Amtrak has a different mission than the investor owned, freight carriers. Nevertheless, meaningful comparisons about some aspects of the organizations can be made. The management structure could be compared to a variety of criteria. Also, the IT, finance and accounting, treasury, customer service, HR, purchasing, etc. functions could be compared. They tend to be generic.
Amtrak is a government owned monopoly. It cannot be benchmarked easily in the U.S., and cross boarder comparisons are notoriously difficult. The only other inter-city passenger rail operation that I can think of is the Trinity Railway Express, which is a commuter railroad that runs from Dallas to Fort Worth. However, Amtrak apologists might not want to go there inasmuch as the FY11 subsidy for the TRE was 17.31 cents per passenger mile compared to 19.12 cents per passenger mile for Amtrak.
Comparing Amtrak to the Great Southern Railway, which operates three long distance routes in Australia, and is an investor owned corporation could be meaningful, but I have not been able to get the Great Southern Railway numbers.
It has worked only because of the largest per passenger and per passenger mile federal and state subsidies of any form of commercial transportation. Through the end of FY11 Amtrak had accumulated loses of $28 billion. Outside of the NEC, Amtrak is a skeleton passenger rail system, augmented by state supported corridors, that is used by less than one per cent of intercity travelers. This is not my definition of “it has worked”.
Amtrak is a broken business model. However, those of us who are calling for a different model are not saying that passenger rail does not have a place in America. The question is whether there are better alternatives to the Nation Railroad Passenger Corporation. Clearly, I believe there are. Moreover, just because a person has a different view than your does not mean that it is ridiculous. It is different. There are heaps of legitimate, differing views on most subjects.
Hopefully the private funded efforts in Florida, Texas, and Italy will be successful. I suspect that they will require some subsidies, but I would be surprised if they cannot offer a better outcome than what we are getting or likely to get from a government run monopoly.
You can also benchmark Mechanical against the frt and commuter agnecies. (a locomotive is a locomotive. A passenger car is about as complex as a locomotive).
You can benchmark food service against restaurant chains and cruise ship companies, or even dinner trains - how much does it cost to feed a guest? How do you do it?
You can benchmark the operation of sleepers against hotel chains and cruise ship lines. A room is a room. What’s it cost to keep one clean and get guests in and out of it?
You can benchmark ticketing and revenue collection against any passenger carrier in the world - any and all modes. Tickets are tickets. How’s the web site work? How about e-tickets? Fare colle
When people are the ‘freight’ the entire equation changes. One clerk can handle the complaints of many shippers. One complaining passenger can tie up the efforts of multiple clerks and managers.
Well, I should know a bit about physics. I am a Mechanical Engineer by education and have done quite a few diesel engine efficiency and locomotive fuel consumption tests in my day.
And, you’d be right about the rolling resistance if we were comparing trains with rubber tires to trains with steel wheels. But, we’re not.
The problem is weight. The FRA says, that in order to operate in a mixed environment, you have to build your passenger cars to withstand 800,000 buff force without deformation, plus a few other requirements like collision posts that make US passenger cars much heavier than contemporary high speed train sets in Europe, for example. An Amfleet car is about 55 tons empty. It holds 76 passenger in short haul configuration. That’s 1500 # per seat. For a six car train with a P42 on one end and a cabbage on the other and a 60% load factor, that comes out to 4500# per passenger. Three people in a Camry comes out to 1100# per passenger.
Passenger trains are either the thing that the advocacy community says they are. Or they are not.
On one hand, passenger trains are supposed to be 10 times more energy efficient, only that applies only to freight, and the figure is maybe 3-5 times more energy efficient. When it comes to passenger, Amtrak is only a 30 percent savings, but 30 percent savings is a lot. Isn’t it?
On one hand, passenger trains subsidy are no big deal because everybody is getting subsidy in one form or another, only the subsidy rate per passenger mile is indeed high. But what about those motorists in rural Montana, someone on the highways must be getting a high rate of subsidy, aren’t they?
Railroad passenger trains have all of these advantages over other modes of transportation, that is, until someone suggests changes to realize those advantages, and it becomes “Son, passenger trains have always required subsidy to operate, back in the day, cross subsidy from the freight operation, and there are all these special things you need to do to carry passengers that cannot change.”
