Discussion: Efficacy of Long Distance Trains

Mr Halstead,

To your comment about USG owning the dirt and the rails:

Amtrak cannot take care of the NEC.

What makes ANYONE on this forum think the USG can do a better job when it owns all the major mileage of the Nation?

Sorry ... I am not willing to give our Government more things to do. They don't do a great job with the ones they have!

John Perkowski
speaking strictly as a Member

The current issue with the investor owned railroads is not so much who owns the track, government vs private, but to what effect subsidies affect the decisions made about that track. What kind of savings per mile do you think resulted from taking existing sidings out of single track lines?

Put together on a balance sheet they look like a small corporate savings but if trains over the road had been able to charge a slight bit more, as would be the case if the highway freight subsidy were removed, the cost per mile is almost nothing, certainly an order of magnitude less than the difference in pricing due to the highway freight subsidy.

Now, we are in a phase where capital investment is needed. The marginal costs for maintaining the ROW were fairly well decided upon back in the excess capacity days. Agreement was there.

Seems like we are at a tipping point. I am fairly sure that if investor owned railroads were just given a "fair" shake in terms of tax policy and elimination of subsidy to highway freight they would count everything even with regard to Amtrak as they would be able to make the investments needed to radically improve the throughput of their mainlines. Never fear, the reauthorization of the transportation bill is forthcoming. It will be quite a battle.

turn the arguement around . what say public roads were sold off to public trucking firms , with that firm having exclusive access ?. And legislation that it must let private cars and greyhound buses use the road with a small payment . Is that going to work ? . i dont think so .
but that is what happens on the railroads in the USA .
One option would be to split the right of way owning company form the train operating departments . they would then be required to allow open access to any company that complies with safety standards.Amtrak would be one of these , and would get fair access .
Wether the track company is privately or government owned , alot of federal money would need to be injected . Partly to compensate the big few now for thier loss of monopoly or buying of thier right of way . and partly to provide capacity for the huge increase in traffic that would follow such a move .

MODERATOR'S NOTE:

It will take substantial work to overcome the investor-owned railroads resistance to "open access."

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/ ... i_19007737

Open access does not advance the issue of efficacy of the LD passenger train. Further, Amtrak's access is by right of law, not general public policy towards access.

Let's keep moving forward.

The efficacy of the long distance trains can be explained best by looking into the future--20 years from now, instead of concentrating on where we are today. The interstate system is beginning to wear out and the cost of operating an automobile or truck is increasing every year. Many airports are currently operating at or near capacity and air travel is losing many of its former advantages compared to rail or highway travel. Given the time it takes to conceive, study, plan, design and finally build transportation infrastructure, we are working today on the transportation system of 2026. If we decide in 2006 that in the year 2026 nobody will have the choice of riding on a long distance train, I think we are going to look like fools to our children. There needs to be a lot of work done on re-building the rails and finding an operating model that works better than the current model, but if we just decide to stop offering intercity rail service we'll be spending more money on the alternatives.

There needs to be a clarification about the statement that "Amtrak is down 1.3% from FY05 to FY06, or -50,000 passengers" on the long distance trains. The drop in passengers is explained by the arrival of Katrina and the meltdown of the Coast Starlight. Overall, trains not affected by those 2 disasters showed a modest increase in passenger boardings and healthy gains in revenue.

icgsteve wrote:

UPRR engineer wrote:....

On the rail your only as fast as the guy ahead of you. Making the jump to light speed (79) and your sure to catch someones flasher. How ya gonna clear the 10 or 15 trains that are ahead of you?

You do it the same way it has always been done, you have enough sidings so that the dispatcher can dump the freight into one before the passenger train catches up to it. This process worked very well for some fifty years or so.

It's just NOT that easy, and its quite expensive.

