You made that argument before and I agree with you. My contention is this is again the fault of the railroad for not pointing this capacity issue out to Amtrak so that Amtrak could get funds to get it fixed potentially (ala Southwest Chief). I take issue with the railroad continuing to take the money to operate the train and having the opinion the Amtrak client only gets capacity when capacity is available and any passengers or bad rap in the press is for someone else to worry about. A lot of Amtrak conductors make sure the passengers on the train know who the host railroad is, I have noticed on some of the trains I ride. I actually also think a lot of small dollar freight clients are treated the same way and it is a big reason a lot of freight traffic goes via truck.
Bottom line is to take the bull by the horn if your the host railroad and fix the issue your paying client is experiencing. Either publicly identify it as an issue or present a bill for Amtrak to get it fixed. I donāt agree with the balance the time spent for a client over the money they bring in IF the client is carrying the traveling public on your tracks and your the host.
Itās like hosting a dinner party for 500 people and having only one unisex restroom available.
The schedules for Amtrakās long-distance trains appear to have a lot of padding.
I ride the Texas Eagle and Sunset Limited several times a year. The southbound Eagle is scheduled to leave Austin for San Antonio at 6:50 pm. Its scheduled arrival in San Antonio is 10.16 pm. That is 3 hours 26 minutes to cover a distance of approximately 80 miles.
Frequently the Eagle leaves Temple, which is where I usually get on it, an hour or slightly more late, and still arrives into San Antonio on time.
In FY24 Amtrak paid other railroads $248 million to host its trains. It is a 37.8% increase over the FY23 payments. Several seemingly knowledgeable persons have said that Amtrakās payments to the other railroads only cover the marginal cost of hosting its trains. If this is true, it is not much of an incentive for the host railroads to get out of Amtrakās way.
If that is the case no wonder they can run late. The host railroads should negotiate a higher payment and ensure Amtrak services speed up. To travel 80 miles in three hours 26 is an absolute joke imo. To me if Amtrak are happy with that kind of service, the passenger loses out ā Big Styleā.
This is due to freight train congestion per TxDOT studies and it was the reason they wanted to buy the line from Austin to San Antonio and reroute the freight trains on a new line to the West, From my memory, to their credit, Union Pacific (host railroad in this case) staffed to this proposal and got tired of the delays and other political nonsense and finally threw in the towel and stated the State needed to contact them again when they are serious and have funds available. So in the states hands on that segment of track specifically. Though Amtrak and Union Pacific should arrive at a negotiation here seperately. Nobody has so far approached Union Pacific as far as I know with a proposal for track capacity improvements between Austin and San Antonio. That responsibility first falls to Amtrak or the host railroad to lead. In the case of CPKC, CPKC took the leadership role. In the case of BNSF, BNSF took the leadership role. So I am not sure what the whole deal is with why UP cannot take the leadership role here.
In FY24 Amtrak paid other railroads $248 million to host its trains. It is a 37.8% increase over the FY23 payments. Several seemingly knowledgeable persons have said that Amtrakās payments to the other railroads only cover the marginal cost of hosting its trains. If this is true, it is not much of an incentive for the host railroads to get out of Amtrakās way.
Amtrak Incentive or Host Railroad management shortcomming? My view the Host railroad is responsible for informing the tenant client what is needed here financially. Just taking the money and running the train like a freight train is rather shortsighted. Maybe they did and maybe they didnāt. However, this is not like a NO FAULT insurance policy, someone is responsible here. I have myself heard of past situations where the railroads treat their freight clients the same wayā¦take the money and run their shipment like crap, then try to upsell them on better service for more money. My suggestion is to not take their money if the shipment canāt be handled efficiently.
Disagree with this in part, Amtrak did exactly that in the case of the Southwest Chief as well as state Corridor Service between Chicago and St. Paul. In fact I got recent info Wisconsin intends to proceed with the close to $75-80 million mainline relocation project in Milwaukee, WI so that Amtrak and the State DOT can reduce freight train interference to passenger rail operations. They are going to build a defacto holding area running through the former Milwaukee Road Muskego yard in Milwaukee for CPKC freight lines. Feds are paying I think $72 million of the cost of this. This will along with other improvements between Chicago and Milwaukee add to capacity of that corridor.
As for flag stops, Iād question why any place that doesnāt generate at least a few passengers a day should be a stop at all. (Toccoa GA, Iām looking at you! And why the Crescent flies through Gwinnett County where 1M people live nonstop)
The two dwell problems I see on Amtrak are:
platforms that arenāt really low or high, but just paved areas at railhead height requiring trainsteps and awkward stairclimbing. Getting to genuine low level or high level platforms w/o freight clearance issues may require insignificant investment.
only one vestibule open. Everyone off, then everyone waiting can board. Station stops should be āall hands on deckā to get multiple vestibules open, reducing the bottleneck.
Completely agree this is nonsensical for even a long distance Amtrak train.
I thought Amtrak had a grant to fix this nationwide and I thought work was underway. Could be wrong but I think I read it in an Amtrak improvement plan. Congress actually pushed them to make all train platforms ADA compatible and funded the program (again, Amtrak did not see the need, Congress had to intervene). Not sure what the status is.
Yes I do not get it when they do this with Superliner LD trains. Nor do I understand fully the business reasons of one stop for sleeping car passengers and one stop for coach. I think Amtrak does this at station stops with short platforms. There are alternatives to this in my view that require a little more thought on the part of Amtrak Management.