On one hand, passenger trains are supposed to have labor productivity advantages because one engine driver can move hundred of people whereas a bus driver moves only 80 on one of those new double deckers that crash a lot. But a bus driver is a “one man band” of driver, passenger service agent, ticket taker, and baggage loader (and food service director by deciding when and where to stop at MacDonalds) whereas a train requires multiple workers to carry out those functions. And these functions cannot be combined or reassigned or
While CAFE standards are mandating more fuel efficient cars, the total number of cars on the road is expected to
increase, so the result could be a wash with regards to fuel use. I would also expect that many train riders are fed up with the overall hassle of driving. The days of carefree motoring of the 1950’s is a thing of the past.
Thank you for a lot of fascinating information, Paul. When I was young, well over half a century ago, and I first became interested in trains my father taught me that the most efficient land transportation we have is a steel wheel on a steel rail. You show that it isn’t quite as simple as that; there are a lot of other things to consider. Like the weight of a railroad car.
It has been pointed out that passenger car weights are set by government employees who believe our heavy standards are needs for passenger safety. In Europe other government employees set different, lighter standards and presumably they believe they do not compromise passenger safety. If we adopted European standards our passenger trains would be more efficient.
Perhaps we need heavier buses to better protest passengers. Of course that would cause buses to be less efficient.
Cars too are involved in accidents, all kinds of accidents and more accidents than any other kind of transportation. I don’t know if the government mandates weight standards for auto safety. Today we hear about efficiency, getting more miles per gallon, but there seems to be a trade off between weight and efficiency. I don’t pretend to know the answer.
But I do travel between New York and Providence from time to time. I hope the safety of train travel will continue to be available to me.
A Toyota Camry may get close to the same number of seat miles per gallon as an Amtrak corridor train, but I’s rather be in full corridor train for a 60 mile trip than a full Camry. One other difference is that travel time may be significantly less with the train when the competing trip on the highway has to deal with congestion. Doing work on the train is a bit easier than in a car - especially for the driver.
As has been noted elsewhere, the CAFE comparison goes out the window with electrification, though EV’s further complicate comparisons. Conversely, the train loses big time if one or both pf the endpoints are a significant distance from the rail route.
The reason the idea of the private sector running Amtrak is ridiculous, Sam, is because if passenger service could be run at a profit the freight railroads would be doing it right now. There is nothing to prevent them from running passenger service on routes unserved by Amtrak and there are plenty of those routes.
I agree with you that there are “heaps of legitimate opinions.” But it seems to me that dismissing Amtrak as a “broken business model” is just a rather academic way of saying it is ridiculous.
Don’t share your notions about private operators not being able to make money running passenger trains with the investors who are planning to do so in Italy, Florida, and Texas. They might give it up.
Oh, since this subject came up, the Dallas Morning News had an article yesterday that a group of private investors are looking at the possibility of running a commuter service from Plano, Texas to DFW Airport.
If a private operator can scope the service to meet the needs of people who are willing to pay for it, they might be able to make money running passenger trains. However, one thing is for sure. If they follow the Amtrak model, they will lose their shirts.
I don’t share your likening a broken business model with ridiculous. A broken business model is a failed business model, i.e. one that over time has not been able to cover its costs. Ridiculous is pejorative.
To call the FEC plan"private" is absurd, to start with they want to run it down the middle of SH 528 (five miles from where I live). Even if they somehow rent it (which you can bet they won’t) they still aren’t paying the cost of initial property acquisition, clearing the land, building through the marshes, bridges, etc.: to paraphrase an ad running round the clock down here, the government built that. And they also want help paying for the track. What we will essentially have is socialized costs and privatized profits, what is mine is mine but what is yours is ours. Further, on your point about monopolies, should it actually get built (the odds of which I have said from the beginning, knowing the political system down here, is 100 to 1 against) would they provide “open access” to other carriers? If not, it is just as much a “monopoly” as if Amtrak operated it.
No system of transportation anywhere makes a profit, regardless of its “business model”, and there is little to be accomplished by pretending otherwise. If Amtrak has any fault it is that it has perpetually been underfunded compared to other government, socially-supported modes of transportation, that is to say, all of them.
