This Week at Amtrak 2006-07-21
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Volume 3 Number 29
- Have you noticed there is still no new president and chief executive officer of Amtrak? Considering all that’s going on, this is no surprise, and a good thing for whoever does eventually take the job.As noted in the last issued of TWA, Norman Mineta has departed as the United States Secretary of Transportation, and his designee on the Amtrak board, Jeffrey Rosen also is gone from DOT. Since the DOT secretary is the principal Amtrak stockholder by law, it would be tough to select a new head of the company without knowing who the real boss will be. Maria Cino, the Deputy Secretary of Transportation since 2005, is the Acting Secretary of Transportation. As of yet, the White House has not nominated a new secretary.
Here’s the scenario: David Laney is still Chairman of the Board of Amtrak, and Enrique Sousa and Floyd Hall are still board members. Mr. Rosen is gone, so there will be a new designee for the DOT on a temporary basis until the new secretary is appointed and approved by the Senate, and then a newer designee possibly will be designated. The White House has sent two new nominations for the board to the Senate, which has yet to act on them. So, anyone who would be hapless enough to be selected by the current board would be in the same position the mercifully departed David Gunn was in after he was hired. Mr. Gunn was hired by the board appointed by the Clinton Administration, but, when the new board members were appointed after the terms expired of the old board, Mr. Gunn found himself with a nearly completely new set of bosses in a situation which did not work out for either side of the fence.
In the meantime, David Hughes continues as Acting President and CEO of Amtrak, and is doing a good job as caretaker. It will be critical, however, for the survival of the company, for the board to make a selection of an outside candidate for the job permanently. When a new broom sweeps clean, it needs to be a broom with no strings attached to anyone in the company.
- It’s been smooth sailing for Amtrak this budget year for its annual handout of free federal monies. The Senate is looking to approve nearly $1.5 billion for Amtrak this year, matching the generosity of the House. Amtrak requested $1.6 billion this year, and received $1.3 billion for the about to end fiscal year. It is extraordinary in Washington to receive funding this close to the request level; this is a testament to the professionalism and skills of Chairman David Laney that he knows how to play the Washington system and get what he needs. This is also a stark contrast to previous silly games played by former president and CEO David Gunn, who was in the habit of holding his breath until he turned blue unless he got what he wanted. Mr. Gunn usually accompanied his requests with great drama and theatrics that were more counter-productive than productive.
- Speaking of Mr. Gunn, the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper ran two articles recently, one full of revisionist history by Mr. Gunn, and the other an interview with Mr. Laney about the future of Amtrak.Mr. Laney was quoted in the article that among the other changes being wrought at Amtrak, there may be a redirection or shortening of some of the long distance routes in Amtrak’s national system this fall.
URPA Vice President William Lindley explains why this should be done with the greatest caution:
“As Amtrak and ultimately Congress considers Amtrak reform, and especially as it looks at cutting long-distance train routes, it should be noted Amtrak does not have, or does not acknowledge, any data or models to predict the impact of service changes. Amtrak only acknowledges the Route Profitability System cannot be used to predict what might happen if routes or frequencies were to be added or cut. Amtrak has admitted RPS expenses are allocated to train routes subjectively. From a planning perspective, such figures are worthless.
“Contrary to some expectations, past experience such as the 1979 route cuts suggest when routes are eliminated, Amtrak’s high system costs are merely allocated to the fewer remaining trains, making them look even worse. If today’s Sunset Limited appears to be a poor performer, it could well be because, of all the western long-distance trains, it is the only one that runs only three times a week – so its station agents and other station costs are divided among three, not seven, trains.
“Indeed, rapidly growing passenger-mile counts (the only real measure of success in the transportation industry for all common carriers other than fixed-fare transit systems) on the recently privatized British railways suggest that modern equipment, operating on convenient schedules, with convenient connections, can and will attract new riders.
“To understand what will happen to a network of passenger trains, we can look to the late Dr. Adrian Herzog’s Matrix Theory. This states that in a route network of ‘n’ stations, the number of origin-destination pairs is n squared, minus n. In a network of 500 stations, then, cutting a single route with fifty stations reduces the number of places you can go “to and from” not by fifty, but by over forty-seven thousand. That is a large number of travelers who will have to pick a different way to get around.
