I have to agree with oltmannD here regarding the Long Distance trains. For the figures Samantha quotes, some of the overhead costs of the NEC are distributed to the Long Distance trains, to the point that it makes the Long distance trains look bad on a route-by-route basis. The numbers for the NEC do not include total costs of the stations, track maintenance, car maintenance, and other capitol expenses, they only cover “above the rails” expenses. I’m willing to be that if the Long Distance trains went away, the remaining trains would all experience drops in ridership and revenue Passenger miles simply because people are not going to take the train if they cannot connect to the destination. This was demonstrated during the Fifties and Sixties, where once one route was terminated, ridership and revenue passenger miles decreased on all remaining trains - because people could not connect.
There also have been many claims made regarding Amtrak’s accounting to the effect that it rigs the numbers in favor of the NEC and short distance trains and against the long distance trains. If you look strictly at revenue passenger miles, it is the long distance trains that generate the majority of the volume, and demonstrate the potential for getting the most value for the dollar investment - not the shorter distance trains.
It is tough to demonstrate value of a service when it serves only once per day, either direction. If the long distance network had, say, three times per day each direction, it would generate more accurate numbers regarding profitability and all of the other issues. You cannot sit around and say “it loses money!” when you have not even made the investment to offer more than once per day service.
This is not meant to make any point, it is a genuine question:
While I agree that very few of us would take a train from NYC to New Orleans, to use the Crescent as an example, how many people take that same train between closer together cities along the route? How many more people would take it to and from intermediate destinations if it ran more than once a day, instead of passing through my city of Charlotte at 2AM?
How many people take it from NYC to DC? … Phildelphia to NYC or DC? How many people take it between Atlanta and Charlotte? … Charlotte and Raleigh? Atlanta to New Orleans? It’s all the same long distance train. Perhaps it shouldn’t be thought of as a long distance train, but rather as a series of intercity trains that connect, and share equipment.
I have to limit my train trips to places the train I board in Charlotte serves, because the schedule is not reliable enough, and trains are not frequent enough to trust any plan that requires a connection. I could wind up stranded in the city where the connection was supposed to take place.
Presentation is everything in customer service. Frequent, clean, well maintained trains that run on schedule are key. Speed and number of stops will determine how far people are willing to travel on it. The other items will determine whether they will travel on it at all.
Boston to New York to Washington and points between.
We have 20 Acela Bullet Trains, they run every hour, they are new, they are clean! It’s used by business men, some tourists, even the news media. Beats driving to an outlying Airport and going through security for a 200, 300, 500 mile trip.
If your in Boston, take a 3 1/2 hour rail trip to New York or Fly to Chicago in the same amount of time. A 20 hour train ride to Chicago, that’s for tourists. Time is money. Long haul trains are a Tourist Attraction, just like the U. S. Park Service.
As for speed, Acelas operate between 135 and 150 mph. Flat out they can reach 169 mph. It’s the Track and the Catenary that restricts the speed, too many curves and nothing anybody can do about it. The line was laid out in the 1840s. Too many bridges, some 100 years old, as the line follows along the Atlantic coast. Catenary installed in the 1930s, some as old as 1910, it needs to be replaced (Boston to New Haven has been replaced). Money, money, money. Wake up Tax Payer, you’ve got the trains, how about the “Right of Way”!
The Crescent has three personalities. It’s a NEC to Atlanta overnight train, a Charlottesville/Lynchburg to NEC day train and an Atlanta to New Orleans day train. There are few through passengers at Atlanta.
Right now, 4 days a week the Atlanta - New Orleans portion is not even being operated due to trackwork.
The question that this raises in my mind is the one train
The real money pit is NEC, it needs 30 Billion Dollars worth of work to make it into A-shape again from Boston to D.C. I heard that in 1999 to 2000 that the NEC need that much work. You could run the LD trains for 50 plus years with 30 Billion Dollars. Plus NEC needs new cars too. Tunnels into New York City needs 3 or 4 billion worth of work.[2c]
Why new cars? Amfleet I only a few years older than Amfleet II and Superliners. All stainless. They can last forever. They probably have a few dozen more years in left in their economic life.
Don’t confuse capital with operating expenditures…
$30 billion sounds like a very arbitrary figure. It works out to a whopping $66.7 million per mile over 450 miles, which is highly exorbitant to spend on an existing railroad, never mind new-build.
