSF Front Range Subdivision to Wyoming. The train would serve several Front Range cities and Cheyenne, cross Wyoming to Ogden during the night, and (without stopping in Ogden) arrive in Salt Lake City in mid-morning. It would wye in Salt Lake and return to Ogden (stopping there), then proceed to Seattle. Eastbound, the train would reach Salt Lake in early evening, again providing a conveniently timed overnight service when it continues on to Wyoming and Denver. We attach a sample schedule [Not attached in TWA].
This configuration offers many advantages. No city with a population over 100,000 is served during the middle of the night in either direction. None of the draft study's timetables accomplish this. Often asymmetrical, those timetables also ensure middle-of-the-night service, in at least one direction, at the key tourist stops in Idaho - thus cutting significantly into discretionary ridership. By contrast, the two-night Pioneer visits calls at these stations during the day in both directions. The "dip" into Salt Lake City (modeled on the Silver Star's long-established Auburndale-Tampa-Auburndale dip) establishes a quasi-corridor between Denver and Salt Lake, with travelers enjoying a choice between the scenic, lower-speed Rio Grande route during the daytime and a faster, overnight trip, via Wyoming, for predominantly non-tourist travel. The Pioneer serves the key Salt Lake stop at convenient times, and the connection with service to western Colorado is retained. The Pioneer-western Colorado layovers eastbound and westbound are long, but not much longer, in either case, than the 9:35 eastbound layover that Amtrak's study considers acceptable. At the same time, the Pioneer would not involve even moderately long Salt Lake layovers for most passengers, i.e. those proceeding to or from Denver and points east. The Seattle service times, unlike those in the draft study, meanwhile allow for same-day transfers to and from Vancouver, BC - a key connection. The timetable is considerably more symmetrical than those in the study, meaning ridership is compromised at fewer stops.
We have developed the Portland-Seattle timetable in the light of the current Cascades schedule, and any Pioneer schedule should give the Cascades priority consideration. In our proposal, the northbound Pioneer will be discharge-only at points between Portland and Seattle, thus sustaining Cascades ridership. Since the southbound Pioneer, presumably, will be the last train of the evening, it will however be full-service rather than receive-only. This will in effect enhance the corridor service as presently configured.
We view the Denver layover as a plus. The possibility of passenger inconvenience when the draft study's 2:34 eastbound layover time at Denver fails to "capture" a late-arriving
Pioneer is eliminated, reducing certain operating costs. Instead of a long sit at Denver Union Station, as the draft study proposes, through-travelers find themselves conveniently positioned for a day of pleasure – or business – in the heart of the Mile High City. In a letter to Amtrak, Denver's Regional Transportation District has cited many possibilities for coordinating Amtrak travel with local bus tours, transit access, and the like. We attach the letter [Not attached in TWA].
Of the options presented in the study, no. 3 (Portland-Salt Lake) offers the best alternative to the two-night scenario. If option no. 3 is ultimately adopted, the train should however leave Portland approximately nine hours later, so as to arrive in Salt Lake City with a moderate recovery/working time before its departure eastbound as a section of the California Zephyr. This adjustment would also make the schedule symmetrical and facilitate round-trip day travel between Portland and, for example, Hood River, where the service times would bracket excursions on the Mount Hood Railroad.
The attached schedule [Not attached in TWA] also differs from the study's options in its mix of stops. Boulder, Longmont, Fort Collins and potentially Loveland (to begin from Denver) replace Greeley in Colorado. A new stop in downtown Cheyenne replaces the remote Borie stop. Green River, a few minutes' drive from the larger city of Rock Springs, loses its station. Mountain Home, with its Air Force base, receives service. Nampa, which has no passenger station at all, and whose station location is undesirable, is replaced by Caldwell. Well-positioned halfway between Boise and Ontario, Caldwell has maintained a highly attractive station property and has expressed enthusiasm about receiving Amtrak service. In Oregon, the much-maligned stop at the UP Hinkle yard yields to Stanfield - a solution repeatedly sought by both Stanfield and the nearby off-line city of Hermiston.
These changes would both reduce certain costs and increase ridership substantially, as discussed below.
2. The BNSF Front Range Option
Central to our proposal is the routing of the train on the BNSF Front Range Subdivision, as opposed to the UP Greeley Subdivision, between Denver and Cheyenne. The study draft dismisses the BNSF option with one paragraph:
Between Denver and the Cheyenne area, BNSF’s Front Range Subdivision which runs through Boulder (home of the University of Colorado) and Fort Collins (home of Colorado State University) to Speer and Cheyenne, is a theoretical alternative to the former Pioneer route through Greeley. However, distances via the BNSF line are longer—14 miles longer between Denver and Speer (where there is no connection to the UP line) and 26 miles longer if the train operated over the BNSF line into Cheyenne (where there is a connection, but no access to UP’s historic station in downtown Cheyenne). Moreover, maximum speed on the unsignalled BNSF line is only 49 mph; over 30 miles are restricted to 30 mph or less; and there is a 15-20 mph speed restriction on the six-mile segment of the line through downtown Fort Collins where trains run down the middle of Mason Street. While operation via the BNSF line is not feasible at the present time due to much longer trip times, it could be a viable alternative in the future if proposals to upgrade the line for high speed rail service come to fruition.
There is nothing "theoretical" about the BNSF route. The Denver Regional Transportation District (RTD) FasTracks plan calls for developing the route's Denver-Longmont segment over the next six years for commuter service. From Longmont north to Fort Collins, plans
including an environmental impact statement process whose completion is expected in 2010 have been outlined for a further extension of commuter rail service, again encompassing major infrastructure improvements. The Front Range Subdivision passes through metropolitan areas totaling 578,000 in population – well over twice that of the Greeley metropolitan area (2007 U.S. Census Bureau estimates). If routed on the Front Range line, the Pioneer would also serve two major universities with a combined enrollment of about 54,000 - more than four times that of Greeley's university. Further, the Greeley subdivision is not being developed for commuter or regional rail, meaning that the BNSF route offers rail connectivity wholly absent from the UP option. At present, the BNSF route has about half the freight traffic that the Greeley Subdivision sees.
The study understates the BNSF route's potential by mentioning the 49 mph speed limit. This is a freight speed limit; the passenger limit is 59 mph. The study also implies erroneously that the street running in Fort Collins totals six miles. In fact the segment is about 1.25 miles long, along a corridor that is being developed for a bus rapid transit system with at least one station that would naturally serve as an interchange point for the Pioneer's passengers.
Further, the BNSF route would serve downtown Cheyenne, as opposed to Borie, the Greeley route's nearest approach - a remote, unpopulated location on a windswept prairie 10 miles from the center of town. This shift would boost ridership from Cheyenne substantially. Perhaps as important, the city of Cheyenne, while it has no interest in underwriting an Amshack station in Borie, is at least in principle prepared to participate in the creation or maintenance of a station in the city center. Contrary to the study's statement, access to the historic UP station in Cheyenne is possible, and other possibilities for the siting of a station in central Cheyenne also exist.
The study thus disregards Cheyenne's ridership and station possibilities, say nothing of the city's clear interest in the matter. It insists instead on Greeley. In the last three fiscal years of the Pioneer's operation in the 1990s, Greeley generated 6,845 boardings and alightings - 2% fewer than the 6,991 generated by Laramie, a community with a somewhat smaller university and a far smaller population base. Both stops were served at convenient times. Pocatello, with a university roughly the size of Greeley's but a somewhat smaller population, contributed 11,614 riders - with middle-of-the-night service (figures from National Association of Railroad Passengers).
The choice between the UP and BNSF Denver-Cheyenne routings should be clear. The latter has much more potential.
3. Equipment
Equipment for a restored Pioneer is far more available than the study asserts. We have drafted several scenarios by which the Pioneer could be restored, a southern Montana service inaugurated, and the Sunset Limited re-extended to Orlando as a thrice-weekly train, without any new equipment [Not attached in TWA] beyond that in the planned 130-car Viewliner order. We attach a summary of what might be the best initial configuration, which deploys single-level equipment to the Pioneer.
The May 2009 Amtrak fleet plan indicates that Amtrak expected to have 179 stored and wrecked cars and an active fleet surplus of 67 cars as of September 30, 2009 (Amtrak, "System Fleet Plan FY2009"). Most of all these cars are of a type usable on the Pioneer. Many of the stored and wrecked cars are being repaired with ARRA funds. The Viewliner order, for which Amtrak has requested bids, would obviously complement that available single-level fleet.
The attachment [Not attached in TWA] does not deal with locomotives for the simple reason that their supply appears very adequate. As of October 1, 2008, Amtrak had 7 wrecked P-42s, 30 stored P-40s, and 9 stored F-40s, and plans did not call for any of these 46 units to be activated as of October 1, 2009. Amtrak is reconditioning 15 of the P-40s, according to Amtrak's own project summary (Amtrak, "ARRA/NRPC Project Summaries," March 25, 2009; project number PRJ29110074), "in order for them to be used in long distance service." This rehabbing will leave a balance of 15 P-40s among the still-undeployed units. Given this information, it is difficult to believe that Amtrak needs to buy new locomotives for the Pioneer (and charge them up front to the Pioneer's account).
While adequate equipment for launching a Pioneer is available through rehabilitation or activation of idle existing equipment, in combination with the Viewliner order, many worthy expansions of Amtrak service are presently under consideration. We thus view the attached equipment proposal [Not attached in TWA] as a shorter-term solution until Amtrak's fleet can be replenished more generally through a system-wide program. According to a September 19 press report, Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois is planning to reintroduce his TrainCARS bill to provide an ongoing funding source for new Amtrak equipment ("Demand for locomotives, train cars to pick up under push for high-speed rail," Chicago Tribune, September 19, 2009; http://www.pantagraph.com/ business/article_10109942-a38f-11de-b399-001cc4c03286.html). We support Senator Durbin's initiative. A Pioneer train with largely rehabbed equipment is not a long-term solution; the maintenance of an adequate national fleet is.
The maintenance of that fleet is a system expense. We do not expect Amtrak to vow that the equipment charged to the Pioneer will never leave the Pioneer equipment pool. A railroad is far too fluid a system for that, and equipment moves from train to train for a variety of reasons. It would be preposterous to charge the anticipated order of Viewliner equipment, for example, to particular trains in the existing system – about like saying that the newborn baby has to buy an extension to the house because the family is now too big for the old one. Establishing the principle that capital assets belong to the entire system puts that system, including new services and old, on a fair and uniform footing. Burdening start-ups with the full cost of new cars, at $4-4.5 million a copy, will only prohibit system expansion.
4. Connections
We see the Pioneer as much more than an 11-foot-wide vehicle moving along a set of tracks: it must be the backbone of a much broader system of public transportation. It should catalyze a marketing and business partnership that will welcome large and increasing numbers of tourists, business travelers and prospective residents to an entire region of America.
In the most obvious terms, this means feeder bus routes – of a sort that Amtrak's draft study ignores completely. Idaho offers a case in point. With a grant from the Idaho Transportation Department, the Yellowstone Business Partnership, based in Idaho Falls and Bozeman, Montana, is planning an innovative, regional public-private transportation cooperative that, in contrast to the Pioneer's history, could bring thousands of train travelers to two of America's most magnificent national parks, multiple ski areas, and numerous towns that today have very limited transit services. The partnership notified Amtrak and its consultant of this initiative in the course of the study draft's preparation. Regrettably, however, the study does not even mention the partnership or its potential for boosting the Pioneer's patronage. If just 1% of all visitors to Grand Teton National Park arrived by connecting coach from the Pioneer's Pocatello station, and departed in like fashion, the train's ridership would jump by nearly 80,000 yearly - that is, if the train called at Pocatello at times convenient for tourists. The study's schedules generally give Pocatello wee-hour service.
The train obviously has to be somewhere in the middle of the night, but the night-to-day differential in ridership at a station where the traffic is largely discretionary is far greater than the same differential at a location where the travel is mostly a matter of business or personal necessity. That is, the draft study's bad times in Pocatello or Shoshone – stepping-off point for Sun Valley and Ketchum – repeat the train's history and constrain ridership much more than bad times in western Wyoming would. Our proposal – a two-night train calling at Pocatello and Shoshone at optimal times – would maximize ridership.
The situation in Pocatello is not much different from that in Shoshone, where the local public bus provider, Mountain Rides, has alerted Amtrak to the potential of connectivity with the Sun Valley-Ketchum resort area and Twin Falls. Mountain Rides has signaled an interest in meeting the train even in the middle of the night, if the schedule demands. None of this potential is mentioned in the study, which focuses instead on the discouraging historical example.
We have also noted interest from potential partners like Northwestern Trailways and the Wild Horse Casino in Pendleton. These appear to have received no attention in the study draft. While the analysis did correctly note the growth in urban transit systems in Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City and Denver, we have to wonder whether that increased connectivity was considered in formulating the remarkably low ridership forecasts.
5. Ridership
The ridership estimates, indeed, are the most pessimistic element of the entire study. The study methodology is not even entirely fair. That is, the authors penalize the raw ridership figures by deducting riders who would "defect" from other trains. The study reduces the projected raw ridership by about 10% to cover this predation on other trains. By contrast, the study gives the Pioneer no credit for the added ridership that it certainly would generate on other Amtrak trains.
This summer's Sunset Limited report takes the proper approach, crediting that projected service restoration for an increase in ridership on the Silver Meteor, for example (Amtrak, "Gulf Coast Service Plan Report," pp. 7 and 33). Amtrak's 2000 Market Based Network Analysis likewise illustrates that connecting ridership is a very significant factor, whereby (in negative terms) the elimination of one train cuts into passenger revenue on connecting trains (Amtrak, "Report to Congress: The Market Based Network Analysis of the National Railroad Passenger Corporation," p. 7).
The draft study exaggerates the role of competition with budget airlines. Trains compete meaningfully with airplanes only in short travel lanes, where the airplane's cruising speed does not represent a major factor in the traveler's budgeting of time. For a long-distance train, ridership is drawn almost entirely from motorists, bus travelers, and people who would otherwise stay home.
The alternative routes for the Pioneer's traverse of the central Rockies are Wyoming (including northern Colorado) and western Colorado (which term here includes some Utah communities). Serving both Denver and Salt Lake City as outlined above, the two-night
scenario sacrifices only a minor degree of connectivity between the Pacific Northwest and western Colorado: one has to wait somewhat longer in Salt Lake City for a transfer, but the connection is retained. At the same time, travel from the Pacific Northwest via the Wyoming route to Denver and all points east does not involve any significant layover, or the unpredictability of two train sections meeting, in Salt Lake City. The study's Pacific Northwest-Salt Lake options - that is, with the California Zephyr picking up the Pioneer in the Utah city - cannot match that advantage. Travel from the Northwest to Denver is also faster by the Wyoming route and, most obviously, the Wyoming-northern Colorado traverse brings many new destinations, and even more city-pairs, into the Amtrak network. The one downside of the somewhat more difficult connection in Salt Lake is more than outweighed, in ridership terms, by the other attributes of the two-night scenario we propose.
Given all the factors in our proposal – retention of the Salt Lake City stop, routing via downtown Cheyenne and the BNSF Front Range route, improved scheduling for discretionary travelers, energetic development of connecting services – we believe that the Pioneer's raw ridership would be much higher than in the study draft's Denver-Seattle scenario. Further, ridership on long-distance trains has increased generally in recent years, rising 17% between FY 2002 and FY 2008. Ridership on the Empire Builder, California Zephyr and Southwest Chief, the three trains most comparable to the Pioneer, has increased by 33%, 7%, and 18%, respectively, over the 2003-2008 period. (Data from National Association of Railroad Passengers website; data from earlier years not readily available).
Amtrak West projected 42,339 annual riders for the Portland-Boise train contemplated in the late 1990s – on a stub route less than one third the full Denver-Seattle distance now under discussion ("Amtrak West's presentation on Portland-to-Boise rail service," September 8, 1999?). This projection, too, suggests that the study draft's forecasts are very low.
The 41% general population increase, cited by the study, in the Pioneer's states since 1992 – in contrast to the 19% national increase over the same period – also argues for the Pioneer's potential.
Given all the above, we believe the study's raw ridership forecast (that is, before impacts on other system trains) should be increased by at least 25-50%, i.e. to 154,500-185,400.
6. Capital costs
While many recent passenger rail projects have contended with rising infrastructure demands from host railroads, this study's figures carry the trend to a daunting extreme.
Start-up infrastructure improvements charged to the Pioneer's budget should be limited to the following:
– a 10,000-foot passing siding at each point where the eastbound and westbound Pioneer are expected to meet. Under the two-night scenario, this would mean sidings in the Great Divide Basin of Wyoming, in Idaho west of Pocatello, and between The Dalles and Stanfield, Oregon.
– reconstruction of the station track at Ogden. (Should funding considerations so demand, it might be possible to defer the Ogden station track installation, temporarily omitting the Ogden stop. It could be replaced by Brigham City, 20 miles to the north, where the Pioneer once in fact stopped. An Amshack would likely be required.)
– minimal track and signaling improvements on the BNSF Front Range Subdivision, in anticipation of more extensive upgrades to that line in conjunction with planned regional and commuter rail development.
– construction of a new run-through track at La Grande to prevent freight-passenger interference while the Pioneer is in the station. The run-through track improvements at Nampa and Hinkle are unnecessary for the simple reason that there should not be a stop at either location.
With the exception of the Ogden improvements, all these enhancements would also provide benefits for freight traffic.
In the case of Boise, improvements to the "Boise loop" are called for, but it remains to be seen, among other things, whether the city of Boise, which owns much of the loop, will itself underwrite the improvement of its track. Boise, the third-largest city in the Pacific Northwest, very much wants the service. The City is committed to the maintenance of the Boise Depot for passenger rail purposes.
In the case of Portland, a new crossover track allowing access between the Steel Bridge and Portland Union Station is needed, as the study notes. However, the Oregon Department of Transportation has applied for ARRA funding that would allow for the restoration of the crossover track, or another engineering solution serving the same practical purpose, as part of a larger package of ARRA projects in the area. Those projects include the Graham Line siding also cited in the draft study, which did not mention the hoped-for funding of either of these improvements from another source. We understand that the crossover would be a relatively minor cost item in any event.
We are thus unconvinced that the resumption of a single daily passenger train, at any point along the route proposed by the draft study, from Denver to Seattle, would in itself justify major infrastructure projects, i.e., projects beyond those discussed above. Amtrak should not pass on these staggering estimates to the study's readers without questioning whether they serve freight rail only, without relevance to the passenger train.
Even the four projects listed above could be viewed as excessive. In 1991, Amtrak studied a reconfiguration of the Pioneer using UP track from Denver to Ogden – as the current draft study does. It concluded that track conditions on that entire segment "are a part of UP's primary main line and are considered satisfactory for the restoration of passenger service without need for capital expenditures" (Amtrak, "Reroute of the Pioneer and the Desert Wind through Central Iowa and Wyoming," p. 18). It is difficult to believe that the Denver-Ogden route, as a major active freight line, has deteriorated significantly since that time.
The California Zephyr has recently had to detour over the Wyoming route between Salt Lake City and Denver because of maintenance on the Rio Grande route. Several reliable reports we have received indicate that the train was typically reaching Denver or Salt Lake at least 2:30 sooner than it would have if it had followed the Rio Grande route's schedule. The Wyoming route is of course faster by nature; an extrapolation of Amtrak's 1997 timetable indicates that the Salt Lake-Wyoming-Denver route that the Zephyr has been using should take about 2:15 less than the Rio Grande. The anecdotal evidence thus strongly suggests that the Wyoming route's condition, without any infrastructure improvements, will consistently support a passenger train moving at the 1997 timetable's speed.
Finally, the two-night train we propose allows for relatively slow night-running along the Columbia River, primarily to allow for good service times in Portland. The slow running there will also mean less need to overtake freights, making the need for the ten-mile second main track that the study calls for in the Columbia Gorge all the more doubtful. For passenger traffic access, the basic need is for 10,000-foot sidings at points where the eastbound and westbound Pioneers would meet.
The point here is not that freight infrastructure improvements are not needed on the route, but that such upgrades should not be charged to a passenger train. If however decision-makers conclude that most or even all of the proposed improvements should be implemented, the Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing (RRIF) program may provide an alternative. RRIF provides a total pool of $35 billion of capital, currently available to Amtrak at somewhat over 4% interest. Amtrak could borrow the entire $324.1 million foreseen by the draft study for the Denver-Seattle route and pass it on to the railroads in question under attractive terms. The UP, for example, has to pay nearly 12% to obtain capital on the private market, according to the federally calculated cost-of-capital figures for the industry, providing "room" to pay Amtrak a premium above the 4%. That premium could defray part of Amtrak's operating loss for the train.
The issue reduces itself to the allocation of investment costs in a complex national economy. Two passenger train movements daily on a high-quality rail line should involve little need for new infrastructure. We agree that capacity investments such as those Union Pacific is calling for will yield social benefits. Shippers will see their products move more expeditiously, expedition of traffic flows will reduce carbon emissions, and so forth. Decision-makers need however to distinguish between the benefits for and needs of passengers, on the one hand, and freight on the other.
The study's projected equipment costs express the reflexive public-sector tendency towards expensive turn-key solutions, rather than the resourcefulness of a private-sector business. As the attached equipment scenario makes clear, rehabilitation of existing equipment will reduce costs substantially. According to Amtrak's ARRA project summaries (cited earlier), the cost for rehabilitation of the variety of equipment being restored with the stimulus funds comes to just under $1 million per car. Those cars represent only part of Amtrak's inactive fleet: other equipment is sitting – waiting. A private businessman who has expressed interest in operating the Pioneer (see under Operating Costs, below) points also to the availability in the open market of considerable additional bi-level equipment that could be acquired and rehabbed for about $1.2 million per car.
Even if, for example, rehabilitated single-level equipment were used in combination with new Viewliner sleepers and diners, the cost per car would still be far less than the study projects.
Cobbling together consists from different sources is not necessarily an ideal solution. Ultimately equipment needs to be obtained system wide, and that equipment should be treated as a system expense, not a charge against any one train.
Station costs could be reduced in certain instances by the willingness of communities to invest (or, in fact, continue investing) in the station properties they own. Ultimately, Amtrak has to move in the direction of the local provision of station infrastructure, and local players
will have to secure the resources to do that. Existing opportunities for local contributions in these sources of civic pride and utility should be explored energetically.
Most of the stations on the potential Pioneer route are either in use as train stations, or have been maintained (in some cases after restoration) through local initiatives, for other purposes. Many of the current station-building activities cited in the draft study either do not occupy the whole facility or serve only occasional events. Because Amtrak will not have agents at most of the stations, the only modification needed at many sites is restoration of the platforms so as to meet ADA requirements.
7. Operating costs
The draft study does not weigh the possibility of private entry into any aspect of the Pioneer's operation (excepting, of course, the private ownership of the railroad). The Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act, which mandated the study, also specifically encouraged private operation of passenger trains, precisely because it might save the public money (Public Law 110-432, Division B, Title II, Sections 214, 216 and 217).
We have explored the potential for private operation of some aspects of the Pioneer's service. To date, one operator has indicated interest in an arrangement whereby Amtrak would exercise its right of access, and hire the private firm for operations. Having read the study draft, the operator predicted that operating costs could be reduced by about $5 million annually by such a contractual arrangement. While seeking private operators, admittedly, lies beyond the study's scope of work, the potential for entrepreneurial entry into the Pioneer's operation needs to be scrutinized, and certainly offers opportunities for economy. We will continue to investigate these possibilities, and would be happy to discuss them in greater detail with Amtrak and appropriate decision-makers.
The study's enumeration of operating costs seems mostly reasonable; the only expense that appears clearly excessive is the 4 to 14 full-time employees perceived as necessary for added services at the staffed stations. A Denver Union Station employee with whom we spoke stated that the station staff there was not larger during the Pioneer's tenure than it is now, with only California Zephyr service. To some extent, of course, the simultaneity of two trains in a station would raise the question of increased staffing needs; however, our two-night scenario essentially avoids a convergence of schedules with other long-distance trains.
It may be possible to provide the train's on-board staffing on the model of Amtrak's Auto Train, which in financial terms out-performs all other Amtrak long-distance services, and whose labor arrangements are more flexible than those elsewhere in the system. Sensible labor contracts could result in some cost savings, for example by allowing employees to cross craft barriers more flexibly.
It is the severe underestimation of revenue – of ridership – that draws our attention far more than any expense item, however. The analysis should have at least pointed in the direction of a fresher, more imaginative approach to this issue. The study draft's consist (like the ridership figures) is very small. As the attached equipment summary [Not attached in TWA] suggests, a larger consist would facilitate certain innovations. One coach car – an Amfleet I coach, with its existing seat configuration – would provide budget transportation for persons of limited means, who would take a bus if it weren't for the fact that the bus service is no longer available. Another coach, with a capacity lower than that of a standard long-distance coach but exceeding that of a sleeper, would be outfitted with seats that recline to full horizontal position, and each two seats would be enclosable by a retractable curtain to provide a modicum of privacy for sleeping – at a somewhat increased fare, naturally. The potentials for attracting new market segments are not the most obvious subjects for a feasibility study, but nothing prohibits their consideration, either.
The Pioneer needs to be seen in terms of its possibilities, not its difficult history. The most telling statistics in the draft study are the cost per train mile and net per train mile in Table 12 (p. 46). The Denver-Seattle option wins the competition here. While the study considers that route less attractive in the light of other metrics, cost per train mile trumps those other considerations. It does not increase markedly as the train's occupancy increases or cars are added to the consist. It is the platform we have to work with, and in that sense the table makes it clear that the Denver-Seattle option is best equipped to minimize subsidies per unit of travel.
8. Timeline
The study presents a discouraging timeline, and we have to wonder why. The analysis concludes that even ADA projects "will average approximately 36 to 48 months" (p. 26). New equipment must be ordered. Existing equipment cannot be rehabbed, even as a temporary measure to get the wheels rolling while grander solutions await. The possibility of using Viewliners, which would be available relatively soon, is brushed aside because the California Zephyr is a bi-level train.
The 36 to 48 months for ADA-compliance upgrades contrasts with the Sunset Limited service plan (cited earlier), which (p. 55) allots 9-26 months for comparable enhancements. One is left feeling that the study stretches out the timeline much as it maximizes expenses - and to no one's benefit in either case.
Tri-Met (Portland), UTA (Salt Lake City) and RTD (Denver) have experience with building ADA platforms and ramps and working safely in railroad rights-of-way in this region. Amtrak has little experience in implementing improvements in this rugged country, and therefore may be anticipating higher-than-necessary costs. An innovative alternative would be for Amtrak to utilize regional transit agencies as general contractors for this work, to reduce costs and expedite the service launch.
9. Conclusion
Under the Amtrak legislation in force since 1970, the nation's passenger railroad has a right to operate on the tracks of private railroads. It needs to exercise that right, at its discretion rather than the discretion of the private railroads. The draft study gives the contrary impression of a federal institution whose duties include reporting, without question, the claims asserted by private railroads as the price of passenger access. We agree that costs engendered by Amtrak trains should be defrayed by Amtrak and that investments in freight rail infrastructure are necessary and will yield important public benefits. The study appears, however, to mix the two priorities, going beyond the scope of what is the passenger train's "responsibility." It is up to Amtrak and Congress to correct this confusion of purposes.
We also perceive the study's infrastructure and equipment budgets as a means of discouraging interest in this system expansion - or any system expansion, for that matter. There are ways to do this more economically. We have advanced some possibilities in this paper, and we urge the further exploration of those possibilities. It behooves us to fulfill the Pioneer's considerable promise without ignoring the need to conserve public resources.
[End quote]
2) Well. Most interesting.
And, yes, the proposals differ from what was offered as a similar analysis in TWA in September. However, these proposals are offered by competent local authorities, working with local knowledge and vision formed by years of waiting for the Pioneer to return. There are no single, final answers; there are a range of choices of final answers which are superior to those initially offered by Amtrak.
Some of the equipment use ideas (specifically, reshuffling other train consists which often operate at a high load factor, such as the Empire Builder) need work, but the sense of thinking outside of the box is genuine. When the subject is equipment pools, there are usually a half a dozen good ideas for any one situation.
Most startling in the analysis is the sense of entrepreneurship, which is totally absent from the Amtrak document. The Cascadia Center for Regional Development obviously does not believe in all power to the government, but, rather, good solutions can be found outside of government. Also most tantalizing is the prospect of private operation of this train under an interesting arrangement with Amtrak.
Under Amtrak’s proposal, the people of the Pacific Northwest are given a one-bid, one horse race. The Cascadia Center changes that equation, and demands at least two horses in the race, if not more. Bravo! Cascadia Center.
Now, it will be up to the federal, state, and local politicians along the proposed route of the Pioneer to ask for more than what Amtrak initially offered. Since Amtrak is a creature of government, these people have the power to influence Amtrak and demand more from Amtrak than what Amtrak was initially willing to do.
And, politicians along the routes of Amtrak’s other two route restoration and new route proposals along the Gulf Coast and in Ohio: the same goes for you, too. The silence coming from Florida and its elected officials since the Gulf Coast report was published in August has been deafening. Congresswoman Corrine Brown of Jacksonville put $1,000,000 of taxpayer money for Amtrak in its 2008 reauthorization to pay for the Gulf Coast report, which had major flaws. To date, not a public word about this report. We’re waiting, Congresswoman. The folks along the Pioneer route have led the way, in record time. We need action in Florida, too.
3) We promised this edition of TWA would contain the latest scribbling of William Lindley of Scottsdale, Arizona. If you’ve made it this far down, you know this issue of TWA is running considerable longer than normal (Almost 7,000 words.) due to the Pioneer report. Mr. Lindley will return next issue; we promise – really, we do, this time.
If you are reading someone else’s copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can receive your own free copy each edition by sending your e-mail address to
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URPA leadership members are available for speaking engagements.
J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739
[email protected]
http://www.unitedrail.org
henryj
Conductor
I think Bruce is going a little easy on these folks. I don't think it is productive to try and route a long distance train all over the map and try and serve every community and go everywhere and do everything at the expense of the timetable. Denver to Portland should be a one night out ride period. Connect to Cheyenne and SLC with a bus. The ride along the Columbia River into Portland is gorgeous and should be in daylight. They are sacrificing schedule and view in order to serve some insignificant online communities. If they want this train so bad then they should finance it themselves, get their own equipment, and contract out the operations to a private contractor. Then they can run it whenever or wherever they want.
