Why did commuter trains survive so long?

[SouthernRailway]

As we all know, after an initial burst of investment after WWII, railroads cut back their intercity services significantly starting in the '50s, and moreso after the Post Office reduced mail delivery by rail in the 1960s.

Question: why weren't commuter trains around large cities cut back to the same extent, if not more, starting in the 1950s? Why did private railroads even invest a cent in them post WWII?

I'd guess that commuter trains in general lost much more money than mainline intercity passenger trains, considering (1) how much worse NY-area commuter railroads do compared to Amtrak and (2) how many intercity passenger trains were marginally profitable or marginally money-losing until the Post Office cut back its rail shipments, causing those trains to become very unprofitable.

I assume that government regulation and political pressure forced private railroads to continue to offer commuter trains, but why would those railroads do anything more than offer the bare minimum train service required?

[GWoodle]

If you look at the 60's, the new gallery style commuter cars offered additional capacity. For a time, the trains would add more passengers at little or no added cost. It is possible those trains had improved profitability until the expressway came along in competition to the service. On some lines, riding the dinky has the attraction of having "made it". One could live in the suburbs and afford the train fare to get downtown + whatever extra the city transit used to get you to the final destination. The trains in many areas lasted long enough to have suburban transit districts that could use some county money for equipment purchase. For each line, you have the prospect of improved equipment & service over the pre war steam powered trains. Those lines that improved survived, while others did not. Even the Rock Island had something new & better to offer. They may have been able to bundle car sales together to keep the car cost down.

For the lines to survive another factor may be having home town management vs having the commuter service run in another city. Customers could complain to management or the line president for late & dirty trains. Upset customers/passengers have a way to have their complaint heard. In sum, there is much less political pressure than good management working to delight their customers/passengers. Market forces at work & high enough ridership on some lines to be "profitable" or at least meet operating costs. The limit here is the point where higher fares & competition from interstates cut into the ridership. It is a 1970's era time for the RTA type public funding to be completed.

The commuter service would not be bothered with the loss of LD traffic, mail, (some lines carried newspaper from the city to the burbs). Different market with a different set of factors. Some lines still enjoy a premium service in competition & superior to the clogged freeway/interstate. With today's F40 fleet, I suspect most lines today run with 6-8 gallery cars on a tight schedule vs the 2-6 car trains pulled by E's or F's in the 1960's.
The only "government regulation " would be the difficulty with the locals to change/dispose of services vs the ICC & the ability to get something into court. Ask the riders of the North Shore how much the government helped.

[TomNelligan]

Question: why weren't commuter trains around large cities cut back to the same extent, if not more, starting in the 1950s?

Well, they largely were. Compare the World War II era route structure and number of daily trains in Boston, New York/New Jersey, or Philadelphia/South Jersey with what was left in the mid-1960s when government subsidy programs began to preserve what was left. Pittsburgh had a significant suburban network on the PRR, B&O, and P&LE that is now completely gone. Detroit had commuter service on the GTW and NYC that is completely gone. And Chicago was an exception to a general rule of minimal new investment in equipment. The NH, NYC, PRR, LIRR, EL, and CNJ (to name five lines that I rode at the time) all had some 1920's/1930s vintage cars in service until public funding kicked in in the 1960s. And in most cases, the reasons these trains lasted as long as they did was that the ICC and state regulators wouldn't let the railroads drop them, not that they didn't try from the 1950s onward.

[electricron]

I believe you'll discover that most of the commuter rail lines that survived the 60s had turnpikes built parrallel to them instead of freeways. Drivers commuting were giving the choice to pay tolls or pay fares, and many, not all, chose to pay fares and let someone else do the driving.

[ExCon90]

The Chicago & North Western was an exception to the rule. According to H. Roger Grant's book Chicago & North Western, Ben Heineman offered diesel power, gallery cars, and air conditioning as a quid pro quo for being allowed by the regulators to abandon most stations within Chicago (at that time there was a C&NW station almost every mile from the city limits on in to the Loop). He then had to persuade the directors that the expenditure was covered by revenue, resulting in much publicity that the commuter service was "profitable." This was accomplished by accounting practices that allocated many of the costs of the service to overhead or other operations. The retired vice president of operations, in an interview with Grant, used the expression "smoke and mirrors."

[neroden]

The argument that the surviving lines were paralleled only by *toll roads* -- or sometimes, no expressway at all -- whereas the lines which died were paralleled by freeways -- seems to have a lot of merit. I'm having trouble thinking of exceptions. Peninsula Commute? Some of LIRR, maybe? Every other example seems to work.

Heck, this even works for Amtrak's "corridor" routes. Empire Corridor, Keystone Corridor, NEC -- they all parallel toll roads, not free expressways.

[The EGE]

Boston's intercity connections didn't live long, but much of the commuter system survived pretty well. Only the Framingham/Worcester Line is parallel to a toll road, although the Old Colony division did die after Route 3 was built.

[NE2]

The argument that the surviving lines were paralleled only by *toll roads* -- or sometimes, no expressway at all -- whereas the lines which died were paralleled by freeways -- seems to have a lot of merit. I'm having trouble thinking of exceptions. Peninsula Commute? Some of LIRR, maybe? Every other example seems to work.

Heck, this even works for Amtrak's "corridor" routes. Empire Corridor, Keystone Corridor, NEC -- they all parallel toll roads, not free expressways.

