This Was The Week That Was, Vol. I No. 28, 2001-11-21
Version XXVIII-A - This Was The Week That Was - An Amtrak Saga
November 21, 2001
It’s the day before Thanksgiving. Amtrak has put an additional 75,000 seats into the inventory to handle the crush of expected business. This year, even the news media is including Amtrak in the holiday travel rush stories. Here’s hoping the best for all of the holiday travelers.
- There is a lot of work to do reeducating the public about passenger rail travel. For so many years, the public, press, and government officials have been constantly told the public is only interested in riding short corridor trains. They have been told the only future for passenger trains is in high speed trains, traveling at 150 mph or more.
In short, they have been constantly lied to, and now a massive campaign must take place that is based more on sanity, and less on fantasy and fiction.
There is a rightful place in our domestic transportation network for every type of passenger train, from the slow and pokey local mail train to high speed corridor trains once the passenger rail system has again reached full maturity and a complete, conventional, nationwide network of passenger trains is in place.
Oh, and somebody do something about Maglev, please. It’s your choice: kill it, get rid of it, or ignore it. Any of those choices will do. It’s the most fanciful of the fantasy solutions. It may be technology that works, but it’s also frightfully expensive, and to build and maintain it would make taking care of the NEC infrastructure look like a bargain and a joy.
But, back to the concept of a full and vibrant national network of trains. When you look at the true accounting picture of trains like the Sunset Limited, Southwest Chief, California Zephyr, Empire Builder, Coast Starlight, Silver Meteor, Silver Star, City of New Orleans, Crescent, Canadian, The Ocean and Chaleur, and the American Orient Express, you see trains that can bring in good revenue and hold down expenses.
You can find feeder trains as part of the system of the long distance trains, each busily carrying passengers and a vital part of a matrix. Also, you can find bridge trains that carrying large numbers of passengers as part of the matrix.
Too, you can find corridor trains that largely serve local markets, but have other functions, such as providing highly developed roadbeds for long distance trains in and out of important large city markets.
When you look at all of it as a network, you realize that each component is a critical part of the mix. You realize that by losing any one component that you greatly reduce your chances of success. You realize that for our national passenger rail system to be a complete, long lasting success, that there must be a desirable mix of long distance, corridor, and feeder trains that have a common ticketing arrangement, ease of use, high value pricing (that does NOT translate to high prices), and an operating pattern that benefits both the marketing and operating departments.
Anything short of that and you have a system that, like today’s Amtrak, has fatal flaws built into the system.
Amtrak, Jr. does not deserve to enter corporate life with fatal flaws. It deserves to be the offspring of today’s Amtrak with all of the problems fixed.
- Something strange has been happening lately. More than once, EVERY Amtrak long distance train has arrived at its end terminal either on time or early, based on the government’s definition of “on time.”
If Amtrak can accomplish this after the last nails have been put in the coffin, why could this have not been done on a consistent basis before?
By the way, before you start grinning about this, consider a few facts.
All long distance trains have an enormous amount of padding in their schedules. Some so much, it’s more of an embarrassment how much padding they have than it is embarrassing how much underutilized equipment there is on the NEC.
As an example, the Sunset Limited has an endpoint to endpoint schedule of just 15 minutes over 67 hours, including intermediate station dwell times. A full 19 of those hours (NOT including any station dwell times) is padding in the schedule. For those that are mathematically challenged, that lacking only five hours of having a FULL day of extra padding just going in one direction across country, from Disneyland in Los Angeles to Disney World in Orlando.
If you don’t think that has much of an impact, consider this: 2,764 route miles, covered in 67 hours equals an average of slightly over 41 mph for the Sunset Limited. 2,764 route miles, covered without the pad time in 48 hours, equals an average of over 57 mph, about the same that an automobile could do nonstop with multiple drivers.
If you want to complain that all of the station dwell time was added into the calculations, don’t. Freight railroads compute their system wide speed averages including times freight cars sit in classification yards, and consider all other terminal functions, too.
Now, look at the same figures from a dollars and cents standpoint: The Sunset Limited averages one coach attendant, two sleeping car attendants, one lounge car lead service attendant, one dining car lead service attendant, three dining car service attendants, one assistant chef, and one dishwasher for OBS staff.
We won’t go into train and engine crews at this point.