This Week at Amtrak; October 9, 2009
A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
America’s foremost passenger rail policy institute
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203 • Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Volume 6, Number 43
Founded over three decades ago in 1976, URPA is a nationally known policy institute which focuses on solutions and plans for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota, California, Arizona, New Mexico, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and other cities. For more detailed information, along with a variety of position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at http://www.unitedrail.org.
URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from any outside sources.
1) If you are an airline, which pays landing and takeoff fees, plus user fees at every airport, plus user fees for the federal and international air traffic control systems, you make the most money operating long haul flights, preferably international long haul flights. As an airline, you stuff as many passengers as will fit in a tiny, tiny space known as “coach” class, and you make sure everyone knows you’re giving them peanuts, allegedly because so many people are allergic to peanuts and they don’t know it. You sell these people their “meals” and drinks, and hope many passengers purchase alcoholic beverages because you make a fortune from them, but – at the same time – don’t want any particular passenger to purchase too much and become drunk and disorderly.
Up front in the aircraft, you have first class and business class passengers, who willingly pay huge extra dollars for larger seats, better food (which is included in the price of the ticket), and a higher level of service. On the long, profitable, overnight international flights, if you are a foreign flag carrier, you now provide something of a cocoon for seating, which has all sorts of technological gadgets and a slightly heightened sense of privacy as the space converts to what allegedly passes for sleeping space.
You operate some short haul flights to feed your profitable long distance flights, but, in as many cases as possible, you take advantage of smaller, more efficient commuter airlines to feed your long haul flights. Sometimes these feeder airlines operate under your name using your reservations system, and sometimes they operate under their own names. Either way, the more expensive, short flights feed your true money-making long haul flights.
If you are a cruise line, which pays docking fees every time your ships are connected to land in any way, plus government inspection fees, plus all sorts of other interesting, yet, arcane taxes no one knows about, you have several classes of passengers on your huge ships, most of which host over 2,000 passengers per sailing.
Way down below the water line, next to the engine room, you have “economy” class interior “staterooms” (really, large closets with bath facilities and no windows) which provide cruise passengers with a place to sleep, bathe, and change clothes. You do provide these passengers with at least four major meals a day (including the always popular midnight buffet), and several small meals a day, all included in the price of your ticket. These same passengers are highly encouraged throughout the days at sea to purchase expensive alcoholic beverages, gamble in the onboard casino, shop in the gift shops, and pay lots of money for shore excursions.
The higher you go on the ship, the more expensive the accommodations, the more money the cruise line makes, and the more affluent passengers through very high fares for cabins with balconies, subsidize the passengers traveling in interior cabins next to the engine room way down in the bowels of the ship.
And, then, there is Amtrak, which is determined to never understand any of the economics of passenger travel, and do things as expensively as possible, with the lowest possible return on investment, and the least ability to create an enterprise which can support itself. Just like the airlines and the cruise lines, Amtrak pays a user fee to its host railroads for use of tracks and dispatching; in fact, this fee is so small and so below market, it’s almost a crime the host railroads don’t make a better return on their investment for their privately owned infrastructure, which Amtrak uses for next to nothing.
Amtrak runs 15 long distance routes throughout the country, and feeds those routes with 26 short distance routes. The 15 long distance route generate 2,609,387,000 revenue passenger miles, and the 25 short distance routes in comparison generate only 1,754,039,000 revenue passenger miles.
Here is what Amtrak brags about, but really doesn’t matter. The long distance routes carried 4,170,300 separate passengers, and the short distance routes carried 13,605,800 passengers. Wow! Amtrak will tell you; look at how wonderful we are because we carried all of those people.
Who cares? The average length of trip of a long distance passenger was 625.7 miles, and for short distance passengers it was only 128.9 miles. Which passenger would you rather have? The long distance passengers coughed up total revenues of $416,284,100, while the many more short distance passengers spent $362,294,100. Whoopee.
Amtrak’s short distance trains would be fine if there was enough capacity and enough long distance routes to carry more passengers. But, as we have seen in the recent reports issued by Amtrak for restoration of long distance service east of New Orleans and for the Pioneer route, Amtrak has little – if any at all – enthusiasm for long distance trains.
To back this up, one only has to look at Amtrak’s business plan. Whoops! We can’t do that, because Amtrak doesn’t have a business plan; it only has an indication it is more interested in taking money from states for short distance trains than for expanding the long distance network.
Amtrak’s short distance trains – little more than a series of Greyhound busses on steel wheels hooked together – are expensive to operate, and, as we see above, don’t generate nearly the transportation output of the long distance trains. But, Amtrak loves body counts, so it likes to brag how many individuals step onto an Amtrak train. This, of course, doesn’t matter, because 1,000 passengers only traveling 10 miles doesn’t mean nearly as much as 100 passengers traveling 150 miles each. Any rational manager will always take the 100 passengers traveling 150 miles because you get a much better return on investment and actually accomplish more good. Moving 1,000 passengers 10 miles is a job for transit or commuter services, not intercity rail passenger trains. It was all of the freight railroads’ big city and regional commuter services – such as those of the Pennsylvania Railroad, New Haven Railroad, Chicago Northwestern, and many others – which ultimately led to the downfall of private passenger service, because by federal regulation the railroads had to run those trains (at huge losses) and the dwindling long distance trains trying to compete with the new glamour of jet aircraft and new, four lane Interstate highways with Holiday Inns could not cross-subsidize the commuter services.
If Amtrak had not been created, and at the same time the Staggers Act had deregulated the railroads as it did a decade after the creation of Amtrak, and the railroads could have found a way to shed their expensive branch line passenger milk runs and various commuter services, there is more than half a chance private passenger rail would not only have survived, but eventually flourished as it has the opportunity to do so today.
Had Amtrak not been created and the railroads deregulated, there probably would still be a healthy rail passenger car building business in this country, a much stronger national network of long distance trunk line trains, and CSX would be running stainless steel silver trains in and out of Florida and Union Pacific would be running armor yellow trains with red striping in and out of California. Had deregulation happened in the Nixon Administration instead of the Carter Administration, it’s quite possible the railroad corporate map would be very different today, because many of the mergers which took place merely for corporate survival may have been put off, or never have occurred if deregulation had happened and the free market place had acted a decade or more earlier.
But, well, today we do have Amtrak, a company which doesn’t seem to want to bestir itself for much more other than its annual begfest for funding on Capitol Hill for more and more free federal monies.
Everybody but Amtrak seems to realize the Obama Administration has handed Amtrak the biggest challenge of its corporate life by saying, “okay, you whined about money for decades, so, here it is. What are you going to do with it?” Amtrak’s answer so far is, “not much.”
Perhaps Amtrak’s apathy is because it seems to be a company at war with itself. It has an interim president and chief executive officer who refuses to speak with the news media. It has a general counsel who seems to think Amtrak – and, herself – are pretty much above the law. It has an interim inspector general who is totally unqualified to hold the position. It has a chief operating officer who is obviously loyal to the guy who hired him – two Amtrak presidents ago (three if you count one other short term interim who was forced out, too).
We know there are a number of good people at Amtrak; we’ve named many of them in this space before. These are senior managers who show up for work everyday, and try to throw off the various shackles which are hung around them on a routine basis and create something worth bragging about. But, these same good people run into incredible roadblocks and bureaucracies which close ranks together and block any type of meaningful change. If you want to fire any of these particular bureaucrats putting up the roadblocks, you’re blocked from that, too, because of what can only be mildly referred to as the “good old boy network.”
What to do?
A new board of directors is forming. The White House announced two appointments to the board this week, and there are still two vacancies to fill. We have a new FRA administrator who serves on the board, too, and whenever a permanent Amtrak president is named, he/she will also be a board member.
It’s time to clean house. Give some of these good people at the top of Amtrak who want to do better the ability to do that. Get rid of the deadwood, and all of the folks with the old allegiances, and replace them with a new, dedicated team that wants to succeed, not merely survive until retirement. Give somebody – and Amtrak – a fighting chance.
If Amtrak keeps going much long the way it is going today, the bankruptcy of New York City back in the Ford Administration is going to look like a romp in the park. Amtrak is also headed down the nearly identical path of the inglorious Penn Central Railroad, which, at the time, created the Enron financial disaster of its day in the last half of the 20th Century. The only way Penn Central eventually was saved and turned into a profitable Conrail was to get rid of so many of its internal antagonists and start with a fresh group of people. Amtrak needs to do that right now, before it becomes as helpless as Penn Central did so many years ago.
2) As promised, and promised, here’s William Lindley of Scottsdale, Arizona.
[begin quote]
By William Lindley
Let's look at one scenario for creating the full matrix of passenger trains in the United States.
Please understand, the continuation of much of the existing "long distance" train network is helpful, but not required, for this scenario. A single daily train handing a handful of passengers at each station is very close to an irrelevancy compared to the volumes the eventual network will create.
We begin with perhaps a half-dozen local turnkey train operators. Each of these would be, at the beginning, in a fairly sizable region of the country and attached to a single Class I railroad, acting as a single point of contact between the railroad and the governmental agencies for all services.
The local trains act as the catalyst to bring cities and towns, large and small, on board with modern passenger rail. Providing local service gives direct benefit to monies spent rebuilding local stations, upgrading rights of way, eliminating grade crossings, and generally providing the "terminal services" that the later express and limited trains will require. The goal with the first phase is to begin laying groundwork so that, as in Europe, when a train leaves the station it can accelerate directly to full speed without creaking through miles of ancient switchwork.
Once these local trains have built political support through an expanding ridership base, express services will be added on longer routes, between the major cities... gradually connecting the matrix of local trains. Then the limited trains, on much longer routes, will be upgraded and dramatically expanded from whatever "long distance" trains still exist.
Looking at the beginning phase – Each turnkey local train operator would follow steps like these:
First, line up an equipment manufacturer – Bombardier, Talgo, or US Railcar which is planning to start building on the former Colorado Railcar's DMU production plans.
Second, bring aboard an insurance company which is willing to work with the railroads. Then, select one of the Class I railroads – and only one – to start with. It is this single railroad with whom you will be a single point of contact. Indeed, it might be beneficial to have a five-year exclusive agreement that "all commuter and short-distance passenger services" on their lines be provided through such a single point of contact.
Finally, and only after these are all at least tentatively aligned, go to the states, counties, and municipalities all along the one carrier's lines. Each region will have different needs – from sidings and double-track, to restoration of missing segments, to grade crossing and station issues; but every city will be getting a uniform and well-understood arrangement. In short, this sort of turnkey operation benefits both the railroads and the cities.
The basic plan for the turnkey local operator in each region is to start with two trainsets, offering three or four daily round-trips. Service will provided not just into destination downtowns, but, to the suburbs on either side, and to most every town of any size along the route. These are true basic transportation, local trains. And they will act as feeders – the base matrix – to the express and limited train networks which will follow.
Generally these first trains will run on routes of between 150 and 200 miles, either centered on one large city or between two cities, with one-way times of about three to four hours, and about a dozen stations. Each trainset will operate about sixteen to eighteen hours a day, maximizing return on investment while permitting sufficient time for servicing.
Let's look at two examples.
In the Tampa, Florida, metro area, two trainsets could provide four daily round-trips. The first train from St. Petersburg could leave at 6:30 A.M., arriving Tampa at 8:05 and Sarasota at 9:45; the first train from Sarasota leaving at 6:30, arriving Tampa at 7:55 and St. Pete at 9:45. The first three trains would leave each terminus every four hours on a "memory schedule" with the exception that the 2:30 P.M. trains, which both would arrive Tampa at about 4 P.M., would wait there an hour until a little after 5 P.M. for the evening rush; then the last trains would depart each terminus at 7:30 P.M. Each train would stop at Pinellas Park, Largo, Clearwater, Oldsmar, Carrollwood, and Sulphur Springs west of Tampa, and Gibsonton, Apollo Beach, Ruskin, Palmetto, and Bradenton on the way to Sarasota. Total population of these is over 950,000. Today's Silver Star calls at Tampa at 12:34 P.M. southbound and 2:17 P.M. northbound, and these local trains would provide excellent connections in all directions.
In Georgia, Atlanta and Macon are less than a hundred miles apart, so four or five daily round-trips should easily be made with two trainsets. Indeed the initial local route should at least connect Warner-Robins, south of Macon, with some of the suburbs beyond Atlanta. Atlanta is an excellent connection point, if a train station at the Five Points MARTA subway stop can be constructed – MARTA acting as the local feeder. These local trains would then serve commuters as well as all-day regional travel. Later, express service to Chattanooga to Savannah would overlay these local trains, followed by a further overlay of limited-stop service from Chicago via Indianapolis and Louisville to Florida.
Similar opportunities exist all across the country. Duluth to Minneapolis. Green Bay to Milwaukee. Anywhere there are cities under 150 miles apart is a prime candidate for comprehensive local train service.
Again, first we bring the states, counties, and cities on board with three or five daily trains that serve not just commuters, but, tourists and residents all day long. Much needs doing to upgrade the existing tracks, signals, and bridges to accommodate relatively fast passenger trains along with today's freight trains; much needs doing to restore stations, station tracks, and re-integrate the passenger train facilities with today's bus, streetcar and subway networks.
The improvements made possible by the local trains is what makes the later express and limited trains work smoothly. By building ridership and political support, all is possible.
[End quote]
3) Found on the internal United Rail Passenger Alliance Intranet:
[begin quote]
When your doctor works for the folks who created Amtrak:
– Office hours are from 2:10 A.M. to 2:25 A.M., Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
– He knows the more patients he sees, the more money he loses.
– You'll have to ride an hour on a bus to the middle of nowhere, because the downtown location was closed "to save money."
– Everything takes longer than it did in 1951, and the furniture looks it.
[End quote]
4) And, this missive from a TWA reader.
[begin quote]
Hello, once again, URPA,
I'm glad that others share my view on letting other companies operate long-distance routes in this country. Even though a lot of people in the rail community are (deservedly) excited about the aspect of high speed rail coming to their states, they should also remember competition also applies to the long-distance trains as well, and pressure needs to be kept on Amtrak. After reading some of the more recent TWA articles, it's obvious to me certain people in Amtrak's management need a wake-up call (Whether it's by losing out on the majority of the HSR corridors, or by watching some of its long-distance routes return to the freight railroads, something big needs to happen to shake them up.). After all, the poorly handled Sunset Limited report, a failure to drastically upgrade the overnight fleet, and demanding states to pay for long-distance routes have all happened on their watch.
Division B, Title II, Section 214 of the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008 says:
(a) In General – Within 1 year after the date of enactment of the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008, the Federal Railroad Administration shall complete a rulemaking proceeding to develop a pilot program that –
`(1) permits a rail carrier or rail carriers that own infrastructure over which Amtrak operates a passenger rail service route described in subparagraph (B), ©, or (D) of section 24102(5) or in section 24702 to petition the Administration to be considered as a passenger rail service provider over that route in lieu of Amtrak for a period not to exceed 5 years after the date of enactment of the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008
Now, with all the talk about whether Amtrak is really disinterested in operating long-distance trains in the long-term, why don't some of the friendlier host railroads contemplate bidding for some of the overnight routes? Pullman may be gone, but the hosts could talk to a manufacturer like the revived Colorado Rail Car company about acquiring some real dining cars and sleepers.
At last year's Railway Age conference, railroad author Frank Wilner advocated returning intercity passenger trains to the freight companies because he thought “a sound business model” would win over anti-Amtrak politicians in Congress (Source: January 2009 Railfan & Railroads). While it sounds tempting, I’m not sure all passenger routes can be returned to the host railroads. Instead, I propose the hosts talk to the likes of Herzog, First Group America, and some of the foreign bidders for HSR and get them to run the trains. I would definitely like to see routes like the Crescent and Silver Star be supplemented with daytime counterparts so I don't have to go from the Carolinas to Atlanta or Florida in the middle of the night.
The hosts would work out a three or four-way partnership with each other and the new entity operating the route (for example, a daily Sunset Limited could have an agreement with BNSF, CSX, Union Pacific, and First Group America) as a way of avoiding the problem of changing trains. Meanwhile, BNSF could run the Southwest Chief by itself and add routes and branches like a spur to Phoenix (a similar situation would apply to Norfolk Southern with the Crescent).
One more thing, the Auto Train concept could be added to other markets by the host railroads (after all, those empty auto racks currently seen on freight trains could be very useful). It may not have been feasible to have a Midwest-Florida Auto Train route 26 years ago, but if gas ever returns to September 2008 levels, it would be more than practical for the Auto Train concept to be extended to other parts of the country.
– Anonymous
P.S. Based on the discussion in the URPA Intranet group during the Labor Day weekend, states like Florida should contact Veolia or any of the companies which fail to get HSR bids to operate conventional speed routes as a precursor to high speed service.
[End quote]
5) More reader mail.
[begin quote]
Mr. Richardson,
This latest Pioneer (a splendid route serving "rich pickings" territory, lots of greens, etc) issue reminds us that Amtrak sees itself not in the passenger service business at all, but, as a candid porter once told me, as a "jobs program." Sad to say, that's the kind of people you have "managing" it, though "managing" is probably the wrong word. "Showing up at the office to get the benefits and the pension" is more like it.
Pity a private operator can't pick this one off.
Always value reading your (depressing) reports.
[End quote]
If you are reading someone else’s copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can receive your own free copy each edition by sending your e-mail address to
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Copies of This Week at Amtrak are archived on URPA’s web site, www.unitedrail.org and also on www.todaywithjb.blogspot.com where other rail-related writings of Bruce Richardson may also be found.
URPA leadership members are available for speaking engagements.
J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739
[email protected]
http://www.unitedrail.org
This Week at Amtrak; October 22, 2009
A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
America's foremost passenger rail policy institute
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203 • Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739, Electronic Mail [email protected] • http://www.unitedrail.org
Volume 6, Number 44
Founded over three decades ago in 1976, URPA is a nationally known policy institute which focuses on solutions and plans for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota, California, Arizona, New Mexico, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and other cities. For more detailed information, along with a variety of position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at http://www.unitedrail.org.
URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from any outside sources.
1) Well. A lot has been happening in the two weeks since the last This Week at Amtrak was published. Before we get into some specifics, we first need to hear what Minnesota Association of Rail Passengers and United Rail Passenger Alliance Vice President of Law and Policy Andrew Selden has to say on the current state of Amtrak.
[begin quote]
By Andrew C. Selden
Amtrak blinds itself, in its endless posturing to fool its bankers in Congress, by measuring its performance by numbers that do not really matter, while ignoring or burying numbers that do matter. As a result, it makes decisions, including strategically important allocations of precious investment capital, on the basis of fundamentally misleading data.
The most glaring example is Amtrak's endless blathering about "ridership." Ridership is only a measure of a sale transaction. It does not differentiate among the size of the sales. One "rider" from New Haven to Boston is, by this yardstick, exactly equal to one rider from Washington, D.C. to Boston, or even Los Angeles to Boston. Amtrak makes this worse by blurring useful sales data (ticket prices) into averages by which they measure (actually, it's just arithmetic, not really "measuring" anything) "yield," which is the average revenue per passenger mile on a train or route. This tends to reinforce the false belief any one passenger is pretty much the same as any other.
In an urban transit system where every passenger pays the same fare, that might be okay.
But on Amtrak, where a typical "corridor" customer might pay $10 to $30, but a family in a sleeper to the west coast could be paying $1,000 or more, these "riders" are decidedly unequal. Fifty of the former are less than two of the latter. But Amtrak is obsessively focused on "ridership."
A yardstick Amtrak tries to hide, and apparently never uses to make important resource allocation decisions, is load factor. Load factor is the percentage of your inventory you are able to sell. Airlines live and breathe load factor.
Load factor is available seat miles (total inventory) divided by revenue passenger miles (seat-miles sold to paying passengers).
Load factor ("LF") matters greatly. Among other things it is a perfect measure of capital efficiency, and where a business is over-invested vs. under-invested. It is an indirect measure of opportunity cost. A trend analysis of LF is a tell-tale for a growing or a dying business.
It indicates whether an operation has achieved an efficiency of scale, or needs to ramp up, or down, its application of capital assets to achieve an efficiency of scale. The NEC's low load factors show Amtrak is already over-invested there: it offers much more inventory than it can sell for $30, or even give away. Long distance trains, with high load factors, show where Amtrak is under-invested, turning away potential $1,000 customers by the hundreds.
Simple "ridership," without consideration of load factor, is classic "Amtrak accounting" that disregards the cost and utilization of capital. If you have a rich uncle who doesn't care, or a politically-oriented appropriations committee that has other objectives, or a gullible state agency that doesn't seem to get it (a la Oklahoma and the Heartland Flyer), then one can disregard capital costs, load factor, and utilization. Ready access to "free" capital (but always with a heavy political and opportunity cost) obscures that.
Suppose a train or route has a LF of 40% (NEC average is about 40%). Suppose the LF is static, or even growing slowly. Is that a good thing? Or does that suggest the capital – represented here by the rolling stock, the overheads and even the relationship and rent costs with the host railroad – might be better applied elsewhere?
In other words: Can those trainsets produce, or earn, even more someplace else?
Real world, actual example: take a standard KFC restaurant with 72 seats grossing a million a year, and is often "full" (i.e., has a very high LF). It is a cash cow. The owner is happy. His banker is happy. But an investment banker focused on returns on capital (i.e., making money by maximizing output) will say, "Bulldoze this obsolete, underperforming asset. Get rid of it. It is a parasite. It is an obstacle to growth and profit. In its place, build a new, larger KFC with 150 seats and a bigger kitchen and a drive-through, that is physically capable of growing into a TWO or even three million a year store." And if the KFC instead were a lightly-used 40-seater that was doing $500,000 a year and showing no real growth, even if it were steadily profitable at that level, any rational analysis would conclude the store should be closed outright, and maybe re-located across town by the Wal-Mart, or out by the interstate. LF as well as cash flow, market share, and earnings are all part of the constant analysis that should be done of any commercial activity.
Amtrak NEVER does that. Amtrak instead fools itself and fools its bankers in Congress and its client state governments with phony-baloney data about transaction volumes ("ridership") and other irrelevancies.
ITEM: Amtrak's net loss last year was UP from the year before, for the umpteenth year in a row, even after all the subsidy and the deferred maintenance and the shrunken fleet and all the other voodoo accounting. That is why Amtrak is still a sinking ship, and why Interim President and CEO Joe Boardman, just like his several predecessors, is no different from Captain Edward Smith of the White Star Line. And trains like the Harrisburg – Philadelphia locals, or Acela, or the Heartland Flyer, with their low load factor, whatever the ridership, are just like that tiny scrape in the hull that eventually worked its disproportionate magic on the fortunes of the RMS Titanic.
[End quote]
2) Amtrak issued another route renewal report, and issued a final report on a second route.
The Pioneer route report, which was commented on previously in this space, was issued in a final form with no real changes in how Amtrak perceives to put this train between Denver and Seattle back into service at extremely high costs and a too long lead time, despite questioning from two United States Senators along the route, Senator Crapo of Idaho, and Senator Wyden of Oregon.
The new report issued was for restoration of the North Coast Hiawatha (Originally, the North Coast Limited, pre-Amtrak.) over the original Northern Pacific Railroad tracks. This route will parallel the Empire Builder route, but make a more southerly trip. Pre-Amtrak, the Empire Builder and the North Coast Limited were strong rivals between Chicago and Seattle, and both routes have breath-taking mountain scenery. The North Coast Hiawatha was one of the trains massacred by the route cuts of the Carter Administration.
Amtrak wants – yes, we're not kidding – over one billion dollars to restore this route, with the bulk of the money going to track upgrades. After the Burlington, Northern Pacific, and Great Northern railroads were all folded into one company (which eventually became BNSF when the Santa Fe was added to the mix), the Northern Pacific route was considered redundant to the Great Northern (Empire Builder) route, and was downgraded. Part of the route in Montana was sold to a short line operator, too.
All of that aside, Amtrak has come out with ridiculously high figures for route restoration, including an amazing $330,000,000 just for six trainset of new equipment, including locomotives. This works out to an astounding $4,500,000 per piece of equipment, which is not only impossible to justify, but incredible anyone could present this figure with a straight face. Additionally, Amtrak demands millions and millions of dollars for crew training, as it has done in previous reports.
This analysis of the North Coast Hiawatha landed in the This Week at Amtrak mailbox.
[begin quote]
Amtrak North Coast Hiawatha Report Reflects Apathy and Atrophy; Fails to Answer Many Questions
By Joseph D. Henchman
October 17, 2009
Introduction
On October 16, 2009, Amtrak published the North Coast Hiawatha Passenger Rail Study as required by the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008 (PRIIA). That law required Amtrak to produce a report within one year of October 16, 2008 examining the feasibility of restoring passenger rail service between Chicago and Seattle via the former Northern Pacific mainline in Southern Montana.
Confronted with a political environment favorable to the expansion of its services, the report suggests an institution whose marketing and innovative instincts have atrophied. The report's tone reflects a determination to drag out the timeline and extract as many subsidies as possible rather than seriously consider how a successful passenger rail service in the study area can be implemented.
Below are specific areas the report is insufficient or raises serious concerns.
Amtrak penalizes the study train for diverted passengers from other trains, but does not credit it for passengers fed to other trains.
Amtrak's report penalizes the ticket revenue of the North Coast Hiawatha by $8 million because Amtrak estimates the train will divert passengers from the Empire Builder, a heavily-patronized Amtrak train (693 passengers each train in FY 2009 through July) that also operates daily between Seattle and Chicago. Amtrak goes so far as to say that the diverted revenue will "increase Amtrak's direct operating loss."
This analysis is incomplete for two reasons. First, the Empire Builder is often sold out for being over capacity, so an additional train may have the net impact of freeing up space on that train to be sold to others, wiping out any revenue loss. Second, and more importantly, Amtrak does not estimate additional revenue for other trains from the addition of the North Coast Hiawatha (or if they do, they don't report it). Few Amtrak long-distance passengers ride end-to-end, with many taking shorter trips often involving transfers to other trains. On the west end is the Seattle-Portland Cascade train as well as the long-distance Coast Starlight to California. On the east end are services to St. Louis, New Orleans, Washington, Boston, New York, and Michigan. Added service into and out of Seattle and Chicago will result in additional revenues for all of these trains. If Amtrak "penalizes" the North Coast Hiawatha for "diverting" passenger revenue from trains, it should also "credit" the North Coast Hiawatha for "feeding" passenger revenue to other trains.
One approach Amtrak did not take would be to estimate system-wide revenues and expenses from the addition of the North Coast Hiawatha. This would give a true picture of the actual incremental cost of service expansion. Amtrak is also studying the expansion of services in several other routes, and is producing piecemeal reports on financial impacts, one-by-one. As Amtrak adds trains and frequencies, the additional options stimulate demand beyond that of one-train-on-one-corridor. A comprehensive approach of these proposals would be necessary for informed decision-making.
Amtrak Inexplicably Buries Its Conclusion that the Train Will Cost Its Operating Costs
There are two types of costs associated with running trains. One are relatively fixed costs that do not vary with the number of trains (system reservations and website, management costs, station costs), and the other are costs that vary with the number of trains (crew costs, fuel, payments to host railroads, and to some extent equipment maintenance). Amtrak's estimate of North Coast Hiawatha operations, put in these terms, is as follows:
Passenger Related Revenue (not including $8 million revenue penalty for diversions from Empire Builder) – $51,000,000
Variable Expense: Fuel – $7,400,000
Variable Expense: Train Crew Labor – $13,000,000
Variable Expense: On-Board Services Labor – $14,700,000
Variable Expense: Mechanical – $11,900,000
Total Variable Expenses – $47,000,000
Net, Variable Expenses – +$3,000,000
Non-Variable: Station & System Expenses – $27,100,000
Total, All Expenses – $74,100,000
Total Net, All Expenses – ($24,100,000)
Farebox Recovery, Variable Expenses Only – 108.5%
Farebox Recovery, All Expenses (Amtrak reduces the farebox recovery by 10 percentage points by excluding the diverted revenue to the Empire Builder) – 68.8%
Amtrak's long-distance service requires subsidies to cover its operating shortfalls [based on Amtrak accounting methods]. Few if any recover 68.8% of their costs for all expenses, or actually break even on variable expenses, as Amtrak estimates here. Why Amtrak buries this information is inexplicable. One possibility would be that acknowledging Amtrak will run a train with a rather positive financial performance undermines its argument that massive subsidies are required to operate it.
Note: Amtrak does not clarify whether its estimate of system and route costs are the amounts that will be assigned to the North Coast Hiawatha or whether they are incremental costs of adding the train. For example, assume (using made-up numbers) Amtrak spends $100,000 a year operating the existing station at Fargo, North Dakota (which the North Coast Hiawatha would stop at), and $5 million a year running its existing national reservation system. Assume also Amtrak's cost estimates in the report include line-items of $50,000 for the Fargo station and $200,000 for system reservations (they don't; those items are not broken out). Does that mean Amtrak is spending an additional $250,000 when the North Coast Hiawatha is launched, or rather the North Coast Hiawatha will be assigned $250,000 of existing costs?
If the latter, it is relevant information, but its inclusion warps the decision-making process. Among Amtrak's costs of operating the North Coast Hiawatha would be costs Amtrak is already incurring, and will incur whether the route is launched or not. To use economics terms, a decision-maker would be erroneously looking at average cost instead of marginal cost.
If it is the former, Amtrak needs to justify the $27 million in route and system expenses beyond merely saying they are "other direct expenses." The amount reflects a third of the expenses associated with running the train, and while not suspect on its face, it does raise questions. Why does Amtrak's report not include a technical appendix itemizing the costs it has estimated?
Amtrak Provides Just One Option: A Single, Slow, Short Train over the Entire Route
Unlike here, Amtrak's past studies have often included a series of operating options. The recent Pioneer Service Study looked at several different alignments, the Sunset Limited Service Study looked at different service options, and the Ohio Service Study looked at different frequency options. Here, however, Amtrak provides no option other than one single, slow, short train. Given Amtrak's own ridership and cost estimates, this is indefensible. It also allows Amtrak to demand higher subsidies than would be required to operate the North Coast Hiawatha.
