United Rail Passenger Alliance

The Dirty Little Secret The Government Doesn’t Want You To Know: Americans Love Passenger Trains

By James E. Coston, Chairman, Corridor Capital LLC
Delivered at the National Passenger Rail Leadership Summit, Union League Club, Chicago

[M]y speech is about a Dirty Little Secret. I want to talk to you today about some things that passenger-train advocates are not supposed to know — and that members of the media and the general public — and especially public policy makers and legislators — are not supposed to know about passenger trains.

I bring this Dirty Little Secret up today — not because I want to discourage you, or demoralize you — but because I want to arm you with essential material you will need as you take the fight for a modern passenger-rail service to the next level. We mustn’t let the next 35 years look like the last 35 years.

Before somebody accuses me of opening on an excessively grim note, however, let me just observe that these are very exciting days that furnish us with excellent grounds for hope.

We just proved it here in Illinois. As many of you know, last year the Illinois General Assembly voted to double its spending for state-supported Amtrak trains, and to get four new daily round trips added to the timetable on about five months’ notice.

During that extraordinarily short lead time, Amtrak had to negotiate slots for each train with the railroads, identify and prepare suitable rolling stock, and hire and train new crew members.

It wasn’t easy. There were glitches — both before and after the new trains were introduced.

But it was all worth it. Just in case you’ve been on Mars and haven’t seen the actual numbers, here’s what happened.

On October 30, the Illinois Department of Transportation began sponsoring two new frequencies between Chicago and St. Louis and one additional frequency each between Chicago and Carbondale and Chicago and Quincy:

In the first full month in which the new trains operated — November 2006 — ridership on state-supported trains between Chicago and St. Louis shot up 91 per cent.

When calculated across the full slate of Chicago-St. Louis trains — three state-supported plus two supported wholly by Amtrak — the ridership increase was 51 per cent over November 2005

On the Chicago-Carbondale route, which got its first morning departure from each end of the line in nearly 30 years, ridership was up 61 per cent in the first month. Last month it was up almost 70 per cent.

On the weakest of the three routes — Chicago-Quincy — ridership was up 35 per cent in the first month. Last month it was up 47 per cent.

The holiday peaks of November and December are long gone now, but the monthly ridership figures just keep growing.

On February 9, after three full months of operation, IDOT reported that the St. Louis corridor was 50.6 per cent ahead of a year ago, the Quincy route was now 44.6 per cent ahead, and the Carbondale route, which serves two huge state universities, was 68.6 per cent ahead of a year earlier.

It now seems very likely that sometime this summer — that is, less than a year after the new frequencies were introduced — ridership on Amtrak’s three Illinois corridors will have doubled.

Nowhere in the United States has passenger-train ridership ever increased at such a pace.

Which is truly amazing when you learn our Dirty Little Secret: This wonderful new Illinois train service actually isn’t very good.

Put it this way: Illinois is not California.

We never passed a bond-issue package like California did in 1990.

We never raised $245 million for intercity passenger-rail infrastructure and $382 million for passenger rolling stock.

We never bought our own fleet of 17 locomotives and 88 passenger cars.

We have to live with Amtrak’s Horizon cars, which are not true corridor equipment but adaptations of commuter-train rolling stock. They look dirty on the outside, and they’re smelly on the inside.

We also must live with the infrastructure limitations of our host railroads. Illinois has not restored any missing double track, as California recently did on portions of the former Southern Pacific Railroad.

Between Amtrak’s rolling stock and the railroads’ capacity constraints, on-time performance of the Illinois trains is terrible, and the Amtrak and IDOT people in this room will confirm it:

On the Carbondale corridor the CN/IC delivers the trains to their final destination on time only about 80 per cent of the time.

But on the other corridors BN and UP get the job done only about 50 per cent of the time. And the rate is dropping as their freight traffic continues to build.

Did I mention the stations? Our stations are, for the most part, pathetically inadequate to handle the numbers now seeking to ride.

Only a handful of Illinois stations, led by the new intermodal transportation center at Champaign and followed by joint Metra-Amtrak stations at Glenview and Naperville, meet current standards for passenger accessibility, capacity, convenience and comfort.

