Could Long Distance Passenger Service Be A Little Cheaper?

Trains Magazine Passenger
1

Hi all, new to the forum. I looked back several pages and didn’t see a similar thread, so I figured I would ask.

Could long distance passenger service be cheaper?

I want to ride the train out to San Diego to visit my brother. It is a little over $400 coach for two adults one way. However, I thought that maybe the wife would like a roomette since the trip is about 48 hours. To select it adds almost $800. To add a bedroom is $1100. Wow.

I understand you are riding on a hotel on wheels, but I think that it’s a bit overpriced. You’re taking a longer trip (time wise) and you think it would be a bit cheaper, like a few hundred dollars cheaper. I know I’m probably probably reaching for the stars, but it would make a huge difference in ridership I would think.

Is there a breakdown of what goes into the price of these rooms?

2

The Super Chief from Chicago to Los Angeles is $165 each ($335 for 2) if you buy tickets 3 months in advance. A roomette is another $564 for a total of $899 one way. That is still pretty expensive.

You may qualify for a discount of 10 per cent or 15 per cent of the basic transportation ($335). See the Amtrak website.

Besides a roomette you get free meals with your roomette fare; in coach there are no free meals.

Of course when you get to Los Angeles you still have to get down to San Diego.

3

Sure it could. It could be free. ATK can charge whatever it wants.

There are some problems with charging less than the market will bear however. First ATK looses hundreds of millions of dollars per year on long distance trains as it is. Cheap rides will decrease revenue and increase losses. Losses have to be funded by Congress. Congress seems not to be convinced that ATK is a particularly good way to buy votes. As a result it gives ATK enough to do what it does, but not enough to do more, like run on more routes or with greater frequency on existing routes.

Mac McCulloch

4

  1. Most of the year the upscale accomodations on long distance trains are full.

  2. The can’t make money on the prices they are charging.

Why lower prices and lose more?

5

Perhaps, if you compare airline coach fare with first class you also will find a large price difference: you get what you pay for & the choice is up to you.

6

And, Amtrak charges what it can get.

The problem is, they still can’t charge enough to cover costs.

So, if we want cheaper sleeper accommodations, Amtrak would have to find ways to radically cut the cost of providing sleeper service.

Do such ways exist? Maybe. Some thoughts by some folk around here over the years:

  1. Contract sleeper service out by bid.

  2. Find out best practices of hoteliers and cruise ship lines and adopt.

  3. Rotate car attendants/dining staff with train crew and sell their rooms as revenue space.

  4. Adopt international airline /Australian railroad style"lie flat" seating.

  5. Split LD routes into day trains with overnight hotel arrangements for through customers.

  6. Adopt European “hostel” type sleeper compartments.

I’m sure there are more ideas out there…

7

There is also this thought (for the longest time I thought that way), that passenger rail should some how, some way, be intrinsically lower cost than say, a jet airplane, that is this delicate lightweight machine with high pressure hydraulic systems, electronic nav and com systems, lightweight high power turbine engines using exotic materials with a thirst for fuel, the need for highly trained crews and maintenance people because if something quits, the plane crashes.

Back in the early 60’s, Trains Magazine (yes, that Trains Magazine, the hosts of this wonderful Forum) told us that a Boeing 727 jet had a lower “direct operating cost” than the Denver Zephyr.

What makes the train so expensive? Part of it is that whereas Amtrak is not the government, it kinda, sorta is the government and there are associated costs. Government often takes a less hard line towards labor, which may be bad because the taxpayers pay in the end for high costs but may be good because maybe pure unregulated capitalism exploits labor. Government has to answer to more “stakeholders” than simply the owners or shareholders, which may be good because various social and intangible needs are met but on the other hand, maybe money is wasted meeting intangibles.

What I am saying from my professional perspective as a research engineer is that there are design trades in everything, and there are trades involved in making something a governmental function vs privatizing it, and I don’t want to get any guff from people telling me I am a wild-eyed Libertarian privatize-everything-in-sight and no-subsidies person. And I don’t want to hear the lament “Well, if roads get subsidies, so should trains.” I am attempting to 'splain, I am attempting to understand that even if we accept that transportation and everything else is subsidized in some form or another, how it is that trains cost so much and train fares are that high.

Even if Amtrak were run "

8

Amtrak knows how much the rooms cost the company and how to price the services. However, as far as I know, it does not make this information available to the public.

