This Week At Amtrak 2004-09-16
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Vol. I, No. 3 – September 16, 2004
- Good news from our Canadian cousins: Peter Armstrong’s Great Canadian Railtour Company, operator of Rocky Mountaineer Railtours in Western Canada has been selected by Canadian National Railway Company to operate passenger rail service over CN’s newly acquired BC Rail in British Columbia.Previously BC Rail operated a rail diesel car train between North Vancouver and Prince George, considered by many to be the most spectacular scenic route in North America. On an interesting note, part of the new service will take GCRC trains over a part of the VIA Rail Canada route between Prince George and Jasper, Alberta, the route of VIA’s Skeena, which runs from Jasper to Prince Rupert on the BC coast, a stop on the Alaska Marine Highway. Full scale operations are scheduled to begin in 2006.
GCRC has an excellent reputation both in the travel industry and the railroad industry. Mr. Armstrong, a former Grayline Tour bus operator, took a dream, some scarce dollars, and cast-off VIA/CN coaches a decade and a half ago and convinced a reluctant CP Rail to allow him to run his trains on the original heritage route of CP’s Canadian between Vancouver and Calgary. BC’s famed route will be in good hands.
- Speaking of our Canadian cousins, no one does onboard and passenger services better than VIA Rail Canada. The company operates just a skeleton of Canada’s original passenger rail system, all with equipment that is 50 years old or older. Locomotives are F-40s, bought when Amtrak was running the same motive power. Yet, VIA trains sparkle, everything is in superb running order, and the slightest interaction with a VIA employees shows they are not only happy to be working for VIA, but they genuinely like serving passengers.
Transition to Amtrak. Poorly maintained equipment. Non-motivated employees. Horrible on-time performance. A company that is genuinely surprised every winter when cold weather and snow arrives, and throws up its collective hands in surrender to the weather elements, as if they were the French military.
Why is there such a difference between Amtrak and VIA? Why can a country with less population than the Commonwealth of California run a first class passenger rail system, and the richest nation on earth runs a system as if we’re living in a third world country?
Money is not the answer. VIA, which is a government-owned corporation, just like Amtrak, receives its share of free Canadian federal money every budget year. VIA has been through the same ups and downs as Amtrak, including losing almost half of its system in 1989 due to government budget cuts.
The difference is management on all levels. First, VIA is not a gigantic federal jobs program as Amtrak still is today. VIA overtly discriminates in who it hires – only employees who are both qualified and want to work for the railroad. VIA managers are hired for their competence, not as agents of social change and hired to fill a gender or racial quota. VIA simply hires the best people, of whatever gender or race they may happen to be, in a country that is even more politically correct than the United States.
Interestingly, VIA union work rules are not nearly as liberal as Amtrak’s work rules, yet VIA seems to survive and prosper.
What does all of this point to? Most of Amtrak’s problems are self-created, not as a result of lack of funding or political support.
Perhaps the most profound statement ever uttered about Amtrak came from a now-departed product line director: ‘Amtrak needs to have the courage to fire the employees it never should have hired in the first place.’
Only when Amtrak understands the width and depth of its problems in-house, will it become a viable organization.
- Sadly, Brock Adams, former congressman, senator, and Carter administration secretary of transportation has passed away at the age of 77. Senator Adams, who represented Washington state, had a long and colorful career in Washington.
In 1970, then Congressman Adams helped develop the Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970, which established the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak by its legal name), and was primarily responsible for the Regional Reorganization Act of 1973 which put several insolvent railroads under the direction of the Northeast Rail Corp. Two years later, Congressman Adams created a plan to further consolidate seven bankrupt railroads in the Northeast and Midwest into Conrail.
As transportation secretary, he presided over Amtrak’s first route discontinuances, and also crafted the 1979 federal bailout of Chrysler Corporation.
Mr. Adams was elected to the senate in 1986, and did not run for reelection in 1992.
- Hamilton, Ohio is about to go from being a schedule stop on the Cardinal route to a flag stop. The Cardinal, when on time, stops at Hamilton in the wee hours of the morning. The station is in what is considered to be a bad part of town, and the condition of the station is said to be in a state of deterioration. Still, even though the Cardinal is only a tri-weekly train, 1,451 passengers used the station in 2003. That means an average of 4.5 passengers used the station each time the Cardinal stopped in Hamilton. Making the station a flag stop possibly leads down the road to discontinuance as a station stop altogether. City officials in Hamilton say they are trying to find money to rehabilitate the station and make it a more attractive stop for Amtrak.
Middle of the night stops always seem prime targets for discontinuance (such as the loss of four station stops in Florida when the Palmetto abandons the old Seaboard route through Central Florida). Still, considering the Cardinal is a tri-weekly train, the station is in poor condition and in a dangerous part of town, 1,451 passengers using the station in 2003 seems like a desirable amount of business.
Here’s a clever idea: instead of abandoning or near-abandoning stations that are less than perfect in Amtrak’s corporate eyes, how about trying to put some resources into local advertising and marketing to see ridership and revenues couldn’t be improved, instead?
Oops, what a silly thought. Amtrak, being an operations-driven company instead of a passenger services driven company, does not reward its managers for revenue improvements. The way Amtrak’s management is structured, the company ONLY rewards managers for expense savings. The possibility or thought of increased revenues is not taken into account for decisions like turning a scheduled station stop into a flag stop, or any other passenger services issue.
That’s why dining cars are mostly looked upon with scorn by 60 Massachusetts Avenue in Washington. The transit mavens who regrettably are in charge of the company only focus on trains that can be easily run in daylight hours with a minimum of staff. It doesn’t matter what the unique opportunities of long distance rail travel are, or what the revenue possibilities are; if the business model doesn’t require low cost coaches and lounge/caf� cars, then the model is not considered for implementation.