(Not to take us to another place here... but) Wish my story about an Amtrak crew change i observed was still on this forum. From what ive saw when the CZ comes up here sometimes during the summer, not all the crews treat there train like a hot-shot. (I have saw a few that did) If your gonna lead the fleet, better be fast. I've never saw any UP dispatcher up here give Amtrak anything but the best. I've dog caught the pack leader, (mailtrain) relieved crew doesnt even have there bags in the van, conductor hasnt yet change our track warrant for bulletins, im already in the 8th run. Maybe a host railroads manager on the headend to light a fire under the hogs seat might improve there efficiency.

What follows is a bit of stretch but it does connect to the current topic so please bare with me:

I was in Germany for most of the 90's and I was on the DB all of the time. It was clear to me that the German's were transforming rail during this time. Many of the citizens had decided that they wanted to emulate American car culture. The rate at which Germans were expanding their car ownership rates was rocketing, big box stores were starting to build on the outskirts of town in areas that had no rail connection and barely any bus connection so they were clearly catering to those who owned cars. The Autobahns were increasingly staued (congested) and the intercity's were congested as well. The German government knew what the people had decided that they wanted to own and drive cars rather than use mass transit, but they also knew that it was not in the national interest to allow this trend to go unchallenged.

The German Government responded as follows: they started a massive ramp-up of transit options in the big cities. Strassen-bahns were often replaced with S-bahn or U-bahns, and those that remanded got all new rolling stock. Road rules were changed in the cities to cut down on congestion, a move that directly made driving more inconvenient. The German Government came out with a firm statement that they would not under all most all circumstances even consider building new Autobahns or expanding the capacity of old ones. Mega doses of money were pumped into the ICE system as well as the conventional system and it was done after listening to what the German citizens said they wanted out of a transit system. If the Germans could do what they people wanted, even if the wants were irrational and cost more than a completely optimized system would, the government did it. The DB at first was thrilled, as they were getting lots of attention and increasing amounts of money were flowing in, but this did not last. Part of the regeneration of German transit was to be a radical change in how German rail works. Entire segments of the DB bureaucracy were shut down, others were gutted and then rebuilt. Management at DB and even more the rank and file were not happy, they did not want so much change and did not see the need for it. But the will of the Government was firm, so they sucked-it up and carried on.

We know how this turned out. The next generation of Germans were convinced that mass transit is the way to go, and the transit works better than it ever has before. Germans are paying a fair amount for transit, but they also can pretty much use it to go where they want to go when they want to go with reasonable trip lengths and at a reasonable cost to the user. On a macro level transit is working to move people were they want or need to go at a reasonable cost to the nation without very many negative environmental costs, the government has shown that it can accomplish a mission, the DB had shown that it is able to adapt to changing conditions with vigor and success.

Would any of this ever have happened if those who were doing to planning looked only to current conditions? Those working in public transportation need to be thinking not of what is going on today but what they believe should be going on ten or twenty years from now. Would the Germans have ever had a chance at being successfully if they had let the DB decide alone what was to be done? No way. People resist change by nature, and the German experience is yet another in a long list of examples were those who need to change have needed to be pulled and dragged into the change.

If America lets the railroads do the planing , and then gives the railroads everything that they ask for, then we will never get the passenger rail system that we deserve. If we will only start with to the conditions as they exist today and and try to optimize them will we ever get very far? I don't think so. Creation takes imagination and when we start with what we have and try to rationalize changes we become very uncreative. Leadership takes daring and vision, creative solutions require a certain amount of dreaming.

This quality is very much missing from this thread.

In the discussion of efficacy of LD trains, it seems that demographics are missing from the discussion. From time to time we see population maps, colored to show the dispersion of population around the country. Heaviest areas are the two coasts and a few spots in the middle.

To make trains work you need people. Germany was cited as a place where rail service thrives and has expanded. Germany is about 20% smaller than our most populous state, California and has about 2 1/2 times as many people as Calif. There are a lot of NEC and Calif. Corridors in Germany. To compare Germany with US LD service one needs to ask how many Germans are taking the train to Beirut or Kaszakhstan? The problem with our LDs is that they go through to much area with few people. Take a look on Amtrak.com at the State Fact sheet that shows on/off for every station updated to FY05. Look at some of the routes and calculate how far some of these trains have to run to pick up just 100 people.