The report recommends the establishment of one round trip a day along the 2,300 mile route on a 49 hour schedule, for an average speed of 47 M.P.H. (The North Coast Limited in 1956 managed 46.5 hours, so Amtrak proposes a train slower than one run 50 years ago.). The train would consist of locomotives, a baggage car, a crew car, two sleeping cars, three coaches, a dining car, and a lounge. Since each sleeping car has a maximum capacity of 49 and each coach has a maximum capacity of 74, that would mean a total train capacity of 320.
On page 28, Amtrak estimates even this slow, single train will result in 359,800 passengers a year, or 492 per train. On the face of it, this suggests the train will fill 153% of its capacity. Of course, few passengers will ride end-to-end, resulting in turnover en route. It would be useful to know Amtrak's estimate of passenger-miles or load factor, but the report does not provide those numbers. Even if each seat turns over once per trip, the load factor would still be 76% (which would make airlines envious).
Amtrak's report handicaps itself by limiting the train's capacity. Many of a train's expenses are fixed (engineer and conductor costs, for instance) or grow only minimally (fuel and service attendant costs, for instance) with additional cars. In the past, American passenger trains have operated with 16 to 22 cars (Today, in Canada, the Canadian transcontinental often operates with 22 cars in high season). The only serious limiting factor on train lengths are station platform lengths and locomotive power (itself limited based on the route's curves and grades) and the ability to transmit hotel power from the locomotive to the rest of the train; usually 18 cars in the United States is the maximum train length because of this. Amtrak provides no information on why it limits the North Coast Hiawatha to nine cars (with only five being revenue cars) other than it lacks the imagination to try for more.
Since Amtrak's proposed train already has locomotives, a baggage car, a crew car, dining car, and lounge, any additional cars would be revenue cars generating sleeping or coach ticket revenue. A 14-car train, for instance, would double the North Coast Hiawatha's capacity, potentially doubling its revenue and most certainly not doubling its costs. Given Amtrak's ridership estimates, such a capacity expansion would be justifiable. Amtrak does not investigate this option.
Amtrak also does not investigate the option of greater frequencies or runs over segments of the route (aside from noting that Washington State would not object to running trains to Minneapolis instead of all the way to Chicago). As Amtrak has discovered with service in California and Illinois, additional trains each day can reduce subsidies because (1) added frequencies can mean equipment spends less time idle at each end and (2) added frequencies can increase revenue from additional riders taking advantage of more options. A second frequency 12-hours off of the proposed schedule would be a natural consideration, as would additional day-train frequencies between segments of the route. It is unfortunate Amtrak looks at additional frequencies not as expanding passengers options and thus revenue, but rather as something to be penalized for "cannibalizing" passengers and revenue from existing trains.
Most transportation providers offer travelers options. One of Amtrak's largest weaknesses is many of its trains run only once per day, resulting in equipment sitting idle for 6-18 hours at each end and passengers giving up if they cannot work with Amtrak's one timetable option. Twice the trains can in many cases result in more than twice as many passengers. Fixed route costs, such as station operating costs (here estimated to be $27.1 million), can also be spread over more trains. As noted above, Amtrak estimates that the train's operation itself, exclusive of system and route costs, will break even.
Amtrak Does Not Investigate Marketing Options
Amtrak's report also provides no discussion of service options or marketing opportunities. The report mentions the North Coast Hiawatha's Livingstone station is not far from Yellowstone National Park, but does not enlighten the reader as to whether Amtrak will capitalize on that beyond leaving passengers at Livingstone. (In the past, the Northern Pacific Railroad ran shuttle trains and later shuttle buses to the park.) The private Grand Canyon Railway in Arizona offers four different accommodation options, including a basic coach seat option. The higher-priced options include snacks, entertainment, and Grand Canyon National Park admission. In Europe, the CityNightLine overnight train service offers several different accommodation options, with higher-priced options including welcome wine or beer, an array of magazines, and breakfast on arrival. Other Amtrak trains have included parlor lounges, observation cars, children's playrooms, quiet cars, wine tastings, and enroute tour guides. Other ideas could include on-board treadmills or weight equipment, video arcades, taverns or bars, or gift shops. Amtrak's report shows no creative thinking with regard to providing services to passengers, an important aspect of its operation.
This is particularly indefensible in that Amtrak requires the purchase of brand-new railcars to launch the service, and estimates it will take 4-5 years to begin operations after funding becomes available. If Amtrak needs five years and new trainsets to provide exactly what it has provided for years on other routes, it is not thinking sufficiently creatively.
Amtrak's report also provides no discussion of joint marketing opportunities for other popular attractions along the route, including the Mall of America in Minneapolis; historic tourist attractions in Butte, Montana (a larger town which Amtrak inexplicably writes off without bothering to estimate the costs of serving it despite rails existing and being on the train's route, even though it reports that public and Montana Department of Transportation comments strongly favored studying operating service via Butte) and Bozeman, Montana; airports; and small-town communities currently without rail service in Washington State.
Conclusion
Throughout the report and its actions in recent history, Amtrak views its role as merely common-carrier transportation handling passengers when they show up. Instead, Amtrak should push itself to figure out how it can develop a market, providing a travel experience. Doing so will improve the bottom line for the company and for taxpayers, but requires shaking Amtrak out of its apathy and atrophy.
Questions Unanswered by Amtrak In Its Report
1. What is Amtrak's estimate of the load factor for the North Coast Hiawatha, and how many passenger-miles will it generate?
2. What are the system-wide and marginal revenues and costs associated with launching the North Coast Hiawatha, including additional revenues to other trains from its operation?
3. How many of the cost items within Amtrak's estimated $74.1 million in estimated North Coast Hiawatha operating expenses will be incurred whether or not the train route is launched?
4. What are the revenue and costs associated with other operating options, such as a longer train of 14-22 cars, or additional frequencies?
5. What additional level of capital investment would be required to raise average operating speed to 55 M.P.H. (42 hour schedule), 65 M.P.H. (36 hour schedule), or 75 M.P.H. (31 hour schedule)?
6. Given that Amtrak will be purchasing new equipment for these trains, what innovative ideas will Amtrak explore for the equipment?
7. What marketing opportunities will Amtrak explore for the operation of the trains, to maximize passenger travel experience and develop the market?
8. What are the costs associated with operating via Butte, Montana?
9. How would a system-wide expansion of train lengths and frequencies for long-distance trains change the operating performance of this route?
10. Why does Amtrak estimate so many people will ride the North Coast Hiawatha, relative to other long-distance trains?
About the Author
Joseph Henchman lives in Arlington, Virginia, and is interested in transportation economics and rail planning. He works as an attorney and policy analyst with a non-profit think tank in Washington, D.C., but this report is not associated with that organization. His email address is jdhenchman [at] yahoo.com.
[End quote]
3) Amtrak has now issued four reports since the end of the summer. First, the Sunset Limited – East of New Orleans/Gulf Coast report (Amtrak doesn't want to run the service); the Ohio 3-C report for restored service between Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati (Amtrak doesn't want to run the service), the Pioneer report for restored service between Denver and Seattle (Amtrak doesn't want to run the service), and, finally, the North Coast Hiawatha restored service report (Amtrak doesn't want to run that service, either).
When you add up Amtrak's estimates to restart these four routes, it's over $2,000,000,000 (that's two billion dollars, if you don't want to count zeros).
In reality, if Amtrak really wanted to do any of these projects, the estimates are probably high by at least 40%, if not a full 50%. But, when you're a planner for a quasi-governmental agency and you're accustomed to spending someone else's money (That would be money which belongs to you, the taxpayer.), costs don't really matter. What matters is convenience and lots of bells and whistles (No pun intended.). Amtrak's dream world dictates all new equipment, extravagant stations where smaller ones will do, crew training costs which are incomprehensible to any railroad professional, and a gold-plating of railroad infrastructure "just in case" the railroads want their entire right-of-way wish lists fulfilled at someone else's expense.
All of this leads to the inescapable, sad conclusion that until Amtrak has a new management team which has any inkling of a vision for the future which includes new passenger car orders, a business plan based on reality instead of only raiding government treasuries, or without fantasies of ignoring the conventional passenger rail business because of the glamour of an incorrect assumption Amtrak will be the exclusive high speed rail operator (there's a thought to give you nightmares for a week), restored long routes such as the North Coast Hiawatha may not be the best plan.
As presented, Amtrak's four route restoration plans are a prescription for disaster.
The Gulf Coast report laments Amtrak went to all of the trouble of studying multiple scenarios, and settled on four, all of which Amtrak has priced too high. The reality of the Gulf Coast report is if Amtrak simply extends the City of New Orleans from New Orleans to Orlando, Amtrak will instantly reestablish a Chicago-Florida train, restore service on the Gulf Coast, and have a powerhouse operation for the cost of one extra trainset for the City of New Orleans (due to current too long equipment layovers in New Orleans) and the cost of Positive Train Control installation on the CSX line between New Orleans and Jacksonville.
The Pioneer report wants to set up a separate operation for the Pioneer between Denver and Seattle, with through-cars on the back of the California Zephyr between Chicago and Denver. Amtrak never considered the huge benefit of running a second frequency in the form of the Pioneer between Chicago and Denver, apparently because it would be too much trouble, no matter how much of a financial gain would be found.
The Ohio report wants to set up a pretty good service, but with a lousy end point in Cincinnati so the service will not connect withe the Cardinal; Amtrak continues its reckless policy of not often enough offering connecting trains just in case some passengers may want to travel on more than one route to reach a final destination.
None of the reports take into account the matrix effect of connectivity, more travel choices, or more stations served. Amtrak can only see costs, instead of benefits.
Little of Amtrak's work reflects it was created by anyone with real concepts of passenger service, what's overall best for passengers, or what posture best serves Amtrak – and, our country – financially.
For right now, until some of this changes, Amtrak may best serve itself and all of us by making some logical, small steps which will strengthen the company financially. Things like Kansas City-Omaha, Oklahoma City-Kansas City, Peoria-St. Louis, Savannah-Jacksonville, or Barstow-Bakersfield (/San Jose). Maybe think about Harrisburg-Newark via the Lehigh Valley.
Even easier would be to add truly new Superliner capacity to the existing long distance trains, to start to capture many of those $1,000 tickets Amtrak is losing now because the sleepers are full at various peak load points.
For those hoping for restoration of routes which never should have went away, this fall is truly a season of discontent. Amtrak seems to have gone out of its way to make things as difficult as possible for any returning trains, yet its chairman of the board and some senior executives are making presentations around the country about how Amtrak is the perfect organization to be the exclusive high speed rail operator for new services in America.
Until Amtrak gets its house in order and demonstrates it has some – any! – vision, no one (even government bureaucrats) are going to be foolish enough to anoint Amtrak as the high speed rail operator.
4) Last Saturday, October 17, 2009, a determined band of people met together here in Jacksonville, Florida. The group named itself the Sunset Marketing and Revitalization Team, and has been meeting for over a year now at various locations along the former transcontinental route of the Sunset, prior to its unceremonious loss of the east end of the route beyond New Orleans due to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
John Sita, Jr. of New Orleans is chairman of the SMART group, and Jerry Sullivan of Jacksonville was the gracious host of the meeting.
The meeting lasted three hours, and the SMART members represented a number of states along the route, both east and west of New Orleans. One SMART member from Louisiana made an all-rail trip from his home to the meeting. To cover the roughly 600 miles from New Orleans to Jacksonville without the Sunset, he rode first to Washington via Birmingham, Atlanta, and Charlotte on the Crescent for a full day and a night, and then took the Silver Star from Washington for the afternoon and overnight trip to Jacksonville. Whew! Talk about dedication ...
Without getting into the various discussions and deliberations the group had, what is notable is the very need for the existence of this group. This group has no formal sponsorship, and is completely self-funded. These people banded together because they feel their quasi-governmental national passenger rail carrier has failed in its duty and obligations to restart the Sunset Limited east of New Orleans, and has constantly failed during the entire existence of Amtrak to make the Sunset Limited a daily train between Los Angeles and New Orleans (And Orlando when the train ran its full route.).
In the real, non-Amtrak world, this group should never have been necessary. If Amtrak had the compunction to live up to its mandate as a national rail carrier, there would be no discussion about the gaping hole in Amtrak's route map between New Orleans and Jacksonville. An entire region of the country is disenfranchised for passenger rail service because Amtrak isn't clever enough to figure out how to make the Sunset a success.
So, a group whose membership is more than 50 souls is working together to take the place of a taxpayer funded organization's planning department to figure out how to make the Sunset Limited viable. Amtrak should be terribly embarrassed.
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Volume 6, Number 44
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1) Well. A lot has been happening in the two weeks since the last This Week at Amtrak was published. Before we get into some specifics, we first need to hear what Minnesota Association of Rail Passengers and United Rail Passenger Alliance Vice President of Law and Policy Andrew Selden has to say on the current state of Amtrak.
[begin quote]
By Andrew C. Selden
Amtrak blinds itself, in its endless posturing to fool its bankers in Congress, by measuring its performance by numbers that do not really matter, while ignoring or burying numbers that do matter. As a result, it makes decisions, including strategically important allocations of precious investment capital, on the basis of fundamentally misleading data.
The most glaring example is Amtrak's endless blathering about "ridership." Ridership is only a measure of a sale transaction. It does not differentiate among the size of the sales. One "rider" from New Haven to Boston is, by this yardstick, exactly equal to one rider from Washington, D.C. to Boston, or even Los Angeles to Boston. Amtrak makes this worse by blurring useful sales data (ticket prices) into averages by which they measure (actually, it's just arithmetic, not really "measuring" anything) "yield," which is the average revenue per passenger mile on a train or route. This tends to reinforce the false belief any one passenger is pretty much the same as any other.
In an urban transit system where every passenger pays the same fare, that might be okay.
But on Amtrak, where a typical "corridor" customer might pay $10 to $30, but a family in a sleeper to the west coast could be paying $1,000 or more, these "riders" are decidedly unequal. Fifty of the former are less than two of the latter. But Amtrak is obsessively focused on "ridership."
A yardstick Amtrak tries to hide, and apparently never uses to make important resource allocation decisions, is load factor. Load factor is the percentage of your inventory you are able to sell. Airlines live and breathe load factor.
Load factor is available seat miles (total inventory) divided by revenue passenger miles (seat-miles sold to paying passengers).
Load factor ("LF") matters greatly. Among other things it is a perfect measure of capital efficiency, and where a business is over-invested vs. under-invested. It is an indirect measure of opportunity cost. A trend analysis of LF is a tell-tale for a growing or a dying business.
It indicates whether an operation has achieved an efficiency of scale, or needs to ramp up, or down, its application of capital assets to achieve an efficiency of scale. The NEC's low load factors show Amtrak is already over-invested there: it offers much more inventory than it can sell for $30, or even give away. Long distance trains, with high load factors, show where Amtrak is under-invested, turning away potential $1,000 customers by the hundreds.
Simple "ridership," without consideration of load factor, is classic "Amtrak accounting" that disregards the cost and utilization of capital. If you have a rich uncle who doesn't care, or a politically-oriented appropriations committee that has other objectives, or a gullible state agency that doesn't seem to get it (a la Oklahoma and the Heartland Flyer), then one can disregard capital costs, load factor, and utilization. Ready access to "free" capital (but always with a heavy political and opportunity cost) obscures that.
Suppose a train or route has a LF of 40% (NEC average is about 40%). Suppose the LF is static, or even growing slowly. Is that a good thing? Or does that suggest the capital – represented here by the rolling stock, the overheads and even the relationship and rent costs with the host railroad – might be better applied elsewhere?
In other words: Can those trainsets produce, or earn, even more someplace else?
Real world, actual example: take a standard KFC restaurant with 72 seats grossing a million a year, and is often "full" (i.e., has a very high LF). It is a cash cow. The owner is happy. His banker is happy. But an investment banker focused on returns on capital (i.e., making money by maximizing output) will say, "Bulldoze this obsolete, underperforming asset. Get rid of it. It is a parasite. It is an obstacle to growth and profit. In its place, build a new, larger KFC with 150 seats and a bigger kitchen and a drive-through, that is physically capable of growing into a TWO or even three million a year store." And if the KFC instead were a lightly-used 40-seater that was doing $500,000 a year and showing no real growth, even if it were steadily profitable at that level, any rational analysis would conclude the store should be closed outright, and maybe re-located across town by the Wal-Mart, or out by the interstate. LF as well as cash flow, market share, and earnings are all part of the constant analysis that should be done of any commercial activity.
Amtrak NEVER does that. Amtrak instead fools itself and fools its bankers in Congress and its client state governments with phony-baloney data about transaction volumes ("ridership") and other irrelevancies.
ITEM: Amtrak's net loss last year was UP from the year before, for the umpteenth year in a row, even after all the subsidy and the deferred maintenance and the shrunken fleet and all the other voodoo accounting. That is why Amtrak is still a sinking ship, and why Interim President and CEO Joe Boardman, just like his several predecessors, is no different from Captain Edward Smith of the White Star Line. And trains like the Harrisburg – Philadelphia locals, or Acela, or the Heartland Flyer, with their low load factor, whatever the ridership, are just like that tiny scrape in the hull that eventually worked its disproportionate magic on the fortunes of the RMS Titanic.
[End quote]
2) Amtrak issued another route renewal report, and issued a final report on a second route.
The Pioneer route report, which was commented on previously in this space, was issued in a final form with no real changes in how Amtrak perceives to put this train between Denver and Seattle back into service at extremely high costs and a too long lead time, despite questioning from two United States Senators along the route, Senator Crapo of Idaho, and Senator Wyden of Oregon.
The new report issued was for restoration of the North Coast Hiawatha (Originally, the North Coast Limited, pre-Amtrak.) over the original Northern Pacific Railroad tracks. This route will parallel the Empire Builder route, but make a more southerly trip. Pre-Amtrak, the Empire Builder and the North Coast Limited were strong rivals between Chicago and Seattle, and both routes have breath-taking mountain scenery. The North Coast Hiawatha was one of the trains massacred by the route cuts of the Carter Administration.
Amtrak wants – yes, we're not kidding – over one billion dollars to restore this route, with the bulk of the money going to track upgrades. After the Burlington, Northern Pacific, and Great Northern railroads were all folded into one company (which eventually became BNSF when the Santa Fe was added to the mix), the Northern Pacific route was considered redundant to the Great Northern (Empire Builder) route, and was downgraded. Part of the route in Montana was sold to a short line operator, too.
All of that aside, Amtrak has come out with ridiculously high figures for route restoration, including an amazing $330,000,000 just for six trainset of new equipment, including locomotives. This works out to an astounding $4,500,000 per piece of equipment, which is not only impossible to justify, but incredible anyone could present this figure with a straight face. Additionally, Amtrak demands millions and millions of dollars for crew training, as it has done in previous reports.
This analysis of the North Coast Hiawatha landed in the This Week at Amtrak mailbox.
[begin quote]
Amtrak North Coast Hiawatha Report Reflects Apathy and Atrophy; Fails to Answer Many Questions
By Joseph D. Henchman
October 17, 2009
Introduction
On October 16, 2009, Amtrak published the North Coast Hiawatha Passenger Rail Study as required by the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008 (PRIIA). That law required Amtrak to produce a report within one year of October 16, 2008 examining the feasibility of restoring passenger rail service between Chicago and Seattle via the former Northern Pacific mainline in Southern Montana.
Confronted with a political environment favorable to the expansion of its services, the report suggests an institution whose marketing and innovative instincts have atrophied. The report's tone reflects a determination to drag out the timeline and extract as many subsidies as possible rather than seriously consider how a successful passenger rail service in the study area can be implemented.
Below are specific areas the report is insufficient or raises serious concerns.
Amtrak penalizes the study train for diverted passengers from other trains, but does not credit it for passengers fed to other trains.
Amtrak's report penalizes the ticket revenue of the North Coast Hiawatha by $8 million because Amtrak estimates the train will divert passengers from the Empire Builder, a heavily-patronized Amtrak train (693 passengers each train in FY 2009 through July) that also operates daily between Seattle and Chicago. Amtrak goes so far as to say that the diverted revenue will "increase Amtrak's direct operating loss."
This analysis is incomplete for two reasons. First, the Empire Builder is often sold out for being over capacity, so an additional train may have the net impact of freeing up space on that train to be sold to others, wiping out any revenue loss. Second, and more importantly, Amtrak does not estimate additional revenue for other trains from the addition of the North Coast Hiawatha (or if they do, they don't report it). Few Amtrak long-distance passengers ride end-to-end, with many taking shorter trips often involving transfers to other trains. On the west end is the Seattle-Portland Cascade train as well as the long-distance Coast Starlight to California. On the east end are services to St. Louis, New Orleans, Washington, Boston, New York, and Michigan. Added service into and out of Seattle and Chicago will result in additional revenues for all of these trains. If Amtrak "penalizes" the North Coast Hiawatha for "diverting" passenger revenue from trains, it should also "credit" the North Coast Hiawatha for "feeding" passenger revenue to other trains.
One approach Amtrak did not take would be to estimate system-wide revenues and expenses from the addition of the North Coast Hiawatha. This would give a true picture of the actual incremental cost of service expansion. Amtrak is also studying the expansion of services in several other routes, and is producing piecemeal reports on financial impacts, one-by-one. As Amtrak adds trains and frequencies, the additional options stimulate demand beyond that of one-train-on-one-corridor. A comprehensive approach of these proposals would be necessary for informed decision-making.
Amtrak Inexplicably Buries Its Conclusion that the Train Will Cost Its Operating Costs
There are two types of costs associated with running trains. One are relatively fixed costs that do not vary with the number of trains (system reservations and website, management costs, station costs), and the other are costs that vary with the number of trains (crew costs, fuel, payments to host railroads, and to some extent equipment maintenance). Amtrak's estimate of North Coast Hiawatha operations, put in these terms, is as follows:
Passenger Related Revenue (not including $8 million revenue penalty for diversions from Empire Builder) – $51,000,000
Variable Expense: Fuel – $7,400,000
Variable Expense: Train Crew Labor – $13,000,000
Variable Expense: On-Board Services Labor – $14,700,000
Variable Expense: Mechanical – $11,900,000
Total Variable Expenses – $47,000,000
Net, Variable Expenses – +$3,000,000
Non-Variable: Station & System Expenses – $27,100,000
Total, All Expenses – $74,100,000
Total Net, All Expenses – ($24,100,000)
Farebox Recovery, Variable Expenses Only – 108.5%
Farebox Recovery, All Expenses (Amtrak reduces the farebox recovery by 10 percentage points by excluding the diverted revenue to the Empire Builder) – 68.8%
Amtrak's long-distance service requires subsidies to cover its operating shortfalls [based on Amtrak accounting methods]. Few if any recover 68.8% of their costs for all expenses, or actually break even on variable expenses, as Amtrak estimates here. Why Amtrak buries this information is inexplicable. One possibility would be that acknowledging Amtrak will run a train with a rather positive financial performance undermines its argument that massive subsidies are required to operate it.
Note: Amtrak does not clarify whether its estimate of system and route costs are the amounts that will be assigned to the North Coast Hiawatha or whether they are incremental costs of adding the train. For example, assume (using made-up numbers) Amtrak spends $100,000 a year operating the existing station at Fargo, North Dakota (which the North Coast Hiawatha would stop at), and $5 million a year running its existing national reservation system. Assume also Amtrak's cost estimates in the report include line-items of $50,000 for the Fargo station and $200,000 for system reservations (they don't; those items are not broken out). Does that mean Amtrak is spending an additional $250,000 when the North Coast Hiawatha is launched, or rather the North Coast Hiawatha will be assigned $250,000 of existing costs?
If the latter, it is relevant information, but its inclusion warps the decision-making process. Among Amtrak's costs of operating the North Coast Hiawatha would be costs Amtrak is already incurring, and will incur whether the route is launched or not. To use economics terms, a decision-maker would be erroneously looking at average cost instead of marginal cost.
If it is the former, Amtrak needs to justify the $27 million in route and system expenses beyond merely saying they are "other direct expenses." The amount reflects a third of the expenses associated with running the train, and while not suspect on its face, it does raise questions. Why does Amtrak's report not include a technical appendix itemizing the costs it has estimated?
Amtrak Provides Just One Option: A Single, Slow, Short Train over the Entire Route
Unlike here, Amtrak's past studies have often included a series of operating options. The recent Pioneer Service Study looked at several different alignments, the Sunset Limited Service Study looked at different service options, and the Ohio Service Study looked at different frequency options. Here, however, Amtrak provides no option other than one single, slow, short train. Given Amtrak's own ridership and cost estimates, this is indefensible. It also allows Amtrak to demand higher subsidies than would be required to operate the North Coast Hiawatha.
The report recommends the establishment of one round trip a day along the 2,300 mile route on a 49 hour schedule, for an average speed of 47 M.P.H. (The North Coast Limited in 1956 managed 46.5 hours, so Amtrak proposes a train slower than one run 50 years ago.). The train would consist of locomotives, a baggage car, a crew car, two sleeping cars, three coaches, a dining car, and a lounge. Since each sleeping car has a maximum capacity of 49 and each coach has a maximum capacity of 74, that would mean a total train capacity of 320.
On page 28, Amtrak estimates even this slow, single train will result in 359,800 passengers a year, or 492 per train. On the face of it, this suggests the train will fill 153% of its capacity. Of course, few passengers will ride end-to-end, resulting in turnover en route. It would be useful to know Amtrak's estimate of passenger-miles or load factor, but the report does not provide those numbers. Even if each seat turns over once per trip, the load factor would still be 76% (which would make airlines envious).
Amtrak's report handicaps itself by limiting the train's capacity. Many of a train's expenses are fixed (engineer and conductor costs, for instance) or grow only minimally (fuel and service attendant costs, for instance) with additional cars. In the past, American passenger trains have operated with 16 to 22 cars (Today, in Canada, the Canadian transcontinental often operates with 22 cars in high season). The only serious limiting factor on train lengths are station platform lengths and locomotive power (itself limited based on the route's curves and grades) and the ability to transmit hotel power from the locomotive to the rest of the train; usually 18 cars in the United States is the maximum train length because of this. Amtrak provides no information on why it limits the North Coast Hiawatha to nine cars (with only five being revenue cars) other than it lacks the imagination to try for more.
Since Amtrak's proposed train already has locomotives, a baggage car, a crew car, dining car, and lounge, any additional cars would be revenue cars generating sleeping or coach ticket revenue. A 14-car train, for instance, would double the North Coast Hiawatha's capacity, potentially doubling its revenue and most certainly not doubling its costs. Given Amtrak's ridership estimates, such a capacity expansion would be justifiable. Amtrak does not investigate this option.
Amtrak also does not investigate the option of greater frequencies or runs over segments of the route (aside from noting that Washington State would not object to running trains to Minneapolis instead of all the way to Chicago). As Amtrak has discovered with service in California and Illinois, additional trains each day can reduce subsidies because (1) added frequencies can mean equipment spends less time idle at each end and (2) added frequencies can increase revenue from additional riders taking advantage of more options. A second frequency 12-hours off of the proposed schedule would be a natural consideration, as would additional day-train frequencies between segments of the route. It is unfortunate Amtrak looks at additional frequencies not as expanding passengers options and thus revenue, but rather as something to be penalized for "cannibalizing" passengers and revenue from existing trains.
Most transportation providers offer travelers options. One of Amtrak's largest weaknesses is many of its trains run only once per day, resulting in equipment sitting idle for 6-18 hours at each end and passengers giving up if they cannot work with Amtrak's one timetable option. Twice the trains can in many cases result in more than twice as many passengers. Fixed route costs, such as station operating costs (here estimated to be $27.1 million), can also be spread over more trains. As noted above, Amtrak estimates that the train's operation itself, exclusive of system and route costs, will break even.
Amtrak Does Not Investigate Marketing Options
Amtrak's report also provides no discussion of service options or marketing opportunities. The report mentions the North Coast Hiawatha's Livingstone station is not far from Yellowstone National Park, but does not enlighten the reader as to whether Amtrak will capitalize on that beyond leaving passengers at Livingstone. (In the past, the Northern Pacific Railroad ran shuttle trains and later shuttle buses to the park.) The private Grand Canyon Railway in Arizona offers four different accommodation options, including a basic coach seat option. The higher-priced options include snacks, entertainment, and Grand Canyon National Park admission. In Europe, the CityNightLine overnight train service offers several different accommodation options, with higher-priced options including welcome wine or beer, an array of magazines, and breakfast on arrival. Other Amtrak trains have included parlor lounges, observation cars, children's playrooms, quiet cars, wine tastings, and enroute tour guides. Other ideas could include on-board treadmills or weight equipment, video arcades, taverns or bars, or gift shops. Amtrak's report shows no creative thinking with regard to providing services to passengers, an important aspect of its operation.
This is particularly indefensible in that Amtrak requires the purchase of brand-new railcars to launch the service, and estimates it will take 4-5 years to begin operations after funding becomes available. If Amtrak needs five years and new trainsets to provide exactly what it has provided for years on other routes, it is not thinking sufficiently creatively.
Amtrak's report also provides no discussion of joint marketing opportunities for other popular attractions along the route, including the Mall of America in Minneapolis; historic tourist attractions in Butte, Montana (a larger town which Amtrak inexplicably writes off without bothering to estimate the costs of serving it despite rails existing and being on the train's route, even though it reports that public and Montana Department of Transportation comments strongly favored studying operating service via Butte) and Bozeman, Montana; airports; and small-town communities currently without rail service in Washington State.
Conclusion
Throughout the report and its actions in recent history, Amtrak views its role as merely common-carrier transportation handling passengers when they show up. Instead, Amtrak should push itself to figure out how it can develop a market, providing a travel experience. Doing so will improve the bottom line for the company and for taxpayers, but requires shaking Amtrak out of its apathy and atrophy.
Questions Unanswered by Amtrak In Its Report
1. What is Amtrak's estimate of the load factor for the North Coast Hiawatha, and how many passenger-miles will it generate?
2. What are the system-wide and marginal revenues and costs associated with launching the North Coast Hiawatha, including additional revenues to other trains from its operation?
3. How many of the cost items within Amtrak's estimated $74.1 million in estimated North Coast Hiawatha operating expenses will be incurred whether or not the train route is launched?
4. What are the revenue and costs associated with other operating options, such as a longer train of 14-22 cars, or additional frequencies?
5. What additional level of capital investment would be required to raise average operating speed to 55 M.P.H. (42 hour schedule), 65 M.P.H. (36 hour schedule), or 75 M.P.H. (31 hour schedule)?
