If Amtrak is “junked” will the freight railroads take over? I think if they do the freight roads will do a better job.
I would say “No Way” for regularly scheduled intercity passenger service. The freight railroads, for the most part, got what they wanted in 1971 when Amtrak was formed.
As far as providing the right of way for contract operators like Rocky Mountain Railtours there may be some interest if there is money to be made and the capacity is available.
Jay
First of all Amtrak won’t go away. This is a good question because NS did express possible interest in passenger service subject to conditions.
I want good passenger service in the US
So do I. But I seriously doubt the freight railroads want anything to do with it, or there would already be service out there somewhere. Passengers need a lot more “care and feeding” than freight…stations, comfortable rolling stock, parking areas, ticket agents, etc. Not to mention the contingency plans (Plan B) to bring in charter buses when the trains get delayed or annulled.
On the other hand, some short lines operate passenger service (Santa Fe-Lamy) and it is affordable.
OK Guys, here is an alternative.
First of all, how much total Federal taxes do the “Big Six” pay each year?
If UP + BNSF + NS + CSX + CP + CN pay a total of about four billion a year to the USA Government, then there IS hope for freight railroads to provide good passenger service.
If much less than that, there isn’t hope.
Here is how. Congress decides how much it is worth to the USA to have a good decent passenger railroad system that the USA can be proud of. If they decide two billion or more, per year, then the scheme would work.
The total pie is then distributed to all the railroads that they themselves provide passenger serviced on the proportional basis of the length in miles of each journey or each individual using the service (N x Miles-sub-n) or possibly the square root of the mileage considering that carrying a passenger 100 miles is not ten times more expensive than carrying him/her ten miles, more like three times as expensived. A number of Larry Kaufman and Larry Parsons types should figure out the formula, since they know more than I do about the proportional costs number of passengers vs number of miles.
In other words, a real tax incentive to provide such good passenger service that people will ride.
The fares the railroad collects are on top of this subsidy.
Short of something like this, well better keep the present arrangement with David Gunn in charge.
For years Amtrak has pumped most of the money to operate the system into the northeast corridor and neglected much of the rest. Living on the right coast I see Washington, Oregon and California providing more and more Amtrak service to the people by providing state funding to assist Amtrak growth. I am sure if Amtrak goes down these three states will still have some rail services for passengers to ride and those states that want service will just have to ante up the funding to continue service. But it bothers me when I see the shape the US airline industry is in and the government subsidies and bailouts keep flowing to them. If Amtrak were given 2 billion a year for capital improvements only for the next five years I am sure the American taxpayer would see an end to Amtrak at the door each year for a hand out. But the states must do their part as well and provide funding for the operation of the stations and personal related to those operations. The airports are heavily subsidized and so is the air traffic control system by the federal government so why can’t the states that have Amtrak service provide the passenger stations and personel to run them. The three right coast states have shown the most improvement in amtrak services anywhere and the those states will continue to support the passenger carrier as long as they are not left as a west coast operation only, without train service to the rest of the country. As long as states keep putting their transportation dollars into highways people will keep buying more cars and filling the additional highways until we will eventually run out of fuel or come to grinding halt due to gridlock. Name one transportation mode more fuel efficient than the railroads that serves the number of people and area of the country.
Greyhound! (Sorry, you asked!) The bus is about 3x more fuel efficient than Amtrak. Amtrak is about = to driving.
Take a look: http://www.ncseonline.org/nle/crsreports/energy/eng-11.cfm?&CFID=19197095&CFTOKEN=13252440
The bus may be efficicent but sorry, the bus to me is one dreadful form of long distance transportation!! Yuck!! [B)]
Before any of you flame me…I drove the darn things part-time for 10 years!! Driving them was one thing, but riding as a passenger for a long stretch? Getting off at stops for meals? Caught in traffic jams on the interstate! No thanks!!
Give me the Silver Meteor’s coach, diner and lounge cars anytime!!! [:D][8D]
I agree! (But that wasn’t the question asked!)
I’d REALLY have to want to go there to take the bus.
I saw some stats a while back that Atlanta was the 10th largest loading point on the Greyhound system. Kinda makes me think there might be a pretty good market for passenger trains here.
First off, I doubt very much if the freight railroads would be even faintly interested in providing passenger service, unless the net profit were to be at least as high as a good freight operation. Why on earth should they? No one should – although apparently some folks do – expect business to be in the philanthropy business.
The suggestion of a tax rebate clearly is to tilt the scales so that the net profit from a passenger operation might be high enough. However… IMHO such a rebate would have to have a dollar value well in excess of the amount AMTRAK requested to operate. Why? Because of a number of factors, but primarily because of duplication. Other factors involve such little details as local taxes, capital cost of all-new facilities and equipment, labour costs, etc. etc.
So what would be the advantage?
The fact that it would actually cost more doesn’t matter to dubya. It would accompli***hree things for him. 1. It would “privatize” passenger rail. 2. The cost of passenger rail to the nation would be obscured within the budgets of those large corporations. 3. It would starve the federal government of money. Starving the federal govt. of money is one of his core philosophies. That’s the reason for all of those massive tax cuts. Theoretically that should lead to smaller govt. (which is his aim) but anyone with a brain knows that it doesn’t happen in reality (so we get massive deficits instead.)