In 1998 the GAO published a report that analyzed each route - revenues, costs, etc. The 15 LD trains had more revenue in FY97 than in FY05. NEC and State Corridors had huge growth in riders, revenue and a drop in losses (NEC revenues will exceed costs by $200 million this year). To make the US rail operations resemble Germany we need to concentrate on the density corridors - this process has begun.

If one looks at the losses posted by Intercity, it is interesting to ask what could be done if a quarter or third of the loss were rechannelled to a regional routes.

As for the freight carriers in 1971 Amtrak was created so that the other RRs would not follow PC into bankruptcy. What seems to be missing from this discussion is how well this has worked. The upside to some LD delays is that large RRs have seen huge increases in traffic. The large carriers will spend $4 billion per year on infrastructure - not too bad.

Now, my thoughts on the efficacy of the LD train for the traveling public. Mr. Lexie Lu has done some very interesting research on the subject, having been exposed to both British operations and now US operations. For starters his paper with what is wrong and right with the current corridor, mid-distance, and long-distance (my terms) trains operated by Amtrak Value of Time, Transfers, and Comfort. It is worth the time to download and read.

An approach like his "Metro Flyer" is a way to use what could be a near-term improvement on the investor owned right of way. The approach seems very sensible, not focusing on 150 MPH corridors but something that is workable for both higher speed freight, TOFC for example. My 60 Seat Coach thread from a while back tries to fill in the interior design aspect of his proposal (An update with drawings is coming).

I've been following this thread with great interest, but until now, have not had sufficient time to adequately add my 2 cents worth....

First and foremost, railroads are for-profit corporations, not "for the benefit of the public" corporations like PBS. The first, last, and all in-between goals of a corporation, by design and intent, is to make a profit. Any portion of that business that doesn't make a profit is either terminated or sold off. Failure to remove losing operations may ultimately cause the failure of the entire corporation.

While most of us here would like to believe that a railroad is here for the public good, or to play the role of "benefactor" to society, that is clearly neither their purpose nor their goal. Their business is to carry cargo/merchandise/whatever from A to B, and get paid enough to pay all the associated costs for doing so, and make a profit (plus bonuses for the bosses). If they can make $1000 profit for moving a container from, say, Los Angeles to Chicago, then moving 2 containers = $2000 profit, etc. I don't have a clue how much BNSF or UP makes for moving one container, but it's clearly obvious that the =profit= to the railroad for moving a trainload of containers from LAX to CHI =far= outweighs any profit they may gain from moving one Amtrak train from LAX to CHI. Add to that any "lost opportunity" with having to hold a high-paying freight train for perhaps 20-30 minutes until Amtrak comes by adds =cost= to the freight-train (fuel, payroll, depreciation, wear-and-tear on the loco), not =profit= for the railroad. If Amtrak were to disappear tomorrow, the railroads would definitely benefit economically.

Oh, and by the way, the second goal of any for-profit corporation is to make MORE profit this year than last year.

Secondly, sorry to say, but if all the LD trains were gone tomorrow, it would not make any measurable impact on traveling public whatsoever. OK, 10 gas stations will make an extra $40 sale on a tank of gas to someone driving LAX to CHI, and, maybe after 1000 or so people drive it, GM may sell one new car as the result. Would Greyhound or American Airlines notice a loss-of-Amtrak-LD-attributable increase in their passenger business? Probably not. Even if they did, it would be miniscule...maybe 0.1% increase, easily attributable to some other factors such as bigger aircraft, a extra round trip flight, or whatever.

I've long been in favor of increased frequencies on the LD routes. At a minimum, 2 trains a day, about 12 hours apart. Preferably, though, 3 or even 4. The problem Amtrak has with its LD trains is the numbers. There just aren't enough seats available on a route with one train per day.

