Version XV - This Was The Week That Was

August 17, 2001

We’re just a week shy of four months chronicling the life of Amtrak in the Summer of 01.

This week was a goodie:

1. Word late Friday is that Amtrak Intercity is toast. The entire Amtrak system will be reconstituted as Amtrak East and Amtrak West. Speculation is that Amtrak West President Gil Mallory will take West, and Amtrak Executive Vice President Stan Bagley will take East. This will split Intercity in half, with the various long distance trains going to the closest coast. No other details are available about where various Intercity senior managers will go. Word around the company is that some of the Intercity vice presidents are wisely taking the retirement buyout offer; why stay around this madness when you can get paid to do nothing?
2. First, the good news. As promised, Amtrak operated a special train between Jeffersonville, Indiana and Louisville, Kentucky. The trip, which ran a total of four miles, celebrated the work being done in downtown Louisville to restore all-train service to Louisville Union Station. Some newer structures that were built after the abandonment of passenger rail service 25 years ago are being removed or moved to allow the reinstallation of passenger tracks up to the station. The Kentucky Cardinal is expected to begin using the station this Fall.
3. In the Broken Record Department, the Amtrak Marketing Department, which is America’s leading discount organization, is waging yet another discount fare sale, which they have been doing since the Spring of this year. The strategy this time? Through November 16th, the end of the Fall Foliage season, Amtrak will offer 30% discounts on tickets valid on trains including the Ethan Allen, Adirondack and Vermonter in New England. Apparently Amtrak is afraid that the sprawling and profitable Fall Foliage business isn’t enough this year to attract riders, so they plan to give away seats on trains at a 30% discount that travel through some of American’s most spectacular and popular Fall Foliage areas.

   Other 30% discount fares around the system continue to be in effect for travel until December 14th.

   Will these marketing people ever learn there are good and effective strategies beyond basic discounting? Don’t they realize that at some point the traveling public becomes immune to such discount marketing and ignore it? Ask the Boys at Braniff, the ex-airline that invented discount travel marketing. Note the “ex” part.

   How much more critically needed cash are these marketing whizzes willing to give away before they realize there are other good marketing ideas?

4. The dismay over Davis has gone away this week. Last week your humble correspondent reported that Amtrak senior management had decided to discontinue stopping the Coast Starlight at Davis, California as a money-saving move.

   What they didn’t count on was the public and private outcry over this ill-conceived move. City officials decried that they had just spent some $2 million dollars on the Davis Amtrak station, and the Coast Starlight needed to stop there as it historically has, in addition to the California Zephyr and numerous corridor trains.

   Gil Mallory came to town, met with officials and other interested parties, and made a decision to restore the stop. Those working hard to keep this calamity from happening included Davis Mayor Ken Wagstaff, URPA California affiliate RailPAC, TRAC, and Russ Jackson, Editor of the Western Rail Passenger Review. Many others worked hard in the background to make this happen.

   It has not been unusual through the last three decades for local municipalities to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year on station renovations and construction to see Amtrak discontinue service afterward in a relatively short period of time. In many instances, the decisions have been reversed after local protests.

5. Amtrak in the NEC has continued to have operating woes. This week on the All-Aboard list, moderator Gene Poon posted the following message:
   

   “Right now, as you are reading this (3:36 p.m. PDT/6:36 p.m. EDT):

   The Amtrak Northeast Corridor, in the vicinity of Metropark, NJ is at a near standstill due to a complete signal outage between Union and County, a distance of approximately 15 miles. ALL trains are being individually cleared past Control Points at restricted speed (max 20 mph). A live report from an NJT train says that train is creeping along behind Metroliner 123 and two other NJTs.

   This report includes a spotting of Acela Express 2170, sitting still at Metropark on its way toward New York City, after having left Philadelphia eight minutes late. The outage is reported to have begun just in time to cause massive congestion for the 5 p.m. rush hour traffic out of the New York area.”

