Amtrak Cascades Schedule

[wigwagfan]

The Eugene run could just as easily be serviced with a few horizons and a cab car serving as a shuttle. It's 120 miles approx, about the same as the Port Jervis, Montauk, or South Shore runs, all of which are amply served with commuter cars.

If the ridership existed, sure.

But it simply doesn't.

Years of literally giving away train service to the public has not resulted in ridership.

Time to call it an end, let the private motorcoach carriers own the Portland-Eugene segment - a new carrier just started service in the last couple months - and use the rail equipment where the ridership warrants it. Seattle-Portland.

If the motorcoaches run full every hour, let's revisit rail then. Until then, it's just a huge waste of resources that in no way makes rail advocacy look good, advocating for empty trains once or twice a day at a high cost "because it's a train". Especially in a state that has so many crisises to address, spending a bunch of money on empty trains is not a good look.

[Tadman]

I think that's a very good point, and it's good to see you post again!

Do you feel, as a local with some expertise, that a dedicated shuttle making frequent Eugene-Portland-Vancouver(Was) trips might have a better effect? Right now the Eugene ridership might be low because it relies on a often-late Starlight and sometimes-late Seattle/Canada train.

[NorthWest]

A lot of the problem is that the schedule south of Portland was changed in the last schedule change to be far less useful.

500 leaves Eugene at 5:30 and doesn't get into Portland until 8:05. If they moved it up half an hour it would be great for commuting.

511 leaves Portland at 9:45 and gets into Eugene at 12:20, making it useless except for as a deadhead move.

508 leaves Eugene at 4:30 and gets into Portland at 7:05.

505 leaves Portland at 6:05 and then gets stuck waiting for 508 (usually in Hito) then runs 20-45 minutes late until theoretically getting into Eugene at 8:40, but usually more like 9:00-9:30. It would be better moved up half an hour (though this trainset does come from Seattle; it is usually on time to Portland though).


The station agents tend to be good at telling people not to book local travel on 14. 11 usually does fine. If only the website told people not to expect reliability when the Starlight is concerned...

The POINT buses to tend to be pretty full every hour.

[wigwagfan]

A lot of the problem is that the schedule south of Portland was changed in the last schedule change to be far less useful. 500 leaves Eugene at 5:30 and doesn't get into Portland until 8:05. If they moved it up half an hour it would be great for commuting.

While I agree on the point that the schedule definitely is not useful (and the weekend schedule is even worse), I have a strong doubt that there are many "commuters" on the train from Eugene to Portland. Maybe a small handful Salem-Portland commuters who like to spend a lot more money than the very cheap Cherriots/SMART buses, which provide much more service than Amtrak ever could.

There's no easy way to add frequency on the route, especially since the traffic flow is very unbalanced. Time to cede the market to buses. Rail isn't always appropriate and contrary to a map, Portland and Eugene aren't really connected to one another. Portland to Salem arguably have a decent amount of commute traffic owing to the state government in Salem and Salem being an affordable housing area less than an hour from Portland, but beyond that your traffic is basically a bunch of one-off trips and college kids a couple times a year. Hardly the kind of business that supports a $20 million per mile times 100+ miles of infrastructure with a few million bucks per year in maintenance on top of the $20 million or so just to fuel up the diesel tank and pay for the five on-board employees and all the Station Agents so little Johnny can pay a half-price fare on an already heavily subsidized fare.

[wigwagfan]

Do you feel, as a local with some expertise, that a dedicated shuttle making frequent Eugene-Portland-Vancouver(Was) trips might have a better effect?

Frequency will always drive repeat customers. Just ask those in big cities if they will ride the bus if it's once an hour or once every 10 minutes. The 10 minute headway service will always attract enough ridership to drive down the cost of operation.

Since there's no way we're going to get hourly service on Amtrak, might as well have hourly bus service. Right now POINT is barely to not at all subsidized by the State (and in fact paying a wide variety of taxes including weight-mile tax) and operated by private companies, so even a modest subsidy by the State is peanuts compared to what we're paying just to run a couple long but empty trains a day just to sit around in Eugene for hours while the crew naps for a mid-day rest.