Using the Lakeshore Limited, for example...there's approximately 300 passenger capacity on that train. Multiply by two to arrive at the number of passengers that pass by the Erie PA station at 3AM or so. That means that of the 600 fares (assuming full trains), the entire cost of 2-3 (maybe more) full- and part-time station agents for that day, plus benefits, rent, utilities, and Eries' piece of the cost pie for general overhead must all be associated to those 600 fares passing through Erie PA. Simply adding one additional daily frequency would result in 2 trains each way with perhaps 200-250 passengers each, or 800-1000 fares per-day passing through Erie PA, as the better times would attract more passengers, too. The costs of the Erie PA station would be essentially unchanged, thereby resulting in the per-ticket amount needed to support operations at Erie would be reduced.

But, coming back to the numbers at Erie...even if every passenger on todays Lakeshore chose to drive and took I-90 through Erie, the added number of cars on the road would not be statistically noticeable. Even if all the passengers on the LD trains into Chicago chose to drive, the added number of cars would not be noticed in Chicago, either.

The numbers also work against small-town America that Amtrak stops at, like Lincoln NE, or Wisconsin Dells, WI. The populations of these small towns are not big enough to have any statistical significance, even if the entire town took Amtrak. People in small-town America have long had one travel choice...automobile. 100 years ago, the horse-and-buggy gave way to passenger trains and interurban railroads that stopped at almost every place two dirt roads crossed each other. Those gave way to the automobile as the publics' =choice= of mode of travel once cars became affordable and the roads were paved. Small-town America was the first to lose their travel options because of low numbers of daily passengers. Again, going back to the profit-motive of business...passenger trains to small towns started losing money about 1930 or so, and had to be eliminated for the business to survive. In 1971, the railroads unloaded the remaining money-losing passenger-hauling business on the federal government. And that's where it is today.

Hauling passengers on a scheduled, daily basis will never make money. That basic truth has been with us since the '30s and is worldwide. Based on the bankruptcies of the airlines through they years, even airlines are not consistently profitable.

So now, we come to the bottom line...WHO is responsible for providing public transportation, and, what kind of transportation is desired? Statistically, the number of passengers on LD trains don't even count. Even if the number of LDs were doubled, they still don't count. The federal government has, in the past, and continues to provide the infrastructure to -allow- travel, but is not, itself, in the travel-business. Independent companies provide the services, whether in the air, on the road, or down the rivers.

Unless the government steps in and starts providing big-bucks to the for-profit railroads to increase infrastructure, Amtrak, or USATrak, or any other passenger-trak will never be on a level playing field. And with todays' financial constraints in all levels of government, the money will NOT be coming.

My estimate...ride Amtrak LD trains now, they won't be around forever.

I want to make one, off-topic comment relative to the thread title but related to some of the comments in the thread, then I'll get back on-topic:

Based on the work I do in transportation planning field and information I've seen, freight rail is much more important to most areas of the United States than passenger rail. I say that as someone who personally has a lot more interest in passenger rail than freight rail. Freight rail traffic, and actually freight traffic in general, has grown significantly over the last decade, primarily as part of intermodal freight traffic (most of the trip mileage on rail, the final few hundred miles on truck) being shipped from foreign countries, especially East Asia (western Pacific Rim). There are legitimate, growing, capacity needs on many freight rail corridors in the U.S. If that freight can't move as quickly or move at all on rail because of passenger rail operations, you know what happens to that freight? It gets shipped by truck. And THAT would be a problem, because many of our highways in the U.S. ALSO have growing capacity issues due to truck traffic, not just regular car traffic. Increased truck traffic would also increase safety concerns, because although most truck drivers, especially for larger companies, are very good drivers, there are many bad car drivers and some bad truck drivers out there and when a truck and car collide, there's a much greater chance of a serious injury or fatality than when two cars hit one another. That's a major reason why the general public supports freight rail improvements (though they don't realize truck traffic will continue to grow due to consumer demand, but that's another story). The bottom line is the cost of goods will go up and the economy will go down if the freight transportation network, on both the rail side and the highway side, isn't enhanced in some way. So let's not talk about a small number of long distance passenger trains deserving to get total priority over a large number of freight rail trains - the number of both types of trains on the rail system now implies that idea is nonsensical, at least in my opinion.