The cost would include residual depreciation, maintenance, labor, materials, and overheads. The price is determined by what Amtrak’s management believes the travelling public will pay. Amtrak uses a yield management system to price its rail services. This is why the prices change almost daily.

Amtrak would only be justified in lowering the prices for its long distance trains if the cost of doing so was more than offset by the incremental increase in ridership and revenues. Amtrak has offered a variety of promotional fares to improve ridership and revenues on the long distance trains, but no matter what it does, it is losing heaps of money on them.

In FY 10 the long distance trains lost $575.5 million before depreciation, interest, and miscellaneous charges. By comparison the NEC earned $51.5 million before depreciation, interest, and miscellaneous charges.

9

I’ve heard it argued that bedrooms are underpriced, if you do a straightforward revenue-per-square-foot calculation on the ticket prices. Of course, that argument only makes sense if that’s a fair way to judge Amtrak costs, which I doubt.

That said:

  • For most people over the age of 20 a private room of some sort is pretty much required for overnight travel. So if you want to increase ridership, you need to make private rooms more accessible.
  • It’s difficult to fit that many private rooms into an 85’ coach and still provide some level of comfort.

Amtrak’s predecessors used “Slumbercoaches” to deal with the problem, using an interlaced layout to squeeze 30-40ish 6’ single-person roomettes into a standard single level coach. I’m not sure I’d fit in one, I’m 6’2". But it certainly sounds like the basis of a solution if Amtrak wanted to revamp their services so that overnight trains were all-sleeper, with prices still being reasonable.

I suspect though that Amtrak probably prefers to see overnight trains be replaced by higher speed day trains, so the entire need to provide bedrooms goes away by itself.

10

For the benefit of those who are fairly new to what was, I will give a description of the configurations of the two models of Slumbercoach. The originals, built from scratch by Budd, had 24 single rooms and 8 double rooms (two berths); the cars that the New York Central had rebuilt from Budd-built 22 roomette cars had 16 single rooms and 10 double rooms. Each room had a washbasin and commode. The double rooms were all on the same level, whereas the single rooms were “interlaced”–the foot of the berth in an upper room was over the seat of a lower room, and the seat/head of the berth of an upper room was over the foot of the berth in a lower room. The berths were narrower than those in the old roomettes. I did spend several comfortable nights in slumbercoaches.

Several 10 roomette-6 bedroom cars were reworked so that the waste water went into holding tanks; No slumbercoaches were so reworked for the necessary plumbing changes were too involved.

11

There are people who sit up and ride all night in a railroad coach. And there are people who sit up and ride all night on an intercity bus.

Amtrak does not offer open sleeping cars which were the traditional pullman accommodation. However, Via Rail does offer them. I don’t know the reasons behind either decision.

12

It costs me $47 each way to go from DC to Pittsburgh, which I do a lot. That’s cheaper than driving, so the price seems pretty cheap to me!

13

First to respond to squiggleslash’s age limit (“over 20”): For financial reasons, I continued riding coach for many overnight trips until I was past 50 years old. When my wife and I were able to travel together, we did use sleeping accommodations for all but one overnight–there was no sleeper on the train. Now, because of a certain health condition, I find it much more convenient to have a private room at night.

As to why Amtrak offers no open section sleepers, consider that the last open section sleeper that was operated in this country was discontinued between November of 1965 and January of 1966–the market had disappeared. It was a heavyweight sleeper that ran between Atlanta and Brunswick, Georgia.

When the CP ordered the cars for its Canadian and other trains, Canadians still used open sections. Indeed, in 1969, the CP still owned 59 (counting three tourist cars) cars, other than those built for the Canadian, with open sections; how many were in regular service, I do not know.

In 1969, the CN owned 209 (counting 31 tourist cars) with open sections; today none of these is in service. When VIA completed the shells it bought from Europe, only bedrooms and deluxe bedrooms were placed in them (Renaissance sleepers).

I do not

14

Given your comments and other’s, I should probably clarify. Over-20 is probably slightly low, but there’s a cut-off point after people settle down, get full time employment, etc, where it’s relatively rare that someone would be willing to travel overnight without a private place to sleep. It does happen, but a quick walk through the coach section of the Silver Star/Silver Meteor (I’ve taken return journeys Palm Beach to NYC four times now) late at night revealed, to me, that the vast majority of people there looked to be students and the military, people on extremely tight budgets who weren’t that used to privacy at that point anyway. The sleeping car section had more couples, and a wider range of ages.