6. Given that Amtrak will be purchasing new equipment for these trains, what innovative ideas will Amtrak explore for the equipment?
7. What marketing opportunities will Amtrak explore for the operation of the trains, to maximize passenger travel experience and develop the market?
8. What are the costs associated with operating via Butte, Montana?
9. How would a system-wide expansion of train lengths and frequencies for long-distance trains change the operating performance of this route?
10. Why does Amtrak estimate so many people will ride the North Coast Hiawatha, relative to other long-distance trains?
About the Author
Joseph Henchman lives in Arlington, Virginia, and is interested in transportation economics and rail planning. He works as an attorney and policy analyst with a non-profit think tank in Washington, D.C., but this report is not associated with that organization. His email address is jdhenchman [at] yahoo.com.
[End quote]
3) Amtrak has now issued four reports since the end of the summer. First, the Sunset Limited – East of New Orleans/Gulf Coast report (Amtrak doesn't want to run the service); the Ohio 3-C report for restored service between Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati (Amtrak doesn't want to run the service), the Pioneer report for restored service between Denver and Seattle (Amtrak doesn't want to run the service), and, finally, the North Coast Hiawatha restored service report (Amtrak doesn't want to run that service, either).
When you add up Amtrak's estimates to restart these four routes, it's over $2,000,000,000 (that's two billion dollars, if you don't want to count zeros).
In reality, if Amtrak really wanted to do any of these projects, the estimates are probably high by at least 40%, if not a full 50%. But, when you're a planner for a quasi-governmental agency and you're accustomed to spending someone else's money (That would be money which belongs to you, the taxpayer.), costs don't really matter. What matters is convenience and lots of bells and whistles (No pun intended.). Amtrak's dream world dictates all new equipment, extravagant stations where smaller ones will do, crew training costs which are incomprehensible to any railroad professional, and a gold-plating of railroad infrastructure "just in case" the railroads want their entire right-of-way wish lists fulfilled at someone else's expense.
All of this leads to the inescapable, sad conclusion that until Amtrak has a new management team which has any inkling of a vision for the future which includes new passenger car orders, a business plan based on reality instead of only raiding government treasuries, or without fantasies of ignoring the conventional passenger rail business because of the glamour of an incorrect assumption Amtrak will be the exclusive high speed rail operator (there's a thought to give you nightmares for a week), restored long routes such as the North Coast Hiawatha may not be the best plan.
As presented, Amtrak's four route restoration plans are a prescription for disaster.
The Gulf Coast report laments Amtrak went to all of the trouble of studying multiple scenarios, and settled on four, all of which Amtrak has priced too high. The reality of the Gulf Coast report is if Amtrak simply extends the City of New Orleans from New Orleans to Orlando, Amtrak will instantly reestablish a Chicago-Florida train, restore service on the Gulf Coast, and have a powerhouse operation for the cost of one extra trainset for the City of New Orleans (due to current too long equipment layovers in New Orleans) and the cost of Positive Train Control installation on the CSX line between New Orleans and Jacksonville.
The Pioneer report wants to set up a separate operation for the Pioneer between Denver and Seattle, with through-cars on the back of the California Zephyr between Chicago and Denver. Amtrak never considered the huge benefit of running a second frequency in the form of the Pioneer between Chicago and Denver, apparently because it would be too much trouble, no matter how much of a financial gain would be found.
The Ohio report wants to set up a pretty good service, but with a lousy end point in Cincinnati so the service will not connect withe the Cardinal; Amtrak continues its reckless policy of not often enough offering connecting trains just in case some passengers may want to travel on more than one route to reach a final destination.
None of the reports take into account the matrix effect of connectivity, more travel choices, or more stations served. Amtrak can only see costs, instead of benefits.
Little of Amtrak's work reflects it was created by anyone with real concepts of passenger service, what's overall best for passengers, or what posture best serves Amtrak – and, our country – financially.
For right now, until some of this changes, Amtrak may best serve itself and all of us by making some logical, small steps which will strengthen the company financially. Things like Kansas City-Omaha, Oklahoma City-Kansas City, Peoria-St. Louis, Savannah-Jacksonville, or Barstow-Bakersfield (/San Jose). Maybe think about Harrisburg-Newark via the Lehigh Valley.
Even easier would be to add truly new Superliner capacity to the existing long distance trains, to start to capture many of those $1,000 tickets Amtrak is losing now because the sleepers are full at various peak load points.
For those hoping for restoration of routes which never should have went away, this fall is truly a season of discontent. Amtrak seems to have gone out of its way to make things as difficult as possible for any returning trains, yet its chairman of the board and some senior executives are making presentations around the country about how Amtrak is the perfect organization to be the exclusive high speed rail operator for new services in America.
Until Amtrak gets its house in order and demonstrates it has some – any! – vision, no one (even government bureaucrats) are going to be foolish enough to anoint Amtrak as the high speed rail operator.
4) Last Saturday, October 17, 2009, a determined band of people met together here in Jacksonville, Florida. The group named itself the Sunset Marketing and Revitalization Team, and has been meeting for over a year now at various locations along the former transcontinental route of the Sunset, prior to its unceremonious loss of the east end of the route beyond New Orleans due to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
John Sita, Jr. of New Orleans is chairman of the SMART group, and Jerry Sullivan of Jacksonville was the gracious host of the meeting.
The meeting lasted three hours, and the SMART members represented a number of states along the route, both east and west of New Orleans. One SMART member from Louisiana made an all-rail trip from his home to the meeting. To cover the roughly 600 miles from New Orleans to Jacksonville without the Sunset, he rode first to Washington via Birmingham, Atlanta, and Charlotte on the Crescent for a full day and a night, and then took the Silver Star from Washington for the afternoon and overnight trip to Jacksonville. Whew! Talk about dedication ...
Without getting into the various discussions and deliberations the group had, what is notable is the very need for the existence of this group. This group has no formal sponsorship, and is completely self-funded. These people banded together because they feel their quasi-governmental national passenger rail carrier has failed in its duty and obligations to restart the Sunset Limited east of New Orleans, and has constantly failed during the entire existence of Amtrak to make the Sunset Limited a daily train between Los Angeles and New Orleans (And Orlando when the train ran its full route.).
In the real, non-Amtrak world, this group should never have been necessary. If Amtrak had the compunction to live up to its mandate as a national rail carrier, there would be no discussion about the gaping hole in Amtrak's route map between New Orleans and Jacksonville. An entire region of the country is disenfranchised for passenger rail service because Amtrak isn't clever enough to figure out how to make the Sunset a success.
So, a group whose membership is more than 50 souls is working together to take the place of a taxpayer funded organization's planning department to figure out how to make the Sunset Limited viable. Amtrak should be terribly embarrassed.
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This Week at Amtrak; October 30, 2009
A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
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Volume 6, Number 45
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1) Here is the latest press release from Crown corporation VIA Rail Canada, Amtrak’s cold weather cousin in the Great Northland. Read, absorb, and learn.
[begin quote]
VIA Rail Canada to boost famed transcontinental train's accessibility and appeal
MONTREAL, Oct. 30 /PRNewswire/ - VIA Rail Canada today announced a $19.5 million program for the reconfiguration of 12 of the stylish stainless steel passenger cars used on its western transcontinental train, the Canadian, to increase its accessibility and market appeal. The work is being funded from the $407 million allocated for passenger rail improvements under the Government of Canada's Economic Action Plan.
"It gives me great pleasure to announce the complete redesign and rebuilding of these cars," said VIA President and Chief Executive Officer, Paul Cote. The contract for the rebuilding of VIA's eight Chateau sleeping cars and four Park sleeper-dome-lounge cars has been awarded to Avalon Rail, Inc., of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Avalon Rail specializes in remanufacturing passenger rolling stock of all types. The company will use various Canadian engineering, design and supply firms for a portion of the project. The cars will be delivered in 2011.
Mr. Cote added, "Avalon Rail was selected for this demanding work through a competitive bidding process based on numerous factors. These included price, craftsmanship, a detailed knowledge of the equipment to be rebuilt and on-time completion of previous projects."
"We are honoured to undertake this work for VIA," said June Garland, president of Avalon Rail. "The Canadian is a living legend, offering thousands of travellers from around the world the ultimate in safe, stylish and sustainable rail travel every year for more than a half-century. I can think of no better showcase for the skills of Avalon's dedicated craftspeople."
The work involved in the modernization and major upgrading of this classic rolling stock is extensive. The eight Chateau sleeping cars will be reconfigured with an all-new arrangement of six upscale cabins designed to accommodate up to three passengers each.
Each sleeping cabin will be completely self-contained and will include an en-suite washroom plus a separate shower. The new cabins will also feature wood paneling, sofa seating, a widescreen television and controls to enable passengers to raise or lower the beds whenever they desire. This elegant new design has been selected to enable VIA's Canadian to attract the growing clientele for more upscale travel experiences.
This program will also substantially increase the train's accessibility for travellers with special needs. The four existing Park car bedrooms will be replaced by two large upscale cabins. One will be identical to those in the rebuilt Chateau sleeping cars. The other will be an extra-large, fully-accessible cabin. It will provide separate, fully-accessible washroom and shower facilities. Each Park car will also feature an onboard wheelchair lift.
About Avalon Rail, Inc.
Based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Avalon Rail is renowned for the excellence of its highly-specialized remanufacturing of vintage and contemporary passenger rail rolling stock. The firm's skilled craftspeople have extensive experience in renewing the sturdy and durable equipment produced from the 1930s to the 1980s by the Budd Company, the originator of stainless steel passenger rail cars.
About VIA Rail Canada
As Canada's national rail passenger service, VIA Rail Canada's mandate is to provide efficient, environmentally sustainable and cost-effective passenger transportation, both in Canada's business corridor and in remote and rural regions of the country. Every week, VIA operates 503 intercity, transcontinental and regional trains linking 450 communities across its 12,500-kilometre route network. The demand for VIA services is growing as travellers increasingly turn to train travel as a safe, hassle-free and environmentally responsible alternative to congested roads and airports.
VIA's Stainless Steel Fleet Backgrounder
The 174 cars in VIA's stainless steel fleet were primarily built for Canadian Pacific (CP) in 1954-1955 by the Budd Company of Philadelphia, the world's leading manufacturer of stainless steel rolling stock. These elegant and robust cars were used to create CP's Canadian, the last all-new train of the Art Moderne-influenced Streamlined Era. VIA bought this distinctive and durable rolling stock when it took over the operation of the former CP services in 1978.
Between 1990 and 1993, VIA completely rebuilt the CP cars, as well as some additional Budd equipment acquired from the U.S. [Editor’s note: This equipment came from Amtrak equipment which was deemed surplus.] The cars were stripped to their shells and fully remanufactured for greater efficiency and passenger comfort at a fraction of the cost of new and unproven equipment. New interiors and a head end power (HEP) system were installed to eliminate the obsolete steam and battery-generator systems that previously provided lighting, heating and air conditioning.
This $200 million project not only renewed the cars for another 15-20 years of productive service on the Canadian and other long-haul and remote trains, but reduced operating costs by more than $20 million annually. A subsequent HEP 2 program applied the same modernization techniques and systems to 33 Budd stainless steel cars for use in the Quebec-Windsor Corridor.
As far back as the 1950s, Budd proudly proclaimed that not one piece of its rolling stock had ever been retired because it had worn out. More than half-a-century later, VIA's HEP 1 and 2 fleets reinforce that accurate. SOURCE VIA RAIL CANADA INC.
[End quote]
2) Sadly, VIA Rail Canada has time and again in these modern times been labeled “Canada’s worst run company.” Even sadder, this smaller and feistier company than Amtrak, which operates far fewer trains, with a much smaller equipment pool, and hundreds of millions of dollars less of free Canadian federal monies, constantly out bests Amtrak when it comes to the professionalism of onboard personnel, clever and widespread marketing, the overall maintenance of equipment, and the desire to succeed.
3) VIA is taking Chateau sleeping cars and brilliantly refurbishing them to provide drawing rooms for three passengers. This delightful throwback to the 1960s and before provides two lower berths in one room, without having to purchase two separate bedrooms and opening them en suite. A third bed, as an upper bunk, is provided, as well. One private toilet and one sink (along with a new shower) fill out the room’s amenities. Note the wood paneling being added, too. It’s notable Amtrak has no drawing rooms in its inventory, even though full bedrooms in all trains always sell out before roomettes.
The remake of the rear end observation dome Park cars to accommodate passengers in wheelchairs and with other challenges speaks volumes for VIA; they understand the upscale and senior citizen market, and are strategically placing themselves to take full advantage of the piles of cash accumulated for long trains such as The Canadian heavily laden with sleeping cars and appropriate accompanying amenities, with less emphasis placed on lower revenue producing coaches.
Amtrak needs to pay attention to this move by VIA Rail Canada, as it will once again be trailblazing a new standard in sleeping car travel.
4) While we’re in the neighborhood, let’s take a look at some of the many opportunities the bureaucrats who populate Amtrak’s executive cadre through the years have flushed down the drain.
These same Budd Company cars VIA is bragging have never gone out of style were once a part of Amtrak’s Heritage fleet, too. When the late Henry Christie made the famous “A” and “B” cars lists of which equipment Amtrak would keep and upgrade from the myriad of fleets it inherited from the private railroads, almost 100% of the equipment retained was Budd-built. The excellent equipment built in the same generations by Pullman Standard was – alas – built using carbon steel instead of the longer-lasting aluminum and stainless steel used by Budd, and, as a result, many of those excellent and exciting cars merely rusted away internally, becoming non-roadworthy and non-useful to Amtrak.
The Budd fleet, which numbered in the hundreds of cars, included crew dorms, sleeping cars of various configurations (including all-bedroom cars on the Auto Train which had drawing rooms), diners, lounges, and coaches.
Through the years, Amtrak’s disdain for this equipment – as opposed to the correct attitude of VIA Rail Canada – grew, and the equipment was sidelined as quickly as possible, with excuses such as no new replacement parts were available and had to be individually machined, and the cars were “too worn out” to have a useful future. (Tell that to the Canadians, and they will look at you like you’re too much in love with winter weather.)
So, even though the Heritage Budd fleet had millions of reliable miles on each car, and all of the fleet had been expensively upgraded to head end power systems for hotel power and air conditioning and heat, the cars were stripped away from Amtrak’s fleet roster, unloved and unwanted.
Many of those cars today and in the hands of railroad equipment brokers, waiting to be loved and used, again.
In addition to the hundreds of single level Heritage Budd fleet cars, also cast away by Amtrak were over 60 of the original Santa Fe Hi-Level cars, which were the basis for the successful development of today’s Superliner fleet. Less than 10 of these cars remain in Amtrak’s fleet, most notably as the Pacific Parlour cars on the Coast Starlight, and some coaches used on the Heartland Flyer stub end train.
The original Pennsylvania Railroad Metroliner cars from the 1960s, numbering in the dozens, sat for years in yards, and, while a few were placed in service for other purposes, almost all of the equipment was scrapped where it sat, gorily cut up and sent to scrap metal dealers.
The Rohr Turboliner sets of equipment (entire trainsets, such as today’s Acela and Talgo trainsets) are another example of equipment summarily discarded by Amtrak, even after the State of New York paid to have three trainsets rehabilitated for use between Albany and New York City, and a then-chief executive officer of the New York DOT by the name of Joseph Boardman (Today’s Amtrak Interim President and Chief Executive Officer) raised cane because Amtrak appeared to be hiding the unused trainsets outside of New York State and refusing to use them for the purpose New York State paid huge money for rehabilitation of the equipment.
5) The question must be asked: Why is Amtrak so quick to discard solid, reliable equipment which other railroads cherish and brag about, resulting in shorter consists, less revenue passenger miles, and overall less income? Why is VIA happy to brag this equipment constitutes a vital core of its company, and cheerfully says rehabilitating this equipment is saving the company tens of millions of dollars, while Amtrak only sees inconvenience and headaches?
Perhaps the answer is VIA has truly been on the brink before, and has a much more precarious political situation under a parliamentary system of government than our system here in the Unites States. It only takes five members of Parliament (The Prime Minister’s version of our presidential cabinet.) to make a decision to do anything to VIA Rail Canada it pleases, including putting it up for sale, as is currently being discussed in Canada.
Amtrak has much more political protection in Congress than VIA has in Parliament, and, perhaps, Amtrak feels since it always has a steady stream of free federal monies coming its way each year, it doesn’t have to be as clever as VIA Rail Canada and constantly prove its chops.
What a pity. The folks running VIA Rail Canada can certainly teach the folks running Amtrak a few things about the best use of resources and making a silk purse out of what Amtrak considers a sow’s ear. Necessity is the mother of invention. Amtrak needs more necessity, not more coddling.
6) As always, the This Week at Amtrak electronic mailbox has something interesting lurking about. Here is a missive about the last issue of TWA featuring the untangling of Amtrak math by Andrew Selden.
[begin quote]
Another excellent issue. It goes into great detail pointing out exactly what is wrong with the numbers that Amtrak distributes to support its internal policies. In a sane environment, the data would determine policy, rather than the opposite. Unfortunately Amtrak is not really accountable to any agency that can force it to meet the goal of an effective national passenger rail system (and probably there is little consensus of rail advocates on what such a goal really means, much less public agreement on that even being a legitimate goal).
Looking back over the history of passenger rail service in the U.S., it is very unfortunate that the kinds of analyses you present were not available when many railroads filed data with state and federal regulatory agencies to justify their “train off” petitions. I see a great deal of similarity between Amtrak’s actions today and many railroad’s activities 50 years ago. Just as Amtrak selects and creates data to justify its desires, those railroads that wanted all their passenger trains to be eliminated did the same, no matter whether they were profitable, made a positive addition to their cash flow, or not. Some didn’t find out until it was too late that they were better off when they still operated passenger trains. The “fact” that passenger service was an anathema to the operation of a profitable corporation became the accepted paradigm of the day to many railroad executives, who in turn were very headstrong and surrounded themselves only with “yes men.” Too few opponents of that policy, both in regulatory agencies or as members of the general public, had the time and resources to interpret the data presented by the railroads or to question its accuracy in order to counter the misleading conclusions that the railroads created. There were some exceptions, but the individuals who fought for retention of profitable or break-even rail service in the public interest were eventually worn down, driven from their jobs, or left them for better opportunity.
If only URPA were around then.
[End quote]
If you are reading someone else’s copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can receive your own free copy each edition by sending your e-mail address to
[email protected]
You MUST include your name, preferred e-mail address, and city and state where you live. If you have filters or firewalls placed on your Internet connection, set your e-mail to receive incoming mail from [email protected]; we are unable to go through any approvals processes for individuals. This mailing list is kept strictly confidential and is not shared or used for any purposes other than distribution of This Week at Amtrak or related URPA materials.
All other correspondence, including requests to unsubscribe should be addressed to
[email protected]
Copies of This Week at Amtrak are archived on URPA’s web site, www.unitedrail.org and also on www.todaywithjb.blogspot.com where other rail-related writings of Bruce Richardson may also be found.
URPA leadership members are available for speaking engagements.
J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739
[email protected]
http://www.unitedrail.org
A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
America’s foremost passenger rail policy institute
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203 • Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739, Electronic Mail [email protected] • http://www.unitedrail.org
Volume 6, Number 45
Founded over three decades ago in 1976, URPA is a nationally known policy institute which focuses on solutions and plans for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota, California, Arizona, New Mexico, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and other cities. For more detailed information, along with a variety of position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at http://www.unitedrail.org.
URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from any outside sources.
1) Here is the latest press release from Crown corporation VIA Rail Canada, Amtrak’s cold weather cousin in the Great Northland. Read, absorb, and learn.
[begin quote]
VIA Rail Canada to boost famed transcontinental train's accessibility and appeal
MONTREAL, Oct. 30 /PRNewswire/ - VIA Rail Canada today announced a $19.5 million program for the reconfiguration of 12 of the stylish stainless steel passenger cars used on its western transcontinental train, the Canadian, to increase its accessibility and market appeal. The work is being funded from the $407 million allocated for passenger rail improvements under the Government of Canada's Economic Action Plan.
"It gives me great pleasure to announce the complete redesign and rebuilding of these cars," said VIA President and Chief Executive Officer, Paul Cote. The contract for the rebuilding of VIA's eight Chateau sleeping cars and four Park sleeper-dome-lounge cars has been awarded to Avalon Rail, Inc., of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Avalon Rail specializes in remanufacturing passenger rolling stock of all types. The company will use various Canadian engineering, design and supply firms for a portion of the project. The cars will be delivered in 2011.
Mr. Cote added, "Avalon Rail was selected for this demanding work through a competitive bidding process based on numerous factors. These included price, craftsmanship, a detailed knowledge of the equipment to be rebuilt and on-time completion of previous projects."
"We are honoured to undertake this work for VIA," said June Garland, president of Avalon Rail. "The Canadian is a living legend, offering thousands of travellers from around the world the ultimate in safe, stylish and sustainable rail travel every year for more than a half-century. I can think of no better showcase for the skills of Avalon's dedicated craftspeople."
The work involved in the modernization and major upgrading of this classic rolling stock is extensive. The eight Chateau sleeping cars will be reconfigured with an all-new arrangement of six upscale cabins designed to accommodate up to three passengers each.
Each sleeping cabin will be completely self-contained and will include an en-suite washroom plus a separate shower. The new cabins will also feature wood paneling, sofa seating, a widescreen television and controls to enable passengers to raise or lower the beds whenever they desire. This elegant new design has been selected to enable VIA's Canadian to attract the growing clientele for more upscale travel experiences.
This program will also substantially increase the train's accessibility for travellers with special needs. The four existing Park car bedrooms will be replaced by two large upscale cabins. One will be identical to those in the rebuilt Chateau sleeping cars. The other will be an extra-large, fully-accessible cabin. It will provide separate, fully-accessible washroom and shower facilities. Each Park car will also feature an onboard wheelchair lift.
About Avalon Rail, Inc.
Based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Avalon Rail is renowned for the excellence of its highly-specialized remanufacturing of vintage and contemporary passenger rail rolling stock. The firm's skilled craftspeople have extensive experience in renewing the sturdy and durable equipment produced from the 1930s to the 1980s by the Budd Company, the originator of stainless steel passenger rail cars.
About VIA Rail Canada
As Canada's national rail passenger service, VIA Rail Canada's mandate is to provide efficient, environmentally sustainable and cost-effective passenger transportation, both in Canada's business corridor and in remote and rural regions of the country. Every week, VIA operates 503 intercity, transcontinental and regional trains linking 450 communities across its 12,500-kilometre route network. The demand for VIA services is growing as travellers increasingly turn to train travel as a safe, hassle-free and environmentally responsible alternative to congested roads and airports.
VIA's Stainless Steel Fleet Backgrounder
The 174 cars in VIA's stainless steel fleet were primarily built for Canadian Pacific (CP) in 1954-1955 by the Budd Company of Philadelphia, the world's leading manufacturer of stainless steel rolling stock. These elegant and robust cars were used to create CP's Canadian, the last all-new train of the Art Moderne-influenced Streamlined Era. VIA bought this distinctive and durable rolling stock when it took over the operation of the former CP services in 1978.
Between 1990 and 1993, VIA completely rebuilt the CP cars, as well as some additional Budd equipment acquired from the U.S. [Editor’s note: This equipment came from Amtrak equipment which was deemed surplus.] The cars were stripped to their shells and fully remanufactured for greater efficiency and passenger comfort at a fraction of the cost of new and unproven equipment. New interiors and a head end power (HEP) system were installed to eliminate the obsolete steam and battery-generator systems that previously provided lighting, heating and air conditioning.
This $200 million project not only renewed the cars for another 15-20 years of productive service on the Canadian and other long-haul and remote trains, but reduced operating costs by more than $20 million annually. A subsequent HEP 2 program applied the same modernization techniques and systems to 33 Budd stainless steel cars for use in the Quebec-Windsor Corridor.
As far back as the 1950s, Budd proudly proclaimed that not one piece of its rolling stock had ever been retired because it had worn out. More than half-a-century later, VIA's HEP 1 and 2 fleets reinforce that accurate. SOURCE VIA RAIL CANADA INC.
[End quote]
2) Sadly, VIA Rail Canada has time and again in these modern times been labeled “Canada’s worst run company.” Even sadder, this smaller and feistier company than Amtrak, which operates far fewer trains, with a much smaller equipment pool, and hundreds of millions of dollars less of free Canadian federal monies, constantly out bests Amtrak when it comes to the professionalism of onboard personnel, clever and widespread marketing, the overall maintenance of equipment, and the desire to succeed.
3) VIA is taking Chateau sleeping cars and brilliantly refurbishing them to provide drawing rooms for three passengers. This delightful throwback to the 1960s and before provides two lower berths in one room, without having to purchase two separate bedrooms and opening them en suite. A third bed, as an upper bunk, is provided, as well. One private toilet and one sink (along with a new shower) fill out the room’s amenities. Note the wood paneling being added, too. It’s notable Amtrak has no drawing rooms in its inventory, even though full bedrooms in all trains always sell out before roomettes.
The remake of the rear end observation dome Park cars to accommodate passengers in wheelchairs and with other challenges speaks volumes for VIA; they understand the upscale and senior citizen market, and are strategically placing themselves to take full advantage of the piles of cash accumulated for long trains such as The Canadian heavily laden with sleeping cars and appropriate accompanying amenities, with less emphasis placed on lower revenue producing coaches.
Amtrak needs to pay attention to this move by VIA Rail Canada, as it will once again be trailblazing a new standard in sleeping car travel.
4) While we’re in the neighborhood, let’s take a look at some of the many opportunities the bureaucrats who populate Amtrak’s executive cadre through the years have flushed down the drain.
These same Budd Company cars VIA is bragging have never gone out of style were once a part of Amtrak’s Heritage fleet, too. When the late Henry Christie made the famous “A” and “B” cars lists of which equipment Amtrak would keep and upgrade from the myriad of fleets it inherited from the private railroads, almost 100% of the equipment retained was Budd-built. The excellent equipment built in the same generations by Pullman Standard was – alas – built using carbon steel instead of the longer-lasting aluminum and stainless steel used by Budd, and, as a result, many of those excellent and exciting cars merely rusted away internally, becoming non-roadworthy and non-useful to Amtrak.
The Budd fleet, which numbered in the hundreds of cars, included crew dorms, sleeping cars of various configurations (including all-bedroom cars on the Auto Train which had drawing rooms), diners, lounges, and coaches.
Through the years, Amtrak’s disdain for this equipment – as opposed to the correct attitude of VIA Rail Canada – grew, and the equipment was sidelined as quickly as possible, with excuses such as no new replacement parts were available and had to be individually machined, and the cars were “too worn out” to have a useful future. (Tell that to the Canadians, and they will look at you like you’re too much in love with winter weather.)
So, even though the Heritage Budd fleet had millions of reliable miles on each car, and all of the fleet had been expensively upgraded to head end power systems for hotel power and air conditioning and heat, the cars were stripped away from Amtrak’s fleet roster, unloved and unwanted.
Many of those cars today and in the hands of railroad equipment brokers, waiting to be loved and used, again.
In addition to the hundreds of single level Heritage Budd fleet cars, also cast away by Amtrak were over 60 of the original Santa Fe Hi-Level cars, which were the basis for the successful development of today’s Superliner fleet. Less than 10 of these cars remain in Amtrak’s fleet, most notably as the Pacific Parlour cars on the Coast Starlight, and some coaches used on the Heartland Flyer stub end train.
The original Pennsylvania Railroad Metroliner cars from the 1960s, numbering in the dozens, sat for years in yards, and, while a few were placed in service for other purposes, almost all of the equipment was scrapped where it sat, gorily cut up and sent to scrap metal dealers.
The Rohr Turboliner sets of equipment (entire trainsets, such as today’s Acela and Talgo trainsets) are another example of equipment summarily discarded by Amtrak, even after the State of New York paid to have three trainsets rehabilitated for use between Albany and New York City, and a then-chief executive officer of the New York DOT by the name of Joseph Boardman (Today’s Amtrak Interim President and Chief Executive Officer) raised cane because Amtrak appeared to be hiding the unused trainsets outside of New York State and refusing to use them for the purpose New York State paid huge money for rehabilitation of the equipment.
5) The question must be asked: Why is Amtrak so quick to discard solid, reliable equipment which other railroads cherish and brag about, resulting in shorter consists, less revenue passenger miles, and overall less income? Why is VIA happy to brag this equipment constitutes a vital core of its company, and cheerfully says rehabilitating this equipment is saving the company tens of millions of dollars, while Amtrak only sees inconvenience and headaches?
Perhaps the answer is VIA has truly been on the brink before, and has a much more precarious political situation under a parliamentary system of government than our system here in the Unites States. It only takes five members of Parliament (The Prime Minister’s version of our presidential cabinet.) to make a decision to do anything to VIA Rail Canada it pleases, including putting it up for sale, as is currently being discussed in Canada.
Amtrak has much more political protection in Congress than VIA has in Parliament, and, perhaps, Amtrak feels since it always has a steady stream of free federal monies coming its way each year, it doesn’t have to be as clever as VIA Rail Canada and constantly prove its chops.
What a pity. The folks running VIA Rail Canada can certainly teach the folks running Amtrak a few things about the best use of resources and making a silk purse out of what Amtrak considers a sow’s ear. Necessity is the mother of invention. Amtrak needs more necessity, not more coddling.
6) As always, the This Week at Amtrak electronic mailbox has something interesting lurking about. Here is a missive about the last issue of TWA featuring the untangling of Amtrak math by Andrew Selden.
[begin quote]
Another excellent issue. It goes into great detail pointing out exactly what is wrong with the numbers that Amtrak distributes to support its internal policies. In a sane environment, the data would determine policy, rather than the opposite. Unfortunately Amtrak is not really accountable to any agency that can force it to meet the goal of an effective national passenger rail system (and probably there is little consensus of rail advocates on what such a goal really means, much less public agreement on that even being a legitimate goal).