Amtrak seems to do custom stops if the charter is large enough. I went to High School in WI (metro Milwaukee suburb) and Amtrak stopped the Empire Builder there out in the specific suburb to deboard the High School Economics class via return travel from Chicago on a Field Trip (charter bus to Chicago). It was an intermittent occurrence then it stopped. I believe it had to due with former Trains Magazine contributor being a CP Rail dispatcher in Milwaukee (former Milwaukee Road employee), his daughter attended the same high school I did. Just a hunch I have on the connection there of why that happenedā¦could be wrong of course. But it was interesting that relationship existed between host railroad dispatcher and Amtrak as far as operations.
In FY24 the NEC had Adjusted Operating Earnings of $268.8 million. The numbers for the State Supported and Long-Distance trains were Adjusted Operating Losses of $251.1 million and $635.1 million. These numbers do not include certain non-cash expenses, i.e., depreciation, income tax expense, adjustment of state supported capital payments, etc.
For the five years ended FY24, the NEC had Adjusted Operating Earnings of $129.4 million. The State Supported trains lost $849.5 million, and the Long-Distance trains lost $2,913.5 million.
At the end of FY24, Amtrak had an accumulated deficit of approximately $45.5 billion. The largest portion is attributable to the Long-Distance trains.
The financials suggest that Amtrak pressuring other railroads to prioritize its Long-Distance trains is a case of the tail wagging the dog.
If a competent management team could operate Amtrak like a market driven business, and were free of politics to do so, it would drop the Long-Distance trains in a heartbeat.
One stop at Taylor, TX is not possible if the Eagle is boarding or deboarding coach and sleeper passengers. The platform is not long enough.
The Eagle has to make two stops at Taylor if it is picking up or letting off sleeper and coach passengers. It has to make three stops if it is picking up or letting off passengers from the LAX through cars as well as the San Antonio sleepers and coaches. The alternative would be to move the sleeper passengers to a coach to board or deboard, but that would be awkward.
As of the end of FY23 Amtrak had spent approximately $880 million to upgrade 185 of its stations to make them ADA compliant. The target date for completion of the remaining stations is 2029.
First, I think it should be the train conductors call and it might just be but perhaps better guidance or possibly ask sleeping car passengers to use another station with a longer platform before selling tickets or making reservations? Could be as simple as trained jawboning of CSRās in an Amtrak call center.
Why not use or obtain Federal Grant money to extend the platform?
Taylor is not a heavy duty stop from what I read, approx 3600 passengers a year in 2022?, applying the ratio of average sleeping car passengers to coach passengersā¦what number does Amtrak end up with for sleeping car passengers annually? What is the cost of two seperate stops over a years period vs sleeping car revenue? There are other potential innovative solutions here.
I donāt think this is 100% true. We had this discussion before and so has Amtrak. A lot of the state corridors would not exist without the Long Distance trains to lower the costs of initial startup. In fact you can see a chunk of the initial Amtrak startup service utilizes corridors with existing stations that were built or upgraded for LD trains. New Orleans to Mobile for example.
Long Distance trains are going to be with us for a while as the current POTUS stated when he was Senator, without the LD trains, Amtrak does not have the political support to win votes in Congress for financial support for the rest of the system. Nature of the beast.
So why not work to make LD trains more efficient instead of leaving them in a rather horrible financial steady state? Seems to me the latter approach might be more efficient then just hoping they go away.
I have taken the Eagle to and from Taylor on four or five occasions. Every time I have been on the train, the conductor tells the engineer before arriving in Taylor the number of stops that will be needed. Moreover, a friend who was one of the San Antonio based Eagle conductors told me that calling the number of stops at every station, if applicable, was one of his duties. He retired about four years ago.
The platform is ADA compliant. It has a lift to help mobility impaired riders get on or off the train. Whether extending it is a good financial decision depends on the present value of the cost of extending and maintaining it compared to the present value of the cost of the Eagle make two or more positioning stops at at Taylor.
In FY 23, according to Amtrakās Texas State Fact Sheet, 4,114 riders boarded or deboard the Eagle in Taylor.
It occurs to me that, if we arenāt requiring the ālimited flag stopā system to decrease travel time, there is comparatively little cost involved in making the multiple stops ā maybe a minute or two qt low notch to move forward a few cars each time. It might be hard to make that up with sustained running past flag stops, BUT it would be easy to include it in the schedule or padding for āknownā or expected ones. The question then becomes ā and in my opinion it is a highly interesting one ā what sort of ADA or other passenger accommodation is to be made at the low-traffic or āpoliticalā stops.
Presumably Amtrak knows, or can legally ask or require, whether a given reservation needs or expects given reasonable accommodation at a āreservedā flag stop. The stop would be made at the appropriate point in the train, presumably opposite a lift or other boarding aid, not necessarily at the same vestibule that would be used for other passengers. I would have to wonder whether a small vehicle, with a few seats and the wheelchair lift, couldnāt be provided at each station and pave the āplatformā just well enough to let the vehicle drop off and pick up āotherā passengers during just one stop. This could also handle baggage or bikes as needed, even if they were unloaded into a āshedā up by the baggage car or power and picked up after the passenger āworkā. This might be a useful early-adopter use for high-level autonomous operationā¦
Amtrak has portable lifts. Iāve cranked the one at Utica, NY numerous times when weāve borrowed it to board limited mobility passengers on our trains.
I hear that Amtrak is rebuilding the platforms at Utica. They could use it. However, the only train thatās too long for the existing platform is the Lake Shore, and sometimes there are NYC passengers to board, and Boston passengers to board in the two sections of the train (itās split at Renssalaer). And, if thereās luggage, the Boston baggage car is at the tail end of the train, well off the existing platform.
As noted, though, itās not really a big deal to move the train a few cars, and it happens fairly often.