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Paris06 wrote:In the discussion of efficacy of LD trains, it seems that demographics are missing from the discussion. From time to time we see population maps, colored to show the dispersion of population around the country. Heaviest areas are the two coasts and a few spots in the middle.

To make trains work you need people. Germany was cited as a place where rail service thrives and has expanded. Germany is about 20% smaller than our most populous state, California and has about 2 1/2 times as many people as Calif. There are a lot of NEC and Calif. Corridors in Germany. To compare Germany with US LD service one needs to ask how many Germans are taking the train to Beirut or Kaszakhstan? The problem with our LDs is that they go through to much area with few people. Take a look on Amtrak.com at the State Fact sheet that shows on/off for every station updated to FY05. Look at some of the routes and calculate how far some of these trains have to run to pick up just 100 people.

In 1998 the GAO published a report that analyzed each route - revenues, costs, etc. The 15 LD trains had more revenue in FY97 than in FY05. NEC and State Corridors had huge growth in riders, revenue and a drop in losses (NEC revenues will exceed costs by $200 million this year). To make the US rail operations resemble Germany we need to concentrate on the density corridors - this process has begun.

In different words, this is similar to what I said back on Page 3 of this thread. In that post, I said I don't believe long distance trains will benefit the United States that much in the future, because the strength of passenger rail doesn't fit well with the needs of long distance trains in the United States. (It also needs to be said straight out what would be considered a long distance train in many European countries would NOT be considered a long distance train in the United States; that "long distance train" there would almost definitely be considered an intercity train here.) I also tried suggesting means to make long distance rail work more efficiently, and again I'll emphasize those means will not only benefit local/regional rail and short distance (<500 miles) intercity rail as well, but benefit those types of rail MORE than they benefit long distance passenger rail.

As was noted about a page up-thread, let's keep in mind this thread is about the "Efficacy of Long Distance Trains", not the efficacy of passenger trains in general. I don't think ANYONE in this thread has suggested local/regional trains or intercity trains on moderate to highly populated corridors AREN'T beneficial; in fact both myself and Mr. Norman, two of the voices in this thread that have stated reservations about long distance passenger rail, have said we SUPPORT local/regional and intercity passenger rail. (In fact, back in that aforementioned Page 3 post, I said I strongly support those kinds of rail.) Mr. Halsted/wigwagfan, while focusing his long distance passenger rail concerns in a somewhat different way in this thread, has also presented information IN SUPPORT OF shorter distance rail and based on other posts he's made on railroad.net, I believe also definitely supports local/regional and intercity passenger rail. Everyone, please remember we're only talking about the pros and cons of long distance passenger rail in this thread.

Since we are talking about the efficacy of the LD train network would anyone care to post numbers or well reasoned numbers showing that it would be cheaper to have a series of interconnected corridor trains instead of a pair of LD trains roughly 12 hours apart or three LD trains roughly 8 hours apart?

We are talking about economic efficacy in some sense right? While some may say that those corridor trains are great isn't a LD train, if kept to schedule, acting just like a corridor train to a prospective traveler? Further, it eliminates most of those nasty transfers.

People simply do not like to connect, not at the airport, not on the bus line, not at the train station, particullarly if they are lugging their baggage around. What is the point of eliminating and end to end through run and turning it into a series of corridors?

So are we not left with the problem of how can passenger trains be run on a schedule be they LD or corridor and what is the correct economic terms that the investor railroads should deal with such?

