Passenger trains will actually perform well over longer distances their value is not limited to short distance or corridors. I do think there is value in corridor projects it is just that they often crowd out talk of improving long distance service and there is talk of getting rid of long distance service or curtailing it.
Passenger trains offer one of the few alternatives to air travel. Traveling long distance by car can be stressful and tiring.
The best landscapes are seen over longer distances. Such scenery can’t be seen on airplane and traveling in a car requires paying attention to the road.
Railroads have economies of scale. The more you build rail infrastructure the cheaper it is to build and generally the cost per mile of offering rail service is cheaper over longer distances. Economies of scale is one of the reasons why Chinese conventional rail and high speed rail service are some of the cheapest in the world and why capital costs were so low (yes and other reasons to).
Most people don’t live in corridors or in end points in corridors and thus have little value in corridor trains.
Railroads were originally designed to conquer long distances and vast open stretches of land.
Honestly, from what I can tell Corridor services are being pushed as this fits the modeling methods used by most State Departments of Transportation. The inherited (highway) corridor models were developed to size the “pipe”, that is the number of lanes required on each roadway segment, between known area populations (MSA). It is one of those classic engineering simplifications.
Obviously, the only correct answer is to figure out the two points a person wants to travel between, total number of people, two bell curves of arrival and departure times and price points, and the value of time for different service options. The beauty of the existing schedules, where they still exist without significant slowing, is that the trial and error method was used to figure the best schedule, when there were multiple experimental timings.
I have commented to a consultant or two on this and they kind of give you that look like oh yeah, that would be the right answer but I was told to do this other thing… and my exhaustative corridor report, due in three weeks, has scope limits. Amtrak has contended they are not a planning organization.
Roughly speaking the longer “corridor” routes seem to do better, centered around 500-700 mile routes if you are running a daytime train. They achieve more density of passengers per trainmile as more origin and destination pairs are covered without a transfer. Ideally two longer corridors would cross in the middle with transfers or shorter corridors under 300 miles be linked, end-to-end.
For example, imagine the Hoosier State running through Chicago to become a Hiawatha run, or even just a Metra run stopping at the O’Hara Airport transfer stop and hitting the far northern suburbs of Chicago before turning. The Utility to a passenger going from Milwaukee or N. Chicago to Indianapolis would be much greater than a trip involving transferring.
But this isn’t picked up by the models used, because they are warmed over high
That long distance trains are a good alternative to flying or less stressful than driving is a point of view. I have travelled the distance from Chicago to the West Coast by plane, train, and automobile, and I will suggest to you that making the trip by train is no magic formula.
I rode the 40 hours Chicago-L.A. on the Amtrak Southwest Limited – once. In coach. On an ex-Santa Fe Hi Level car in the SPD40F, pre Superliner era. The hard part of the trip besides trying to sleep in a coach seat, even a deep-recline leg-rest seat that would command a premium business-class or First-class price on a trans-Pacific jet was the night time snoring and hacking and wheezing of fellow passengers – should have had ear plugs. Never had that problem on a trans-Pacific jet. Maybe the wooshing of the air past the airliner walls blocks out the racket of sleeping with scores of other barracks mates.
40 hours is actually a remarkable express schedule for that distance and this was no Trans-Siberian railroad, and I had other, shorter long-distance trips in coach and economy sleeper (Slumber Coach) that were at least less tedious, but that one trip pretty much cured me of long-distance train travel. You know, there are some advantages to airplanes if you think of it.
I had a 20-hour trans-Pacific journey once involving the Shin-Kansen, two more changes of train to get to Narita, the trans-Pacific trip in airline coach, the commuter flight Chicago-Madison, and finally a short automobile trip home. But the 40 hours on the Southwest LImited was a bit much.
One of the arguments favoring intercity train travel over bus or airplane is that you get a whole lot more legroom in coach, you can get a private room in First class (sleeper), you can “get up and walk around”, and if you are restless in your coach seat or sleeper compartment (they tell me the seats in Superliner sleepers have less cushioning and support than the Superliner coach seats), you can go to the lounge car to get a snack or a drink or have a meal in the dining car.
None of these (expensive) amenities are intrinsic to trains – they are there because it is generally believed that they need to be there to make long-distance train travel tolerable. Sort of like the Queen Mary carried, what, 3000 passengers in passenger service but maybe two to three times as many as a troop carrier? I imagine those soldiers deployed overseas were really stuffed in there, but when you are in the Army, either by enlistment or draft, you don’t complain or at least not to your officers, and you are grateful that you are on the Queen Mary where the crossing is half as long and where the Queen Mary can outrun any U-boat.
So on the shorter distances, the train can pack more seats in and offer fewer onboard services, just like a jet, because the travel time is so much shorter. You don’t have the expense of onboard service personnel who require crew dorms for their rest and break times; your operating crew can make “turns” keeping them closer to home. You may not even require more crew than a locomotive driver and a conductor and assistant conductor to collect tickets and supervise boarding and deboarding.
For a short enough distance, the train becomes competitive with a jet because the jet has to take off and land that adds a fixed overhead of time and fuel to even a short hop that the train doesn’t have.
