I am of the opinion that Amtrak should suspend running their long-distance trains in the winter and run them as tourist trains, with all the attendant amenities of the days of yore, in the better weather. Coast to coast on a train is not a convenient form of travel for any other reason but sightseeing. Regional service for heavily populated urban areas. can be established as needed
Most LD routes should be modified or eliminated totally. Why should tax payers subsidize land cruises?
In the world of PSR railroading - the freight carriers ought to shut down during periods of Winter weather - they don’t employ sufficient personnel to be able to sustain reliable operations.
Only one thing holds Mother Nature at bay during the Winter - Manpower in mass quantities.
Amtrak is the political solution that has kept passenger rail running for the last 50 years. Your solution is wishful thinking that will lead to the political erosion of support for subsidies, and virtual elimination of all passenger rail.
Winter is when I travel on those trains. When I ride the Capitol, I see families, young folks (like college kids), and I see darn few “upscale” looking riders. To us it is a reasonably priced way to get somewhere. At a leisurely pace.
I have been searching for a reasonable train vacation for my upscale sister. SOmething lke VIA maybe. Problem is when it comes with a $10,000 pricetag, they lose interest.
If the automakers had to pay for the highways, and the airlines had to pay for airports and air traffic control, those modes would not be profitable either.
Rocky Mountaineer is the best choice in North America. It’s expensive but well worth the price.
The RM looks like a great experience.
But I like being in a room/roomette on a moving train at night. It’s true you miss a lot at night, but there is something magical to me about looking out at night. Especially waking up in the dark to find you’re stopped and wondering where and why. Or what station you’re at. Etc. There is nothing quite like being in a dark compartment and being able to see out well, and watch all these mysterious, sometimes hardly-lit, vignettes flash by. Just lights in house windows seem to tell a story. Grade crossing red flashers rushing by suggest an almost emergency urgency.
Think I’m a romantic … ?
The preceding posts seem to support my opinion that LD trains should be related to tourist trains.
Either that or you’re channelling Rogers E. M. Whitaker!
Well, here’s a subject that’s never, ever before been discussed in these forums!
MY opinion (!) is that the public through their (so far) duly elected representatives, has for over half a century supported LD trains, and Amtrak recently received an encouraging vote of confidence from Congress in a concrete form we all know about. So I’d say, Checkmate.
Lithonia Operator: Trains at night are certainly romantic. Ever notice how two people in a roomette or bedroom don’t necessarily require all the bunks to be in use? Talk about cosy! And while we’re at it, how about being upstairs in the dome of the Capitol Limited when it carried a dome car, and riding through a thrilling and vivid electical storm!
Flintlock: Agreed! But without belaboring the point, Frimbo was a hard-headed, realistic Manhattan executive. He knew all too well the chapter and verse of why passenger trains in his day didn’t pay and the many and varied reasons the railroad companies themselves contributed to that state of affairs. His essays consistently showed he was under no illusions about anything.
No worries. Amtrak’s long distance trains aren’t going away anytime soon.
Since Amtrak, there have been about a dozen private LD tourist operations in the US. All have gone out of business, except that the one successful Canadian company, Rocky Mountaineer, has started a tour on ex-Rio Grande Denver/Moab. We will see how that goes.
Remember - the way Congress created Amtrak, they expected it to be DEAD in 5 years. The fact that Amtrak has made it past 50 years is indictative of Amtrak’s refusal to die.
As long as Congress doesn’t pull the feeding tube.
NKP, your dome/lightning experience sounds awesome.
So doesn’t that suggest that people who ride endpoint to endpoint on the CZ and EB are using a subsided cruise? The failure of private cruise trains is because charging actual cost plus turns folks away. If Amtrak charged just cost on those Western LD trains for sleeper class, there would be almost no first class passengers.
Amtrak knows how to play politics.
And ahain, I believe losses could be cut greatly by full-service hotel-likie stationb restaurants with full home-and-business take-out and even delivery, and on-board catering just a small fraction of the take-out business. Mariott could do a great job.
Even at the height of the ‘golden age’ of passenger rail, most trains had the equivalent of separated first class and steerage on liners, usually implemented as coaches one side of the diner (which, remember, usually operated as a loss-leader) and Pullmans with strict access restrictions on the other.
Ed Ellis and others tried a logical less-expensive version of Joe’s suggestion: add a couple of cars’ worth of luxury experience on a scheduled basis to an ‘ordinary’ Amtrak train. This provides the cruise luxury even if 'the rest of the train’s s a regional or providing emergency transportation between isolated ‘flyover’ destination pairs unserved by other mass transit.
To my knowledge every attempt at this has sooner or later gone under; even if it is on average profitable, any sufficient ‘lean time’ leads to the usual death spiral disasters… and extinction is forever. In my opinion you set up ways to subsidize this at lean times, perhaps set up analogous to the original Social Security plan…
The other half of this (and we had active threads about this very recently) is that there are many places Amtrak service could be improved at comparatively little or no cost. “Regime change” or mandatory re-education camp equivalents for surly employees are one good place; a managed version of food delivery services coordinated with actual station stops (or deliveries to stopped trains) is another. There is often a way to lower Amtrak’s costs without cheapening or removing service, and a process very similar to the one Delta engaged in a couple of years ago could be set up for Amtrak to prioritize and test.
In a sense, the response to the pandemic has made bricks-and-mortar station restaurants much less necessary if they can’t fully pay their own way locally. We had a discussion about ‘ghost kitchens’ a few years ago – no reason why an Amtrak commissary couldn’t provi
That last paragraph is intriguing. Could you restate more cogently and with fewer obscure references?