With all due respect, Sam, I don’t suggest you intend to be pejorative with “broken business model” but I do think the phrase is when used with respect to Amtrak. Since all forms of transportation are subsidized to some degree no “business model” can be created for any which will show a way to profit. It is possible to pull out certain functions and operate them at a profit. For example, at some airports private security services are being used instead of TSA people. It is possible for business to make a profit there because the private security agencies pay less and give fewer benefits than the Federal Government.
Perhaps we should have no government services at all and simply do without those that cannot be operated at a profit. There is, however, a problem with such a plan. If we did away with the Post Office, for example, private businesses could deliver first class mail for less than we currently pay but it could not include remote areas. For me personally that would be no problem; I live in a suburb of New York City. But should I argue for repeal of the Postal Express statute so I can save a few bucks and now worry about people in rural Montana? I choose not to do so.
The other points are well covered by Dwight Branch. I appreciate your concern and attention. John
I don’t give a flip about “profit”. I only care about getting the most from our tax dollars and finding ways to increase and improve passenger rail transportation.
Just saying “spend more” is no plan. We could “spend more” and have trains that just go around in a circle at 10 mph, producing nothing, and then wave our hands in the air and say absurd things like “this train costs less than the land it took to built a 5th runway in Atlanta”, or “it’s less than a new Abrams tank”. But that would be silly. We wouldn’t be able to look our neighbors straight in the eye at cocktail parties and and say “thanks for your support”.
If Florida wants to “give away” access to a state highway ROW to the FEC for the incremental cost of doing it and in turn get passenger rail service for their citizens with no ongoing direct operating subsidy from the state treasury, why not do it?
In fact, I think it’s a model that might work. If you can cover the “above the rails” cost of operation, you might find some political will to fund the infrastructure, particularly where you can show that will cost less than any other equivalent capacity improvement.
So, unless your hobby is howling at the moon in righteous indignation, it’s best to get behind something that might actually work, particularly if your interest is in there being more passenger trains.
No, but we should measure the cost effectiveness of those services against the alternatives.
As for Amtrak…an analogy. If you had a family member who you loved who continued to indulge in some self-destructive behavior, or at the least, refused to take responsibility for his own welfare, would you continue to enable that bad behavior or or would you intervene and work for their salvation?
The profit motive helps drive efficiency and effectiveness. I worked for an investor owned electric utility for more than three decades. Even when we were a regulated monopoly, we were constantly reminded of the need to meet the shareholder’s expectations, i.e. profits to pay dividends and accrete the value of the stock. With deregulation of the electric utility business in Texas, the profit motive became even more of a disciplinary force.
If a commercial enterprise (a common carrier transporting people for a rental fee is a commercial enterprise) is not governed by competition and the profit motive, what drives or helps drive efficiency? Moreover, why should passenger rail, which is a commercial enterprise, be given a pass with respect to earning its keep?
There is a broader issue than whether a claim that the broader advocacy community “is howling at the moon” is on the face of it an offensive personal attack, in contrast with, say, responding with a four-letter word in response to a link to a Wikipedia page, clarifying that there are many near-200 MPH HSR lines in Europe but actual 200 MPH+ in regular service is more rare.
That broader issue is whether proposals of reform or improvement or increased efficiency of Amtrak are welcome within the advocacy community. There appears to be a defensive reaction within the advocacy community to any change to Amtrak apart from increasing trains speeds and train frequencies.
Back in the day of the David P Morgan editorship of Trains, Trains Magazine was reform-minded in its editorial policy, both with respect to passenger trains trains and freight trains. The editorial view was that not only were passenger operations in peril through the pattern of financial losses and ICC train-off petitions, but that the supposed profitable freight side of railroading was also at risk. That risk came to be an actuality with the Penn Central bankruptcy that culminated in Conrail, a kind of super Penn Central of bankrupt or tottering Eastern lines.
The David P Morgan stand was “we are foremost railroad enthusiasts and we would like to see railroading continue so there would remain trains that we could be enthusiastic about. What can we do to see that railroading survives?” Hence that era o