“Furthermore, Dr. Herzog’s work suggests one train’s potential ridership at a station is related not to the linear value of the population served, but to the cube of the natural logarithm of the population. In other words, a station serving a town of 500 would have a ridership factor of about 6; a city of 100,000 would have a ridership factor of about 42; and a city of five million a factor of about 100. The upshot of these mathematics is that even the smallest stations are significant contributors to long-distance train ridership.
“Amtrak and Congress should not consider eliminating transportation options to towns and cities – which are already longing for more options to highway travel – without first requiring Amtrak planning managers to provide meaningful projections for what would happen in the case of both cuts, and additions to, its routes and train frequencies.”
- If you build it, Amtrak probably won’t come. Rhode Island is discovering this sadness as it is breaking ground on a new intermodal train station next to a major airport in Warwick. The $222.5 million multipurpose facility has long been planned as the link connecting Warwick and its airport to Boston through commuter rail, and to the entire Northeast corridor via Amtrak trains, according to the Providence Journal newspaper.Oops. When the station opens in late 2009, Amtrak won’t be a tenant, and all of the Wondertrain Acela frequencies and other Northeast Corridors trains will pass by without stopping.
It seems that for Amtrak to stop at the station, it will require $50 or $60 million dollars more for building costs for new tracks and electrification, money which Amtrak says it doesn’t have, even though it committed to the project in the beginning. While various negotiations and funding sources were being worked out to get the project going, in 2004, Amtrak changed its requirements for any new online stations for the NEC to require separate station tracks from the main line. Planners now say it could take up to 10 years to make all of this happen to accommodate Amtrak.
Also, Rhode Island DOT and Amtrak are still far apart on the commuter piece of the new station. To expand commuter service, DOT needs to use Amtrak NEC tracks. The state wants to pay $15 a train mile to use the tracks, Amtrak wants $35 a train mile, which amounts to roughly a $2 million difference in the annual payment. Rhode Island claims the normal price nationwide is $8 to $11 a train mile. There are also negotiations over indemnity and insurance in case of problems or a wreck.
This brings up an old point of contention between Amtrak and its host railroads. Amtrak does pay a rate between $8 and $11 a train mile to use host railroad tracks for the long distance system. This cost is what is known as a not fully allocated cost, which means Amtrak only pays for what it actually costs to travel over a mile of track at the time. The cost does not include maintenance of way, updated signaling, associated corporate overhead, or any other cost of doing business for the railroads that would normally be associated with running their own freight trains over the railroad.
Amtrak, on the other hand, has traditionally said what is good for the goose is not good for the gander, because, pleading poverty, it has always charged fully allocated costs for freight trains to run over its NEC tracks. However, to add to the pain, Amtrak, through original sweetheart contracts, grandfathered in commuter rail authorities in the NEC, so this same formula has not held true for commuter railroads.
Here’s the bottom line: if you’re a freight railroad sending a train over Amtrak tracks on the NEC, you pay every associated cost of operating that train, including corporate overhead. If you’re a transit commuter agency operating over that same trackage, you do not pay as much as the freight railroads, even though the costs to Amtrak are the same for operating the track. If you’re Amtrak operating over your own rails, you don’t necessarily charge your own trains with the full cost of each train using the NEC either, witness the highly questionable “profit” reports of Wondertrain Acela and Metroliner trains. The regional Amtrak services in the NEC show huge losses, even though they use the same tracks, same stations, same infrastructure, and same everything else Acelas and Metroliners use.
One bright spot in all of this is Amtrak’s board has said those sweetheart contracts with NEC commuter agencies are going away over a reasonable period of time. This is apparent in the change of pricing between what Rhode Island DOT wants to pay, and what Amtrak wants to charge.
The next hurdle is for Amtrak’s host freight railroads on the national system to have the same benefits for use of infrastructure as Amtrak charges for use of its infrastructure. When that issue is resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, then Amtrak will begin to be an important customer to host railroads, and have all of the benefits that accompany such a status.
- Savvy readers of TWA may recall the past few years mercifully departed Amtrak President and CEO David Gunn was always touting the need to bring Amtrak up to a “state of good repair.” Lots and lots of free federal monies were poured into Amtrak to make this happen.Here is a love letter from an Amtrak passenger, sent to the Letters to the Editor page of The News Journal in Wilmington, Delaware, home of Amtrak’s central national operations center and one of Amtrak’s largest training facilities.
“Amtrak trains broke down repeatedly on way to Fla.
