Now finally the contract is let for the bi-levels. 88 for midwest service and 42 for California. Max speed wil be allowed 125 MPH. average cost $2.7M / car. Cab cars will cost more. Interesting to compare with new Viewliners.
Amtrak is very short of cars in the Midwest and I think this is great news.
Are the cars being bought because Amtrak is short of equipment for its midwest trains or because its existing equipment is outdated and needs to be replaced?
The average load factor on the midwest trains during the first 11 months of FY12 was 45.9 per cent, which is significantly below Amtrak’s average system load factor of 52.9 per cent. Only the Wolverines and KCS-St. Louis trains had an average load factor above 50 per cent.
Some of the trains probably are periodically space constrained (holidays, vacation season(s), etc.), but the average numbers don’t suggest that space availability is a major problem for Amtrak.
The California purchases may be in part to allow retirement of the Amfleet cars from Pacific Surfliner service.
Which they can then convert to baggage cars and then…oh, never mind! [:)]
Happy Thanksgiving!
“Load factor measures usage by capacity. It is calculated by dividing passenger-miles (the aggregation of trip lengths for individual passengers) by seat-miles (the sum of the products of total seats available and total miles traveled for individual trains). Data are available beginning in January 2003.”
I’m wondering for passenger trains, making multiple stops, what the maximum percentage would realistically be so as to have sufficient capacity en route? Although a number approaching 100% might be good on a non-stop between two cities (like on an airline), might not that result in turning away potential customers? Gil Carmichael (former FRA Administrator during the GHW Bush administration) once said, “As a rule of thumb, because of on/offs at intermediate stations, a train with a 65% load factor is generally full and at some point in the route peaks out with no seats available.”
If a train is full between two points on a run from A to F, i.e. B to D, then it is operating well below capacity between the other points if the overall load factor is 65 per cent. It can attain a 65 per cent load factor without being 100 per cent full.
Amtrak’s average load factor for the first 10 months of FY12 was 52.9 per cent, which was down from 53.2 per cent for the corresponding period in FY11. The NEC had an overall load factor of 52.0 per cent, with the Acela trains racking up 62.2 per cent and the NEC regionals coming in at 48.2 per cent. The NEC Special Trains accounted for the difference. The State Supported and Other Short Distance Corridor Trains had an average load factor of 43.5 per cent, and the long distance trains had an average load factor of 62.8 per cent.
The load factor is only part of the story. The NEC had a $302.8 million operating profit through August of FY12. However, after depreciation, interest, and ancillary charges, it incurred a substantial loss. The long distance trains, with their relatively high average load factor, lost $539.5 million before depreciation, interest, and ancillary charges over the same period.
One way to increase the load factor so that it approximates the load factor for the airlines would be to lower the fares and rack even greater losses. That would not be a good business decision, but it might make for good politics.
Streak,
Is there perhaps some further information here?
The article you link to says California is buying some of these cars and Illinois, Michigan and Missouri are buying the rest. Nothing actually says they will be used by Amtrak so I was wondering if there is more information here.
What is clear is that Amtrak is not buying these cars. However, Amtrak may well be operating them for the states involved in the purchase.
After looking at the question a bit more, I think Carmichael’s point [he’s not just an amateur passenger advocate or poster on a forum, he was an FRA administrator] is that passenger trains, except for non-stop ones, none of which currently exist, are different from airlines, and therefore the load factor criterion for most efficiency needs to be lower than that of a well-run airline.
I heard of some high, airline-level load factors on the TGV trains in France.
But I am in the camp that there are “engineering” limits on load factor without making the service inconvenient, that people cannot travel at the times they want.
For instance, the Hiawatha Service is a success story in terms of frequency of service and a burgeoning ridership, perhaps helped by the mess Illinois made in upgrading all of its toll roads at one time.
On the other hand, it seems that the increase in ridership has been accomodated by adding cars to the train and that the overall load factor remains below 50 percent. What I think is happening is that it is capacity constrained at rush hour as the Hiawatha train is a de facto commuter train for many people who need to get between Milwaukee and Chicago on a daily basis, but it is not cost effective to switch cars out of the consist for the off peak times, hence a low off-peak load factor and a middling overall load factor.