Whether the “corridor” should be limited to “400 miles” or whether we should countenance day trains on 700 mile
There you go again! Goring oxen and generally pointing out “tail wagging the dog” ideology.
Well, that’s almost true. You can sail across the pond on the Queen Mary 2 about once a month. It takes a week (twice as long as the typical crossing 50 years ago). The cost for the cheapest inside cabin is surprisingly in line with coach airfare. But, nobody is subsidizing the operation of the ship.
What’s the authority for claiming that Amtrak is not a planning organization? I have never read anything in its official publications to suggest that it shuns planning.
The company develops and publishes five year financial, strategic, and business plans. In addition, amongst other things, it has generated a vision plan for HSR in the NEC. Lastly, as per statements in the 2012 Annual Report, Boardman has re-organized Amtrak’s management teams so as to hold them accountable for the company’s various service lines. Re-organization by implication connotes some planning.
Whether the company is an effective implementer of its plans is another question.
They run trains. That’s pretty much it. Sure, the do planning. Sometimes, they even do some strategic planning (recently for equipment fleet) or capital planning (for the NEC), but but they really don’t do transportation planning, the part where you figure out where people want to go from and to - or even where you can induce them to travel from and to - and then figure out how to best accommodate it.
“Most people don’t live in corridors or in end points in corridors and thus have little value in corridor trains.”
Although I don’t have a specific reference at this point, in part because the Census Bureau’ website is shutdown, my reading of Census Bureau data, as well as related articles that have appeared in the press and journals, indicates that most Americans live in or near mega cities.
The NEC (Boston to Richmond) accounts for nearly 17 per cent of the nation’s population. That’s roughly 52.8 million people. Another example can be found in Texas. Nearly 70 per cent of the population is found in mega cities connected by corridors, i.e. DFW to San Antonio, Houston to Galveston, Brownsville to McAllen, etc.
The market for the long distance trains is not deep enough to support them financially. And adding capacity is not likely to change the outcome. They are a financial disaster. Had it not been for the long distance trains, Amtrak would have had an operating profit in FY12. And had some money left over to make a substantial contribution to the capital charges.
Their role is to plan train and connecting bus service. The development of the Thruway bus system, with the latest flowering being in North Carolina, suggests Amtrak has some notion of planning beyond the rails.
To be fair Amtrak is constrained by politics. Amongst other things it cannot get in the face of its 535 independent contractors, each of whom believes that he or she has been anointed by a high power and is not be challenged in their individual as well as collective wisdom.
We don’t know all that goes on behind the scenes with respect to planning and what Amtrak might do if it were not so dependent on government funding.
I may be reading between the lines, but I have the impression that Boardman recognizes the drag the long distance trains impose on Amtrak and would spin them off if he could.
Look at me. Defending Amtrak when given my druthers I would privatize it in a heartbeat.
As has been pointed out on another thread, the economic value of the long-distance passenger trains is negligible to negative. Their political value is quite high, which goes a long way in explaining why they are still in the timetable. Amtrak’s upper management knows that the bottom line matters, but it also knows that it has to maintain a semblance of support in Congress to get any funding for the short-haul service that still has an economic justification.
Put another way - 50% of Amtrak’s passengers ride in the area north of Richmond and east of Pittsburgh and Buffalo - in about 6.5% of the continental US land mass. Another 21% ride in the west coast corridors, and 8% in the Chicago corridors. If Amtrak is accused of being “corridor centric” I think I might see why.
The states are in the vanguard of development of improved passenger rail services, as well: VA, NC, IL, MI, NY, WA, CA. Also the PRIIA . Amtrak largely follows, same as their response to the problems the IG identified with food services. Amtrak is mostly reactive.
Perhaps one of these days, a thorough report from the IG or the CBO will show that LD services have little economic value returned given the large investment in equipment and recommend it be largely ended.
European passnger rail services rely heavily on tight-scheduled, across platform transfers and they work very well. I am quite certain they are not relying on “warmed over highway sizing models.”
Network modelling is needed. Freight railroad all have network models to optimize traffic flow and inform service design (and capital budgeting). I think they would all be flat broke without these tools.
Schlimm: Cross platform transfer certainly makes train changes easier and the transfer time is just right.
However, as I took a quick look at the timetable for trips from Frankfurt (M) Flughafen (Airport) to Munich Hbf, I noticed that most connections before and after the time you found are one seat (no change) trips. And there’s a connection every hour or half hour. When I fly in there, I am never stressed, as I know that as soon as I get off the plane and through customs and baggage, there will be a train going my direction shortly, just the way it should be.
The airport in Frankfurt has had excellent train connections for many years. A short ride on regional transit to the central train station in Frankfurt, many long distance trains stopping at the airport for direct connections. They could have been content with that, but still added another train station at the airport, specifically to better connect with long distance HSR trains.
The new Frankfurt Flughafen Fernbahnhof was constucted because of the new dedicated HSR line to Cologne. It is open and airy, yet has weather protection. A big improvement over the old, underground airport stop.
I gave that ICE change just as an example of how it works. Certain stops, like Mannheim, Wurzburg and Hannover are frequent examples of cross platform changes.