What type of people do you find on Amtrak trains? I'm a grad student, live a block from the Amtrak station, and am curious what really draws people to ride. The recent fuel cost spike has made me think twice about driving or flying, but when I look at Amtrak it just really miff's me that they sell any tickets other than short commuter based travel. I see on-time percentages below 50%, it costs more, and takes 10 times longer. Am I missing something?
Amtrak basically does not sell cheap last minute tickets the way the airlines currently do. (Though in 6-12 months, there may not be so many cheap last minute airline tickets.) If you compare airline bookings 10 months in the future with Amtrak bookings 10 months in the future, do you see the same cost differences?
Whether it takes 10 times longer depends a lot on where you were going. I bet it doesn't take 10 times longer if you were going to Chicago instead of Harrisburg. Or Indianapolis, for that matter.
A lot of the problem is the sad state of investment in rail in this country. Whether or not you find the current service useful, it has some value in keeping stations intact that we will need in the future when we do invest in more attractive service. It may also be helpful in keeping tracks in place and keeping a relationship active between Amtrak and the freight railroads.
Amtrak has a limited number of mothballed 30 year old coaches and some spare diesel-electric locomotives, and otherwise does not have extra equipment available to meet growing demand, and since they're still operating under rules handed to them by the United States Congress where they're suppose to try to make a profit, the natural thing for them to do is to raise ticket prices. Even once Congress finishes working out the details on a bill that will change Amtrak's mission of making a futile attempt at profitability, Amtrak will have a choice between having last minute tickets being completely unavailable, or having them be pricy.
With investment in double tracking where freight railroads ripped up the second track decades ago, faster tracks, more direct routes, and additional rolling stock, a lot of these problems could go away. If you had a 15 year old automobile that took 6 months to get replacement parts for because Congress had passed a law rationing automobile parts, would you be wondering why anyone ever uses an automobile? Amtrak is about as neglected as that hypothetical hard to repair automobile, if you're trying to come up with a fair comparison between the potential of automobiles and the potential of trains.
I find travel by sleeping car extremely pleasant compared to any other form of long distance travel I've ever encountered. If I were going from, say, the Albany train station to Chicago, the wall clock time is pretty much irrelevant because of that pleasantness, and because I'd be spending most of the train ride eating and sleeping, and I have never slept so comfortably while traveling by any other form of land travel or by airplane. In pratice there's also unfortunately a five hour non-sleeper train ride between the Albany train station and Boston, but that train ride is still more pleasant than taking a plane to Chicago (or Indianapolis, for that matter).
I wanted to go from Lafayette IN to Harrisburg PA, and the trip would take about 24 hours, have a 70% chance of being delayed, and costs about $200 more than a plane ride.
That is indeed an example of a route that's just not very direct under the present system. I think with some serious investment, we could probably have an Indianapolis to Pittsburgh train that could continue to Harrisburg. Or we could have faster Chicago to Harrisburg train service (I think it could be done in about 4 hours if we merely made a decent attempt at catching up with the French). And we could have more frequent Indianapolis to Chicago trains that go through Lafayette that could shorten the connection time.