The other thing to do is a differential pricing scheme, where you charge more for rush hour and less for off peak. Funny thing is that on the pre-Metra C&NW, you got a deal on a monthly pass, which I believe was for riding all the way to Northwestern Station (now Ogilvie Center) whereas there was no monthly pass if you got out at Davis Street station in Evanston and no deals for riding outside of rush hour. So they were discounting rush hour and charging more for off peak for some reason or another.
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I have to take their word for it. Amtrak has stated to me officially that it is very short of reserve equipment and that charters that require a seperate trainset are probably off the table right now. I asked about a Chicago-Green Bay charter tentitively for next fall’s Packers vs Bears game and I was told to consider another option. So perhaps it is part of some larger conspiracy not to use your untested accounting approach…or maybe they are telling me what they percieve to be the operational truth?
The purchase is not by AMTRAK but if you note the funds come from a FRA grant (tiger funds I believe ). So the IMHO AMTRAK is buying these cars using a financial sleight of hand to prevent them going on the books. I know SAM1 will not like this method.
Now a history lesson…
AMTRAK’s first fleet strategy plan noted that about 65 bi-level cars would be needed per year for various services. At some time the FRA stepped in and wisely required that all bi-levels be identical except for minor passenger items. AMTRAK, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Washington state, & California were invited to attend a equipment conference to flesh out specifications. May have been others as well ? California was designated lead agency somewhere in this process.
The conferences settled on the design early this year. The specs are very important for commonability of equipment with much compatible with the Viewliners now under construction. Any change of equipment will be required to be backwards compatible. The FRA then designated a grant for 130 cars and the conference issued a request for bids. In September the bidder was selected and CALIFORNIA awarded the contract listed in the announcement. These cars will be used for AMTRAK service in CA and the midwest. Nothing may prevent some other operator in the future but for any FRA money for future cars these specs will be followed.
Looking at a couple of old C&NW commuter Galena Division TT from my youth, there is no discount for riding rush hour trains.
[quote user=“Paul Milenkovic”]
I heard of some high, airline-level load factors on the TGV trains in France.
But I am in the camp that there are “engineering” limits on load factor without making the service inconvenient, that people cannot travel at the times they want.
For instance, the Hiawatha Service is a success story in terms of frequency of service and a burgeoning ridership, perhaps helped by the mess Illinois made in upgrading all of its toll roads at one time.
On the other hand, it seems that the increase in ridership has been accomodated by adding cars to the train and that the overall load factor remains below 50 percent. What I think is happening is that it is capacity constrained at rush hour as the Hiawatha train is a de facto commuter train for many people who need to get between Milwaukee and Chicago on a daily basis, but it is not cost effective to switch cars out of the consist for the off peak times, hence a low off-peak load factor and a middling overall load factor.
The other thing to do is a differential pricing scheme, where you charge more for rush hour and less for off peak. Funny thing is that on the pre-Metra C&NW, you got a deal on a monthly pass, which I believe was for riding all the way to Northwestern Station (now Ogilvie Center) whereas there was no monthly pass if you got out at Davis Street station in Evanston and no deals for riding outside of rush hour. So they were discounting rush hour and charging more for off peak for some reason or another.
In my opinion, seemingly low load factors do not mean that the train isn’t popular or that no one is riding it. In fact, it may be more economical to keep passenger consists as unit trainsets and trail empty cars rather than to switch, whereas with airlines, they don’t form airplanes into "air trains’ but instead dispatch different sizes of planes on different routes at different times using massi
And my untested accounting approach would be what? My numbers come from Amtrak’s operating reports, which are available to anyone who wants to read them.
I was in Seattle last week. I rode the Cascades to Portland and back. Amtrak had six horizon cars parked at King Street Station as augmentation equipment in anticipation of the heavy travel over Thanksgiving. The conductor on my Talgo train said that the equipment had come from Chicago.