Looking back over the history of passenger rail service in the U.S., it is very unfortunate that the kinds of analyses you present were not available when many railroads filed data with state and federal regulatory agencies to justify their “train off” petitions. I see a great deal of similarity between Amtrak’s actions today and many railroad’s activities 50 years ago. Just as Amtrak selects and creates data to justify its desires, those railroads that wanted all their passenger trains to be eliminated did the same, no matter whether they were profitable, made a positive addition to their cash flow, or not. Some didn’t find out until it was too late that they were better off when they still operated passenger trains. The “fact” that passenger service was an anathema to the operation of a profitable corporation became the accepted paradigm of the day to many railroad executives, who in turn were very headstrong and surrounded themselves only with “yes men.” Too few opponents of that policy, both in regulatory agencies or as members of the general public, had the time and resources to interpret the data presented by the railroads or to question its accuracy in order to counter the misleading conclusions that the railroads created. There were some exceptions, but the individuals who fought for retention of profitable or break-even rail service in the public interest were eventually worn down, driven from their jobs, or left them for better opportunity.
If only URPA were around then.
[End quote]
If you are reading someone else’s copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can receive your own free copy each edition by sending your e-mail address to
[email protected]
You MUST include your name, preferred e-mail address, and city and state where you live. If you have filters or firewalls placed on your Internet connection, set your e-mail to receive incoming mail from [email protected]; we are unable to go through any approvals processes for individuals. This mailing list is kept strictly confidential and is not shared or used for any purposes other than distribution of This Week at Amtrak or related URPA materials.
All other correspondence, including requests to unsubscribe should be addressed to
[email protected]
Copies of This Week at Amtrak are archived on URPA’s web site, www.unitedrail.org and also on www.todaywithjb.blogspot.com where other rail-related writings of Bruce Richardson may also be found.
URPA leadership members are available for speaking engagements.
J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739
[email protected]
http://www.unitedrail.org
This Week at Amtrak; November 17, 2009
A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
America's foremost passenger rail policy institute
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203 • Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Volume 6, Number 46
Founded over three decades ago in 1976, URPA is a nationally known policy institute which focuses on solutions and plans for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota, California, Arizona, New Mexico, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and other cities. For more detailed information, along with a variety of position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at http://www.unitedrail.org.
URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from any outside sources.
1) Here is the text of a speech delivered to the Florida Coalition of Rail Passengers here in Jacksonville, Florida on Saturday, November 7, 2009 by this writer.
[begin quote]
It's been an interesting week for the railroad business; changes we couldn't imagine a decade ago have suddenly become true. America again has a "railroad robber baron" – but, this time, it's a benevolent man who may be the smartest businessman in the world.
Warren Buffett said he would cheerfully pay $34 billion for the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, and BNSF said they would cheerfully accept his offer.
While many people agree this is not going to launch a series of mergers – there isn't much left to merge other than creating a transcontinental railroad – this is a game changer. BNSF under private ownership no longer has to act by the dictates of Wall Street.
Think of the BNSF deal as a giant-sized version of what happened to our own Florida East Coast Railroad: going private allowed it to think radically outside of the box.
The FEC – after over a decade of waiting – has partnered with the Florida Department of Transportation and Amtrak to restore passenger service on its coast route between Jacksonville and Miami. Now, start thinking about BNSF and passenger service – they have already publicly indicated if the right business opportunity comes along, they will talk about it.
Reading the FEC/FDOT proposal – which is part of the national grab for high speed rail stimulus money – gives any reader respect for the Florida DOT.
Amtrak has its usual equipment demands, because both the Silver Meteor and Silver Star will again be split here in Jacksonville, and half of the consists will go to Miami via Orlando, and half go on the FEC.
The best part is the request for additional local regional trains running between Jacksonville and Miami to provide a higher level of frequencies. The most obvious part left out is extending the Palmetto south of Savannah and running it down the FEC or perhaps over to Tampa.
The only part of Florida's rail plan found wanting is mention of doing something to bolster Tampa's conventional train service. In the Tampa Bay area we have Florida's second largest metropolitan area, and it's level of train service is less than that of Sebring and Palatka.
If you really want to look at the unfairness of it all, take a look at Florida's panhandle. The people living there pay all of the same taxes we pay, but their train – the Sunset Limited – went away because Amtrak doesn't want to bother restoring the train after a hurricane that happened over four years ago temporarily tore up some track.
As I join you today on behalf of United Rail Passenger Alliance, my late friend and predecessor, Austin Coates, was no stranger to this group or many of you personally. We've never forgotten Austin's most famous line regarding Amtrak – "it's just business as usual."
More than half a decade after Austin's passing, we need to help Amtrak stop its continuing "business as usual."
Let's look at how Amtrak has treated us here in Florida over the past 25 years or so.
Going back to the pre-Amtrak days, Florida had so many passenger trains you couldn't walk very far without tripping over one. Florida was a state built by the passenger train.
We had the Seaboard's Silver Meteor, Silver Star, Palmland, Sunland, and Gulf Wind. Not only did we have service to Miami, but we also had service down the middle of the state and from Tampa down the west coast to Venice.
The Atlantic Coast Line provided us with service on the East Coast Champion, West Coast Champion, Gulf Coast Special, seasonal Florida Special, and the Everglades. The ACL on the west coast would take you to Fort Myers.
From Chicago and the Midwest, you could catch the City of Miami, South Wind, Seminole, or Dixie Flyer.
Until just a couple of years prior to Amtrak, the Florida East Coast even operated its daily two car train between Miami and Jacksonville.
Then came Amtrak Day in 1971.
Amtrak Day wasn't as bad for Florida as elsewhere, for we still had the Silver Meteor, Silver Star, Champion, and South Wind. We lost the Gulf Wind, and that huge – and currently unfilled gap – between Jacksonville and New Orleans opened up. We lost service south of Tampa on the west coast. But you could still get to Florida from Chicago with single train service, and you had three choices from New York to Florida, and both coasts and the middle of Florida through Ocala were still served.
We all know what has happened since then.
The once busy crew and maintenance base in Tampa is gone, with just a single daily train remaining. Naturally, this occurred only after the City of Tampa decided to spend a king's ransom on the breathtaking restoration of Tampa Union Station.
Miami, once the golden goose of passenger railroading, now has two trains a day.
The South Wind, then the Floridian, with direct Chicago service, is gone.
The Cross Florida service between Tampa and Miami came and went.
The extended Palmetto from Savannah to Jacksonville, and eventually to Tampa, and then turned into the Silver Palm to Miami – is gone.
We now have Auto Train, but unless you're taking along your car and only have a destination of Northern Virginia or beyond, it's not the most useful service in Amtrak's stable.
Then, there is the sad saga of the Sunset Limited. We all worked hard in Florida to bring the Sunset to us in 1993. The State of Florida ponied up over $7 million to help upgrade the CSX line in the panhandle.
We knew prior to the Sunset's extension, there was an average of 75,000 calls per year into the Amtrak res centers seeking a train between New Orleans and Florida.
Now, the Sunset is almost history. I say "almost" because it never officially went away, just in reality went away. As [FCRP member] George Bollinger often asks, "what if it had been the Seaboard and L&N that had suddenly decided to stop running the Gulf Wind, just because it was inconvenient?"
For a while, unknowing people tried to blame our friends – yes, make no mistake about it, at CSX they are our friends – for not allowing Amtrak to resume service on the Sunset. But, we know CSX gave Amtrak written notice the line was available for the Sunset on April 1, 2006.
By law, when Amtrak cancels an entire train route, it is supposed to post a 180 day notice of cancellation. This minor technicality to Amtrak has never been honored, with the ongoing excuse of not only did the dog eat Amtrak's homework, but Amtrak merely "suspended" the service due to conditions wrought by the hurricane.
A number of union jobs on all levels were lost by the suspension of the Sunset. Yet, Amtrak's unions have chosen to do nothing about this. No union filed a lawsuit, no union screamed at the top of its organized lungs about this flagrant abuse of the law.
Congresswoman Corrine Brown put $1 million into last year's Amtrak reauthorization to study the restoration of the Amtrak route. We know the result of that; a lot of paper with a lot of excuses and reasons why Amtrak doesn't want to restart the service.
The quickest, cheapest, cleanest way to restore service is to extend the City of New Orleans from New Orleans to Orlando.
Because of bad equipment scheduling, the City trainsets sit for a full day in New Orleans before they return to Chicago. On any given day there are two trainsets in Louisiana, the one just departing New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal and the one about to arrive at NOUPT. By extending the route to Orlando, only one extra trainset would be required to bring the train to Florida.
Amtrak will instantly whine about stations; the only real station problem is at Mobile, where the Eisenhower-era relic of the L&N Railroad's poor choice of architect station building was mercifully torn down after Katrina. The only problem for Mobile is finding a new spot for a platform and placement of a temporary Amshack.
Remember, the only manned stations between New Orleans and Jacksonville were Mobile, Pensacola, and Tallahassee. Everything else was just a platform and city-run shelter.
Many of my readers of This Week at Amtrak know I talk about the Sunset and the City of New Orleans a lot, and there's a reason for that. From 1996 to 2000, I was a paid consultant to the Gulf Coast Business Group, working with both of those trains, plus the Crescent. My late business partner and I specialized in marketing for these trains, creating onboard services programs, the highly successful 24 hour dining car test runs on the Sunset, and handled special events, such as station openings and helped with the inaugural of the Gulf Coast Limited. Even today, those are still my trains.
From 1999 to 2000, we ran the Sunset Limited and City of New Orleans Promotional Office for Amtrak from our offices here in Jacksonville. We worked a number of projects that brought new riders to the Sunset and City through radio and television station promotions, worked with local media, and even hosted a dining car gathering in Memphis for local and regional media food critics.
Like any large company, we found white hats and black hats inside of Amtrak. Some very good people left because of the constant problems caused by the black hats, and others left merely because Amtrak was not the most pleasant place to work if you weren't part of the good old boy network.
But, there is a shrinking core group of dedicated people who are there because they like running passenger trains.
What can we do to help those at Amtrak who want the company to succeed?
First, everyone must realize there is more than one answer to Amtrak's problems. Those who constantly plead "we all have to work together" generally mean we all have to agree with them, and forget about any other solutions.
Second, we have to realize the reality of passenger rail around the world. Amtrak constantly wants us to believe no passenger rail system in the world makes money. This is only an excuse to enable Amtrak's dysfunctional behavior.
I invite you to do your own research; scan credible publications like the International Railway Journal and read the stories about passenger rail systems in The Netherlands, Germany, and Japan which make money.
Doubters say this isn't true, these companies are still propped up by their governments. Wrong. Some of these systems may operate over government owned right of way – just as trains do on the Northeast Corridor – but they still pay a train mile fee. Some of the systems share the rails with freight trains – just like Amtrak – and they receive a benefit – just like Amtrak – from the shared cost of infrastructure.
For years, URPA has been crunching numbers and seeing almost every long distance train in the Amtrak system makes money "above the rail." This is the same system used by other countries – based on operating costs, not full infrastructure maintenance costs – and revenue passenger miles.
One thing URPA has talked about for decades is Amtrak's erroneous use of warm body counts in the form of ridership instead of the real world metrics of load factor and revenue passenger miles. Amtrak wants us to be wowed by warm body counts, which are meaningless. What matters is how far you carry a passenger, and what revenue you derive from a passenger, not how many passengers.
Which passenger would you rather have: one passenger traveling the 608 mile average length of trip on the Silver Meteor at 15.7 cents a revenue passenger mile ... or four passengers on Oklahoma's Heartland Flyer, traveling an average length of trip of 175 miles at 12 cents a revenue passenger mile? That one passenger on the Meteor not only makes Amtrak more money than the four passengers on the Heartland Flyer, but that one passenger will also spend more money onboard in the diner and lounge, had less cost to the national reservations system, less to reach through marketing, and tracks all the way through Amtrak's accounting system with less costs because Amtrak is handling one passenger instead of four.
When the late Graham Claytor – without a doubt Amtrak's best president – retired from Amtrak in 1993, the company was generating internally enough money to cover 72% of its 1989 $1.7 billion operating budget, up from 48% in 1981. Today, that number has slipped dramatically, down to about 60%.
Since Mr. Claytor retired, we have seen a virtual parade of permanent and semi-permanent interim chief executive for Amtrak, from Tom Downs to George Warrington to David Gunn to David Hughes to Alex Kummant to today's Joe Boardman.
Every new Amtrak president seems to have made the company worse in so many ways. We've seen the Heritage fleet – which is highly valued and treasured by VIA Rail Canada today – sold off. The original Pennsylvania Railroad Metroliners were scrapped. The Turboliners were rehabbed with someone else's money, and then suddenly hidden and stored, and are now for sale.
We have seen the delivery – and subsequent running off the wheels – of the too small order of Viewliners, with a promise, but no firm order for any more. We've seen a more than decade old order of Superliners, but those numbers are thinning due to neglected maintenance. We've seen the much heralded arrival of the Acela trainsets, but their mechanical troubles, too, have become legendary.
In short, Amtrak has no reserve equipment pool it can activate quickly to expand or create new services. Even though there are still nearly 200 cars sitting in the wreck line, most of that is needed just to restore existing consists to previous levels of productivity, or put a service back east of New Orleans.
During all of this while we have seen meaningless ridership numbers rise, we've also seen abysmal systemwide load factors; during some years more than half of Amtrak's highly perishable inventory goes unsold.
We have seen train consists shrink and shrink.
So, Amtrak is running fewer seats miles for occupancy, creating less of a chance for success. Its equipment is old and getting more worn out by the hour. We know some equipment is being rehabbed by this year's stimulus money, but it's only token amounts for the national system.
Which brings us back to, what can you do to help change Amtrak?
I urge everyone in this room to start a new campaign.
The Cardinal is the only train in Amtrak's entire system which is run by federal mandate. Senator Robert Byrd slipped into federal law that his train – the Cardinal running through his home state of West Virginia – has to be operated. Amtrak uses and abuses this train, but it's helpless to cancel it the way it did the east end of the Sunset Limited.
My conservative soul is tortured by this next suggestion, but it may be necessary until Amtrak can be made to run like a real business. FCRP needs to convince the Florida Congressional Delegation the Silver Meteor, Silver Star, and an extended Palmetto south from Savannah to Jacksonville and beyond, and some sort of restored service east of New Orleans, must be mandated to be operated by federal statute.
Your sister organizations in other states need to do the same with their trains. Remember – if it happened to the Sunset Limited east of New Orleans – it can happen to any train. Most of you know the very most basic rule of railroad safety: when on railroad property, be prepared for a train to be coming towards you at any time, from any direction. You know the second most basic safety rule – the one which separates real railroaders from rail fans – never, never, never, step on top of the rail; always step over the rail.
Florida – and every other state – is currently standing on top of the rail, unaware a train is bearing down from an unknown direction. Amtrak's management is much more interested in seeking free federal monies than in operating trains.
We've seen no new equipment orders to date – just promises of a single-level order for Viewliner cars – and the just released update of Amtrak's ongoing five year plan calls for no new cars.
If Amtrak is serious about keeping its system intact, it would be at least talking about a new car order, especially for Superliners. But, the silence is all we need to know.
Paul Dyson, President of the Railroad Passenger Association of California and Nevada, has openly raised the question of whether or not Amtrak is actually planning to exit the long distance route business because of a lack of equipment order.
A few weeks back, one of our URPA associates was attending a rail fair in the Northeast. He ran across an Amtrak Engineering Department intern who wanted the world to know how important he was – after all, he was an intern at Amtrak.
The question of equipment orders came up, and this young man offered a glimpse into Amtrak's corporate thinking. He said, "Amtrak isn't interested in slow trains, it's only interested in fast trains."
Just shortly after that, Tom Carper, Amtrak's Chairman of the Board, gave a presentation to the Midwest High Speed Rail folks touting Amtrak as the logical and national operator of all of the nation's high speed systems. When you read Mr. Carper's presentation, you realize the young intern wasn't just whistling "Dixie."
So, if you're [FCRP member] Jerry Sullivan and you want to travel west to visit your grandchildren in Texas, it's not likely to happen any time soon on a restored Sunset Limited. If you're George Bollinger and you just want to ride trains, you better plan your trip early, because too often you can't get there from here.
Until Congress mandates Amtrak must operate its long distance trains, every one of those trains is in danger. The train may not go away today, but it's consist will be constantly shrinking, the level of service will deteriorate worse and Amtrak will remain – as Union Pacific's official spokesman labeled it – "novelty transportation."
Amtrak today accounts for only two tenths of one percent of America's transportation output, hardly enough for anyone to take seriously. Even worse, Amtrak isn't doing much to change that.
The only people Amtrak listens to is Congress, when it mandates Amtrak do something. It's time for Congress to mandate – without exception – Amtrak must run all of its long distance trains, and throw in some restorations like the Sunset back to Florida, the Pioneer, with a full second frequency operating all the way between Chicago and Denver, the North Coast Hiawatha, and take the Sunset and the Cardinal daily.
Amtrak will kick and scream and whine everyone is being mean to it by making it run trains it doesn't want to run. But, if someone doesn't do something this drastic soon, long distance passenger rail in America will be only a memory like steam locomotives, dome cars, and Pullman berths.
Thank you so much for allowing me to be with you today; it's a pleasure to be here.
[End quote]
2) Warren Buffett's privatization of the venerable Burlington Northern Santa Fe rocked the railroad world. Here is what William Lindley of Scottsdale, Arizona had to say.
[begin quote]
Warren Buffett's offer for BNSF the first week in November might prove to be a pivotal event for intercity passenger rail, having come at a time when, as Don Phillips in his recent Trains magazine column recently highlighted, dissatisfaction over Amtrak's seeming refusal to participate in a renaissance of train travel is at a peak.
Undoubtedly, Buffett has a record of making sound business decisions; and BNSF, being among the best managed and progressive of large railroads, does fit a motif of acquiring something good and making it better.
Over the next weeks we will look at some of the synergies (much as that word is overused, it does apply here) and economies of scale that could apply to an enlarged role for BNSF in the passenger train business. But right now a single move would signal a positive direction. Words and attitude cost little but mean much; as you may know, trademarks, unlike copyrights and patents, are most defensible when they are in continuous business use. BNSF could gain much publicity, and build on its widespread and long standing – even if subconscious – recognition, by reviving its classic red, yellow, and silver "Warbonnet" scheme.
A new interpretation of their classic corporate symbol would show a revived interest in being a participating citizen in every railroad town and city. Not to mention the free advertising garnered from rolling under practically every child's Christmas tree. Renewing interest in today's youth will perpetuate the recent industry rediscovery that trains are good for more than just hauling coal – they are the future of transportation, as well as the history.
Yes, we undoubtedly will consider details in our upcoming columns here, but for now, Mr. Buffett, we simply convey – Welcome to the world of railroading.
[End quote]
3) Professor James McCommons of Northern Michigan University has a new book out this month, and it's required reading for anyone interested in the business of passenger railroading.
For full disclosure, this writer was interviewed for the book here in Jacksonville by Mr. McCommons. The interview was full of serious, well thought out questions and observations; it's very clear the product of all of his interviews and research has led Mr. McCommons to creating a book far any beyond anything else on the market today regarding passenger rail as it stands in America.
"Waiting on the Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service – A Year Spent Riding Across America" is much more succinct than its title, and presents a wide variety of honest opinions and thoughts about passenger rail. More than just the usual viewpoints are presented with conclusions both obvious and left for the reader to determine.
The book is actually too short; Mr. McCommons reports his publisher, Chelsea Green (www.chelseagreen.com) had him remove about 40,000 words of his original text to fit into a predetermined format. What a shame; when you read the book, you are wanting more, and another brief 40,000 words would be welcomed by any reader.
There is a lengthy review of the book in the current issue of Passenger Train Journal magazine by Karl Zimmermann for those wishing more detail, but, please, if your buy just one railroad book this year, buy "Waiting on the Train;" it's time and money well spent. We can only hope Mr. McCommons will one day do a follow-up book.
4) Speaking of the latest issue of Passenger Train Journal (2009:4, Issue 241) which just hit the newsstands in the past week or so, there is an ever-so-timely article on Amtrak's Pioneer, the subject of much discussion for an expensive route restoration, as well as the usual mix of good articles and photos. Editor Mike Schafer's On The Point column – as always – not only hits the mark about the Pioneer, but covers some other good points, too. Other rail magazines may publish more frequently, but Passenger Train Journal remains the magazine of record for the business of passenger trains.
5) And, this e-mail to TWA arrived shortly after the last issue was published regarding VIA Rail Canada.
[begin quote]
I am a big fan of VIA and have been doing a yearly trip from Toronto to Vancouver on that lovely train, the Canadian for quite a few years. About a year ago, I wrote a comment to Crain's Chicago Business online about Amtrak and their lack of interest in taking care of their equipment. When we board the Canadian in Toronto, she is shining, the windows are spotless, (glass, not micro scratched plastic), flowers are fresh and the crew seems happy to see us!
A couple of weeks ago, we went from Portland, Maine to New York City, and while waiting in Boston to transfer trains, several Acela's came and went: they were already grimy and neglected looking. One of my stories about VIA involved what I consider to be a remarkable piece of quality railroading when the Canadian from the west was delayed by a blizzard and a freight accident making it too late east to turn. VIA put together a very spiffy "shuttle" consist which left on schedule from Toronto with a complementary lunch, complementary wine too!, and in several hours we rendezvoused with the now turned train and proceeded west, right on schedule. I asked a supervisor how this feat was accomplished, to which he replied, "it is all a matter of attitude." Says it all about the difference between VIA and Amtrak.
[End quote]
If you are reading someone else's copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can receive your own free copy each edition by sending your e-mail address to
[email protected]
You MUST include your name, preferred e-mail address, and city and state where you live. If you have filters or firewalls placed on your Internet connection, set your e-mail to receive incoming mail from [email protected]; we are unable to go through any approvals processes for individuals. This mailing list is kept strictly confidential and is not shared or used for any purposes other than distribution of This Week at Amtrak or related URPA materials.
All other correspondence, including requests to unsubscribe should be addressed to
[email protected]
Copies of This Week at Amtrak are archived on URPA's web site, www.unitedrail.org and also on www.todaywithjb.blogspot.com where other rail-related writings of Bruce Richardson may also be found.
URPA leadership members are available for speaking engagements.
J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739
[email protected]
http://www.unitedrail.org
This Week at Amtrak; November 24, 2009
A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
America's foremost passenger rail policy institute
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203 • Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Volume 6, Number 47
Founded over three decades ago in 1976, URPA is a nationally known policy institute which focuses on solutions and plans for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota, California, Arizona, New Mexico, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and other cities. For more detailed information, along with a variety of position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at http://www.unitedrail.org.
URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from any outside sources.
1) Today is the Tuesday before the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and Wednesday is considered by everyone to be just about the busiest travel day of the year, even in times of recession.
Once again, Amtrak is making its usual Herculean effort on the Northeast Corridor to shuttle holiday travelers between Washington, New York City, and Boston.
This year, there are also some additional services on the West Coast in California, and some extra goodies elsewhere.
However, once again, there is a notable lack of beefing up of long distance trains throughout the nation; Amtrak apparently feels only people on the Left Coast and Right Coast, north of Virginia, celebrate Thanksgiving, and the rest of the country – as usual – are left to fend for themselves for holiday travel.
Part of the problem is Amtrak's lack of equipment, due to its deliberate plan to keep as much long distance equipment as possible out of service to save on maintenance costs. Never mind the revenue lost or new passengers to be served; Amtrak managers only receive recognition and bonuses on money saved, not money spent to improve the company's core financial position.
2) All of that aside, it is important to pay respect to all of the Amtrak employees who will be working long and hard on Wednesday and Thursday, and throughout the holiday weekend taking care of their passengers. Amtrak is still a 365 day a year operation, and no matter that it's Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, or any other holiday, dedicated Amtrak employees are out on the road, manning ticket windows in stations, cleaning cars in coach yards, and refueling locomotives all over the country, and we thank them for taking care of our needs while they are away from home and their families.
3) You may want to glance again at the date of this missive; one month from today is Christmas Eve. Finished your shopping, yet?
4) Thanksgiving also marks another milestone: Amtrak Interim President and CEO Joseph Boardman marks the completion of his single year contract this week as Amtrak's chief steward. Since no announcements have been made to the contrary, everyone can only assume his one year contract has been extended ...
William Lindley of Scottsdale, Arizona has some thoughts on the subject.
[begin quote]
By William Lindley
Those of you who held General Motors shares and now hold the converted "Motors Liquidation Company" will be pleased (sarcasm alert) to know that according to their website (https://www.motorsliquidation.com/?evar10=InvestorInfo_MotorsLiquidation), at the end of the bankruptcy proceedings, it is the Company's expectation your remaining interest in "common stock will have no value."
We could argue who was to blame for GM's failure – the unions? the management? the corporate culture? too much government regulation? not enough government assistance? – but the crux of the matter is, the board of directors – and particularly the president – are ultimately responsible for a corporation's performance. It was the board's, and the president's, responsibility to either guide the company to stability, or advise the stockholders far in advance of an impending failure. The board, and particularly the president, failed to do so.
No-one should be much interested in placing blame now, though; words have little value, results have much.
By the same token, we expect interim Amtrak president Joseph Boardman to be clear about his company's future. Many of us have heard him speak, with positive impressions. Yet the results that matter – reports stuffed with lackluster, unimaginative excuses instead of positive plans for restoring furloughed routes or opening new ones – ultimately rest under his watch. The failure to order equipment sufficient even to maintain current routes, ultimately rests under his watch.
Look out your window. Do you see a tree or a shrub? It is doing one of two things – growing or dying. There is no middle ground, there is never stagnation. A business is the same way. Grow, or die.
Is it Amtrak's intention simply to go gentle into the good night? If not, where is the bold plan, where is the vision for growth? Eagerly, we await.
[End quote]
If you are reading someone else's copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can receive your own free copy each edition by sending your e-mail address to
[email protected]
You MUST include your name, preferred e-mail address, and city and state where you live. If you have filters or firewalls placed on your Internet connection, set your e-mail to receive incoming mail from [email protected]; we are unable to go through any approvals processes for individuals. This mailing list is kept strictly confidential and is not shared or used for any purposes other than distribution of This Week at Amtrak or related URPA materials.
All other correspondence, including requests to unsubscribe should be addressed to
[email protected]
Copies of This Week at Amtrak are archived on URPA's web site, www.unitedrail.org and also on www.todaywithjb.blogspot.com where other rail-related writings of Bruce Richardson may also be found.
URPA leadership members are available for speaking engagements.
J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739
[email protected]
http://www.unitedrail.org
Last edited by a moderator:
This Week at Amtrak; December 7, 2009
A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
America’s foremost passenger rail policy institute
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203 • Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Volume 6, Number 48
Founded over three decades ago in 1976, URPA is a nationally known policy institute which focuses on solutions and plans for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota, California, Arizona, New Mexico, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and other cities. For more detailed information, along with a variety of position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at http://www.unitedrail.org.
URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from any outside sources.
1) Paul Dyson, the Never Say Die President of the Rail Passenger Association of California and Nevada sent yet another love letter to Amtrak Interim President and CEO Joseph Boardman.
[begin quote]
5th December, 2009
Mr. Joseph H. Boardman
President and Chief Executive Officer
NATIONAL RAILROAD PASSENGER CORPORATION
60 Massachusetts Avenue NE
Washington DC 20002
Via Fax to 202 XXX-XXXX (1 pages total)
MORE UNACCEPTABLE SERVICE FAILURES ON PACIFIC SURFLINER
Dear Mr. Boardman:
Once again I must write to you about the catastrophic service failures on the Pacific Surfliner service. As I write hundreds of passengers are stranded by the locomotive failure of train 769 at San Diego. As a result I have been told that 796 from Goleta will be covered by buses this evening even though it would be possible to deadhead a crew to cover the service.
This is a repeat of the disaster of the day before Thanksgiving when you should have had every available manager and every piece of rolling stock in service. Instead passengers waited for hours for trains that were as much as 6 hours late. There is no excuse for the lack of action by Amtrak. We demand that you:
– Make arrangements with the commuter operators Metrolink and Coaster to make standby trains available to you, with extra crews available to operate them.
– Hire in some of the hundreds of idle freight locomotives and put a freight and a passenger locomotive on every train until you have put your own equipment in a state of good repair.
– Negotiate a power pooling arrangement with the commuter operators. Many of their locomotives operate only about 30 hours per week.
We are tired of excuses and inaction. We will be asking for a congressional hearing and state hearings to find out why California is paying so much to Amtrak for corridor service and getting so little in return.
We look forward to your early response.
Yours faithfully,
ORIGINAL SIGNED
Paul J. Dyson
President
[email protected]
818 XXX-XXXX
cc RailPAC Board , LOSSAN Board, Bill Bronte, Division of Rail
[End quote]
2) Mr. Dyson has perhaps directly targeted finding a solution to Amtrak’s ongoing misadventures. Even though Amtrak top executives directly appear before Congressional committees, they often leave with only a slap on the wrist and business as usual recommences.
Those with a good understanding of history recall this same type of mischief took place with VIA Rail Canada in the late 1980s. In a parliamentary form of government such as in Canada, it doesn’t take an “act of Congress” to get things done; it only takes a vote in the Prime Minister’s cabinet to institute often drastic actions. That happened with VIA when it was unresponsive to its owner’s (the federal government of Canada) wishes, and ended up with its budget slashed so mercilessly, over half of VIA’s long distance system simply disappeared.
No one wants to see Amtrak any smaller than it is today, but, at some point, Amtrak’s management must be made to understand they are not operating in a vacuum and they cannot operate on hubris alone in perpetuity.
3) Here is a letter which ended up in This Week at Amtrak’s mailbox this past week; it’s being circulated among over 30 state passenger rail associations. The natives are definitely restless, and the Army seems to be close to being in a state of agitated rebellion. Somebody better make sure the stockade doors at Amtrak are sturdy and can withstand assault.
[begin quote]
A CALL FOR CHANGE AND NATIONAL VISION
An open letter to Amtrak
We in the rail-passenger advocacy community, along with friends and well-wishers outside the movement, are longtime supporters of expanded and improved rail passenger service in the U.S. As part of our support for passenger trains, we have supported Amtrak, standing by it and defending its funding in good times and bad.
Now the times have changed, and the temper of our advocacy must change with it. The Obama administration’s embrace of passenger rail, including its unprecedented commitment $8 billion in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds, has lifted the nearly four-decade threat against American passenger trains. The breathing space afforded by this sea-change in public policy allows advocates to switch from a posture of defense to a more sober and measured examination of the American passenger train.
We are deeply concerned by Amtrak's apparent unwillingness to embrace change, its reluctance to express a national vision and, most of all, its failure to develop a National Growth Plan with annual ridership targets, programmed frequency expansions, openings of new routes, and a major equipment-acquisition program designed both to support and stimulate ridership growth and route expansion.
