Conrail long ago (Now CSX and NS) gave up the idea of the local freight agent and sent sales people to large corperations to sell contract freight rate contracts to move products and raw matairal from point A to B. The Company agreeded to pay a flat rate to move X amount of cars below the published tariff, If the rates went up and they had more cars the company got the better end of the deal.
What I am proposing here is that lets say the FBI runs agents up to NY or some bank runs lobbists down to DC on a daily or weekly basis is that Amtrak sell them a contract that would allow them to get a discount rate or pay a flat fee based onthe projected number of passengers that that Co. or Gov. agency would ship on Amtrak. between point a and point b It would work like a futures contract and would work well on the Northeast corridor were trips are short and frequnt
It wouldn’t work.
People are people - not freight cargo. Two vastly different cargo and operation - means of use, etc…
Freight cargo goes to two points (a and b) and is private - the car you pay to move is FULL.
Passenger trains are public, have many points to board and exit the same car, and aren’t always full.
But see, you’re not thinking outside the box. If we could require everyone in the country to live in one of two buildings, we could easily set up an efficient, money making, high speed, passenger rail network between the two buildings and could guarantee our investors that every train would be full. All we need is some favorable legislation and some jackbooted enforcers to make it happen. Society definitely needs to learn to conform better to meet the needs of today’s railroads! [8D]
Ok unfortunatly thats how freight railroads think…
But…Lets say a Goverment agency like the Justice Department has a headquarters in DC and a
div. in NY City and on the avarage there are 100 trips each month by varuise members of that department on buisness and they are lets say flying at a cost of 275.00 a trip or taking the train at 150.00 a trip…Amtrak comes in and says we will sell you a contract that if you gaurentee us 1200 trips a year and we will give you a 30-50% discount if you agree to gaurentee that you will have X number of people going to new york city every year. The agency is already moving that amount of people anyway its just a matter of moving them on Amtrak. It works like a futures contract.
Burlington Northern does that with Grain and has monthly auctions on grain trains. This could work with any origin destnation pair…It a matter of finding out which companys shuttle employees back and forth between corprerate offices or Divions
I suppose Amtrak could use this theory to go after the shackle boxcar contract.
Actauly prisonor trasport would not be a bad contract
With this plan, you have a very big risk of either running empty (because you “reserved” seats for your “futures”, or over full (SRO) because your “futures” haven’t used their seats for a long time, you sold them, and then they send about 40 people at once.
To balance your load factor, you would need to have an agreement that does reserve a certain number of seats of your “futures” which they must pay for whether they use them or not. Except, that if you were able to sell vacant “futures” seats, your “futures” customer would get a refund (complete or partial). This is not difficult to do but does take an extra labor assignment on your end to keep the accounting straight.
This way, your customer is able to have a guarenteed seat and AMTK is not tied up with empty seats that it can not get money for.