I think Amtrak is one of the best run organizations in the USA., always there 24/7, with good food, clean cars., very attentive employees., who always keeps you well informed,gets you to your destination on time, sometimes early., good place to meet new people., wonderful scenery., prices right., why would anyone who likes trains not like Amtrak I just dont understand.Well thats my story and im sticking to it!
why would anyone who likes trains not like Amtrak
Because some of us are old enough to remember a time when train travel was all the things you mention and railroads took pride in service.
… and it’s obvious to some of us that Amtrak could be a whole lot more and a whole lot better and a whole lot cheaper to run.
How often have you ridden Amtrak? And on which trains?
OK. I get it. This was sarcasm. Sorry it didn’t sink in the first read …
Well out of the 48 thousand on here., only 4 comments., evidently Amtrak must be doing something right. And one thing I forgot in original post., you also have a lovely person, Julie., who will help you, also.,if you were doing business with any other transportation company you would be talking to someone you couldnt understand 10 thousand miles away.Only in America do we have an Amtrak(with way to much time on my hands)
So obvious that nobody brings along a spreadsheet with figures showing us how. [8D] Not to mention that all the commuter railroads are run way cheaper than Amtrak…right?
Amen, brother.
Mark
Wellll, actually we did do something like that on another thread.
Deja vu all over again!
Must have gone back for a couple more rounds of “getting hit on the head leasons” not knowing that “abuse” was in room 12.
As to the question regarding whether Amtrak could be run cheaper, better, faster, there is always the comparison to Europe.
I get criticized for being dismissive of 20 percent differences and for arm-waving with numbers, but I am an electrical engineer for whom 5-20 percent is component tolerance and that one only worries about order-of-magnitude differences (scale factors of 3-10).
The U.S. serves 300 million people with an Amtrak subsidy of about 1 billion/year and provides .1 percent of passenger miles. France serves 60 million people with a public expenditure of 10 billion/year and provides 5 percent of passenger miles. Based on this cursory comparison, passenger trains in France require just as much subsidy per passenger mile as they do here.
Of course I am comparing oranges and pommes. France has the TGV, you can get places by train in France while Amtrak is our national shame and so on and so forth. But it appears that the rate of subsidy per passenger mile for Amtrak is not an artifact of it being of skeletal network and of uncreative management – it appears that passenger trains cost that amount of money.
You could say that both Amtrak and SNCF are government run, and that government operations have a culture that affect costs – there are political consequences to the kinds of economic ruthlessness practiced by corporations. Perhaps airline travel would be much more expensive if government run – think pre deregulation air fares.
Care to link that thread? I wouldn’t mind seeing if “something like that” is what I’m looking for, or might have holes in it.
Not even Wendell Cox’s PublicPurpose.com agrees with that. They cite a total of 9.45 percent of passenger miles in France on rail, i.e. of all kinds (2001 figures). 37 billion passenger miles in a year by high-speed rail (over about 1,056 route-miles) is nothing to sniff at, especially when compared to the less than 10 billion annual passenger miles for rail all around the USA (related to lack of available seat-miles; see below).
Airlines made money back before deregulation, and they were not government-run. Deregulation led to (and continues to lead to) the death of many airlines. Is the suggestion here to do away with the FRA? who levies a lot of regulation on the railroads, much of which makes it very expensive to run passenger rail service, but much more of which has an eye to passenger safety.
And if we’re going to continue to harp on RPMs, it’s only fair that we do not forget ASMs. Amtrak’s current carrying capacity is directly due to ASMs and nothing else. RPMs and ASMs cannot be separated.
http://www.trains.com/TRC/CS/forums/6/1249018/ShowPost.aspx#1249018
Don Oltmann had focused on one particular Amtrak line-item, the numbers of shop personnel and costs of maintenance. In his experience, Amtrak seemed quite high. As you can see from the locked thread, he was engaged on the matter by someone who didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about, but who had decided that was going to be his particular target for the week. I thought the premise was interesting and, lacking the practical background myself on the point to make an educated guess one way or another, wondered if there might be a statistical means of looking at the question.
Comparing three arbitrary years of passenger car maintenance figures from a Class 1 railroad that ran a modern, streamlined car fleet with large numbers of bilevel cars in service, with the diesel-electric maintenance and repair costs from the same road, it appeared that there was a relationship in costs – a confidence level measured by the R squared value – suggesting that a modern railroad passenger car ought to cost for repairs and maintenance about one-third the cost of a modern diesel-electric locomotive; “modern” representing post-1955 technologies. In that fashion, it appeared that modern diesel-electric repair and maintenance costs offered a useful surrogate for comparing Amtrak’s shop operation; partly because of the apparent statistical reliability of the comparison, and partly because Amtrak has a high proportion of diesel-electric locomotives. I use the word “apparent” because I do not want to suggest that the use of three random years of data r
But the guy that claimed that a passenger car was “a bunch of seats bolted to a platform” supposedly DID kinow what he was talking about???
It tuned into a limbo contest. I lost. The winner got spanked and put in time out.
Oh, since my immediate supervisor my last two years of working for a railroad was Vice President of Passenger Services, I probably had some meagher idea of what a railroad passenger car was … [warning: “meagher” – possible hyperbole alert!]
I don’t recall, what was your basis for being in that discussion? I’m pretty sure it was experience, or was it education? Your statistical analysis showed what? Or did I leave the real reason out?
The basis for discussion was the lack of foundation for the claim that comparing the maintenance cost of passenger cars could be equated with the cost for maintaining a diesel locomotive.
So after you ran this comparison, how many of Amtrak’s maintenance employees, by trade or location, could be laid off and the remaining staff could still accomplish their job?
I hope this so called “Vice President of Passenger Services” was working for a tourist railroad. Unless you can name another place that a passenger car is “a bunch of seats bolted to a platform.”
And “hyperbole” still isn’t another word for sticking your foot in your mouth.
Well, hang on to that one, it must be all you’ve got. I will announce, in the future, all uses of hyperbole in advance, just for you.
Now, what is your basis – experience, education and/or training – for evaluating these costs or challenging anyone else’s evaluation of these costs?
Since the reference to a hypebole was an afterthought on your part, it seems a lame coveup.
I have yet to see anyone’s evaluation of costs. You can compare costs of anything, but to what end? What useful data can be calculated from such a comparison?
Since I didn’t offer such a flawed comparison, why would I be offering anything like that?
PS–My experience is the ability to recognize a line of BS when I see it.
Yes, “hypebole” usually doesn’t have to be announced in advance to most people. They “get it.” You didn’t and that was purely my miscalculation.
Well, in this instance, you had a combination of education, experience, and a statistical analysis on the part of two contributors. That’s usually how its done under such circumstances, and, in fact, is done all the time. You haven’t done it, so you wouldn’t know.
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I’m impressed.