Why would we want the railroad to be made into an A-shape, too? That’s an unusual shape. [swg]
The North and East River Tunnels are almost 100 years old, but they don’t need billions put into them.
I agree about the Amfleets. They are not as old as some fans try to make them out to be.
I got that figure in one of my Trains Magazine or Railpace back in 1999 or 2000 I forget which year, and Amtrak said it needs new cars for NEC. It was in amtrak 5 year plan back in 2000.
Maybe Trains should do an update on this story, What amtrak really needs like New Cars, NEC stuff in an issue sometimes? Alot of stuff change in past 8 years. That would be a really good for trains to do new story about this?
We keep coming back to thinking the problem with Amtrak is lack of rolling stock. It is fun to make wish lists about all of the cool stuff Amtrak should get.
The biggest priority should be getting the trains to run on time. If they can’t get a once-daily service on time owing to freight-train congestion, how are they going to run a 3-times daily service?
My vote for a helpful Trains article would be an in depth look as to what it takes to get a 50 MPH (average speed) passenger train over a 20-30 MPH freight railroad network Are there differences between host railroads? Do these differences reflect different matches between traffic and capacity or are there railroads with better time keeping owing to better operational practices? Is Amtrak at fault for not honoring their “time slots” or is this an excuse from the host railroads? What are the worst bottlenecks? What impact does Amtrak have on capacity for moving freight, which by the way, also has the potential for reducing highway congestion by taking up some of the growth in truck traffic.
Someday soon I’ll try to write about “the theory of slots” and what the frt RRs know, what they think they know and what they don’t know about their line capacity.
The notion that a portion of the fixed costs (interest and depreciation) and overheads (IT, HR, Procurement, etc.) associated with the NEC are shifted to the long distance trains probably is not true. Nor is it likely that they are shifted without warrant to another owner of a portion of the NEC.
Amtrak’s financial statements are audited by KPMG, which is one of the largest and most reputable accounting firms in the world. The KPMG auditors examine the accounting for and allocation of all costs. If they find that there has been a shift of fixed costs and overheads that cannot be supported by the underlying drivers, they would report an audit finding. By the same token, they pay careful attention to the classification of accounting items. If an item that should be capitalized is expensed or vice versa, they would blow the whistle. If the audit findings (errors) are significant, they would issue a qualified opinion. In this hypersensitive post Enron era, Amtrak management does not want to go there.
On July 11, 2007, Alex Kummant told the SUBCOMMITTEE ON RAILROADS, PIPELINES, AND HAZARDOUS MATERIALS OF THE COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE that it would take approximately $10 billion (excluding any real estate acquisition) to upgrade the NEC to a high speed rail line. He said that it would take $625 million to make the improvements required to reduce the Washington to New York running time from 2:45 hours to 2:30 hours. Furthermore, he estimated that it would take $7 billion to reduce the running time to 2:20 hours. The big jump in cost to get the last ten minute reduction appears to stem from the fact that the tunnels in Baltimore and New York would have to be re-worked.
You had better believe that there are those of us who have long suspected that Amtrak takes the cost overhead and distributes it across the entire system, in other words taking costs associated with the corridors and NEC and charging them to the long distance trains. This has been alleged for over a decade.
As long as we are talking numbers here, let’s talk about the Empire Builder. The Builder had over a half million riders, generating $ 43.2 million in revenue. That’s ahead of AutoTrain, which had $ 42.8 million. The Builder generated 390.8 million passenger-miles, with the average trip being 774 miles. The train averaged 206.7 passengers per train mile, with a load factor of 61 percent. The Southwest Chief had 316,700 passengers, 302.7 million passenger miles, $ 35.7 million in revenue, with an average trip of 956 miles.
For comparison, the Capitol Corridor had 96.5 million passenger miles, 1.45 million riders, average trip of 66.5 miles, and only $ 16.7 million in revenue. Source: Amtrak annual reports.
As a comparison, the West Coast Main Line in the UK which is 401 miles in length is undergoing an overhaul which should be completed in December 2008. The total cost is estimated at £9 billon ($18 Billion) and includes capacity enhancements (4 tracking), increased line speeds (110mph increased to 125mph) and tilting trains. Most of the upgrades have been concentrated on the southern 200 miles of the route.
As a result, from December the fastest London-Glasgow time (401 miles) will be 4 hours 8 minutes (Average speed 97mph). And that with trains that don’t travel above 125mph.