My sincere belief is that the vast majority of people over that cut-off point who consider train travel as an option compare an overnight train trip to a flight. The flight wins unless they really, really, hate flying. Sure, it’s cramped, it’s uncomfortable, it’s boring, but sleeping in a chair with limited space to change and wash isn’t really an improvement on flying, and so it boils down to a choice between $400-$1,000 in sleeping accommodations each way on top of the ticket price, or putting up with all the humiliation and discomfort of flying for a few hours (rather than overnight) without paying that extra premium.

There are always going to be exceptions. There are people who are happy to sleep in an Amtrak long distance coach seat (they’re not bad se

15

Problem in a nutshell:

Amtrak serves the routes that Congress tells them to. It takes them years to get permission to add or upgrade equipment.

Private enterprise hires someone to study the market and determine where there are enough potential riders to make it feasible. They then put their resources to work in those areas only. If a train is frequently over sold then they would add a car or perhaps make the train shorter but more frequent. If sleepers are usually sold out they would add more sleepers.

16

And who tells Congress?

In other words, is it a different group a people who are interested enough and even care about trains who tell Congress what they want with respect to passenger trains than the group of people commenting on this Web site?

OK, OK, there are not that many people who are regulars at trains.com and a whole lot more people who like passenger trains enough to influence Congress. But there is a vast majority of people who probably don’t think one way or another about trains, so it is a pretty narrow segment of the electorate out there that has a disproportionate interest in this subject that has this political influence – simply for expressing their opinion.

It is like the Walt Kelly “Pogo” cartoon where our opposum hero proclaims, “We have met the enemy and he is us!” Congress is not some remote group of people who do stuff for no apparent reason. Congress is us.

Well yes, there is a large faction in Congress that does not have a love for trains. But to the extent that Congress “does trains”, are they doing anything at odds with what informed opinion recommends that they do?

Put another way, is there anything Congress is doing Amtrak-wise that lacks defenders her

17

Paul:

If your letter to your congressman does not have a very large check attached to it, he will never see it. You will get a boilerplate reply with his robo-signature on the bottom prepared by a low level member of his staff and that will be the end of it.

18

Thank you, Johnny, for your historical note about the disappearance of open sleepers in the US since before Amtrak existed. And you suggest that even Via Rail is phasing them out.

I do understand that even in their heyday the upper birth was never very popular because it lacked a window. From that perspective I guess a roomette is comparable with a lot more privacy and convenience.

As far as your personal travel choice is concerned, I hope you continue to be able to travel in a way that you find comfortable and enjoyable.

John

19

A few comments about upper berths.

As to windows, most open section sleepers did not have windows by the uppers, but there were a few that did, such as the Illinois Terminal’s sleepers, and the lightweight sleepers built with sections for the Overland Route trains before WWII. Indeed, the first time I slept in an upper I was able to look out in the morning before I got down (if you had an upper, you got down to get up), for the IC was using pre-war 6-6-4 sleepers on the Seminole at the time (my car was American Sailor, which was in the consist of the first daily City of Portland to leave Chicago). Now, if you sleep in an upper in a Viewliner, you have two windows.

One disadvantage of the upper, until after WWII, was that you had to call the porter for a ladder if you were going up or coming down; some time after the war the folding ladder, which was attached to the upper, was developed, and it was no longer necessary to call the porter. As I remember, these were found in new lightweight sleepers only, I am not certain that pre-war built lightweights were so modified (I really do not remember if American Sailor had the individual ladders).

One advantage of the upper was that the foundation of the berth was solid, and not composed of four pieces, as the foundation of the lower was.

The June, 1971, issue of the Guide is the last issue I have in which the CN and the CP mention the sleeping accommodations available. By then, the CP was using only cars that had been built for the Canadian, but the CN was still using cars with open sections, of different ages, on all but one of its trains that were operated with sleepers.

Perhaps it was felt that the cars built by Budd for the Canadian were superior to the other cars, and the other cars were removed from service. Then, when it seemed that more cars were necessary for the Halifax service, VIA bought the car shells and provided bedrooms in th

20

Again Johnny, thank you for your historical note with the details of the upper birth. I can only wish I were traveling on the Canadian.

John