I am not proposing taking private property, which was done in the past in the form of unequal taxation and subsidy to competitors, but merely finding if it is possible with a equitable tax and subsidy policy to meet the needs or travelers.

wigwagfan wrote: Why should we dump more money into the LD trains, given its low usage compared to other modes of transportation?

Over the last few months we've discussed the various subsidies that everybody receives - everybody except pipelines, that is. They seem to pay their own way. I don't think passenger travel by pipeline is ready for prime time yet, however!

The highway subsidy was calculated previously by Mr. Halstead as 3 cents per passenger mile. That would mean an increase in gasolene prices of very, very roughly a dollar a gallon to break even, although that probably means the highway passenger traffic would be subsidizing the heavy freight movements.

But we have not discussed the INDIRECT impacts of LD trains. This is a very complex and fuzzy area. While I do not claim that the following study is absolutely 100% correct, it does imply, at least, that the LD subsidies are much less when these indirect, and positive results are taken into account. Although it is for Montana only, the results are interesting. See the pdf document here, at the Montana Department of Transportation website.

This is one of the core problems for Amtrak, and indeed much public supported transportaion: the dollar costs are frequently much more identifiable than are the dollar benefits, when many of those benefits are indirect.

Please also note that the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials has come over in favor of passenger rail; the relevant website is here.

wigwagfan wrote:By the way, all of Amtrak's increase in ridership was in SHORT-HAUL transportation. The topic of this thread is Long Distance, where Amtrak is down 1.3% from FY05 to FY06, or -50,000 passengers.

While that's absolutely true (through August), it is perhaps just a little misleading. Remember that the Sunset Limited was cut back, and that New Orleans is not as much as a passenger city as it used to be. When you remove the Katrina effect of the Sunset, Crescent, and City of New Orleans, the number of LD passengers went up (although just barely) and revenues went up by 9.3%.

Don't forget, too, that revenues on the enhanced Empire Builder went up 16.7%, or about $6.3 million (more than was budgeted)! The increase in sleeper revenue accounted for $3.2 million of that, up 21.9%.

Several people have commented along the line of "well we all agree that short distance rail makes sense, but LD does not"

There seems to be confusion about who LD routes serve. The assumption is that they serve people who wish to travel long distances, and while people can travel long distances on LD trains this is not how they have traditionally been used much of the time, nor are they primarily used this way now. LD trains have never been "land cruises" where most of the people get on at the trains origin and get off at its destination. LD distance trains today are often used by people who wish to travel from one stop on the line to another stop. Back in the day when we had a rail network people would use more than one LD train in the network to patch together a rail journey that got them from where they were to where they wished to go. I don't have the stats handy but I have noticed that during the time when the intercity rail network collapsed, from 1964 to 1971, average trip length did go down but it was not dramatic. Passenger miles did collapse, but the fact that trip length did not indicates that the LD system was not at that time used primarily for LD trips.

This is not to say that there would not be a great opportunity to create LD travel on LD trains. We are entering a period where demographically there will be a lot of older people with time on their hands and money in the bank. These same boomer's have been trained by the maritime cruise industry to the concept of a long journey for enjoyment purposes, and a rail cruise can tap into nostalgia as well. There is a knee jerk response to the idea of more trains from say Chi to SFO along the lines of "Why the hell would we want to do that, how many people would be open to spending that much time on the trip, most everyone will fly no matter how many trains their are and how good they are" True enough that air will get more of the LD travel market no matter how good rail is because most people don't have the time for a transcon rail trip. But given that air travel is where it is at today I submit that if people had the rail network available that we had in the 1950's (and it is important to add a 1950's quality rail experiance as apposed to the AMTRASH experiance) that many people would be jumping off of airplanes and onto trains, it would be the older and younger and financially less well of who would jump. The dynamic that we had in the 50's would be reversed. A good long distance network not only would get the medium distance traveler that LD trains increasingly served between the time that air travel took off in the late 40's and the rail network collapsed, but it also would pull a lot of LD travelers onto trains, LD travelers that were getting pretty scarce on rail by the late 50's.