The OBS staff adds up to 10 people in non-peak times. Add the base wages together of these people, and you have an average of about $17.00 per hour per employee. Now, add another 42% for taxes and benefits per hour ($17 x 42% = $7.14; $17 + $7.14 = $24.14 per hour per employee).
So, you have an average employee cost of $24.14 per employee, times 10 employees, equaling $241.00 per hour. OK, then take $241 per hour and multiply that times the extra 19 hours added into the schedule for padding, each one way trip. That works out to $4,579 per one way trip in additional wages because of pad time.
Let me say that another way: That’s Four Thousand, Five Hundred and Seventy-Nine dollars per one way trip paid in paid pad time OBS employee hours (Don’t forget about the T&E employees, too, but you can do your own math).
Just to take that a little further, the Sunset makes 312 terminal departures a year (156 round trips because the train is tri-weekly). Let’s do some more math.
If the Sunset has $4,579 of pad time payroll per trip, then multiply that times the 312 annual departures the train has. $4,579 x 312 = $1,428,648.
Again, in long hand for a chilling realization: The Sunset Limited annual payroll, just for pad time for employees (without taking into account peak season crew increases) is One Million, Four Hundred and Twenty-Eight Thousand, Six Hundred and Forty-Eight dollars.
Since we’re on a roll here, let’s determine how many extra passengers it takes to pay just for pad time in the schedule.
The average length of trip on the Sunset is about 700 miles for coach passengers (longer for sleeping car passengers). Using promotional fares and others on average, you can get about $115 for fare revenues for that length of trip.
So, divide $1,428,648 by $115, and you need 12,423 passengers to pay for the pad time in the schedule.
Does this help explain why it’s so easy to make targets out of long distance trains?
Does this help explain why it’s so critical to have well-maintained equipment and good T&E crews and good dispatching for long distance trains?
Does this help explain why just seemingly minor things can have such a huge impact on a train’s bottom line?
An example of this is in San Antonio, Texas (one of your humble correspondent’s favorite cities). The Texas Eagle, leaving from the new Amtrak station (which sits on the same tracks alongside the old Amtrak/SP station that is now an entertainment complex), has to take almost an hour’s worth of circuitous tracks to get in and out of the Amtrak station and onto or off the main line to Austin and Fort Worth.
That’s all because one very small piece of connector track (that the length of it can be measured in terms of feet, not miles) from the station tracks to the nearby main line is missing. And, no one has been anxious to fix it.
So, day in and day out, the daily Texas Eagle eats up two additional hours of OBS employee time (see Sunset Limited example above and do your own math), plus T&E time, plus lengthened schedules for passengers, which almost everyone seems to think about last.
We’re talking big, big bucks here.
And, San Antonio is not the only example. There are many, many other pieces of missing trackage and/or roundabout accesses to and from stations and terminals all over the country. Think about the many slow approaches to stations like the New Orleans terminal that is a stub-end station. Again, hours upon hours lost.
Think about getting in and out of Chicago, Amtrak’s main national hub.
It is points like these, that, if they had been properly attended to first, instead of reinventing high speed rail in the mode of the failure of Acela, that could be saving Amtrak millions upon millions of dollars a year.
The point missed is that instead of fixing gaping holes in a system that already has proven its potential for over a 100 years, Amtrak senior management went after the brass ring of Acela, and bet the farm on something that may take years and years now to achieve profitability.
If the much less expensive broken pieces to the national system had been fixed when identified, and if Amtrak senior management had paid scant attention to the national system instead of having the transit fixation of the NEC and other corridors, Amtrak could be operating today at much, much less of a deficit.
Remember the TRA $2.3 billion? That money was supposed to be used to fix many of these problems like San Antonio. Was that the case? No. The money instead went into the NEC.
Now is not the time to trash the national system because it has been criminally neglected. Now is the time to look at the national system with reality and realize it’s a critical piece of our domestic transportation network that will work near perfectly with some fine tuning and loving care.
To do anything else is to waste an opportunity of gigantic proportions and doom the United States to have a huge gap in the domestic transportation network that will cost much, much more to replace in the future than to fix now.
To everyone this Thanksgiving holiday, whether you’re reading this in the United States or reading it abroad, have a safe and happy holiday weekend, and God Bless America.