Version I - This Was The Week That Was

May 11, 2001

At the end of the day on Friday of a most startling week, here’s what happened:

1. First an announcement came from the US Secretary of Transportation, then, finally, late Friday official word came that Amtrak Chairman of the Board and HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson was resigning. His last meeting of the board will be on May 23rd. Finally, Norman Mineta, the Secretary of Transportation will be able to take his rightful place on the board. The expected fallout of Secretary Thompson’s departure is that Amtrak President George Warrington will also execute a departure before much longer. Secretary Thompson is considered to be Mr. Warrington’s most ardent supporter.
2. Last Friday, a full week ago, Amtrak issued an advisory through its ARROW reservations system that for the week inclusive of the 4th of July, the Sunset Limited would operate six frequencies only between Los Angeles and San Antonio due to track work by CSX in the Pensacola area. No alternate transportation would be provided east of San Antonio, and all reservations and tickets were canceled. Amtrak began calling passengers, suggesting either a change of travel plans or a cancellation of travel plans. This decision, which can only be labeled as ludicrous, was made at the product line level, within the Southwest Business Group. Today, a week later, we have learned that Amtrak Intercity President Ed Walker personally became involved in this decision, and forced an extension of the Sunset during the 4th of July week to New Orleans, allowing passengers to again connect with the City of New Orleans and Crescent. No alternate transportation will be provided east of New Orleans. While a great improvement, this new decision still falls short of taking care of passengers east of New Orleans, including the Sunset’s eastern terminus, Orlando, which is the single largest vacation destination in the world. The lack of service for an entire week to Orlando will come during the summer high season’s peak travel week.
3. Further, about the Sunset, we discovered that the Sunset is being featured on Amtrak’s RailSale page, offering discount coach seats from the end of May until the end of August, all the way from Orlando to Los Angeles, or the reverse, for only $117.20 per passenger, one way. We also learned of similar sales on the Southwest Chief and the California Zephyr, three of Amtrak’s signature western long distance trains that normally are sold out during all summer travel months. This strongly indicates extremely soft bookings for these trains.
4. This week we learned of plans under discussion for two major changes in the way Amtrak Intercity does business. Plans under discussion are for all Intercity dining cars to be available to sleeping car passengers only, completely excluding cash paying coach passengers. The passengers in the coaches will be forced to eat cold food or microwaved sandwiches in the lounge car. This is expected to be extremely unpopular on the western long distance trains where passengers are onboard for two to three days. (Note: This now may be a good time to think about reopening Harvey House restaurants in stations along the way.)

   The other change, which may have been decided on Thursday, is to reduce the number of coach train attendants to one attendant for every four coaches. While this will be very interesting for attendants opening doors on single level trains where two vestibules can be coupled together, it will be even more interesting for Superliner trains where the doors are in the middle of the cars. This may be the time for grandmothers to stop traveling alone or with grandchildren since there will be virtually no one to assist them with luggage or personal belongings.

5. This was the week that the Super Express Acela trains had difficulty keeping the pantographs working. It also provided the first instance of an Acela train dealing with an emergency stop outside of a high platform station with passengers onboard and no way to reach the ground since the trainsets do not have trap doors. Fortunately, a slowpoke Northeast Direct train, that operates with normal (read that mostly-working equipment) was right behind the crippled Acela train and somehow made a mid-sea transfer of passengers onto ordinary Amfleet equipment so the passengers could continue on their way. The Acela was finally restarted and dead headed home.
6. This week marked yet another week of failure for the Acela Express Super Express former nonstop trains between Washington and New York City. The trains have been, at best, a third full, even after adding a Philadelphia stop. The response to first class has been underwhelming. This is the program, when fully up and running, that was expected to generate $200 million a year to “save” the national system and the rest of the company. This is the program that may burn down the farm, instead. Acela was supposed to bring people in droves from the airlines. Instead, it has cannibalized riders from the more reliable Metroliners and only moved revenue from under one hat to another.
7. Here in Florida, this was the week that Amtrak provided a windfall for regular riders. Amtrak on Thursday introduced a “flash” pass that can be purchased for as little as $199 for a full year of unlimited riding on any train between any city pairs in Florida. Just show up at normally all-reserved trains, flash your pass at the conductor, board and ride as much as you like, as often as you like, for a full year. This is available only to Florida residents. While this will delight many regular riders, the true indication of this is that the Florida trains, which normally run at high load factors, are running with lots of empty seats. Amtrak is not heavily promoting this new pass yet, but the numbers could be impressive. For every 1,000 passes sold in this state of 15 million residents, Amtrak will accrue $199,000 in free revenue. After August 10th, the pass cost will go up to $249. It will be interesting to see how popular this pass becomes. Until the schedule and route changes are made for the new FEC service, which will be at least a year away if you’re an optimist (still $40 million short of startup money needed), the only all-train connection between Jacksonville and Tampa Bay is an overnight connection, the Sunset, when running, is still a tri-weekly run through Florida’s panhandle, and there is no direct Orlando-Tampa train connection.

That was the week that was. With this much fun this week, it’s going to be fascinating to see what happens next week.

Now is not the time to be faint of heart.

Bruce Richardson
Jacksonville, Florida