Amtrak has a Superliner coach and sleeper parked in San Antonio in case the Sunset Limited (Texas Eagle) cannot make its connection with the Texas Eagle out of San Antonio. It also has had two Superliner cars in reserve at Fort Worth. This makes me wonder how equipment constrained Amtrak really is.
Clearly, Amtrak probably does not have all the equipment it would like for the peak travel days, i.e. holidays and a portion of the summer vacation season. But there is little in its operating reports to suggest that the equipment constraints are as severe as some claim.
When a train sells out, is it sold out for one segment or multiple segments? What is the overflow? And would it justi
[quote user=“blue streak 1”]
The purchase is not by AMTRAK but if you note the funds come from a FRA grant (tiger funds I believe ). So the IMHO AMTRAK is buying these cars using a financial sleight of hand to prevent them going on the books. I know SAM1 will not like this method.
Now a history lesson…
AMTRAK’s first fleet strategy plan noted that about 65 bi-level cars would be needed per year for various services. At some time the FRA stepped in and wisely required that all bi-levels be identical except for minor passenger items. AMTRAK, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Washington state, & California were invited to attend a equipment conference to flesh out specifications. May have been others as well ? California was designated lead agency somewhere in this process.
The conferences settled on the design early this year. The specs are very important for commonability of equipment with much compatible with the Viewliners now under construction. Any change of equipment will be required to be backwards compatible. The FRA then designated a grant for 130 cars and the conference issued a request for bids. In September the bidder was selected and CALIFORNIA awarded the contract listed in the announcement. These cars will be used for AMTRAK service in CA and the midwest. Nothing may prevent some other operator in the future but for any FRA money for future cars these specs will be followed.
Hamilton Ellis in “The Lore of the Train” writes that the term commuter comes from a railroad company “commuting” the fare for frequent riders where to commute means to reduce, as the authorities “commuting the sentence” of a prisoner in response to a public outcry regarding the severity of the punishment. Ellis goes on to say that someone “commutes by automobile” completely misses the meaning of the term, that a fare is charged for the trip and that the fare is reduced.
In the mid 1970’s, I “commuted” on the C&NW North Line. During the semester (actually, Northwestern University had three school-year quarters, with the summer session being quarter number four), I rode inboad as far as Davis Street. During the summer, I rode the line all the way to Northwestern Station for a summer job “downtown.” Actually, I was quite fortunate that the job was only a block from Northwestern Station, which is (now called Ogilvie Center) a couple miles from “the Loop”, requiring many commuters to take a bus or L train to get to their destination.
The trip all the way inbound could be made with a monthly pass, which was a substantial discount from individual train tickets. The trip to Davis Street offered no such discounted pass. The individual ticket fare to Davis Street was in absolute dollar terms somewaht less per ride than the trip all the way to Northwestern Station on the pass (otherwise people would have just purchased the pass and gotten off the train), but the passengers going the full distance were getting considerably more “transportation” in terms of miles travelled and avoidance of the congested final leg of the Edens or Kennedy Expressways.
Streak,
Thank you for the additional information. TIGER means transportation investment to generate economic recovery. I’m sure many people object to this program and this kind of program in general. It sounds to me like it is in the spirit of FDR’s WPA, CCC and similar programs. Since political comments are discouraged here I will not say anything further on the issue.
To commute derives from the Latin commuto = to exchange or interchange, which comes from the Latin root muto = to change. Commuting a prison sentence means to change or alter the original. Meanings change from the original usage, often in parallel, and in the case of commute the term refers to the back and forth trip a commuter makes. The Romans did not use that term, rather, iter ab urbe. So commuting has nothing to do with a discount.
All three C&NW lines offered unlimited monthly tickets for many years from Madison Street Terminal to the specific suburb (later to zones - groups of suburbs) and at a considerable discount over RT tickets or even 10 or 25 ride tickets (also discounted). In your case I would have thought you would have been better to buy a monthly ticket to Madison Street but exited at Davis Street, but I guess the discount was not sufficient.