It seems whenever I want to take a trip, I take the airplane because the sleepers on the Crescent out of Birmingham are always sold out. Does anyone know what Amtrak is doing about this?
Well, if Amtrak was netting any cash out of sleeper service, they could use the cash flow to justify new equipment. That they don’t order more equipment and that there isn’t anyone else out there willing to sell sleeper service on Amtrak trains speaks volumes about the profitability of the sleeper service.
New sleepers would be a subsidy to middle/upper middle class Americans and railfans. That leaves me a bit queasy.
Now, if Amtrak could figure out how to make a profit at it - that’s another story…
Oltmannd,
George Chilson, who is the President of NARP, I think, did an analysis of Amtrak’s sleeping car operations and claimed that they are profitable. The study is on NARP’s web-site. I am keen to get your perspective on it.
A few observations:
Cost of vehicle ownership is completely ignored. There are 100 sleepers in the fleet - at $2M a pop. There goes most of NARPs margin…
A sleeper is a more complex vehicle than a coach -more mechanically complex, harder to clean, more stuff to clean, etc., so allocating car mile costs uniformly isn’t quite right.
Only included direct labor costs - apparently ignores hard dollar fringe - RR retirement, healtcare, etc.
I suspect the GAO’s supposition about food service and coach/sleeper service is closer to the truth than NARPs. In my own experience, I’ve seen very, very few coach passengers in the diner. Most frequent the lounge car/cafe car. Drop the sleepers and you can drop the diner, too.
If the incremental margin was really 32% then why in the world did Pullman go under? Running sleeping cars on an incremental cost basis was EXACTLY there business model, no? And, it would provide more than enough cash for Amtrak to justify repairs those bad-ordered Superliners.
If there was truly a profit to be made in the sleepers, Amtrak would have no trouble at all finding a private operator ala Pullman. They’d be banging down the door.
If they are always sold out, then they are not charging enough, right?
I’ll agree with that.
The lack of equipment explains why the Palmetto turns around at Savannah rather than reaching Florida. It is also probably the main reason the Sunset Limited has not run east of New Orleans since Katrina.
Pullman was ordered to break up several areas of thier Business. Then you had Business travelers seeing time = money in the Auto, Bus or Airplane on the new Airports and Interstates being constructed. So that is that for 16 hours or whatever between east coast and Chicago. You can do the same trip by plane in 25% of the time.
Checking fares on the Texas Eagle yields sleeper pricing pretty up there. They can always pack the masses into the coaches.
Oltmannd,
Thanks for your thoughts. I came to the same conclusion and sent my results to NARP. I am still waiting for a reply.
Until AMTRAK cleans up their management of sleeper space they cannot justify more sleeper cars: In many cases the total number of sleeper passengers could be handled by one less car on the end points of a run; wash - nyc, atlanta - new orleans, jacksonville/orlando - miami, etc. Do not know the western routes well enough. Then the selling of space (sold out)? and too many examples of vacant spaces at the last minute. That really needs changing.
I’d still like to know why the onboard personnel have to occupy sleeper space. Why not change them enroute like the conductor, trainmen and engineer?
For what it’s worth, once upon a time I had a bedroom Philly-Atlanta, then coach Atlanta-New Orleans, since I only wanted to pay for the sleeper for the times when I would be sleeping. I left something in the bedroom, when I inquired to retreive it we had to excuse ourselves to the people who had our old bedroom for Atlanta-New Orleans.
Like you I hadn’t imagined that anybody would have wanted to book a bedroom for that daylight portion of the trip, but there you have it, at least once somebody did, and apparently all the other bedrooms were booked coming out of Atlanta.
Also the tight utilization you’re proposing could result in losing business. Suppose 2 sleepers are sold out Washington-Atlanta, and half of 1 car’s passengers then get off, or go to coach. You can’t drop 1 sleeper without also dropping the half of the 1 sleeper car’s people who were otherwise willing to pay for daytime sleeper space.