I think this is a case of correlation not implying causation. Most medium-distance toll roads were built in the 1940s and 1950s, immediately before the Interstate Highway System provided non-toll funding for similar roads. So toll roads were built in the most congested corridors, which is also where commuter rail had the most chance of survival.

In fact the LIRR is a good example of this. Although the Southern State Parkway was tolled until 1978, the Northern State Parkway (built in the 1930s) never had tolls, and neither did the Long Island Expressway (1950s).

[novitiate]

Boston's intercity connections didn't live long, but much of the commuter system survived pretty well. Only the Framingham/Worcester Line is parallel to a toll road, although the Old Colony division did die after Route 3 was built.

My understanding was that the New Haven wanted to get rid of the Old Colony passenger service long before Route 3 was finished- it just provided the final justification to pull the plug.

[ExCon90]

That may have been true in other cases as well. I think it's a fair generalization that after the war the railroads got rid of what they could when they could. One example is the Santa Monica Air Line of Pacific Electric (although not commuter rail, I think it was longer than either of the Chestnut Hill lines in Philadelphia). One car, one round trip a day, 5 days a week, and PE had a terrible time getting rid of it -- a number of influential people lived along it, and knew what buttons to push and what code to input. I don't know whether there's a correlation between survival of service and political influence of commuters, but there's a story that Highland station on the PRR Chestnut Hill Branch, with 4 daily riders, survived because those 4 had the clout of multitudes.

[SouthernRailway]

Thanks for all of this info.

I'd guess my follow-on question is more specific:

Why did NYC-area commuter railroads in particular last so long, with such densities and frequencies of service? I know that they were pared back somewhat after WWII, but the geographic scope of the lines that remained in service by the time public funding came in the 1960s and later was still pretty extensive.

I work in the private sector, and I cannot imagine working in the corporate offices of a railroad that ran NY-area commuter lines and making a case for investing a cent in them, or even trying to continue operating them, unless forced to.

[neroden]

Thanks for all of this info.

I'd guess my follow-on question is more specific:

Why did NYC-area commuter railroads in particular last so long, with such densities and frequencies of service?

Well, the natural situation is *the* strongest in the US, in terms of promoting train usage. If you want to get into Manhattan, you do not go by car; if you do, you have to cross a minimum of one body of water on a very congested bridge or tunnel, and then find parking in the most expensive real estate in the country.

Very rich and very powerful people continued to go to Manhattan by train, when they would drive everywhere else.

The result is that the political pressures caused the commuter services around NYC to be government-subsidized very early. They were frequently not allowed to raise fares, and under the "old regime" ICC they were usually not allowed to discontinue passenger service.

(1) The LIRR was an independent subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and had very little freight service. It went bankrupt in 1949. It was not permitted to shut down, and was operated under convoluted funding procedures which I don't fully understand for the next 16 years. NY State started to fund it early, and finally purchased it outright in 1965.

(2) The Interstate Commerce Commission simply prohibited the discontinuance of the New York Central services, except for the Putnam branch, and they were funded out of the profits of the New York Central. When Penn Central went under, the states (NY and CT) bought the Metro-North lines.

(3) The state subsidies for the commuter services in New Jersey started in 1967, and continued straight on after that until they took over operations.

So, basically, the NYC-area commuter routes started going bankrupt quite early, but government funding saved them well before any other areas were funded. Triumph of big government.

[neroden]

...unless forced to.

So I guess the conclusion of my research is "yes, they absolutely were forced to".

My other conclusion is that any Long Islander who calls for getting the government out of the business of running passenger trains is a very particular sort of idiot: the sort who hasn't looked at his own local history.

[M&Eman]

In NY in particular. Many of the commuter routes were "too big to fail". They were such a vital part of the local economy that as soon as the railroads tried to pull out, a combination of mandates and subsidies appeared to keep them running. Some routes did die; the aforementioned Putnam Division which was easily cannibalized by parallel routes, as well as the NYC West Shore line and Erie Northern Branch routes in Eastern Bergen County which succumbed to competition from busses (not cars! Manhattan parking is ill-advised) traveling over the George Washington Bridge. Some of the routes saved were more marginal back in the 50s and 60s when subsidies first kicked in, but were saved as cheap extensions of further in "essential" lines in an effort of future-proofing as the further expansion of suburbia continued, (LIRR to Ronkonkoma, NJT to Princeton/Trenton, the Coast Line). Others were integral to many pre-WWII suburbs full of wealthy and influential residents (Former Lackawanna Lines, CNJ main line, former NYC/NH Lines, much of LIRR within Nassau County).

[amtrakowitz]

As we all know, after an initial burst of investment after WWII, railroads cut back their intercity services significantly starting in the '50s, and moreso after the Post Office reduced mail delivery by rail in the 1960s.

Question: why weren't commuter trains around large cities cut back to the same extent, if not more, starting in the 1950s? Why did private railroads even invest a cent in them post WWII?

I'd guess that commuter trains in general lost much more money than mainline intercity passenger trains, considering (1) how much worse NY-area commuter railroads do compared to Amtrak and (2) how many intercity passenger trains were marginally profitable or marginally money-losing until the Post Office cut back its rail shipments, causing those trains to become very unprofitable.

I assume that government regulation and political pressure forced private railroads to continue to offer commuter trains, but why would those railroads do anything more than offer the bare minimum train service required?

You sure that commuter rail service is so universal? Many cities that used to have commuter rail no longer have it; most prominent are Detroit, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. Some cities have brought back commuter rail, but only on a limited scale (e.g. Dallas, Minneapolis, Nashville).