United Rail Passenger Alliance

COMMENCEMENT DATE: The sooner, the better

Ladies and Gentlemen,

You’ve been doing a better job lately telling the Amtrak story, but, please, make at least one more giant leap forward. Too many reporters who should know better are misconstruing facts about Amtrak’s long distance train national network.

With the reintroduction this week of the Lott-Lautenberg senate bill (S. 294, renamed the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2007) reauthorizing Amtrak, and the resultant press coverage, in story after story we have seen phrases such as “money losing long distance trains,” or “lightly used long distance trains” from sources such as the Associated Press and Reuters, both of which should know better.

Why aren’t you doing more to stop this nonsense? Your own figures from FY 06 show 2,430,166,000 revenue passenger miles were generated by the long distance train national network, while the combination of all NEC trains, including Wondertrain Acela was just 1,482,448,000 revenue passenger miles, and the short distance trains, which includes state supported trains, generated only 1,448,903,000 revenue passenger miles.

To put it another way so everyone can understand, 15 daily and tri-weekly long distance trains in each direction generated 2.4 billion revenue passenger miles, 40 daily NEC trains in each direction generated 1.5 billion revenue passenger miles, and 102 short distance daily trains generated 1.4 billion revenue passenger miles.

Not to make too fine of a point, but 2.4 billion revenue passenger miles from 15 trains (two of which aren’t even daily) versus 2.9 billion revenue passenger miles from 142 NEC and short distance trains hardly seems like “lightly used long distance trains.” [You may wish to point out another figure, that 3,731,200 passengers rode those “lightly used long distance trains.” Now, please be careful using this number, because it is only a body count, and has no link to definitions of load factor, average length of trip, or revenue passenger miles. But, it does say that 1.2% of Americans rode long distance trains last fiscal year. There is a lot of infrastructure maintained in this country for a lot more money every year that is used by far less than 1.2% of the population. This is not an expression of modal envy, but an expression to allow Amtrak’s first professional board of directors and a new president and chief executive officer an opportunity to stop the federal money flow into a black hole known as Amtrak and commit the same amount or less money into a healthy and robust Amtrak that meets its original mission and function — to create and maintain a realistic part of the domestic transportation matrix of providing a passenger rail component that efficiently operates passenger trains for all purposes, including leisure travel, family travel, or business travel.]

From a financial aspect, the 15 trains in the long distance network, on average each generate $23,868,066 in gross revenue (before any subsidy), and the 142 trains in the NEC and short distance networks only generate $7,035,810 each on average in gross revenue. The total operating expense (according to Amtrak figures) was $1.1 billion for the NEC and short distance networks, and $841 million for the long distance train networks.The average load factor on the 15 long distance network trains was 55.1%, on the 102 short distance trains, 40.7%, and 45.2% on NEC trains.

As to the “money losing” aspect, that Amtrak figure is confusing and needs to be cleared up. The FY 06 books show a positive cash flow for Acela, without any subsidy necessary. But, the same books also show a subsidy requirement for other NEC trains, which use the same stations, same dispatching personnel, same tracks, and same reservation system as the Acela trains. Please explain how one set of trains, Acelas, with 2,668,200 riders can “make money,” while other NEC trains, with 6,840,200 riders, loses money.

We also know your executives have made statements that the long distance system loses $300 million a year (and the FRA in the past has put that figure at $100 million), but your FY 06 books show that figure at $481.6 million. Where are the books being padded? What is being charged against the long distance system that isn’t being charged against the short distance or NEC trains?

Is the difference in the cost of maintenance of way of the NEC, which you are charging to capital costs instead of operating costs? Are you even charging a set track fee to Acela and other NEC trains, or are you dumping everything into a capital costs account the “pretty up” the operating books? If the true federal operating subsidy is a total of $584 million, and you received $1.3 billion from the federal government, where did the rest of the money go, after Railroad Retirement mandatory payments and debt service?

All of this can be very confusing, so you can see why the corporate communications department needs to go on the offensive, issuing outright challenges to reporters who are not communicating the true Amtrak story.