Amtrak seems unaware that a transportation revolution is under way in America. The Obama Administration and progressive leaders are now offering Amtrak an opportunity for expansion and growth. Unfortunately, Amtrak continues to be plagued by the same drift, inertia and self-doubt of the past. Indeed, Amtrak president Joseph Boardman himself noted that “there are a whole host of people here who don't know whether to believe,” implying that people who cannot make the transition will have to leave the company.
President Boardman must now follow through on his observation.
Amtrak must realize that if it is to prosper, it must make itself relevant to America's transportation needs to the point of being indispensable. It must take a proactive role in the design of our national rail passenger system rather than merely executing plans developed and funded by others.
For the last 30 years Amtrak’s “business plan” has been: “If anybody wants us to run trains we’ll run them—just bring a check.” Outside of the Northeast Corridor, this message has been directed solely to state governments and has resulted in the addition of primarily intra-state trains. There has been no acknowledgment of any interstate route obligations beyond what Amtrak inherited from the private railroads. The company does not acknowledge any obligation to grow the interstate or overnight part of its business and has never designed a blueprint or sought funding for doing so.
For example, in years past Amtrak could have offered to share the costs of developing a showcase corridor, such as Chicago-St. Louis, to demonstrate to Congress and to other regions of the nation how a properly designed, funded and operated passenger-rail service could stimulate economic growth in the communities it served. It could have advocated the development of such a service between Chicago and Florida, or between booming city pairs in the underserved Sun Belt, such as Phoenix and Los Angeles, or Dallas and Houston. Such a success would have led to calls for more service elsewhere, ensuring a better future for Amtrak, while blunting calls for its demise.
But Amtrak never displayed the necessary initiative, and its absence did not go unnoticed by Amtrak’s adversaries as they subjected the company to one shutdown scenario after another.
It is time for Amtrak to be its own best advocate, as well as the advocate for the traveling public and for passenger trains themselves. It can only strike the public as odd that while the president, the congressional leadership, the advocacy community and dozens of state departments of transportation call for a passenger-rail buildup, Amtrak itself is silent.
A good first step for Amtrak to begin embracing the future would be through the placement of an equipment order large enough to allow system and frequency expansion. The company's current request for a 130-car order of new Viewliner II single-level cars and an option for 70 more cars, while praiseworthy, shows no vision for the future and ignores present and future capacity needs. This order will do little more than replace old, worn-out equipment. It will not allow for any meaningful expansion. To its credit, Amtrak recently proposed an additional 500- car order for new, standardized coaches, but these cars will only replace worn out Amfleet cars running primarily on the Northeast Corridor. It ignores the needs of the Superliner fleet and does nothing to address the need for new routes and additional frequencies on existing routes.
When the ARRA funds suddenly became available in 2009, Amtrak didn’t even have a wish list ready and is only now belatedly beginning to talk about a large-scale acquisition program. Amtrak needs to get started on that list now. But, it must do more than propose an order for cars or locomotives. Priority should also be given to route planning and expansion. It should develop a real vision for expansion of the current Amtrak system, laying the foundation for a truly national network. The “Grid and Gateway” proposal by the National Association of Railroad Passengers represents an excellent start.
Amtrak needs to evangelize governors, mayors, chambers of commerce, major colleges and universities and regional economic-development authorities about the good news robust train service can bring. It must champion trains nationally and regionally and lobby Congress for a national budget sufficient to support multi-state route expansions. It must court Congress, the Obama Administration, states, local leaders and others to promote its own survival and prosperity by developing plans for expansion that do not depend solely on the largesse of state legislatures. If Amtrak fails to do this, its relevance will continue to be a question in the minds of many.
Apologists may plead that Amtrak has had to fight just to stay alive and has no “juice” to support a culture of growth. But even in a hostile environment – which all private businesses and public-sector agencies encounter at one time or another – real leaders continue to prepare plans and wish lists, float trial balloons and put together pilot projects to demonstrate a concept and build public support for more ambitious programs.
We in the advocacy community have supported and defended Amtrak over the decades, but that support is conditional. If Amtrak wants our continued support, it will have to change, and soon. Amtrak must embrace the future, and if that means separating itself from those who feel comfortable only with the past, so be it. Nothing less will be acceptable. We are committed to the creation of a truly national rail passenger system by all possible means, whether it’s through Amtrak or some other approach.
The time to build a national passenger-rail system is now and Amtrak must become proactive and forward-thinking or risk its own demise.
[End quote]
Here is the only proper response to this letter: Amen.
At last word, less than a half dozen state passenger rail associations have summoned the collective intestinal fortitude to endorse this letter. Many seem content to continue to do nothing and metaphorically play the fiddle while Amtrak burns around them.
Now is not the time for cowardice; now is the time for action. If you are an active member of a state passenger rail association, demand your association not only endorse this letter, but begin to take action to force Amtrak to live up to its obligations to every American.
As long as Amtrak management thinks it can continue to feed at the public trough and not have to worry about support, then it will continue to operate as it does today with managers more worried about hanging on long enough to collect their pensions rather than creating and growing a national passenger rail system which is robust and viable.
Make it your personal New Year’s resolution to make Amtrak accountable to you and every other taxpayer in America. If we’re going to spend public money to keep Amtrak going, then we should be realizing a public benefit.
4) More from Ken Orski at Innovation NewsBriefs. This is Volume 20, Number 23; further information is available at www.innobriefs.com.
[begin quote]
December 5, 2009
The Selling of Transportation Reform
A small but influential group of individuals gathered recently at the downtown Washington office of University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs at the invitation of its Director, former Virginia Gov. Gerald Baliles. The bipartisan group included two former U.S. Transportation Secretaries and some 30 key players and opinion leaders who constitute what could be loosely described as Washington's permanent transportation policy establishment.
The purpose of the meeting was to solicit advice on a set of recommendations stemming from the Miller Center's transportation conference (see, "Reconsidering the Current Paradigm: Notes from the Miller Center Transportation Conference," NewsBrief, September 17, 2009). While the discussion dealt with a number of discrete issues to be addressed in the report, the central challenge was posed succinctly by Gov. Baliles at the outset of the meeting. The transportation sector, he suggested, is being neglected despite the evidence of a mounting crisis – aging infrastructure, growing traffic congestion, strained freight and logistical facilities. Both the Congress and the Administration are extemporizing rather than taking bold steps to avert the looming crisis. Where is the outrage? Baliles asked. Why is there no popular outcry? And what can we do to overcome this inertia? How can we create a sense of urgency and develop a narrative that will reverberate with the public, capture the media's attention and goad Congress and the Administration into action? The Governor's conclusion: we must involve "the three Ps": the Public, the Press and the Politicians.
What follows is some reflections stimulated by the Miller Center discussion. Specifically, can we sell the notion that continued inaction on the transportation front is placing the nation at risk? Can we elevate the need for greater transportation investment and program reform to a higher priority on the nation's policy and legislative agenda? And how can we rally the public, the press and the politicians to support these goals?
The Public
Does the public perceive a genuine "transportation crisis?" Opinions differ. While catastrophic failures such as the bridge collapse in the Twin Cities are a powerful reminder of the need for constant vigilance, such dramatic failures are happily few and far between. The public does not necessarily share the transportation officials' sense of urgency or alarm about "crumbling infrastructure." The Minneapolis bridge collapse is a fading memory. And while the severity of metropolitan traffic congestion and its adverse impact on the economy and people's lives are readily acknowledged, the driving public has grown skeptical that more money or program reform will bring effective congestion relief. Perhaps they have come to accept the truth of the oft-repeated skeptical refrain that "you cannot build your way out of traffic congestion." What is more, traffic congestion leaves vast stretches of rural and small-town America unaffected and unconcerned. As one participant pointed out, the average nationwide commute time of 25.5 minutes has not increased for the past eight years according to Bureau of the Census data. Traffic congestion may be of great concern to many individual communities, but it is not necessarily perceived as a "crisis" deserving national attention.
Contrast this with the strong public support for climate change action. Until recently, at least, the need to curb greenhouse gas emissions received substantial public support. (This support has reportedly declined precipitously in the wake of "Climategate" – the recent disclosure of climate data manipulation at the U.K.'s Climate Research Unit.) The issue resonated strongly with the public because global warming was perceived as a potentially catastrophic threat to mankind ("planet in peril"). Traffic congestion and an occasional bridge collapse have not reached – and we doubt they will ever reach – the same level of concern and apprehension (or mass hysteria, depending on your point of view.)
We offer the above arguments not to refute the need for action, but to suggest that they provide a plausible explanation why there has been no public outcry about the stalled transportation authorization and no groundswell of public demand for a reform of the transportation program.
Supporting a Transportation Vision
If evoking an impending transportation crisis is not a convincing way to gain public support, could an appeal to the people's sense of vision be more effective? After all, America's transportation history has been marked by a series of ambitious transportation initiatives – Erie Canal and the transcontinental railroad in the 19th century, the Interstate Highway System, the urban rail transit networks and the air navigation system in the 20th century. Can't public support be rallied around a bold new transportation infrastructure agenda suitable for the 21st century? The positive reception given to President Obama's high speed rail initiative would suggest that a new transportation vision can still capture the public imagination. And if a giant new infrastructure program on the scale of the Interstate Highway Program no longer is financially feasible, could one not enlist public support for a more modest capital program that could still enhance the nation's infrastructure and contribute to economic growth? The answer, we believe, is a tentative "yes" – provided, as one participant noted, that the infrastructure plan is presented as a collection of tangible projects that could capture the public's imagination, rather than vague and poorly understood promises "to improve transportation performance."
The Press
The popular press and mass media can be captivated by and serve as an effective communicator of bold new transportation visions – especially ones with a high technological content. The daily press and television also can effectively dramatize and draw public attention to spectacular transportation failures such as a bridge collapse or traffic gridlock. But the media's attention span is short and its ability to stay on subject is limited by a constantly shifting news focus. Moreover, many of the issues central to transportation reform are considered as too arcane by newspaper editors and editorial writers to be of interest to the general public. Trade and "niche" publications do provide more depth but their outreach and influence are limited to the client groups they serve. In principle, the blogosphere could serve as a useful educational tool. However, constituency-driven blogs are often tendentious and advocacy-driven. To properly inform and educate public opinion requires a flow of accurate information, diverse views and impartial analysis. Most blogs do not meet this test. We are left with a conclusion that getting one's message across will require a sophisticated outreach strategy that includes ability to connect with opinion makers outside the traditional communication channels.
The Politicians
There are several explanations for the delayed plans to enact a transportation bill and more generally for transportation's relatively low standing on the list of Congressional and Administration priorities. The most obvious reason is the already crowded Obama policy agenda and the importance of the competing priorities of health care overhaul, the challenge of job creation, financial regulatory reform, and climate change.
Deficit Financing and Higher Taxes Are Off the Table
Contributing to the legislative inertia on the transportation front is the Administration's reluctance to use deficit financing or raising taxes to support expensive new government initiatives. Administration officials have signaled that the President's focus next year will bear heavily on bringing the deficit down. This mindset is matched on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers are conscious of the political and economic danger of increasing the national debt and reluctant in an election year to consider measures that would add to the soaring deficit. As one participant remarked, the political community refuses to buy into the crisis scenario or admit there is an infrastructure problem. Or else the problem is not viewed as serious enough to warrant additional deficit spending.
There is an equal reluctance to consider tax increases. Proposals to enhance the Highway Trust fund revenue by raising the gas tax – to the extent such proposals are still heard these days – are coming from interested stakeholder groups and lobbyists rather than from the grassroots. And those meet with a skeptical reception on Capitol Hill, a bare 12 months before mid-term congressional elections. One telling indication has been the unwillingness of the House Ways and Means Committee to consider a tax hike to fund Rep. Oberstar's proposed $500 billion surface transportation bill.
Suggestions as to other sources of funding – such as a National Infrastructure Bank or a federal capital budget, mileage (VMT) fees and financial transaction fees – have likewise met with deep congressional and White House skepticism.
Short-term vs. Long-term funding
To be sure, there exists a possibility of a short-term infusion of funds in the context of a new job creation initiative. Highway and transit interests have seized on the White House "jobs summit" on December 3 to push for an $84 billion package of "ready-to-go" projects, and the House is readying a jobs bill that would provide up to $70 billion for "shovel-ready" infrastructure projects and aid to small business. However, this places transportation advocates in a quandary. They need to be part of the current job creation dialogue in order to stake out a claim to any stimulus funds that might be forthcoming. However, any short-term infusion of funds will remove – or at least seriously reduce – congressional urgency to act upon the larger need for strategic investment in transportation infrastructure aiming to promote long-term economic growth. This dilemma was evident in President Obama's remarks at the jobs summit. What's good in the long term, Obama is reported to have said, may not necessarily work as an immediate short term jobs stimulus, currently the Administration's paramount objective. There are tensions in the process of allocating infrastructure spending, he said, between immediate "shovel-ready" projects as opposed to long-term visionary projects. He intimated that the short-term goal to spur job growth would take priority in choosing projects over the long term need for strategic infrastructure investment. But some observers have raised questions whether even immediate "ready-to-go" transportation projects, such as pavement re-surfacing and highway beautification, create new jobs or merely keep existing DOT and contractor road crews fully occupied.
The Clouded Future
Thus, the prospect for an early enactment of a reform-oriented multi-year surface transportation authorization remains murky. Rep. James Oberstar (D-MN), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has abandoned his quest to enact a six-year $500 billion bill by the end of the year in the face of continued Senate and House leadership opposition. Instead, he announced during a press conference on December 2, that he would agree to a six-month extension of the existing program, provided that there is an agreed upon time line for enacting a longer-term authorization. One possibility could be a staged process consisting of a two-year "front-loaded" transportation bill focused on job creation, followed by a longer-term bill containing broad policy reforms. However, at this point, the constantly shifting dynamics concerning the need for and type of a jobs stimulus makes any predictions about congressional action at the expiration of the current short-term extension on December 18 a mere speculation. Only one thing is certain: getting the lawmakers to enact an ambitious long-term surface transportation program in the tax- and deficit-averse political climate of an election year would be an uphill struggle.
[End quote]
5) And, on this final note, this missive arrived at This Week at Amtrak. Good thoughts for all to consider from Evan Stair of Passenger Rail Oklahoma.
[begin quote]
I thought you might like to take a look at the new Amtrak 2009 national route map. Isn't it pretty? I especially like the photograph of the train crossing at the top. Look at the inclusion of all those magnificent buses that flesh out the system... making it look twice as large as it really is.
Oops... I guess someone forgot to tell the cartographer to remove the New Orleans to Florida segment of the Sunset Limited... Oh... excuse me? I guess Amtrak considers this just a "service disruption" so it has a rightful place on the map?
Seriously, several questions come to mind:
1) If this IS just a service disruption, then why did they have to study its restoration? Why not just start operating it again?
2) Since this is just a "service restoration" why did Amtrak see a need to study alternatives to its pre-Katrina operation?
3) Since this is a federally funded route disruption, shouldn't the financing of the restoration match that of its pre-Katrina operation? It seems that Katrina erased everything but the red ink on the National map.
Needless to say, the four-year-and-counting "service disruption" and inclusion of an operational line on the Amtrak system map that has not operated for four years should be a source of embarrassment to Amtrak. In fact, it is false advertising. This map is displayed in Amtrak depots across the nation; possibly even travel agencies. It is included within travel planners and timetables. Fortunately, travel planners and timetables explain the situation. However, where is the disclaimer on the system map?
[End quote]
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URPA leadership members are available for speaking engagements.
J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739
[email protected]
http://www.unitedrail.org
This Week at Amtrak; December 8, 2009
A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
America's foremost passenger rail policy institute
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203 • Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Volume 6, Number 49
Founded over three decades ago in 1976, URPA is a nationally known policy institute which focuses on solutions and plans for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota, California, Arizona, New Mexico, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and other cities. For more detailed information, along with a variety of position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at http://www.unitedrail.org.
URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from any outside sources.
1) Finally, at last, after waiting oh, so very long (Too long, in fact.), SunRail, the 61 mile long commuter rail system in Central Florida serving the Metropolitan Orlando area is about to be a reality.
Just hours ago, the Florida Senate, meeting in a special session, passed HR 1, a bill to create SunRail and to also permanently fund South Florida's Tri-Rail system.
Life is good.
SunRail had failed twice before in the Florida Senate, two years in a row in the legislature's regular annual sessions. The Florida House each time overwhelmingly passed the proposal, but a spiteful state Senator from the small city of Lakeland, Senator Paula Dockery, did her best to kill SunRail because she was mad her husband's original, too-expensive, ill-advised bullet train scheme was made to go away by former Governor Jeb Bush almost a decade ago.
In a rare change of places in politics, the Republicans were pushing for SunRail, and the Democrats were mostly against it. Senator Dockery, who is now running for governor in next year's state elections, is also a Republican.
Overall, SunRail had bipartisan support on many fronts, but the trial lawyers were originally against it because the original bill protected CSX, which is selling the track and infrastructure to the State of Florida for hundreds of millions of dollars wanted reasonable risk protection for any freight trains it would continue to run in off-hours when SunRail wasn't running between Deland, a far northern suburb of Orlando in Volusia County (near Daytona Beach), through the heart of downtown Orlando via Sanford (home of Auto Train's southern terminus), Casselberry, Longwood, and Winter Park all the way down to Poinciana, to the southwest of Orlando, near the theme park area of Orlando (Walt Disney World, SeaWorld, Universal Studios).
There was a fuss by the unions, who claimed the Republican-ruled State of Florida government was union-busting. At the last moment, they came to an agreement through some sort of backroom deal, and the unions relented and allowed the Democrats to vote for SunRail.
But, mostly, for the first two years, SunRail failed because of one Senator, Paula Dockery. She used every piece of disinformation and distortion she could find to kill SunRail out of spite, and she cut deals with as many other senators as she could on unrelated topics to buy their votes in her favor. It took the untimely death of a longtime Senator from here in Jacksonville, who supported the concept of SunRail, but voted against it due to a deal cut with Senator Dockery, for the bill to finally pass. The dearly departed Senator's elected replacement was one of the chief paid lobbyists for SunRail the previous year, so his vote was an automatic "yes."
In the end, it all came down to politics and perception. SunRail was touted as a job creator (no doubt about that), and it was touted as a budget buster, taking money out of the mouths of babes and education opportunities away from school children, not to mention all of the alleged hospitals and clinics which wouldn't be built because of the cost of SunRail.
It was only when the Republican majority in the Florida Senate realized it wouldn't be prudent to go against the Republican President of the Senate and the Republican Governor that some sense came into focus.
In the mean time, United States Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood came to Florida earlier this year and made it very, very clear if SunRail was not approved, and a funding source found for Tri-Rail, then Florida would be completely out of the running for any federal stimulus funds to build the proposed high speed rail routes in Florida. Added to Secretary LaHood's admonishment were similar dire warnings from Republican Senator George LeMieux and Democratic Senator Bill Nelson (of NASA and space travel fame), as well as a varied assortment of Members of Congress.
So, no matter how good the plan, how good the plan is for the citizens of Florida and Central Florida's tens of millions of annual visitors from around the world, it all came down to a few votes and a lot of political pressure.
Is that any way to run a railroad?
2) Here is who will benefit from the SunRail/Tri-Rail bill:
– The majority of SunRail will run fairly parallel to Interstate 4, the main highway through the very middle of downtown Orlando. Interstate 4 is best described as a slow moving parking lot any time between 7:00 A.M. and about 8:00 P.M., and if there is a wreck, well, don't plan on being home for dinner on time.
As with all commuter rail systems, the sudden appearance of commuter trains will do nothing to alleviate traffic congestion; you couldn't run enough trains with a two minute headway on a triple track mainline to take care of Central Florida's driving problems. The benefit of SunRail is it will provide a reasonably priced, reasonable time alternative to driving on Interstate and surface roads, so almost every commuter in and out of downtown Orlando or commuters traveling from one side of Metropolitan Orlando to another will have the opportunity to take the train and possibly benefit.
– The Orange Blossom Expressway, a second proposed commuter rail system in Central Florida will also benefit. This much smaller system will connect in downtown Orlando with SunRail, coming from far suburban counties to the north of Orlando. This system will travel over rails currently owned by a short line railroad. The start of SunRail could prompt this feeder system to get off the ground faster.
– Everyone in the engineering and related fields, plus many in the construction industry will benefit, almost immediately.
SunRail is probably one of the projects which is actually "shovel ready" and will have a relatively short construction window before beginning service. The current CSX infrastructure is excellent, and it won't take much to upgrade what is already there to make it commuter-system ready. There will be some double tracking required, and the construction of local stations will take place, but none of those are years-long projects, especially with the year-round, construction friendly warm climate of Central Florida.
– CSX will hugely benefit; it's selling 61 miles worth of infrastructure it currently pays taxes on to the State of Florida for over $400 million, and it still gets to run as many freight trains as it wants over the tracks in off hours for – are you ready for this? – $1.00 a year (Yes, one dollar.).
Additionally, CSX gets more tens of millions of dollars to upgrade the former Seaboard Air Line Railroad main line through Ocala to divert trains from the former Atlantic Coast Line Railroad main line through Orlando it is selling to the State of Florida for SunRail. The money for diverting the traffic will go to more infrastructure improvements on the old SAL line such as grade crossings, more sidings, better signaling, and the construction of several highway and road overpasses in congested areas.
CSX will also build a brand new Intermodal facility southwest of Orlando in Polk County, abandoning its older, smaller, more expensive to operate facility in Orlando that is currently on the SunRail route. The upgraded CSX/SAL line via Ocala will handle the diverted traffic from Orlando and the old Intermodal facility and take it all to the new facility.
– Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade Counties, the host counties of Tri-Rail, will all benefit from this legislation. In lieu of the desired $2.00 per day surcharge (A nice synonym for "tax.") on rental cars in each of the three counties, excess state transportation funds will be used for Tri-Rail. Each of the three counties will still contribute to Tri-Rail finances on an annual basis, but the three counties will not be solely responsible for funding the commuter rail system.
This will also most likely clear the way for a huge expansion of Tri-Rail into a "Y" shaped system. The former inland SAL main line Tri-Rail now calls home parallels – in some cases just by a matter of city blocks – the current main line of the Florida East Coast Railroad, a private subsidiary of RailAmerica, based here in Jacksovnille. The FEC for years has been hoping for a similar deal CSX received over two decades ago to sell its track and infrastructure to an expanded Tri-Rail system, while retaining similar rights as CSX has to run over Tri-Rail in off hours.
As with CSX, the FEC would be relieved of the tax burden of ownership and the costs of maintenance and insurance on about 75 or so miles of very expensive, urban track and infrastructure if Tri-Rail buys its line from the north of West Palm Beach (Around Jupiter, Florida.), south all the way into downtown Miami.
Since Henry Flagler and the FEC in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were the original builders of all of the East Coast of Florida south of St. Augustine for all practical purposes, the FEC line has a superior route through the middle of downtowns and urban areas than the old SAL line which was not completed into South Florida until the Florida Land Boom in the 1920s. The FEC had all of the downtowns and track which hugged the South Florida beaches, and the Seaboard was forced to build further to the west in the suburbs and swamplands on the edge of the Florida Everglades south of West Palm Beach where the line swung east from its route through Winter Haven, Sebring, and skirting Lake Okeechobee.
Tri-Rail plans to keep its current system, and add trackage to the north and south of West Palm Beach on the FEC (The same trackage which is part of Amtrak's high speed rail proposal for Florida vying for part of the $8 billion in stimulus money to be awarded later this Winter.).
– Every other proposed commuter rail system in the country will benefit from the passage of the SunRail bill because from the beginning, the bill has been a model of rational, reasonable planning, with no pie-in-the-sky ridership figures, too conservative costs, or too extravagant revenue figures. SunRail was conceived and planned using real world numbers and real world expectations. Like the Northstar system in Minneapolis, and the Trinity system in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, SunRail most likely will exceed expectations on opening day.
The deal struck with CSX, similar to the deal the Commonwealth of Massachusetts struck with CSX to expand its state commuter system outside of Boston, most likely will become a model for all future deals with CSX, which is good. CSX will receive huge benefits from the deal, which is to be expected as CSX acts on behalf of its shareholders. While CSX will benefit, the public will also benefit in any number of ways, not the least of which is access to private railroad infrastructure CSX has no duty to share with anyone else it doesn't choose to do business with on any particular day. But, both the SunRail and Massachusetts projects demonstrate how everyone can win, and life goes on with everyone benefitting.
– Amtrak will greatly benefit from SunRail; it will have the benefit of the upgraded infrastructure necessary for SunRail, plus the upgraded shared station facilities, and more friendly dispatching since there will be very little freight train activity south of Jacksonville (Where ALL freight trains came into Florida to be funneled south into Florida's peninsula) on the former ACL line/now SunRail line for 61 miles in Central Florida. For about 210 miles from Jacksonville to the Auburndale cutoff where Amtrak trains turn from the former ACL line onto the former SAL line for the run into Miami, Amtrak trains should have a mostly clear shot of clean dispatching with very little freight train interference. This could lead to a shortening of Florida schedules since the northbound Silver Meteor and Silver usually arrive into Jacksonville ahead of schedule.
Another benefit to Amtrak will be a heightened awareness of passenger rail travel by the commuters on SunRail; passenger-train-aware people are more likely to be receptive to long distance train travel. Hopefully, Amtrak will make the most of this by heavily promoting Amtrak trains at commuter stations.
– U.S. Railcar, which is now the proud owner of the former Colorado Railcar designs for both single and bi-level commuter trains should benefit greatly from today's vote. The original plan, when Colorado Railcar was still a viable company, called for that company's DMUs to provide all of the motive power and consists for SunRail, and it's highly likely any expansion of Tri-Rail in South Florida will also use these same DMUs which have undergone field tests on Tri-Rail in the past few years. Perhaps this will help U.S. Railcar with its request for a federal grant to construct a factory in Ohio to build these self-propelled railcars.
– Transportation planners in Jacksonville to the northeast of Central Florida, and in the Tampa Bay area to the southwest of Central Florida have won a major victory. In addition to the creation of SunRail and the funding of Tri-Rail, the enabling legislation also creates two new state programs to deal with all present and future commuter rail systems in Florida. As far as state government is concerned, commuter rail in Florida "has arrived."
– Real estate developers and entrepreneurs will benefit greatly. Even though Central Florida is very densely built-out and populated, look to new mixed use housing and retail and office developments to spring up within walking distance (Even in the Florida heat and rain in the Summer.) of the new SunRail stations.
3) Here is who will not benefit from the SunRail/Tri-Rail bill:
– Anyone who intentionally buys or builds a home near an existing railroad track which has been in place since the late 19th Century. The NIMBYs lost; the train tracks which were built to handle traffic will continue to do so, and those opposed to trains will have to find a life elsewhere.
– The anti-rail talking heads who make careers out of making arguments which are usually a couple of French fries short of a Happy Meal against commuter rail and any other type of rail. Often, what's old is new, and commuter rail is making a comeback in this country and will have a happy life alongside the automobile and sport utility vehicles of the world. While the return on investment in SunRail and Tri-Rail may not happen in exactly the same way or following the same formula which works for building more and more roads and highways, the ROI on commuter rail has a proven record of success beyond the tired "green" and "sustainability" arguments which are – by themselves – no complete arguments at all for huge projects such as commuter rail.
– Asphalt and concrete manufacturers. Instead of laying literally miles and miles of asphalt and concrete on new roads, these folks will have to settle for acres of new asphalt and concrete on new commuter rail station parking lots and access roads.
4) As a final note, we should examine Amtrak's role in all of this. Some had suggested in order to go around various liability questions with CSX and other issues before this bill was passed Amtrak should simply be the operator or SunRail, and many of those issues would go away.
Amtrak is consistently the most expensive commuter system operator in the country, with a less than stellar record (See the immediate previous issue of TWA to this issue and the discussion of Amtrak's failures in California operating the Pacific Surfliner service on behalf of California.).
Here is something to think about: If Amtrak were no longer America's best kept secret, and the company promoted itself like any other American company, more Americans would know of and understand passenger rail.
Reading the online news articles about SunRail and the accompanying idiotic, knee-jerk reactions to SunRail by uninformed readers was a tragic exercise. It appears a certain element of our society absolutely hates anything to do with passenger rail, and think it should be consigned to museums and Third World countries. These people have no idea, nor rational concept of the many economic and social benefits of passenger rail. Many of these people would rather give up their firstborn child than their automobiles.
There is nothing wrong with choice, just as there is nothing wrong with someone choosing to only travel in their personal vehicle. That's the kind of choice we take for granted in this country, and we cherish to right to make that choice.
But, while keeping that same right to choose, we should not be taking away the rights of others who choose to travel by a means other than a personal vehicle.
Amtrak carries two tenths of one percent of America's travelers, which is hardly a blip on anyone's screen. Amtrak is – and remains – statistically irrelevant to American transportation.
If Amtrak chose to be a healthy, relevant passenger carrier, then many of the arguments made against SunRail out of ignorance simply would not have added anything beyond puffs of hot air to the discussion. That was not the case, however; SunRail failed twice because no one knew how to make a rational argument for passenger rail against a determined foe, because no one knows about passenger rail.
That is something Amtrak can do something about; it can stop being statistically irrelevant, and create a vision for the future which includes conventional passenger rail as part of our domestic transportation network. Until that happens, more prospective commuter rail systems are going to be delayed or shot down in flames because no one can talk intelligently about the sins and virtues of passenger rail in America.
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Copies of This Week at Amtrak are archived on URPA's web site, www.unitedrail.org and also on www.todaywithjb.blogspot.com where other rail-related writings of Bruce Richardson may also be found.
URPA leadership members are available for speaking engagements.
J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739
[email protected]
http://www.unitedrail.org
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This Week at Amtrak; December 10, 2009
A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
America’s foremost passenger rail policy institute
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203 • Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Volume 6, Number 50
Founded over three decades ago in 1976, URPA is a nationally known policy institute which focuses on solutions and plans for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota, California, Arizona, New Mexico, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and other cities. For more detailed information, along with a variety of position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at http://www.unitedrail.org.
URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from any outside sources.
1) Just when we thought things were slowing down for the Christmas season ... word has come the Amtrak Board of Directors has authorized taking the current tri-weekly Sunset Limited and turning it into a daily operation.
