A recent discussion brought up some important questions regarding intercity rail service models. In the mid-1960’s the idea of short and frequent routes was brought up as a “new” service model for which intercity rail was thought to uniquely suited to fit under the longer hauls by airlines and above automobiles and buses only in congested road corridors. A lot of the period US literature covered this idea without much criticism as it was embraced by the USDOT when it was formed and they control the research money here. Now airlines have pulled out of thin routes under 750 miles due to high fuel costs, leaving a large travel market under that cutoff .
Many other “new” approaches were tried in that era under the “fixed guideway” banner, such as guided rubber tired vehicles and the tracked air-cushion vehicle (pre-maglev), proceeding from the thought that it must be the rail technology that was obsolete as opposed to good technology working within a poor financial arrangement, the disruptions of the leveraged fuel excise tax. The argument that the fuel excise tax is anticompetitive had been made by the investor held railroads, by PRR’s Symes, and others to the ICC since the 1930’s but was ignored, leading to a search for a “new” solution in this writer’s opinion. Without question there is value in traveling faster, but at what relative cost, that is the true question of an intercity marketplace model.
Dr. Martland of MIT has gone a long way toward characterizing such a model in a
When Amtrak was operating through service between Chicago and Kansas City through St. Louis, how many passengers rode through St. Louis (terminal to terminal, wayside to wayside, or between wayside and terminal)? Is there any count as to how many passengers now change from one train to the next?
I think you need to re-examine your one-seat model as it applies to real situations, stop justifying whatever you are attempting to say on the basis of various ways of calculating true costs of highways. and drop the jargon.
So why exactly in the real existing situation outlined above (Chicago to Kansas City) are two short corridors one at 79-110 mph better than just running a few daily through trains 800-900 miles (past KC) on a single train start? Delay sticks to all trains on the route and does not pick one or the other. Or better yet make modest improvements (or retain) the infrastructure to permit running those through trains at the AAR endorsed 90 mph.
The short corridor arrangement is both slower due to the connection and has a lower perceived utility to the traveler hence less market attraction. One might understand if St. Louis offered service in many different directions requiring a transfer but it doesn’t. Why does it make sense to convert all the existing longer routes to a corridor arrangement unless we are talking about a massive expansion of trainmiles? Even still you can make a connection at a through terminal as DB does without termination the train there.
A dual track dedicated line with 0.5 degree curves shared between 155 mph passenger and 75 mph domestic intermodal freight sounds great, but it will not happen until we can get over some basic question in the US regarding the financial cost of highways mostly due to the lobbying of the ATA. The USDOT is no help in this regard. So here is the author’s stab at the two questions that need to be asked.
What is the acceptable time to make a connection in the US context such that delay will not propagate and to what degree does that wait destroy revenue? - Seems like 1.5 hours. NRPC says market research shows a 40% passenger loss versus through trains.
What is the acceptable time to schedule a train turn in the US context? - Seems like 2.0 hours.
The obvious factor is time when comparing train with air. The critical factor for train vs bus or auto is out-of- pocket cost.
When looking at train vs air, train average speed and convenience are critical, if we are looking at city center to city center. For suburbs, rental cars need to be more readily available for most cities. The faster the train can average, the longer the corridor can be and remain competitive.
CHI-KC. A business guy or a vacationer who values his vacation time can fly in 1:20, as cheaply as $220 one-way. Add two hours to and from the airports to city centers, and two hours for security and check-in, if you are cautious, So 5;20 and eight non-stops per day on SWA alone. There are another 18 non-stops, one as cheap as $92. Amtrak has one through train, pretty fast 7:11, (3:00 to 10:11pm) for $82. you can take Lincoln service, connect in St.L and spend from 7 am to 9:40 for only $57.
Bottom line. CHI-KC is too far to attract business passengers and others who value their time. Driving, especially for a family, is cheaper and only 8 hours (+ stops) and you already have a car. But CHI-StL is becoming more and more competitive by train, 5:30 now, versus about 5 by air. If they could get most of the track up to 110 (125 even better) and speed up the bottlenecks coming into CHI and StL, Amtrak could grab much of the airline business.