The public and politicians have time and again been fed wrong information about the long distance system, and haven’t bothered to do any digging on their own. Most reporters have just regurgitated old saws about Amtrak failures without looking at real facts. It’s the job of the corporate communications team to clean up that mess, and get the right story out to the public.

The Amtrak Corporate Communications Department doesn’t just work for the part of Amtrak that runs the NEC; it works for all of Amtrak, including the part of Amtrak here in bow and arrow country, west of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and south of Washington, D.C.

We all have to remember the concept that Amtrak has “lurched from crisis to crisis” as Reuters reported this Tuesday, January 16th, was mostly the making of its two last presidents and CEOs, George Warrington and David Gunn, who seemed to specialize in “the sky is falling” when it came to talking with the media and politicians. We know all of that alleged lurching was Amtrak-made more than anything else. Now, it’s up to the corporate communications professionals to clean up the lurching mess and get the facts straight so the public and politicians have a real picture of Amtrak.

Women’s offer to help is derailed

By Dave Lieber Star-Telegram Staff Writer

The train trip sounded like a terrific idea. Members of area chapters of the Red Hat Society planned a weekend trip from Fort Worth to San Antonio. They bought round-trip tickets on Amtrak and prepared to hit the rails.

Only the train was four hours late arriving.

But when it finally got to the Fort Worth station that day in October and the 38 members of the social organization prepared to board, they didn’t know that the worst was yet to come.

“A comedy of errors,” trip organizer Debbie Brookshire later told me.

The women who sat on the lower level of the bilevel train were told at first that they couldn’t get any dinner because the train was late. The women persisted.

“They told us, ‘We’ll have somebody come down and take your order,’” Donna Morris said. “We never saw an Amtrak employee.”

One of the women called a relative who worked at a restaurant in Waco. When the train stopped there, the relative brought food on board.

The rest of the Red Hatters sat on the upper level. When they walked to the dining car, Brookshire said, Amtrak personnel “jumped in our faces.” The staff said that the dining car was about to close and that they had not known the women were coming.

Brookshire told them they had bought their tickets two months ago. “It’s not my fault the train was late,” she told them.

Morris, who sat downstairs, remembers going upstairs to get ice.

“The guy serving the food was on the phone,” she said. “It was obviously a personal call. He said, ‘I love you, too.’ He wasn’t talking to his boss. He hung up and turned around. We said, ‘We need some ice.’”

She said he replied, “I got off the phone for that?”

“Isn’t that your job?” Morris asked.

“You don’t have a clue what my job is.”

She answered, “Well, you’re not driving the train, so can I have some ice?”

You’ve got to admire the Red Hatters’ spunk.

There were other problems. The downstairs passengers complained of being too hot, while the upstairs passengers said their cars were too cold. And nobody could fix it.

The train finally arrived in San Antonio around 4 a.m. Of course, the taxis that had been arranged to take the women to their hotel were long gone.

The weekend in San Antonio, the women told me, was terrific. But when it came time to leave, several of them rented cars to get home rather than ride again on what they had come to call Damntrak.

Red Hat members complained. An Amtrak representative offered the entire group vouchers equivalent to the value of half of their round-trip tickets. The women talked it over. At first, they thought they could use them for a future Red Hat train trip. But many of the women vowed never to ride the train again.

So they came up with another idea. What if they donated the vouchers to a nonprofit organization that helps military families?

They had a group in mind: Family & Friends for Freedom Fund, based in New Jersey, helps military families travel to meet wounded members in all branches of service as they recuperate in military hospitals. Fund founder Paula Sturla told me she was excited about the Red Hatters’ generous offer.

So the Red Hatters explained their plan to an Amtrak representative. But the Amtrak official said it was not possible because it was against Amtrak’s rules. All vouchers must be used by the passengers to whom they are assigned.

The Red Hatters were miffed. “Here we’re trying to do a good deed,” Brookshire said. “Military people don’t make a lot of money. We wanted to help them. If somebody gets wounded and gets sent back to the States to a medical hospital and a wife is clear across the country and can’t afford to go to the hospital, they could take the voucher and say: ‘Here is your ticket. Go help your husband.’”