The Atlanta to NO sleeper is a deal! It only costs about $25 and includes meals in the diner. So for two people travelling, you essentially get breakfast, lunch and dinner for two for $25!
The Crescent scored near the bottom of the NARP’s analysis of sleep revenue/cost. If you short-turned the sleepers in Atlanta or even B’ham, you could double the number of sleepers per train. (you could short turn a couple of coaches and a locomotive as well)
You just build the train like this:
locos
sleepers
diner
short turn coaches
cafe
thru coaches
baggage
Then uncouple the lead loco and pull clear. Make a cut between the short turn coaches and the cafe, pull that section of the train clear.
What I really wanted to know is Amtrak buying or building new equipment such as sleepers? I believe that there are probably certain times of the year, in certain parts of the country, where trains could be run in sections as in “the old days”. That is where there were two separate trains, an all coach section or train and an all sleeper section or train.
If the Lautenberg-Lott increased Amtrak funding comes through, I hope the priority is the Midwest Regional Rail Initiative and other gas-saving congestion-relieving corridor projects over the purchase of sleeper cars.
Don Oltmann raised the point on this forum some time ago that the advocacy community would be more effective setting priorities on “what kind of Amtrak” we wanted to have. More recently, I raised the question regarding from the standpoint of the advocacy community, was the Midwest Regional Rail Initiative and end in itself, that is the providing of fast, frequent corridor service in a regional network, or was the MRRI in the minds of some advocates a means to an end, a feeder service to Chicago hub of the LD trains, of long Western trips, diners, lounge cars, and sleepers.
If it is the former, restoring the Sunset, getting more sleeper cars, and so on is a distraction from getting MRRI. If it is the latter, these other things make sense, but advocacy becomes primarily about the long-distance train experience for the people who value this kind of thing, and the fast-frequent fuel-saving congestion-relieving regional trains becomes a side effect. If the regional trains never develop to the point that they are fast, frequent, fuel-saving, and have a meaningful effect on congestion is almost beside the point provided they make the LD trains more accessible.
Oltmannd; gardendance:
Sales of sleeper service should have one sleeper booked only all the way through and then a second short sold. by cutting some of the cars out more space would be allowed for the short high demand sections. ie; Atlanta - Wash, jax - wash, chi - pit, albany - chi, possibly charlotte - wash . As far as switching AMTRAK CAN DO THEIR OWN WITH ROAD CREWS either through, inbound, or outbound, as was done in Atlanta, Dallas, Denver and other locations when the mail and express contracts were being done.
Good point. I forgot that the inbound crew could still be on duty even after the outbound crew took the train south.
Kummant talks all the time about growth of corridors, and never about any opportunities for LD trains. So, I’d suspect WYSIWYG as far as sleepers go.
Equipment productivity is a key driver of economic performance for transportation companies. It’s part of the reason Amtrak does so well with those Acela trains. (and why commuter rail does so poorly) It really doesn’t pay to have equipment lay around idle only to operate in peak season. If Amtrak started spending capital in order to have equipment available for seasonal trains, that would be a new low for them IMHO.
A good measure of productivity for a passenger car might be revenue dollars per car-day.
the only off season is Sep 10 to middle of october and late january and a month after easter. That is the time heavy cleaning on the equipment and any deferred maintenance could be done. That is how the airlines have been operated.
Commuter opperations may seem underutilized; but is it better to run two intercity round trips with the same equipment with an average 250 passengers per trip, or one commuter round trip averaging 800 passengers per trip?
Would you forego running the commuter rather than the intercity in the peak?
250 passengers over 150 miles vs 750 passengers over 50 miles is dead even in the passenger mile count.
The question is which is more valuable in the net. And, that depends what the goal is.
If the goal is improving urban air quality and highway congestion relief, then it’s no contest…which is partly why commuter rail is popping up all over the place.
But equimpent productivity for commuter rail is really lousy. Which is partly why Amtrak’s farebox recovery tends to be better than most commuter rail systems.