The freight railroads by virtue of foregone insitutional experience with passenger services, fractioning of identical efforts among many different organizations too small to bring economy of scale to bear, and because passenger would by necessity play second fiddle to freight in the company’s set of priorities, would be highly unlikely to do a better job than Amtrak. It would certainly be a more erratic experience, with one road doing one thing well and other badly, and the next road doing the opposite. Taking a single-mission focused outfit like Amtrak and scattering that mission among five or six organizations with a different primary mission, is a dreadful idea.
Those who say otherwise, as far as I can see, have absolutely no experience in running a railroad, or any complex and technically demanding organization, and if perchance they have worked for a rairoad, I’d want to look to see if they’re the ones who screwed it up.
OS
I’m not so sure Amtrak has a single mission. In fact they may have several overlapping and/or contradictory missions.
I think it would be disasterous to divorce NEC engineering work from equipment ownership and Amtrak train operations, primarily because the 3 have to function as a system and there’s lots of room to suboptimize the system if they are separate.
On the other hand, Amtrak’s “home grown” signal system on the NEC is a good example how not to do it. If Amtrak’s mission had been to promote seemless, incremental development of HSR starting with the NEC, you’d likely have something totally different on the NEC.
Sometimes I wonder if Amtrak’s self-perceived mission isn’t “survive in one piece at all costs”. I can’t come up with anything else that explains their actions over the past 15-20 years.
All I realy want is many passenger trains serving many places across America. We need fast passenger service. If Amtrak was like the French TGV we would never have a dispute on funding.
No quibble from me on your points, Don. I was looking back to the original question if the freight railroads would be better at providing Amtrak services than Amtrak. Now, if you’d address that … [:)]
If you pay’em enough and hold their feet to the fire, there’s no reason they wouldn’t deliver UPS-like service. Those are two big caveats, tho’… Neither is true now, which is part of the reason Amtrak train perf on the frt roads isn’t very good.
The question first asked, was, as stated by OS, would Amtrack services be taken over by the “Big 6”. But, the others answers, although at times going astray of the original question, all apply to our subject even if only tangently.
The real issue is a political philosophy elucidated by San Diego Coaster. Smaller government. Since making government smaller from the legislative and budget end has not worked, “W” is going to starve the government for money and that is supposed to force the government to downsize. Well, that doesn’t work either because both Oregon and California have tried that - and Oregon is still trying hard at it and the public infrastructure has suffered.
There are two basic ways for “W” to accomplish what he wants. First, is to end all types of subsidy to all modes and make them all pay (as railroads do now and none of the others do) all of the costs of doing business. The other is to reduce revenue to the government which is easiest done by giving massive tax cuts to those decision makers who would benefit by the governments reductions and transfer any costs to those who can least afford to pay.
So, for the sake of argument ----- There are 3 methods for “W” to use to rid the US of that robberbarron Amtrack. One, is, what I call the Minneta Plan. In the military, we called it divide and conqure. Split up the organization into pieces which are dependent on each other so that at least one becomes sufficiently underfunded that the system collapses. Hold out a carrot ($1.2B) in subsidy if the “re-org” is accomplished. The subsidy, of course, would not go to any of the areas that have been underfunded thus making the collapse more likely and sooner.
Another is to cut taxes to a segment of the transportation economy for their assistance in ending Amtrack. The suggestion of reducing the “Big 6” tax bill by some $2B is the easiest subsidy to hide and in exchange, the “Big 6” take over the passenger train. As OS states, to additionaly segm
Eric,
You analysis would be okay, if it wasn’t for the misperception that the other modes do not pay all their costs of doing business. They do. It may be via some redistribution of user fees and allowing the will of localities to add to the pie, but in the end none are really subsidized, so your point is moot. Besides, railroads have a market power that none of the other modes have, namely access to monopolistic pricing via the spinelessness of the STB and the anachronistic owner-operator ROW.
Your other misperception that tax cuts have lead to less revenue is also completely wrong. Since Bush’s tax cuts came into effect, revenues have increased substantially. It is the cost of fighting two wars, plus the hidden costs of increased environmental regulation that have resulted in these deficits. Cutting back “third nipple” operations like Amtrak makes sense in these times.
The Amtrak plan Mineta is pushing involves taking the government out of providing operations and refocussing that aid on only providing 50% of the infrastructure, consistent with other modal models. Hopefully, that rail infrastructure aid will also come from a user fee, since that is the best way to fund infrastructure. Rather than taking a portion of the railroads income tax reciepts, the feds should pass a fuel tax on railroads and use that money for rail infrastructure maintenance and development where public access is allowed.
The idea of the freight carriers taking back the rail passenger service in place of Amtrak poses a bunch of questions.
If you have diffeent railroads running the passenger service the first question is how to obtain a uniform quality of service? A partial answer is; at the outset the Southern Railway and the Denver & Rio Grande didn’t join Amtrak, and their trains were better than Amtrak’s.
How many trains would run on each route? Presently many routes are congested so the host freight railroads might only be able to absorb one passenger train for each of their lines, similar to Amtrak.'s long distance trains today.
Considering that the freight railroads participate in “just in time” types of shipments, how much would it be worth to them to accept a passenger train over their line in place of a slot for an intermodal train.?