Why is the rail service model of short corridors better than longer through train routes assuming they all run at the same speeds and incur the same potentials for delay, but the through trains do not have connection times?
Why are the existing rail coach trips averaging 425 to 550 miles depending on the route?
What about travel from cities two hours either side of the metro that have to backtrack to get to an airport?
What is the point of running through? Maybe one through train per day would suffice. As to the claim of 425 to 550 miles, what routes, what city pairs? what is your source?
Examples, ridership from nodes?
Most travel is metro to metro. To have a net that includes all those smaller cities is beyond the scope of what can be done. Even in Europe, the service to smaller towns has been pared down.
For those of us with long memories, the OP sounds a lot like some of Peter Lyon’s thoughts in “To Hell In A Day Coach”. One of his musings was that short-to-medium-haul rail corridors would develop in various parts of the country, with long-distance trains connecting the corridors. The whole process would lead to a glorious renaissance of passenger rail in all its forms.
In retrospect, my purchase of that book in 1970 was a waste of money. It was poorly researched, poorly written and definitely hostile to the current railroad managements, with the possible exception of Canadian National.
The average coach trip distances of 425 to 550 miles are as reported in the PRIIA route by route reports. Only results from the eastern trains like the Crescent or Lake Shore Limited were used. Travel from metro areas alone isn’t the overwhelming volume of passengers from those tallies.
So at a minimum, if 300 mile corridor are the service model, you would force one transfer if not two to continue serving the current users if the “long distance” national system routes that seem to draw all the criticism were divided up to form corridors just to fit a USDOT theory.
What if the investor held railroads actually understood the real travel market pretty well in setting up the original streamliner schedules as relatively long routes to avoid connections and build volume? What if the real issue still is a falling short of incremental cost recovery on the interstates by a factor of 8x on the original sections? You probably cannot undue this but it sets up a good rationale for the acceptable relative costs.
Thanks for bring this up… If some of our posters study the PRIIA reports they will see that fact. To carry it forward the end points of travel are not a majority although they may be the most ( 5% ) The Crescent is somewhat different as it has most passengers from Birmingham / Atlanta to destinations CVS and north.
You are referring to rather out-of-date marketing, ~70 years old. And the interstate cost recoveries have nothing to do with this, totally tangential, except it seems to be your justification, along with health insurance from highway accidents for LD trains. 300 miles is not just a USDOT theory. It is based on time, speed and distance. I will examine the PRIIA reports later.
most long distance travelers are not metro to metro but small city or town to and from metro or another small city or town. even in the nec, a lot of the regional train traffic is to and form places like westerly, kingston, new london, wilmington, trenton, and much of this is through new york.
Because…It’s running a schedule from the 1950s! If it were geared to where people actually live when they are awake, the results would be completely different. The schedule totally ignores the huge population between Charlotte to Atlanta while it caters to rural AL and MS. Makes no sense at all.
There used to be a through train. What happened was service on both sides of St. Louis was so unreliable that it killed the train.
Back in the bad old days, if a person wanted to travel south from NYP, you’d try to arrange the trip around a train the originated in NY. The through trains from Boston were just terrible - even with recovery time in NYP. Good thing tickets we “unreserved” back then!
MO has invested a bit in the UP on their side of St Louis and IL has their “maybe sometime this century we might actually go a bit faster” project in the works, so through trains might again make sense. But, I doubt you’ll ever score much end to end ridership. You might get a good chunk of trips from Jeff City to Chicago or even Springfield to KC, but KC to Chicago? Probably not - not with conventional + HrSR, anyway.
Yes, there was a through day train Chicago-Kansas City through St. Louis on Amtrak many years ago. My wife and I took it from St. Louis to Chicago in 1989; it was a little late arriving in St. Louis, and about an hour late arriving in Chicago–just after the checked baggage room closed. We had checked a suitcase from Memphis to Chicago (so we would not have to worry with it in St. Louis) the night before (we spent the night, coach, between Memphis and St. Louis)–but we were able to convince someone in the Chicago station to let us get the suitcase since we should have arrived before the baggage room closed.