   Deferred maintenance strikes again?

6. Howie Dash, a thoughtful passenger rail advocate and Amtrak watcher from the New York City area this week brought up a few points for consideration by all who follow the highs and lows of Amtrak.

   “It seems to me that the Amtrak MBNA report was issued around March 1, 2000. That was almost 18 months ago.

   What is the status of the trains that were supposed to start operating according to that report? Only the Kentucky Cardinal, which started prior to the issuance of the report is running and may be expanded. The Zenda Limited [Also known as the Janesville Rockett to many of us] is gone or soon to be gone … many of the other trains, such as Des Moines service will never see the light of day and the others are delayed indefinitely.

   Here are a few other items on Amtrak’s scorecard.

   • No new long distance equipment has been ordered to support the MBNA and any possible system expansion.
   • Beech Grove’s repair of wreck damaged and out of service cars stopped a long time ago, putting all of the remaining long distance trains in a very precarious position [because of lack of serviceable equipment].
   • The final implementation of the Acela Express is one and a half years behind schedule.
   • The Capstone program, which would update and modernize the 25 years old Amfleet equipment for Acela Regional service has been terminated.
   • The startup of the MRRI is in jeopardy because of Amtrak’s failure to hold up its end of the bargain and order the trainsets needed.
   • Acela Express ridership is [performing] under expectations in the critical NY-Boston market segment.”

   Mr. Dash, it should be noted, is a distinguished member of the railroading community, and has been a railroad employee and manager for over 20 years.

7. Along these same lines, Amtrak president and CEO George Warrington, while attending a Town Hall meeting chaired by United States Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, was quizzed about the startup of the new Chicago - Des Moines service as promised last year in the MBNA.

   Local newspapers reported that Mr. Warrington allegedly furrowed his brow and replied that the service “doesn’t come to mind” as part of any current expansion plans.

   Local officials interpreted this to mean that the proposed service was off the radar screen and had been scrapped without public notice.

8. As the late Dr. Adrian Herzog would say, in The Yuk Yuk Department, many of us who are members of Amtrak’s Guest Rewards program received our updated statements in the mail this week.

   Some sharp observers noted some slight discrepancies in Amtrak’s own materials, such as the availability of sleeping cars on day trains that currently do not have them, and delicious cuisine on trains that only carry a snack bar.

   Everyone’s favorite boo boo, however, was the photograph of the interior of a passenger jet airplane, taking one half of a page of a four page newsletter. The jet plane used belongs to Midway Express Airlines, Amtrak’s joint midwest marketing partner (not the same airline that went bankrupt this week, that was Midway Airlines). Apparently, Amtrak marketing thought it was more important to show the interior of a coach section of an airplane instead of the coach section of a passenger rail car. After all, “parts is parts,” and “seats is seats,” right?

9. In other marketing news, Amtrak announced that bookings involving first class seating on Acela Express trains will no longer offer exact seat assignments. Amtrak noted that it had been determined that a majority of first class guests prefer the flexibility of a selecting a seat when they board, as they do now in reserved seating on other services.

   Was Amtrak trying to reinvent the wheel again when it comes to Acela? It is interesting to note that when the Acela equipment was built, seat numbers were assigned to first class equipment the same way that airlines assign seat numbers on jets. The thinking behind this was that when travel agents book seats, it would be easier for them to use the same schematic that is used on planes.

   Well, we know the Acela moves pretty fast in some stretches, but we had no idea it moved so fast that travel agents would could compare it to a jet plane!

In the new world of Amtrak East and Amtrak West, that’s it for this week. With all of these corporate structural changes and paint scheme changes and logo changes going on at the same time that Amtrak had to mortgage Penn Station in New York just to make payroll, does anyone else wonder if this was what it would be like in the last minutes of a ship such as the Titanic when the crew would be rearranging the deck chairs?

Bruce Richardson
Jacksonville, Florida