The Red Hatters called the office of U.S. Rep. Kay Granger, R-Fort Worth, Morris said. A caseworker tried to persuade Amtrak officials to make an exception and provide assistance to military families with wounded relatives.

But Amtrak wouldn’t budge.

So the women called The Watchdog.

I had several conversations with Marc Magliari, an Amtrak spokesman in Chicago. He explained that the policy is strictly enforced because Amtrak wants to avoid its vouchers being sold on the black market.

“They are not transferable because we don’t want them abused, and we want the people who deserve the compensation to receive it,” he told me. But he said he would see what he could do.

Days later, he called back and said the policy was rigid.

However, he told me the fund could apply for “a standing discount” that can be used for anyone traveling under the group’s auspices. He asked me to put the group’s leaders in touch with him to apply for the discount. I’m taking care of that.

Still, I wondered whether everyone in the travel industry has a policy prohibiting the transfer of such vouchers.

Southwest Airlines spokeswoman Brandy King told me: “Our vouchers are transferable to anyone. Our policy is that you can’t sell or barter them, but if you’d like to transfer them, you are allowed to.”

The Red Hatters, meanwhile, are not happy with Amtrak.

“They are the most rigid organization that I have ever dealt with in my life,” Morris said. Yet the offer of a standing discount for the Friends for Freedom Fund, she said, is “better than nothing.”

The Watchdog column appears Fridays and Sundays. Dave Lieber, 817-685-3830 watchdog@star-telegram.com

Apparently, there are, as they say, “still a few bugs in the system.” Some fact checking reveals other passengers have encountered the same kind of service on the Texas Eagle, a train, when it was under the direction of a product line manager, that was known for good service. The Eagle has an OBS staff from the Chicago crew base.

This is not the first time a Chicago crew has been criticized for rudeness and abruptness. There seems to be a strange phenomenon that some crew bases habitually have abusive employees when it comes to passengers, and other crew bases exemplify all of the good things about passenger service. The only explanation for this is the state of crew base management. Good crew base managers motivate and demand good work from their employees, while uncaring or bad crew base managers allow employees to run amuck with no consequences. These type of stories indicate more housecleaning is needed at Amtrak to weed out many of the employees and managers that never should have been hired for passenger service jobs in the first place. It is neither fair to the employee or passenger when someone doesn’t have the emotional and professional qualifications to be helpful and pleasant to all passengers. The result is unhappiness on everyone’s part.

Keep in mind a piece of the CSX main line track already goes through Irmo. No Amtrak trains use this part of CSX.

Mayor John Gibbons and Irmo residents believe a new siding in town would allow multiple trains to use the siding to keep the CSX main track fluid. Irmo residents say the siding would cause noise and shake their homes.

Irmo was founded as a railroad whistle stop in the late 19th Century. Right now, up to 20 trains run daily through the community, and Irmo sits in the middle of a 30 mile segment of single line track without a siding. In the real world, that’s known as a bottleneck.

Current freight train loads include coal, auto parts and grain, say CSX officials. Somehow, town leaders have jumped to the conclusion that because CSX wants to keep its trains moving efficiently, suddenly chemicals and other dangerous freight cargo will be on those trains.

CSX spokespersons say the new siding, wherever it’s finally located, will have an electronic warning system, electric switches, and other features experts call the best safeguards against wrecks.

But, Irmo worrywarts aren’t convinced. They want no part of “progress.” These are the moments when you have to wonder if all of those residents and government officials who enjoy the many benefits of the federal, state, and local taxes that CSX and other railroads pay would be happy to get rid of that tax income if those pesky trains disappeared. Perhaps they would also be happier to have all of those additional huge semi trucks on the local and state highways, too that would appear to replace railroads. Maybe they would like the marked increase in the cost of everything from electricity to groceries on store shelves without the benefit of freight moving over railroads.

The residents of Irmo and most other places need to get over themselves. Railroads aren’t any more interested in unsafe operating conditions than trackside dwellers are who choose to have homes near railroad tracks.

This type of “not in my backyard” argument is just plain silly.