The new version of the Sunset Limited – and, most likely, the Sunset Limited name will regrettably be retired, in a death before its time – will make the daily Texas Eagle a daily train all the way from its present daily endpoint in San Antonio, Texas to Los Angeles. For the first time in decades, the fabled Sunset Route of the former Southern Pacific Railroad and now Union Pacific Railroad will have daily service. The Texas Eagle will now be a Chicago-Los Angeles daily train. There is hopeful speculation the less than spectacular Texas Eagle name will be retired, too, and perhaps replaced with something more appropriate such as restoring the former Southern Pacific/Rock Island famed name, the Golden State. Other names, such as the lackluster California Eagle, have also been suggested.
Cities and towns with current tri-weekly service now having daily service from a full service train include
Del Rio, Texas
Sanderson, Texas
Alpine, Texas
El Paso, Texas
Deming, New Mexico
Lordsburg, New Mexico
Benson, Arizona
Tucson, Arizona
Maricopa, Arizona (Phoenix)
Yuma, Arizona
Palm Springs, California
Ontario, California
Pomona, California
and, into Los Angeles Union Station.
For the segment of the current Sunset Limited route between San Antonio and New Orleans, a new daily stub train will be established, with coach and a first class coach service, along with a food service car. The schedules of this yet-to-be-named train will coordinate with the new version of the Sunset at San Antonio.
When this plan first surfaced earlier this year at the Railroad Passenger Association of California meeting in Los Angeles, many had hoped through car service from Los Angeles to at least New Orleans would remain. Alas, in this version, that is not to be; passengers traveling from points west of San Antonio will have to change trains for cities, towns, and hamlets east of San Antonio.
Many are hoping that will change; there are other points in the Amtrak system where that type of operation takes place, notably on the Lake Shore Limited and Empire Builder.
As an interesting note, Alpine, Texas, most known for its wide open spaces and almost total lack of denizens, will now have daily train service with sleeping cars, and a full service diner, but Houston, Texas, one of the largest cities in America, will have daily service with only coaches, a first class coach service, and some sort of diner/lounge food service. Somewhere, somebody at Amtrak thinks that’s a peachy idea.
Stations east of San Antonio which will now have daily coach service on the new stub train include
Houston, Texas
Beaumont, Texas
Lake Charles, Louisiana
Lafayette, Louisiana
New Iberia, Louisiana
Schriever, Louisiana
and, New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal.
There is no information as to when this service will commence, and on what schedules the two trains will operate.
2) What of service on the Sunset Limited route east of New Orleans?
Don’t hold your breath. Amtrak’s Gulf Coast report which it published late this summer made pretty plain hash of what the company wants before it will consider restoring this much-missed and much-needed service.
We will give the Amtrak Board of Directors some credit for embracing Brian Rosenwald’s plans for the Sunset Limited west of New Orleans, but the board will receive a collective lump of coal in its Christmas stocking for doing nothing to restore the immorally-stopped service east of New Orleans.
If you are reading someone else’s copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can receive your own free copy each edition by sending your e-mail address to
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All other correspondence, including requests to unsubscribe should be addressed to
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Copies of This Week at Amtrak are archived on URPA’s web site, www.unitedrail.org and also on www.todaywithjb.blogspot.com where other rail-related writings of Bruce Richardson may also be found.
URPA leadership members are available for speaking engagements.
J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739
[email protected]
http://www.unitedrail.org
This Week at Amtrak; December 15, 2009
A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
America’s foremost passenger rail policy institute
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203 • Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Volume 6, Number 51
Founded over three decades ago in 1976, URPA is a nationally known policy institute which focuses on solutions and plans for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota, California, Arizona, New Mexico, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and other cities. For more detailed information, along with a variety of position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at http://www.unitedrail.org.
URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from any outside sources.
1) It’s that time, again. Amtrak has put out the Fall 2009/Winter 2010 national timetable, and these things just keep getting better with every edition. Amtrak’s timetables are one of the few bright spots in the company; each one becomes more user friendly than the previous edition, and the design – which was stagnant for years – shows some zip and imagination.
Notable are the number of paid advertisements by outside agencies and vendors. These people are obviously interested in the business which can be created by Amtrak’s passengers, and they are reaching them in the most expeditious manner, plus helping reduce the cost of producing the timetables.
Whoever is creating the timetables needs to keep doing whatever they are doing. It’s working, and working nicely.
2) It’s begun. Yesterday’s San Francisco Business Times reports the California High-Speed Rail Authority is submitting a business plan to state lawmakers increasing the price tag of the California bullet train between Los Angeles and San Francisco by $9 billion, from $33.6 billion last year to $42.6 billion now.
Ridership estimates have also fallen, from 51 million riders a year down to 41 million; the Authority says the lower ridership estimate is based on projected higher fares, from $68 to $104, now almost $105 instead.
The cost increases for construction are due to inflation, more right-of-way purchases, and additional track work required.
The Authority expects the intrastate project will be funded by $9 billion for 2008's Proposition 1A approved by California voters, local funding of $4 to $5 billion, private funding of $10 to $12 billion, and you and me as federal taxpayers will kick in $17 to $19 billion over the life of the construction project, which isn’t planned to be completed until 2020, 11 years from now.
3) This will give you an end-of-the year giggle. There is a mini-crisis brewing in Tallahassee, Florida’s capital. Senator Paula Dockery, who lost the battle to defeat SunRail this go round earlier this month is never saying “die.” Her new approach: Ask for all of the e-mails swapped between various government officials, departments heads, etc., relating to SunRail. Senator Dockery has particularly been gunning for the Secretary of the Department of Transportation.
Here’s the fun part: Florida has very strong sunshine laws governing all public communications, including intra-governmental e-mails. It seems while the legislation was being formed, Florida’s Department of Transportation was in constant contact with CSX, the main beneficiary of the law; CSX is selling its right-of-way and infrastructure to the State of Florida to make SunRail in Central Florida possible.
Horrors! says Senator Dockery. Florida DOT, as it was crafting legislation, was in contact with CSX, the beneficiary of the legislation. Something crooked must be going on!
Most likely, it never occurred to Senator Dockery, in all of her vitriol and seeking revenge against CSX and Florida DOT, perhaps, since both parties are going to have to agree to this deal, if the parties communicate while the deal is going on, there will not be a prolonged period at the end for negotiations? Perhaps, if agreements are made incrementally, then upon final drafting of the deal, only signatures will be required instead of more and more negotiations?
That’s what a reasonable person would think.
The folks at Florida DOT didn’t help themselves, though, by creating what is now known as “Wafflegate.” It seems the DOT people MAY have wanted to avoid public records disclosure searches by labeling all of their e-mail pertaining to SunRail with the names of breakfast foods.
Yes, you read that correctly. E-mails traded between DOT officials had subject headers of “pancakes,” and “French toast.” When the initial public records search was made using key words such as “SunRail,” “CSX,” and “commuter rail” the search engines somehow completely ignored “pancakes” and “French toast.”
So, a tempest in a teapot has come to be. Somebody, drinking the breakfast tea, should have used better judgement in labeling e-mails. A very good commuter rail project is now mired in election year political backbiting and witch hunts because somebody was just being foolish.
3) Does everyone understand the concept of an unfunded mandate? This is what Congress and the federal government frequently do; laws are created everyone must follow, but no money is provided often for the billions of dollars it will cost for private industry or individuals to follow the new law’s mandate.
Positive Train Control, as mandated for 30 of our nation’s railroads in the Amtrak reauthorization signed last year by President George W. Bush is an unfunded mandate, which the railroad industry estimates will cost $10 billion to comply, says ProgressiveRailraoding.com. The railroads (including Amtrak) will be required to install the monitor-and-control system. Industry benefits on the $10 billion investment are expected to be about $600 million, far, far short of the cost of installation.
As a result of this, some railroads are looking at their track networks and trying to figure out how much of the networks have to have PTC by the mandated start date. Some railroads, such as CSX, are looking at lightly used main lines, like the Sunset route east of New Orleans into Florida, and making decisions not to upgrade that track, electing instead to move freight trains over a nearly parallel route further to the north, and dropping back into Florida for the gateway at Jacksonville to all of Florida’s peninsula.
Other Class I railroads are correctly doing the same. With a mandated investment in the billions, and return on investment in the low millions, railroads have to take a rational approach to PTC. No track is being torn up, but routes are being downgraded until the long term business climate looks more favorable.
This puts Amtrak in a bit of a difficult position. Any route expansions or restorations have to take into account for the first time whether or not PTC infrastructure is in place. If not, the cost of the expansion includes the addition of Positive Train Control on the new track.
Some TWA readers have wondered what all of this is going to do to Amtrak as it shakily stands today.
Most likely, the host freight railroads are going to look to Amtrak as much as possible to bear the cost of PTC on their lines, especially on routes which are lightly used for freight movements, but constantly used by Amtrak. Parts of the Southwest Chief route on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway qualify under this condition.
The freight railroads will look at Amtrak like one of their investment bankers; Amtrak has less controversial access to cash from the federal and state governments than the private railroads. Don’t be surprised sometime in 2010 or soon after for Amtrak to make a large grant request to Congress, perhaps in the hundreds of millions of dollars, solely for the purpose of PTC upgrades along established routes.
This only makes sense; it was Congress, in its rush to prove its chops after the many fatalities of the Metrolink crash in Southern California earlier in 2008, which said any line carrying passenger trains and certain hazardous freight loads must be PTC equipped if used in regular, scheduled service.
If Congress believes its own publicity and believes it acted correctly with the Amtrak reauthorization in 2008 which included PTC mandates, then it should have little, if any, problems coming up with the big bucks it’s going to take to fund Positive Train Control.
Since Congress mandates host railroads MUST handle Amtrak trains, and Congress mandates host railroads MUST offer the safety of PTC, the Congress MUST pay for all of this. It’s one thing to make railroads host passenger trains, it’s entirely another to penalize them with additional expense to create a multi-billion dollar mandate nearly 40 years after Amtrak was created.
4) Here is the latest from Ken Orski at Innovation NewsBriefs. This is Volume 20, Number 24; for further information, consult www.innobriefs.com.
[begin quote]
December 12, 2009
Using the Jobs Stimulus to Reform the Transportation Program
Writing recently in the National Journal's Transportation blog, we observed the new Obama-proposed job stimulus might dim the prospects for an early enactment of a long-term surface transportation authorization. "The jobs stimulus," we wrote, "or rather its infrastructure component, could be the death warrant for any foreseeable reform of the federal surface transportation program." ("What Have We Learned from the Recovery Act", December 9, 2009, http://transportation.nationaljournal.com)
The crowded senate calendar, we reasoned, means congressional action on the second stimulus proposal — or at least its $50-70 billion component dealing with new infrastructure spending — must wait until next year and may not reach the President’s desk until late Spring 2010. With the newly authorized infrastructure funds added to the still unspent $16 billion left over from the Recovery Act (ARRA), federal stimulus spending for transportation projects could stretch well beyond 2010.
Assuming the job stimulus becomes law, we asked, does any one think Congress would still have any appetite to enact a $500 billion multi-year authorization in 2010, on the eve of a congressional midterm election? Most likely, we concluded, a multi-year authorization would be delayed until 2011and some pessimists think that with a new Congress and an increased emphasis on deficit reduction, an even further slippage could occur. "Is the tradeoff worth it? You decide" we wrote.
Well, the response is in and it largely supports our point of view. It came in the form of responses from fellow bloggers and in a December 9 Newsweek column by David A. Graham, entitled "Putting the Cart Before the Horse: Could a transportation-based jobs stimulus stymie infrastructure reform?" Wrote Graham: "The stimulus bill would spend tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure but do little to remake a flawed financing and planning system. That’s a missed opportunity, according to some observers, who are concerned a stimulus, while better than nothing, would fall short of its potential by ignoring the issues the surface transport bill aims to address." The column goes on in a later paragraph to say: "The worry is that by pumping large sums into infrastructure this spring, Congress might kill any appetite for a meaningful overhaul of surface transportation funding any time soon." It quotes my fellow National Journal Transportation blogger James Corless, director of the liberal Transportation for America coalition as "very concerned." "We worry greatly," the column quotes Corless, "that putting tens of billions of dollars into these existing stovepipes is not going to have the intended outcome," i.e. a true reform of the surface transportation program.
Meanwhile, the objectives of the proposed second stimulus are becoming more elastic as we speak. At a December 10 Brookings Institution forum on Infrastructure, U.S. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood said he sees no reason why some of the infrastructure funds in the stimulus program should not be allowed to be diverted to fund the operating expenses of transit systems which have been hard hit by the economic recession. It's difficult to see how such a move would help to promote job growth, but then the entire rationale and objectives of the second infrastructure stimulus have been poorly articulated and, not surprisingly, are coming under increased scrutiny.
Hopefully, by the time Congress is ready to act — most likely, only after the President’s State of the Union address in January — the hemorrhaging of jobs will stop and Congress will be able to shift its focus, as several of my fellow bloggers suggested, from "ready-to-go" maintenance projects (which seem more effective at preserving existing jobs than at creating new jobs) to a longer lasting goal of investing in infrastructure projects that improve national connectivity, increase metropolitan accessibility and enhance economic growth. Such action would make it less urgent to enact a multi-year transportation bill, whose prospects of passage in 2010, we still believe, are anything but certain.
[End quote]
If you are reading someone else’s copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can receive your own free copy each edition by sending your e-mail address to
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You MUST include your name, preferred e-mail address, and city and state where you live. If you have filters or firewalls placed on your Internet connection, set your e-mail to receive incoming mail from [email protected]; we are unable to go through any approvals processes for individuals. This mailing list is kept strictly confidential and is not shared or used for any purposes other than distribution of This Week at Amtrak or related URPA materials.
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URPA leadership members are available for speaking engagements.
J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739
[email protected]
http://www.unitedrail.org
Loks like the PTC mandate will make it all the more difficult and challenging to add service for Amtrak, or any service provider. Just when things were starting to look a little bit good for Amtrak, there are dark clouds on the horizon.
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This Week at Amtrak; December 17, 2009
A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
America’s foremost passenger rail policy institute
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203 • Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Volume 6, Number 52
Founded over three decades ago in 1976, URPA is a nationally known policy institute which focuses on solutions and plans for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota, California, Arizona, New Mexico, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and other cities. For more detailed information, along with a variety of position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at http://www.unitedrail.org.
URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from any outside sources.
1) Sometimes, the information sneaks in through the backdoor, which is fine, as long as it comes in.
Courtesy of the United States House of Representatives, Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, we have learned of Amtrak’s plans for new equipment.
The United States House of Representatives, in a rush to spend more public money, has presented H.R. 2847, THE “JOBS FOR MAIN STREET ACT, 2010” which it considers to be a jobs creation bill. There is all types of transportation monies in the bill, including scads of money for Amtrak.
Before you jump to any conclusions, this is a bill which is in progress, not a completed bill approved by both the House and Senate and sent to the president for signing. This is only a bill in progress, working its way through the legislative system.
But, what this bill does is give us a good glimpse into Amtrak’s wish list for new equipment.
Here’s what the bill has to say, pertaining only to Amtrak.
[begin quote]
AMTRAK: $800 MILLION
H.R. 2847, the Jobs for Main Street Act, 2010: Title I, Chapter 6 of H.R. 2847 provides $800 million to Amtrak for fleet modernization, including rehabilitation of existing equipment and acquisition of new equipment such as fuel-efficient locomotives. It also strengthens Amtrak’s Buy America requirement to encourage domestic manufacturing and rehabilitation of the equipment.
Amtrak’s equipment is aging; it is a major factor in delays. Some of Amtrak’s vehicles are more than 50 years old. The average life of a passenger rail car, depending on its usage, is 25 to 30 years. The lifespan of a locomotive is 20 to 25 years. Currently, Amtrak has 92 Heritage cars in service (which are 53 to 61 years old), 17 Metroliners (which are 42 years old), 412 Amfleet I cars (which are 32 to 35 years old), 122 Amfleet II cars (which are 28 to 29 years old), 249 Superliner I cars (which are 28 to 30 years old); 184 Superliner II cars (which are 13 to 15 years old), 97 Horizon cars (which are 19 to 20 years old), 50 Viewliners (which are 13 to 14 years old), 29 Talgo cars (which are 10 years old), 120 Acela cars (which are nine to 10 years old), and 41 Surfliners (which are seven to nine years old).
With respect to locomotives, Amtrak has 49 AEM-7 locomotives (which are 21 to 29 years old), 18 P32’s (which are 18 years old), 18 P32DM’s (which are 11 to 14 years old), 21 F59PHI’s (which are 11 years old), 15 HHP-8’s (which are eight to 10 years old), and 207 P42’s (which are eight to 13 years old).
Over the next five years and given adequate resources, Amtrak plans to purchase 396 new single-level vehicles for corridor service, which will replace about 95 percent of the Amfleet I vehicles; purchase 275 new single-level vehicles for long-haul service in an effort to remove all of the Heritage single-level cars and about 95 percent of the Amfleet II vehicles from service; purchase 160 new bi-level vehicles to replace 65 percent of the Superliner I cars; and purchase 100 new electric locomotives to replace the entire electric locomotive fleet. Amtrak also plans to acquire 54 new diesel locomotives, replacing 20 percent of its diesel fleet; and purchase five additional Acela trainsets and 41 new switch engines to replace the entire switcher fleet. Amtrak estimates that the effort requires capital funding of approximately $4.57 billion.
Recovery Act Implementation: The Recovery Act provided Amtrak with $1.3 billion for capital improvements. Of the $1.3 billion, Amtrak has awarded $623 million in contracts for 350 projects. This amount represents 48 percent of the total apportionment. Other major initiatives are planned, including infrastructure improvements (such as major bridges); and improvements to rights-of-way, facilities and other structures, information management systems, and communications and signal systems. Amtrak is also making capital improvements to stations and other facilities to meet requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act; various safety and security improvements, including purchasing police equipment; and replacing concrete ties.
[End quote]
Okay, while your True Believer buddy to the left of you is jumping up and down for joy at the information above, you, being a regular reader of This Week at Amtrak, and, therefore, exercise more bold caution when it comes to announcements from Amtrak or about Amtrak, take a more critical view of what you have just read.
You realize everything above only talks about REPLACING aging equipment; none of the hyperbole above actually talks about fleet EXPANSION.
In other words, Amtrak, if it gets the big bucks, only plans to replace its fleet, not expand its fleet. Using Amtrak’s usual bureaucratic thinking nonsense about always wanting perfect government-think scenarios because they are neat and tidy and don’t require any real thought, probably considers all of that older-hopefully-replaced equipment as upcoming surplus, to be sent to the scrap yard.
Amtrak still hasn’t learned its lesson from its chilly cousin to the north, VIA Rail Canada, which has the majority of its fleet’s equipment older than what Amtrak is using, and they cheerfully slap a new coat of paint on it, take out some of the dents, upgrade the electronics, and keep it going down the road with great dispatch, mostly because when Budd built the stuff in the 1950s, they built is the same way other companies built Sherman tanks: virtually indestructible.
But, no, that won’t do for Amtrak. Amtrak wants all-new, instead of new augmenting older for a blended fleet with different purposes. Heaven forbid Amtrak maintenance would have to be as clever as VIA Rail Canada maintenance.
So, yes, it’s nice to know Amtrak does have some plan tucked away somewhere for the future. Unfortunately, that plan doesn’t call for any expansion, or any improvements. It only calls for replacements.
Amtrak hasn’t figured out that wars are not won by just replacing dead soldiers; wars are won by determined surges making use of a combination of existing and new soldiers.
2) Did you notice the ad in the November 2009 issue of Railway Age Magazine?
It has the unglamorous title of “Request For Proposals: 10-PCJPB-T-025 For a Rail System Operator.” Did that make you start tingling all over? No? Well, here’s why it should.
The ad was placed by Caltrain, which operates the former Southern Pacific Railroad commuter service in and out of San Francisco and down the San Francisco Peninsula. Caltrain operates 98 trains per day, San Francisco-San Jose-Gilroy, with a total of 33 stations (including endpoint terminals). Included in the system is the famed Silicon Valley. The system has 77 miles of track with a top speed of 79 M.P.H. Caltrain carries on average, 39,000 passengers a day on weekdays.
This is not an inconsequential system; there are 29 locomotives and 110 passenger cars.
Let’s look at Amtrak in California; Amtrak’s biggest state cash cow. Amtrak takes in State of California (Caltrans) revenues for operating costs for the Capitols, San Joaquins, Pacific Surfliners, and, now Southern California’s Metrolink, in addition to its current operations deal for Caltrain.
Amtrak has been operating Caltrain on behalf of the Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board (a longish and legally proper way of saying the old Southern Pacific San Francisco Peninsula commuter service) since 1992. Now, the contract is up, and Caltrain has advertised for a request for proposals.
Amtrak just lost the Virginia Railway Express on the Right Coast; what would happen if it lost Caltrain on the Left Coast?
With the addition of Southern California’s Metrolink, probably not much on the surface; the Amtrak bureaucracy in the West would just keep on marching.
Those with a sharp eye may notice Gilroy, California is on the Union Pacific main line which is traversed by Amtrak’s Coast Starlight. Gilroy slips right in the middle of the San Jose and Salinas station stops.
So, let’s speculate, just a bit, as an intellectual exercise.
Suppose Amtrak doesn’t keep the Caltrains contract; suppose some other service provider, such as Veolia Transportation, Herzog, or even the French company which is taking over VRE on the far side of the country successfully bid for and win the Caltrain contract.
And, then, suppose the Caltrain operator performs successfully, and pleases not only the folks at Caltrain, but also – more importantly – the folks at Caltrans, who are monthly writing big, big checks to Amtrak for operating the Pacific Surfliners, Capitols, and San Joaquins (Metrolink writes its own checks).
What if some renegade bureaucrat in Caltrans says, “well, Caltrain is doing so well, how can we expand that service?
“What would happen if, say, we took one or two of those Caltrain consists, and pushed them further south than Gilroy, perhaps all the way to Los Angeles?
“What would happen if Union Pacific Railroad liked the Caltrain operator better than Amtrak?
“What would happen, if say, well, gee, we just start turning over all of the Caltrans contracts to the Caltrain operator, instead of retaining Amtrak contract after contract?”
The answer is, Amtrak would suffer a horrible blow, and be crippled tremendously in the west. Amtrak would actually have real world competition. Amtrak would have to sing for its supper every night. Amtrak would really have to perform.
All of this, of course, comes under the heading “what if?”. But, it’s an intriguing “what if?”.
Amtrak for too long has taken most of its world for granted. It has even had the hubris of presuming it will be the preferred operator of the coming various high speed rail systems, even though it has not done well operating what it has today.
An article in today’s Daily Finance (www.dailyfinance.com) says Japan Central Railway has started putting together a proposal to be the sole builder and operator of America’s high speed rail system; everything from building track and infrastructure to building and operating trainsets. These are the same folks who operate the profitable bullet train franchise in Japan today.
The French and Germans want in on the USA action, too.
Amtrak may think it has the home field advantage, but it’s tough to see how, when there are much more successful worldwide competitors out there knocking on America’s door.
Veolia Transportation, which operates some sort of commuter rail or transit system in over 500 cities around the world (equivalent to Amtrak’s number of station stops in the national system) wants in on US high speed rail, too. They have the talent, and they have the financial clout to make it happen.
Will Amtrak understand in time what is swirling around it and potentially causing a lot of mayhem? Will Amtrak understand it has a long, long way to go to get its corporate house in order so it can fend off these much more successful international competitors? It’s going to take a lot more clout than Amtrak has today on Capitol Hill to keep things together. Amtrak needs to understand the world is not an exclusive Amworld.
If you are reading someone else’s copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can receive your own free copy each edition by sending your e-mail address to
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Copies of This Week at Amtrak are archived on URPA’s web site, www.unitedrail.org and also on www.todaywithjb.blogspot.com where other rail-related writings of Bruce Richardson may also be found.
URPA leadership members are available for speaking engagements.
J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739
[email protected]
http://www.unitedrail.org
This Week at Amtrak; January 5, 2010
A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
America’s foremost passenger rail policy institute
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203 • Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739, Electronic Mail [email protected] • http://www.unitedrail.org
Volume 7, Number 1
Founded over three decades ago in 1976, URPA is a nationally known policy institute which focuses on solutions and plans for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota, California, Arizona, New Mexico, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and other cities. For more detailed information, along with a variety of position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at http://www.unitedrail.org.
URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from any outside sources.
1) Welcome to the seventh year of This Week at Amtrak, where there is always the hope, dream, and desire Amtrak will become a responsible part of our nation’s domestic transportation network.
Hope always springs eternal. Reality always disappoints.
Where are we this January that we weren’t last January?
We still do not have a permanent president of Amtrak (see the next item below).
We still do not have an expected passenger equipment order which will expand the fleet.
We still do not have a funded marketing plan which will increase ridership nationwide.
We still do not have every train in the system operating on a daily schedule.
We still do not have anything but a bare, inadequate, skeletal national system.
We still do not have anyone publicly leading the company with a future vision or growth plan.
We do have a plan to take the Sunset Limited west of New Orleans to a daily operation, but we don’t have a plan to restore the illegally stopped service east of New Orleans.
We do have some executives at Amtrak who are anxious to make the company perform better and provide better service, but they are hamstrung by the cadre of executives who seem to be there mostly for the retirement package.
We do have a desire on the part of many Americans of all ages to ride trains, but there are not many trains to ride.
We do have other competent passenger train operators in this country waiting for the opportunity to move beyond providing commuter services to real intercity services.
We do now exist in the era of anticipating coming high speed rail, but it’s going to be a long, long process getting there.
We do have visionaries like former Federal Railroad Administration Administrator Gil Carmichael who have developed realistic plans for the future, but often these learned and inspiring voices seem to be talking in the wilderness more than to receptive audiences in Washington, no matter how long and hard they talk and make a great deal of sense.
We do have people like Andrew Selden of Minneapolis, Minnesota who not only understand the business of passenger railroading, but are willing to create a vision and plan for the future.
Where are we in January 2010 versus January 2009? Another year has gone by without much major happening in the world of Amtrak.
Keep in mind, that has occurred intentionally on the part of Amtrak; it has had a plethora of opportunities, and it has chosen to focus on planning for the expected panacea of high speed rail and ignore its core business of 79 M.P.H. conventional trains. Maybe that’s why so many foreign passenger rail operators, from across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans have expressed an interest in developing high speed rail in the United States. These astute businessmen have looked at Amtrak and found it wanting in so many ways; they must figure competing for Amtrak for a chunk of business is like shooting fish in a barrel.
2) There is always someone in a company who has the zest and drive to make things happen. Eh, not so much at Amtrak.
The Amtrak Board of Directors, which will never be mistaken for a body which takes bold action, has extended indefinitely the tenure of interim President and Chief Executive Officer Joseph Boardman.
The Amtrak board currently consists of five voting members, one being Mr. Boardman. There are four vacant seats on the board, two of which have nominees awaiting Senate confirmation. Two seats have no announced appointees; apparently the White House and various and sundry Members of Congress haven’t agreed upon who gets those seats (If anybody asks, we can recommend a cadre of highly competent potential board members, none of which have the type of conflicts the two current nominees have, and each would be a stellar addition to the board.).
So, in a fit of bold caution, the Amtrak board extended Mr. Boardman’s contract and made a statement saying a permanent president of Amtrak would not be announced until the board is more fully populated.
Hmmmm, let’s see. When was the last time the Amtrak Board of Directors was fully populated?
Seriously, anybody know?
You have to go all the way back to the end of the Clinton Administration to find a legal quorum of board members.
In the interim during the Bush years, stars like former board chairman David Laney and some others held things together and worked through a number of problems while the White House dithered and the Senate obfuscated about appointing qualified board members.
So, Mr. Boardman gets to keep his job a while longer.
Okay, let’s get to the bottom line. There is certainly a rational argument to be made about a board of directors hiring a chief executive, and then new members of the board arrive and find the chief executive not to their liking. We’ve already seen that scenario play out with the unlamented departure of former Amtrak President and CEO Alex Kummant. Even though Mr. Kummant departed over disagreements about a number of issues, it was never an ideal situation to have a CEO hired by a departed board expected to meet the needs of a new board.
The big complaint really centers around the White House. Guys, it’s been a full year, now. That is more than enough time to find and screen political appointees to the Amtrak board. There are a number of qualified people just waiting in the wings, hoping for a chance to lead Amtrak into a better era and a more prosperous time. But, the Amtrak board, always a bottom of the barrel issue for any White House administration, remains a sideshow, and – highly regrettably – business as usual reigns.
In the interim, how about some leadership from the United States Department of Transportation and/or the Federal Railroad Administration? How about setting some goals for Amtrak and creating a true surface transportation policy?
How about SOMEONE doing SOMETHING? Doing ANYTHING? Dan Pardue of Raleigh, North Carolina, when trying to do problem solving with non-cooperative equipment or non-cooperative clients, always says “Do something, even if it’s wrong. At least some action is being taken, and perhaps the right answer will come along by starting some sort of process.”
Amtrak, here at This Week at Amtrak we will gladly provide you with Mr. Pardue’s telephone number so you can call him for some tutoring. Please, start some sort of process to start doing something – anything, please.
In 2009, a year which will go down in the annuals of history as a truly misbegotten year, Amtrak received record amounts of free federal monies. Stimulus money flowed, and regular budget money flowed.
While Amtrak did start whittling away at a backlog of projects which are nice to have completed, most of those projects (with the stark exception of rolling stock rehabs) will not generate any additional revenues for Amtrak. Most of the projects are just things which needed to be done, and had been neglected; some for decades.
Again, Amtrak has an unprecedented opportunity for change and upgrading itself as a company and our nation’s domestic passenger railroad.
But, Amtrak seems to be doing a bang up job of wasting that opportunity, instead of taking advantage of so much manna from the federal treasury.
We give Mr. Boardman credit for stabilizing some things, and he gets a huge “attaboy” for leading the company to accepting Brian Rosenwald’s excellent work of starting the process of converting the Sunset Limited west of New Orleans into a daily – yet, still a bit flawed – operation. We’re waiting for some leadership on what will happen east of New Orleans, and we keep hearing whispers the Cardinal, perhaps one of Amtrak’s most scenic routes, will be lifted from the doldrums and waste of a tri-weekly operation.