“We left Wilmington on June 16 for Orlando, Fla. Our Amtrak train was scheduled to leave at 12:55 p.m. It was about one hour late. The engine broke down in Yemessee, S.C. at about 10 a.m. (It was scheduled for 5:56 a.m.) We sat with no power for air conditioning, no water, and no bathroom facilities until 1:30 p.m., when a CSX locomotive was borrowed to pull the train to Savannah, Ga.
“We were told by Amtrak employees that people in one car were passing out from the heat.
“In Savannah, we were told to disembark to be bussed to our destination. The people at the station were not informed about the problem and called police about crowd control.
“Several buses arrived from Jacksonville, and we and our luggage were loaded according to destination. We were handed soggy pork sandwiches with cups of barbecue sauce and warm sodas for lunch.
“At 5 p.m., there were at least two buses just for Orlando people. Amtrak conductors, waiters, cooks and other employees traveled with us, handled baggage and handed out meals.
“We arrived at Orlando at about 9:45 p.m. (scheduled arrival was 12:55 p.m.) By the time we picked up a rental car at the airport, it was 11 p.m., too late to safely drive to Sarasota. So we stayed in a motel.
“For the trip home, I dropped my spouse and luggage at the Orlando station for a 12:55 p.m. departure. I dropped off the rental car and called a shuttle to take me back to the station. The board said the train was delayed until 5:45 p.m. It did not arrive until 10:30 p.m., and was pulling another train that had broken down.
“Pizzas and sodas were brought in for everyone waiting. An additional engine pulled these two trains in Sanford. In South Carolina, sandwiches, chips and soda were served. There was no water in the restroom. We arrived at Washington, D.C., at 11:55 p.m. (scheduled for 6:32 a.m.).
“At 12:55 a.m., when we left Washington, Amtrak gave everyone sandwiches, chips, water and cookies. Who wants to eat at 1 a.m.?
“We finally arrived in Wilmington at 2:45 a.m. June 28. We were scheduled to arrive at 8:30 a.m. June 27.
“I was so glad to get home. I know Amtrak cannot control the weather and flooding, but it should maintain engines better to avoid these mechanical and signal problems.
This letter more than proves the point made above about the next president and CEO of Amtrak being an outsider. We have already witnessed some new senior level managers come into the company, and some of the worst ones have departed. However, considering the level of customer service which occurred here (or perhaps, lack of customer service is a better thought), why is Emmett Fremaux still Amtrak’s Vice President of Customer Service? These passengers, through no fault of their own were treated abysmally, with little consideration for their comfort, convenience, good health, or any other matter. Contingencies which should have been planned for in advance obviously never occurred until too late. People were endangered because of this. If Amtrak is going to continue to have mechanical difficulties (and, it will take some time for all of the mechanical problems to be solved), why are there not plans automatically in place to meet these challenges? Why are passengers asked to travel on a service that is not only undependable, but potentially life threatening?
Something needs to be done, and the beginning point is a complete replacement of Amtrak’s customer service values and efforts, beginning at the top. Mr. Fremaux, the former head of the District of Columbia elections office, needs to leave the railroad industry and go back to a bureaucracy where he can do less damage than he is doing now.
- Wondertrain Acela has yet more problems. The electric outlets passengers are supposed to have available to them for use with laptop computers, cell phone rechargers, and other uses inside the rail cars have failed, causing all of the outlets to be disconnected. Amtrak says the root of the problem has been found, and a fix is shortly on the way. (Sigh) What else will go wrong with Acela? If this type of electric problem can occur, what else can go wrong on these trains powered solely by electricity?One can’t help but wonder what the people at Bombardier, the manufacturer of Acela must be thinking. Bombardier is a company respected throughout the world for its excellent products, craftsmanship, and ability to get a job done right. And, then along came Acela, much of the design and implementation of which was forced onto Bombardier by Amtrak under the less than sterling stewardship of departed misfit Amtrak President and CEO George Warrington. One can only suppose Bombardier probably feels it wishes it never heard of the name Acela or had anything to do with the project. No good deed goes unpunished, especially when it comes to Wondertrain Acela. Bombardier deserves better than to be associated with this problem child created by Amtrak.
- Ever wonder who that is traveling next to you? Passengers on the Southwest Chief this week have reason to wonder. The Associated Press reported police in Kansas City, Missouri arrested an Amtrak passenger on the Southwest Chief, traveling from Los Angeles to Chicago when they found 10 pounds of cocaine in a bag they believe was his. The 35 year old passenger claimed the cocaine wasn’t his. Uh huh.