That sounds like the URPA line – I believe you have a link to URPA in your post.
What URPA is saying is tantalizing, that there is indeed cost-shifting going on. But it ends there. The Empire Builder, AutoTrain, and Southwest Chief are great revenue generators compared to a non-NEC corridor route. But at what cost? How many locomotives, how many train sets, how many cars of different types in a consist, how much fuel, how much to pay the crew, how much to operate and staff train stations all up and down the route?
URPA appears to just flap their arms about all of that. I have tried e-mailing URPA to no response on these questions. I talked to someone in our brick-and-morter advocacy group about URPA who knows some of the principals – he conjectured that URPA has a “Deep Throat” within Amtrak who knows all of this but they are protecting their source. OK.
My favorite horse carcass is Amtrak fuel consumption as oil has reached all-time highs and the general belief is that passenger rail is going to save us. While fuel consumption is merely one slice of the cost of running trains, it is a quantitative basis for supporting a claim --that trains could save energy over other modes – that should be easy enough to measure. I write down how much gas my car uses over different route segments – city driving, intercity trips – one would think someone could say how much fuel each Amtra
If Amtrak’s accountants attempted to circumvent Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, they would be roasted by the public accountants. I suspect that most people who allege that Amtrak cooks the books do not have access to them and, even if they did, would not be able to understand them. I spent more than 25 years as an accountant and auditor with a Fortune 250 company. I am thoroughly familiar with generally accepted auditing practices in the United States.
For the fiscal year ended September 30, 2007, the Empire Builder had total revenues of $58 million. It incurred direct labor of $26.1 million and other direct costs of $41.4 million, for total avoidable costs of $67.5 million. It lost $9.5 million before shared costs, which were $25.3 million. The total attributed cost was $92.8 million, which means the Builder lost $34.8 million before depreciation and interest. The loss was 8.9 cents per passenger mile and 5.4 cents per seat mile before interest and depreciation.
Amtrak’s public reports do not break down the amount of depreciation ($456.6 million) and interest ($95.9 million) attracted by the Empire Builder or the other long distance trains. However, it is relatively small. It is probably fair to say that the total losses for the long distance trains were five per cent higher than the losses before the application of depreciation and interest. Five per cent is a conservative estimate.
For the same period (Amtrak’s accounting year runs from October 1st to September 30th) the Auto Train had total revenues of $53.5 million. It incurred direct labor of $15.8 million and other direct costs of $27.2 million for total avoidable costs of $43.0 million. It had a positive contribution of $10.5 million before the absorption of shared costs, which were $19.4 million. The total attributable costs for the Auto Train were $62.5 million, resulting i
Am I the only one who thinks that the NEC should be legally seperate, and operated seperately, from Amtrak since it is so different from the rest of Amtrak’s operations? (Besides which it actually operates on its own tracks in most of the NEC.)
In terms of Politics, I think Gunn’s direction of making clear that trains cannot run as a profitable business when competing with airlines and roads that have subsidies is right.
There’s a security aspect to the politics: After all, someone can’t drive a train into a tall building. If there’s a tunnel under the building, that’s different. But a train is fundamentally different from a bus line like Greyhound. Different needs, different experiences. Making sure that some variety of cross-country travel exists is a good idea if we ever face another “planes all down” situation. Making sure Congress knows that is key to the politics of the job.
As for routes, I’m surprised they haven’t brought back a Chicago-to-Florida route. You’d think that would be a big deal.
I take the Empire Builder, mostly, and I sometimes wonder if it could be managed to have additional trains, running twelve hours apart or something like that. It might make some stops more interesting, if you don’t have to embark at 3 AM or so.
My other personal preference is that the trains don’t run where I want to go. I have in-laws in Iowa, and there probably hasn’t been passenger service from Minnesota to Iowa in half-a-century. There are times where having Chicago as a hub can be a royal pain.
In a broader way, perhaps focusing on some key tourist areas (like, say, Mt. Rushmore), and figuring out routes that will take people to those places, is a way to go.
I recently rode on a refurbished sleeping car on the Empire Builder, and it was really nice. Let’s just say that the improvements to the toilets were fantastic: elbow room! Continuing that program of fleet maintenance and improvement is also important.
But I suspect Amtrak funding would have to go far up to manage such things.
old southern RR schedules had almost 1/2 the cars terminating in Washington. in the early 70’s holiday extra section was atlanta-Washington only. That appears to be the high demand portion of the Cresent.