Why wasn’t Amtrak created in the 1950s?

[SouthernRailway]

Question: why wasn’t Amtrak created before 1971?

Fact: Railroads lost money on passenger trains in basically every year after WWII.

Fact: By the late 1950s, airlines had jets.

So:

How did long-distance trains hold up as well as they did until 1971? They had mail contracts until the mid-1960s but any sensible business person would have wanted to ditch passenger traffic as early as the late 1940s.

Given that European countries all had predominantly state-owned passenger rail after WWII, and given the facts above, why didn’t the US have Amtrak starting in 1950 or so?

[mtuandrew]

Railroads weren’t going bankrupt yet.

[TomNelligan]

The creation of Amtrak was a political response to the bankruptcy of Penn Central and the accelerating pace of train discontinuances in the late 1960s. Things had gotten to a point where there would be few trains left within a few years. Most railroads were loosing money of passenger trains in the 1950s but there was still a comprehensive national network and no incentive for Congress to do anything that some would have labeled as socialism, an even more loaded word then than it is for some folks today.

[Tadman]

I believe there was a singular incident around 1970 where PC filed to discontinue a huge number of passenger trains and that spurred congress to action.

[electricron]

Money making US Mail contracts were still being made with US railroads in the 1950s. It was the passenger trains that moved most of the mail. Not everyone paid the US Postal Service the extra nickel or dime for first class stamps. Golly, there was even a cheaper postcard stamp back then.

What happen in Texas was happening everywhere else. Here's a YouTube video about the death of passenger trains in North Texas. Warning, the video is over two hours long.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj4k8qDAB8I

It was not until the NEC passenger railroads entered bankruptcy before the US Congress took action and started Amtrak. The rest of the country could survive with expanding airliners and intercity bus services, but not the highly congested New York City.

[jonnhrr]

I believe there was a singular incident around 1970 where PC filed to discontinue a huge number of passenger trains and that spurred congress to action.

They filed to end all East/West service which basically meant everything outside of the NEC.

[Tadman]

Thanks, I thought this was somewhat correct. I seem to remember a PTJ article in the last few years about such activity.

[MACTRAXX]

Everyone:

Back around 1959-1960 Trains Magazine wrote an in-depth study on the status of North American passenger rail service.

I know that there are other Forum members here that know about this past study and
when it was published since this has been mentioned in previous topics about the years before Amtrak began (created as Railpax in 1970; Amtrak 5/1/1971) service.

If anyone knows the exact issue and title please add where this can be found to this topic...MACTRAXX

[CHTT1]

Title of the issue was "Who shot the passenger train?" I'm not sure of the date.

[Gilbert B Norman]

May 1959 TRAINS.

A masterpiece.

[Station Aficionado]

I believe there was a singular incident around 1970 where PC filed to discontinue a huge number of passenger trains and that spurred congress to action.

They filed to end all East/West service which basically meant everything outside of the NEC.

I believe they sought to discontinue all service west of Harrisburg and Buffalo.

[SouthernRailway]

This month’s Classic Trains describes Class 1 railroads’ losses on passenger service:

In the late 1930s, they lost the equivalent of $4 billion per year.

Even by 1947, they lost the same amount.

By the early 1950s, they lost half of freight earnings.

And all along, branch lines lost money.

I recall reading somewhere else that passenger trains lost money starting in the 1920s.

So railroads lost money on passenger trains for nearly 50 years before Amtrak.

Given that European countries nationalized their railroads early on, and given Democratic dominance in government starting in the early 1930s, why didn’t railroads (1) stop investing in passenger rail and (2) demand the creation of Amtrak starting in the 1930s, if not sooner?

[mtuandrew]

Moderator Note: same topic + same poster + two threads => same thread

[gokeefe]

So railroads lost money on passenger trains for nearly 50 years before Amtrak.

This conclusion is so generalized as to be meaningless. I could also say, "railroads made money on passenger trains until right before Amtrak." Technically, I would be correct because of the Seaboard and perhaps one or two other outliers. Your statement is in this case correct to an extent but certainly far more so in 1969 than in 1929.

The simple reason why Amtrak wasn't created in the 1950s is because the extent of the losses was treated differently by the railroads. For some the mail and express contracts were considered ample justification to continue service and provide a public convenience. Others had such extensive commuting operations that discontinuance was politically impossible. Boston & Maine comes to mind in this example.

Others treated passenger service as a prestige operation. ATSF was by far the best example of this approach. The Southern was another with the Illinois Central and Kansas City Southern a distant third and fourth.

Seaboard and Atlantic Coast Line clearly were making big money on the Florida services with the RF&P a secondary beneficiary.

Regardless of the corporate reasoning to keep running in the 50s by the mid 60s the losses had in fact become so big that the railroads had no choice whatsoever no matter how committed they were to the operation.

The two big exceptions among the railroads that did not join Amtrak, Southern and the Denver Rio Grande and Western, did so only because their accountants told them it was cheaper to stay out. Of course this was merely a fluke in Amtrak's member railroad formula as opposed to any indication of profitability for their passenger trains.

So, to be fair, not every railroad was ready to throw in the towel at the same time. They each arrived at their own conclusions at different times for different reasons. In some cases after multi year marketing efforts were undertaken to save the services. Reistrup at the B&O in the early 60s is considered a textbook example of an attempt at "salvation".

Maine Central took a completely different approach, paring back operations until they were able to file for discontinuance as an intra state carrier. They managed to terminate everything by Labor Day weekend of 1960. This made the MEC among the very earliest Class I carriers to terminate all passenger rail service in the postwar era.

In order for Amtrak to have been created in time for this event Congress would have had to take up the question in 1958, pass legislation at some point in 1959 and get Amtrak ready for operations by late August 1960.

To give one a sense of just how absurd a proposition that is it's worth noting that in 1957 the B&O has just finished reequipping the National Limited with streamlined sleeper cars. The B&O along with others had yet to really see the darkness that was just over the horizon.

Even the mere occurrence of a thought of terminating all passenger service, let alone the quantum leap of establishing a government owned carrier, would not even be a twinkle in most of their eyes on New Year's Eve 1959.

[gokeefe]

Afterword: I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge Mr. Norman's long held advice to this forum that the Seaboard very nearly stayed out of Amtrak and chose to join literally at the eleventh hour. Those executives barely saw the wisdom in Amtrak in 1971 let alone 1959.