But, Mr. Boardman, in his interim post, is still head of the company, and he still sets the daily tone and pace of the company. We do expect some sort of future vision, even if it’s just a building block to be used by a permanent CEO. We do expect some sort of growth plan, and we do expect an equipment order beyond the rather paltry announcements which have been made for replacement equipment, only.
In short, even if it’s interim leadership, we do expect leadership.
Amtrak is an ongoing enterprise, with a long-forgotten mandate and mission to provide the United States of America with a national passenger train service. Keeping Amtrak in a state of suspense because the White House and Members of Congress can’t decide on political appointees for the board of directors is not only wasteful, it’s sinister and displays an outright prejudice against all of us who understand and cherish passenger rail travel.
Mr. Boardman, please start the process. The Obama White House, please do your duty and populate the Amtrak Board of Directors. United States Senate, please fulfill your advise and consent duties as outlined in the constitution so the Amtrak board seats can be filled in an expeditious manner.
Somebody, somewhere, please, don’t leave us all hanging.
3) Amtrak ended 2009 battling the late fall/early winter Blizzard of 2009, with a pretty good record. Chicago got penalized by one of its host railroads dumping a freight train off the tracks, causing a huge traffic jam, and it took a while to get things back to normal. No penalty to Amtrak. On the Northeast Corridor, while the airlines just threw up their collective hands and said they weren’t flying in the bad weather (it’s kind of tough to blame them when the weather is that nasty), Amtrak did mostly fulfill its duty as the all-weather common carrier and kept a lot of trains running, as did its host railroads south of Washington, even though trains were woefully late. Too many trains were cancelled during the busy holiday period (it’s especially vexing Amtrak chose to cancel the Palmetto, even though the majority of its run was south of the destruction of the storm), but transportation still was available.
There were too many mechanical malfunction reports of Amfleet cars on the NEC with doors which were frozen open. Gosh, those cars have only been around for a bit more than three decades now, in the heat of summer and the cold of winter, one has to believe someone in that vast period of time could figure out how to overcome Budd’s design flaws of the vestibule doors freezing in the open position when the car is full of passengers traveling at 100 M.P.H. and the icy wind is tearing through the interior of the car and passengers.
Going further into winter, Amtrak has been battling more weather-related problems and the country has been battling record cold temperatures and storms. (It MUST be all of that global warming; what other explanation could there be for such a cold and cruel start of what most likely is going to be a long, cold, bitter winter?) Some trains are running more than a dozen hours late, other trains just seem to be disappearing off of the schedule, and are never being launched out of their terminals.
This is when Amtrak’s too thin fleet reserves come back to bite it. Inbound equipment that normally turns for the next day’s outbound train suddenly is stranded on a siding somewhere on the far side of nowhere, and there’s no spare equipment to put on the road. Passengers and crews are stranded; things spin more and more out of control, and eventually system gridlock occurs. Remember all of that old equipment that used to sit around, but is gone, now? Wouldn’t it be nice to have that for occasions just such as this winter?
Before the Age of Amtrak, the private passenger railroads always kept a slice of their old equipment fleets around for use in emergencies. It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t the most efficient stuff in the world, but it got passengers to a destination when nothing else could. Amtrak has scrapped or sold all of its old equipment; after all, since it gets lots of free federal monies from the government treasury it doesn’t have to worry about keeping passengers happy by providing them the transportation they paid for in advance. Amtrak can just annul as many trains as it wants, and say “so sorry, so sad” to its stranded passengers, and keep totaling up the tab to be paid for by Congress next budget year.
What a way to run a railroad.
If you are reading someone else’s copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can receive your own free copy each edition by sending your e-mail address to
[email protected]
You MUST include your name, preferred e-mail address, and city and state where you live. If you have filters or firewalls placed on your Internet connection, set your e-mail to receive incoming mail from [email protected]; we are unable to go through any approvals processes for individuals. This mailing list is kept strictly confidential and is not shared or used for any purposes other than distribution of This Week at Amtrak or related URPA materials.
All other correspondence, including requests to unsubscribe should be addressed to
[email protected]
Copies of This Week at Amtrak are archived on URPA’s web site, www.unitedrail.org and also on www.todaywithjb.blogspot.com where other rail-related writings of Bruce Richardson may also be found.
URPA leadership members are available for speaking engagements.
J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739
[email protected]
http://www.unitedrail.org
A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
America’s foremost passenger rail policy institute
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203 • Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739, Electronic Mail [email protected] • http://www.unitedrail.org
Volume 7, Number 1
Founded over three decades ago in 1976, URPA is a nationally known policy institute which focuses on solutions and plans for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota, California, Arizona, New Mexico, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and other cities. For more detailed information, along with a variety of position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at http://www.unitedrail.org.
URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from any outside sources.
1) Welcome to the seventh year of This Week at Amtrak, where there is always the hope, dream, and desire Amtrak will become a responsible part of our nation’s domestic transportation network.
Hope always springs eternal. Reality always disappoints.
Where are we this January that we weren’t last January?
We still do not have a permanent president of Amtrak (see the next item below).
We still do not have an expected passenger equipment order which will expand the fleet.
We still do not have a funded marketing plan which will increase ridership nationwide.
We still do not have every train in the system operating on a daily schedule.
We still do not have anything but a bare, inadequate, skeletal national system.
We still do not have anyone publicly leading the company with a future vision or growth plan.
We do have a plan to take the Sunset Limited west of New Orleans to a daily operation, but we don’t have a plan to restore the illegally stopped service east of New Orleans.
We do have some executives at Amtrak who are anxious to make the company perform better and provide better service, but they are hamstrung by the cadre of executives who seem to be there mostly for the retirement package.
We do have a desire on the part of many Americans of all ages to ride trains, but there are not many trains to ride.
We do have other competent passenger train operators in this country waiting for the opportunity to move beyond providing commuter services to real intercity services.
We do now exist in the era of anticipating coming high speed rail, but it’s going to be a long, long process getting there.
We do have visionaries like former Federal Railroad Administration Administrator Gil Carmichael who have developed realistic plans for the future, but often these learned and inspiring voices seem to be talking in the wilderness more than to receptive audiences in Washington, no matter how long and hard they talk and make a great deal of sense.
We do have people like Andrew Selden of Minneapolis, Minnesota who not only understand the business of passenger railroading, but are willing to create a vision and plan for the future.
Where are we in January 2010 versus January 2009? Another year has gone by without much major happening in the world of Amtrak.
Keep in mind, that has occurred intentionally on the part of Amtrak; it has had a plethora of opportunities, and it has chosen to focus on planning for the expected panacea of high speed rail and ignore its core business of 79 M.P.H. conventional trains. Maybe that’s why so many foreign passenger rail operators, from across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans have expressed an interest in developing high speed rail in the United States. These astute businessmen have looked at Amtrak and found it wanting in so many ways; they must figure competing for Amtrak for a chunk of business is like shooting fish in a barrel.
2) There is always someone in a company who has the zest and drive to make things happen. Eh, not so much at Amtrak.
The Amtrak Board of Directors, which will never be mistaken for a body which takes bold action, has extended indefinitely the tenure of interim President and Chief Executive Officer Joseph Boardman.
The Amtrak board currently consists of five voting members, one being Mr. Boardman. There are four vacant seats on the board, two of which have nominees awaiting Senate confirmation. Two seats have no announced appointees; apparently the White House and various and sundry Members of Congress haven’t agreed upon who gets those seats (If anybody asks, we can recommend a cadre of highly competent potential board members, none of which have the type of conflicts the two current nominees have, and each would be a stellar addition to the board.).
So, in a fit of bold caution, the Amtrak board extended Mr. Boardman’s contract and made a statement saying a permanent president of Amtrak would not be announced until the board is more fully populated.
Hmmmm, let’s see. When was the last time the Amtrak Board of Directors was fully populated?
Seriously, anybody know?
You have to go all the way back to the end of the Clinton Administration to find a legal quorum of board members.
In the interim during the Bush years, stars like former board chairman David Laney and some others held things together and worked through a number of problems while the White House dithered and the Senate obfuscated about appointing qualified board members.
So, Mr. Boardman gets to keep his job a while longer.
Okay, let’s get to the bottom line. There is certainly a rational argument to be made about a board of directors hiring a chief executive, and then new members of the board arrive and find the chief executive not to their liking. We’ve already seen that scenario play out with the unlamented departure of former Amtrak President and CEO Alex Kummant. Even though Mr. Kummant departed over disagreements about a number of issues, it was never an ideal situation to have a CEO hired by a departed board expected to meet the needs of a new board.
The big complaint really centers around the White House. Guys, it’s been a full year, now. That is more than enough time to find and screen political appointees to the Amtrak board. There are a number of qualified people just waiting in the wings, hoping for a chance to lead Amtrak into a better era and a more prosperous time. But, the Amtrak board, always a bottom of the barrel issue for any White House administration, remains a sideshow, and – highly regrettably – business as usual reigns.
In the interim, how about some leadership from the United States Department of Transportation and/or the Federal Railroad Administration? How about setting some goals for Amtrak and creating a true surface transportation policy?
How about SOMEONE doing SOMETHING? Doing ANYTHING? Dan Pardue of Raleigh, North Carolina, when trying to do problem solving with non-cooperative equipment or non-cooperative clients, always says “Do something, even if it’s wrong. At least some action is being taken, and perhaps the right answer will come along by starting some sort of process.”
Amtrak, here at This Week at Amtrak we will gladly provide you with Mr. Pardue’s telephone number so you can call him for some tutoring. Please, start some sort of process to start doing something – anything, please.
In 2009, a year which will go down in the annuals of history as a truly misbegotten year, Amtrak received record amounts of free federal monies. Stimulus money flowed, and regular budget money flowed.
While Amtrak did start whittling away at a backlog of projects which are nice to have completed, most of those projects (with the stark exception of rolling stock rehabs) will not generate any additional revenues for Amtrak. Most of the projects are just things which needed to be done, and had been neglected; some for decades.
Again, Amtrak has an unprecedented opportunity for change and upgrading itself as a company and our nation’s domestic passenger railroad.
But, Amtrak seems to be doing a bang up job of wasting that opportunity, instead of taking advantage of so much manna from the federal treasury.
We give Mr. Boardman credit for stabilizing some things, and he gets a huge “attaboy” for leading the company to accepting Brian Rosenwald’s excellent work of starting the process of converting the Sunset Limited west of New Orleans into a daily – yet, still a bit flawed – operation. We’re waiting for some leadership on what will happen east of New Orleans, and we keep hearing whispers the Cardinal, perhaps one of Amtrak’s most scenic routes, will be lifted from the doldrums and waste of a tri-weekly operation.
But, Mr. Boardman, in his interim post, is still head of the company, and he still sets the daily tone and pace of the company. We do expect some sort of future vision, even if it’s just a building block to be used by a permanent CEO. We do expect some sort of growth plan, and we do expect an equipment order beyond the rather paltry announcements which have been made for replacement equipment, only.
In short, even if it’s interim leadership, we do expect leadership.
Amtrak is an ongoing enterprise, with a long-forgotten mandate and mission to provide the United States of America with a national passenger train service. Keeping Amtrak in a state of suspense because the White House and Members of Congress can’t decide on political appointees for the board of directors is not only wasteful, it’s sinister and displays an outright prejudice against all of us who understand and cherish passenger rail travel.
Mr. Boardman, please start the process. The Obama White House, please do your duty and populate the Amtrak Board of Directors. United States Senate, please fulfill your advise and consent duties as outlined in the constitution so the Amtrak board seats can be filled in an expeditious manner.
Somebody, somewhere, please, don’t leave us all hanging.
3) Amtrak ended 2009 battling the late fall/early winter Blizzard of 2009, with a pretty good record. Chicago got penalized by one of its host railroads dumping a freight train off the tracks, causing a huge traffic jam, and it took a while to get things back to normal. No penalty to Amtrak. On the Northeast Corridor, while the airlines just threw up their collective hands and said they weren’t flying in the bad weather (it’s kind of tough to blame them when the weather is that nasty), Amtrak did mostly fulfill its duty as the all-weather common carrier and kept a lot of trains running, as did its host railroads south of Washington, even though trains were woefully late. Too many trains were cancelled during the busy holiday period (it’s especially vexing Amtrak chose to cancel the Palmetto, even though the majority of its run was south of the destruction of the storm), but transportation still was available.
There were too many mechanical malfunction reports of Amfleet cars on the NEC with doors which were frozen open. Gosh, those cars have only been around for a bit more than three decades now, in the heat of summer and the cold of winter, one has to believe someone in that vast period of time could figure out how to overcome Budd’s design flaws of the vestibule doors freezing in the open position when the car is full of passengers traveling at 100 M.P.H. and the icy wind is tearing through the interior of the car and passengers.
Going further into winter, Amtrak has been battling more weather-related problems and the country has been battling record cold temperatures and storms. (It MUST be all of that global warming; what other explanation could there be for such a cold and cruel start of what most likely is going to be a long, cold, bitter winter?) Some trains are running more than a dozen hours late, other trains just seem to be disappearing off of the schedule, and are never being launched out of their terminals.
This is when Amtrak’s too thin fleet reserves come back to bite it. Inbound equipment that normally turns for the next day’s outbound train suddenly is stranded on a siding somewhere on the far side of nowhere, and there’s no spare equipment to put on the road. Passengers and crews are stranded; things spin more and more out of control, and eventually system gridlock occurs. Remember all of that old equipment that used to sit around, but is gone, now? Wouldn’t it be nice to have that for occasions just such as this winter?
Before the Age of Amtrak, the private passenger railroads always kept a slice of their old equipment fleets around for use in emergencies. It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t the most efficient stuff in the world, but it got passengers to a destination when nothing else could. Amtrak has scrapped or sold all of its old equipment; after all, since it gets lots of free federal monies from the government treasury it doesn’t have to worry about keeping passengers happy by providing them the transportation they paid for in advance. Amtrak can just annul as many trains as it wants, and say “so sorry, so sad” to its stranded passengers, and keep totaling up the tab to be paid for by Congress next budget year.
What a way to run a railroad.
If you are reading someone else’s copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can receive your own free copy each edition by sending your e-mail address to
[email protected]
You MUST include your name, preferred e-mail address, and city and state where you live. If you have filters or firewalls placed on your Internet connection, set your e-mail to receive incoming mail from [email protected]; we are unable to go through any approvals processes for individuals. This mailing list is kept strictly confidential and is not shared or used for any purposes other than distribution of This Week at Amtrak or related URPA materials.
All other correspondence, including requests to unsubscribe should be addressed to
[email protected]
Copies of This Week at Amtrak are archived on URPA’s web site, www.unitedrail.org and also on www.todaywithjb.blogspot.com where other rail-related writings of Bruce Richardson may also be found.
URPA leadership members are available for speaking engagements.
J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739
[email protected]
http://www.unitedrail.org
yarrow
Engineer
the 1/5/10 newsletter should, imho, be required reading. excellent statement of the state of amtrak.
Yep, too many apologizers down below here that accept any excuse. Its a sad state and one can only imagine how health care will turn out with its entrenched politicians running the show! The words National Rail Passenger system may as well just be removed from any literature. It a system reduced to a few major hubs and what lucky cities and towns that happen to be along the way. Progress or improvement are unknown terms it seems.
This Week at Amtrak; January 11, 2010
A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
America’s foremost passenger rail policy institute
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203 • Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739, Electronic Mail [email protected] • http://www.unitedrail.org
Volume 7, Number 2
Founded over three decades ago in 1976, URPA is a nationally known policy institute which focuses on solutions and plans for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota, California, Arizona, New Mexico, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and other cities. For more detailed information, along with a variety of position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at http://www.unitedrail.org.
URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from any outside sources.
1) VIA Rail Canada is superb at doing it. The freight railroads do it like it’s an everyday occurrence. Amtrak, on the other hand, can never seem to get it right.
We’re referring, of course at this time of year, to operating trains in severe winter weather. While things have mostly been humming on the Northeast Corridor, it’s been a far different story out in flyover country where the Empire Builder operates between Chicago and Seattle, Washington/Portland, Oregon.
It’s been a while since Amtrak consistently got a train over the road anywhere near to keeping a schedule, and even running two trains in a row.
The problem has mostly been blamed on malfunctioning air systems from the locomotives. Without a working air system, there are no brakes on a train. (The air system we’re referring to has nothing to do with the hotel power from the locomotives to the rest of the train which provides heat for the train.)
Some Empire Builders have arrived nearly a day late, some not at all, some have only traveled a part of the route before being annulled. Word is, even Amtrak’s host railroad for the Empire Builder, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, has banned the Builder from its infrastructure until Amtrak can prove it can get a train from Point A to Point B without having a locomotive failure and fouling the main line which has heavy freight traffic.
All of this begs the question, “why?” since Amtrak has had nearly 40 winters to figure things like this out.
Some folks have speculated it’s because Amtrak tries to have an all-weather locomotive fleet, which operates in desert heat in the Southwest as well as it does in blizzard conditions in North Dakota. As with anything else which tries to be all things to all people, the inevitable failure occurs.
Some folks have speculated Amtrak’s mechanical department just isn’t up to the job, and does what it can with the budget it has to work with each year.
Some folks have speculated Amtrak just doesn’t care; if it doesn’t have anything directly to do with the NEC, then it’s not important.
But, looking at VIA Rail Canada, which generally operates under some of the most severe winter weather conditions in the world, VIA rarely has Amtrak’s winter weather problems. And, VIA is a smaller company, has fewer resources, and often makes do with older equipment.
The freight railroads in the same severe winter weather always manager to get trains with dozens and dozens of heavily loaded freight cars down the track, also using air brake systems, and they don’t have these problems. BNSF, like Amtrak, operates from the extreme northern tier of the country to the extreme southern tier, and needs locomotives, too, which can work in extremes of heat and cold.
If VIA can do it, and BNSF can do it, and Union Pacific can do it, and CSX and Norfolk Southern and Kansas City Southern can all do it, along with Canadian National and Canadian Pacific, why can’t Amtrak?
As said in this space before, we know there are some dedicated transportation people at Amtrak who want the railroad to run right, no matter what the weather forecast. Why aren’t these people given the budget and resources they need to get the job done? Amtrak begs for money every year from Congress and the federal treasury, laying out priorities. Why isn’t locomotive reliability outside of the Northeast Corridor in the winter a priority?
These are the times which try mens’ souls, when the harsh realities of Mother Nature go up against the needs of mortal man. These are the times when the professional railroaders, who go to sleep thinking about railroading and then wake up the next morning thinking about the same thing, need the resources to do their jobs. If Amtrak wants to continue to promote itself as the custodian of the next generation of passenger trains and thinks it’s going to be the first choice as the operator of the new high speed rail systems, rational people making those decisions are going to wonder why Amtrak, which is operating conventional rail on a system which has been in place for over 150 years, can’t figure out how to make that system work. If Amtrak can’t get conventional rail right, how will it ever get high speed rail right?
2) Where are you on the Amtrak spectrum? Are you a True Believer, willing to accept anything Amtrak and the National Association of Railroad Passengers says, at face value? Are you always willing to give Amtrak more and more money, without accountability, just because it’s Amtrak?
Are you more of a pragmatist, and believe in the business of passenger rail, knowing at one time it was a sane, profitable business, and there is no reason why in the future it can’t return to that status?
Are you convinced the days of passenger rail are gone, and everyone should enjoy driving their private vehicle down crowded highways or the only other option for public transportation is airplanes?
Which one are you? Do you fit into any of those categories, or, perhaps are you something of a blend of two or more of those categories?
How do you see the future of passenger rail? Are we on the cusp of renaissance, or near the end of the line? Is that light at the end of the tunnel an oncoming passenger train you welcome, or the halogen headlights of an overpriced SUV getting five gallons of gas to the mile of transportation?
It’s time to start choosing sides. More and more passenger rail publications are openly questioning the actions/lack of actions of Amtrak. Columnists who were once reliable Amtrak Apologists are now apologizing to their readers for taking so long to see the truth about Amtrak, and its lack of motivation.
So, are you going to sit on the sidelines and kibbitz about what the final colors of pre-merger Seaboard Air Line Railroad passenger locomotives were, or are you going to figure out how to take some action and demand better passenger rail transportation in this country, whether or not it’s from Amtrak?
Politics in Washington are in a turmoil, and there is likely to be a huge sea change in Congress at the end of this year. No matter who is charge in Washington, it’s time to express your displeasure with how things are with passenger rail, and demand better oversight, and, most importantly, demand someone, somewhere, develop a coherent national surface transportation plan.
As long as everyone just sits around and waits for something to happen, nothing is likely to happen. Amtrak seems content to consume its annual free federal and state monies without any demonstration of progress to create more or better passenger trains. Amtrak needs some major prodding, and it needs prodding from someone who can force change and inspire vision at Amtrak.
What are you going to do about it?
If you are reading someone else’s copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can receive your own free copy each edition by sending your e-mail address to
[email protected]
You MUST include your name, preferred e-mail address, and city and state where you live. If you have filters or firewalls placed on your Internet connection, set your e-mail to receive incoming mail from [email protected]; we are unable to go through any approvals processes for individuals. This mailing list is kept strictly confidential and is not shared or used for any purposes other than distribution of This Week at Amtrak or related URPA materials.
All other correspondence, including requests to unsubscribe should be addressed to
[email protected]
Copies of This Week at Amtrak are archived on URPA’s web site, www.unitedrail.org and also on www.todaywithjb.blogspot.com where other rail-related writings of Bruce Richardson may also be found.
URPA leadership members are available for speaking engagements.
J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739
[email protected]
http://www.unitedrail.org
A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
America’s foremost passenger rail policy institute
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203 • Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739, Electronic Mail [email protected] • http://www.unitedrail.org
Volume 7, Number 2
Founded over three decades ago in 1976, URPA is a nationally known policy institute which focuses on solutions and plans for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota, California, Arizona, New Mexico, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and other cities. For more detailed information, along with a variety of position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at http://www.unitedrail.org.
URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from any outside sources.
1) VIA Rail Canada is superb at doing it. The freight railroads do it like it’s an everyday occurrence. Amtrak, on the other hand, can never seem to get it right.
We’re referring, of course at this time of year, to operating trains in severe winter weather. While things have mostly been humming on the Northeast Corridor, it’s been a far different story out in flyover country where the Empire Builder operates between Chicago and Seattle, Washington/Portland, Oregon.
It’s been a while since Amtrak consistently got a train over the road anywhere near to keeping a schedule, and even running two trains in a row.
The problem has mostly been blamed on malfunctioning air systems from the locomotives. Without a working air system, there are no brakes on a train. (The air system we’re referring to has nothing to do with the hotel power from the locomotives to the rest of the train which provides heat for the train.)
Some Empire Builders have arrived nearly a day late, some not at all, some have only traveled a part of the route before being annulled. Word is, even Amtrak’s host railroad for the Empire Builder, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, has banned the Builder from its infrastructure until Amtrak can prove it can get a train from Point A to Point B without having a locomotive failure and fouling the main line which has heavy freight traffic.
All of this begs the question, “why?” since Amtrak has had nearly 40 winters to figure things like this out.
Some folks have speculated it’s because Amtrak tries to have an all-weather locomotive fleet, which operates in desert heat in the Southwest as well as it does in blizzard conditions in North Dakota. As with anything else which tries to be all things to all people, the inevitable failure occurs.
Some folks have speculated Amtrak’s mechanical department just isn’t up to the job, and does what it can with the budget it has to work with each year.
Some folks have speculated Amtrak just doesn’t care; if it doesn’t have anything directly to do with the NEC, then it’s not important.
But, looking at VIA Rail Canada, which generally operates under some of the most severe winter weather conditions in the world, VIA rarely has Amtrak’s winter weather problems. And, VIA is a smaller company, has fewer resources, and often makes do with older equipment.
The freight railroads in the same severe winter weather always manager to get trains with dozens and dozens of heavily loaded freight cars down the track, also using air brake systems, and they don’t have these problems. BNSF, like Amtrak, operates from the extreme northern tier of the country to the extreme southern tier, and needs locomotives, too, which can work in extremes of heat and cold.
If VIA can do it, and BNSF can do it, and Union Pacific can do it, and CSX and Norfolk Southern and Kansas City Southern can all do it, along with Canadian National and Canadian Pacific, why can’t Amtrak?
As said in this space before, we know there are some dedicated transportation people at Amtrak who want the railroad to run right, no matter what the weather forecast. Why aren’t these people given the budget and resources they need to get the job done? Amtrak begs for money every year from Congress and the federal treasury, laying out priorities. Why isn’t locomotive reliability outside of the Northeast Corridor in the winter a priority?
These are the times which try mens’ souls, when the harsh realities of Mother Nature go up against the needs of mortal man. These are the times when the professional railroaders, who go to sleep thinking about railroading and then wake up the next morning thinking about the same thing, need the resources to do their jobs. If Amtrak wants to continue to promote itself as the custodian of the next generation of passenger trains and thinks it’s going to be the first choice as the operator of the new high speed rail systems, rational people making those decisions are going to wonder why Amtrak, which is operating conventional rail on a system which has been in place for over 150 years, can’t figure out how to make that system work. If Amtrak can’t get conventional rail right, how will it ever get high speed rail right?
2) Where are you on the Amtrak spectrum? Are you a True Believer, willing to accept anything Amtrak and the National Association of Railroad Passengers says, at face value? Are you always willing to give Amtrak more and more money, without accountability, just because it’s Amtrak?
Are you more of a pragmatist, and believe in the business of passenger rail, knowing at one time it was a sane, profitable business, and there is no reason why in the future it can’t return to that status?
Are you convinced the days of passenger rail are gone, and everyone should enjoy driving their private vehicle down crowded highways or the only other option for public transportation is airplanes?
Which one are you? Do you fit into any of those categories, or, perhaps are you something of a blend of two or more of those categories?
How do you see the future of passenger rail? Are we on the cusp of renaissance, or near the end of the line? Is that light at the end of the tunnel an oncoming passenger train you welcome, or the halogen headlights of an overpriced SUV getting five gallons of gas to the mile of transportation?
It’s time to start choosing sides. More and more passenger rail publications are openly questioning the actions/lack of actions of Amtrak. Columnists who were once reliable Amtrak Apologists are now apologizing to their readers for taking so long to see the truth about Amtrak, and its lack of motivation.
So, are you going to sit on the sidelines and kibbitz about what the final colors of pre-merger Seaboard Air Line Railroad passenger locomotives were, or are you going to figure out how to take some action and demand better passenger rail transportation in this country, whether or not it’s from Amtrak?
Politics in Washington are in a turmoil, and there is likely to be a huge sea change in Congress at the end of this year. No matter who is charge in Washington, it’s time to express your displeasure with how things are with passenger rail, and demand better oversight, and, most importantly, demand someone, somewhere, develop a coherent national surface transportation plan.
As long as everyone just sits around and waits for something to happen, nothing is likely to happen. Amtrak seems content to consume its annual free federal and state monies without any demonstration of progress to create more or better passenger trains. Amtrak needs some major prodding, and it needs prodding from someone who can force change and inspire vision at Amtrak.
What are you going to do about it?
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J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739
[email protected]
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Boca Raton translates as "rat's mouth," and refers to some rocks located at the inlet, not to the people who currently live in the city. Snarkiness is fine, but accuracy is better.
haolerider
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What in the world are you talking about?
Ryan
Court Jester
Way the hell back on Page 1 and 3 years ago, Bruce makes the following claim:
Our takes issues with his accuracy.
jis
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Reading the latest issue, it appears even Bruce is getting bored with his own rants. :lol:
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What is boring are exactly as he mentions, the people who seem to think Amtrak is so "Wonderful" and nothing needs to be improved. Or at the least we should be eternally grateful for the pitiful way in which Amtrak Management operates the system. Anytime you point out how the better old roads would have treated passengers, cars, schedules or food services you get howls of protest from the "newer breed of apologist that frequent this site". I have repeatedly mentioned in winter that Amtrak's tendency to "give up and shut down" are symptoms of poor management and a no one seems to care attitude that permeates at Amtrak. The articles on Via Rails Canadian coming in an hour early in a four day trip while the Empire Builder and most other long distance trains left passengers stranded with not other options was proof of a colossal lack of responsibility of anyone to keep the trains running.
Going on twelve years or more of toilets that won't work at high altitude proved to me that the passengers were way down on the list of things to take care of at Amtrak. When is my next break is probably the top priority.
Going on twelve years or more of toilets that won't work at high altitude proved to me that the passengers were way down on the list of things to take care of at Amtrak. When is my next break is probably the top priority.
Ryan
Court Jester
No more boring than the same old "Amtrak is awful" posts, ignoring the realities of the situation (for example the fact that the Canadian in wintertime has a massive pool of equipment laying in wait and more padding than a roll of Charmin toilet paper) and providing nothing in the way of *realistic* suggestions for the betterment of Amtrak.
Your amazing. Do you think that the many problems that are endemic within amtrak have gone without suggested improvements. Where the heck have you been for the last 30 years! Time after time people have written, called, emailed both amtrak, and their representatives with general disregard for the writers complaints.
If a pool of extra cars is what it takes to make winter service work again as it should, then were are the plans to fix that? If more capable service people are needed, where are they? Its been well over a year since the administration has said it will back improved passenger rail service, I see no evidence that other than a few pet lines anything much is being done. Where are the plans that fix the current operating problems, or are we to accept thousands of passengers being dumped after reserving, and paying for fares, many months in advance for years on end yet. That is not a way to "run a railroad", even a child would know that.
I dare to say that Amtrak has received many thousands of complaints about the toilets. Have they been fixed?
I took part in at least three surveys on the CCC and gave it low marks on all points. Crews have hated the car, passengers hated the car. Yet they still tout them as successful. I have rarely met someone on a train where the lounge has been removed that thinks its a good thing. Has no one told them?
Cars run dirty and with torn seats, that complaint has gone on for as long as Amtrak has existed.
Bottom line is, the public is not running a passenger rail road, are not experts at management either, however we are the very reason they exist. A good manager is someone who studies all the aspects of a business and improves things when necessary. When you have a group that seems oblivious to any problems and year to year operates the same old way something is wrong. Now even while there is some chance that things could be significantly improved with a chance for expanded rail service to cities long abandoned by Amtrak, nothing much is done except more emphases on rail service in the east. There is much more to the country than that small slice. We need management who can see that and have a vision of how to restore it. This business of waiting and denial is not acceptable.
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