Chicago Union Station is beyond obsolete. It has crowd-control and user-friendliness problems that are on the brink of becoming public-safety and public-health problems.

And while our state budget for passenger-rail operating support just doubled from $12 million to $24 million, it still falls far short of California’s $75 million, which pays for 40 daily round trips compared with Illinois’ seven.

Yet all of these inadequacies only emphasize how big our victory in Illinois really is.

Just imagine: If we can double our train ridership in less than a year with the inferior trains, tracks and stations we’ve got now, think how fast our ridership would grow if these assets could be replaced with adequate ones.

If I can slip in a little infomercial, that’s the task our company, Corridor Capital, is working on today: We’re trying to bring Amtrak, state DOTs and investors together to make it easier for operators of passenger trains to get the modern rolling stock, stations, maintenance shops — and even infrastructure — they need to handle the coming tsunami of passenger-train demand.

We feel a lot more confident in offering those services today than we did a year ago, because the numbers we’re getting from these seven daily Illinois frequencies have taught us a lesson that now needs to be shared with rail advocates — and with elected officials and public policy makers all across the country.

What is that lesson?

Simply that the United States has crossed a major watershed: There no longer is any argument about whether the American people want to ride trains.

Remember back in 2000 when Amtrak President George Warrington told a congressional committee that it looked like Amtrak was not really on its “glide path to profitability” — yeah, remember that? — and that maybe it was time to hold a “national debate” on whether the country should make a commitment to a serious passenger-rail service?

I’m here to tell you today that debate is over and the verdict is in: The people are riding trains. … In fact, in Illinois our ridership was growing by double digits even for the three years before the four new trains were added.

Now we’re going to double our ridership in one year. We’re going to fill up the new trains without cannibalizing any trade from the old ones.

Even California never did that.

And please remember, there’s another way Illinois is not California: We’re not cultural pioneers here. New trends do not start in Illinois. They reach Illinois—usually from the West Coast and after a lag of several years. We’re Heartland, not La-La Land.

Well, the train trend has reached the Heartland. If Illinois is ready, the whole country is ready.

In one sense, this success makes our job as advocates easier.

When we ask our elected officials to fund more passenger trains and more infrastructure improvements, we don’t have to speculate about, “If we run it will they come?”

We ran it, and they came.

We don’t have to hire expensive consultants to do computerized ridership projections.

The public is buying tickets faster than the computers can project the trends.

All we have to do is run trains, and the riders show up at the depot.

And those riders, my friends, are only a tiny sliver of the potential ridership in our state and across the rest of the Heartland.

That’s because most of the people who need these trains still don’t realize the trains exist.

Amtrak and IDOT have close to zero money for promotion.

There’s no TV advertising and only a tiny amount of print advertising, most of it in college media. We still don’t understand how all these new passengers found out about their trains.

So you have to ask yourself not only, “How many people would ride these trains if they were actually good?” — but also, “How many people would ride these trains if they knew about them?

And by “know about them” I don’t mean just reading a news story re-written from an IDOT or Amtrak press release.

I mean hearing and seeing first-rate advertising for these trains — creative, exciting, contemporary messages appearing repeatedly — in the same forums where people learn about Southwest Airlines and Carnival Cruises and Hilton Hotels and Harrah’s Casinos and Disney World and Toyota and all the other travel/hospitality/mobility resources we have to choose from today.

Have you any idea of the scale of the response that would follow if trains were promoted as hip and happening?

That’s not a rhetorical question. I can answer that question, because the answer already is part of the historical record. The Dirty Little Secret is, we are not entering new territory. We’ve seen this movie before.

How many of you have read the wonderful book by Rush Loving called The Men Who Loved Trains? … The Men Who Loved Trains now in its sixth or seventh printing, and there’s no mystery why: It’s a very exciting, well written book about some of the most dramatic episodes and larger-than-life personalities behind the revival of the Class I railroad industry in the late 20th century.

Don Phillips raved about it, TRAINS magazine excerpted one of its chapters, and everybody who’s read it loves it.

But The Men Who Loved Trains doesn’t just deal with the freight side of the railroad industry. Rush Loving devotes three-and-a-half pages to showing that while the federal government was laboring during the 1970s to revive much of the nation’s freight railroad industry it had to figure out what to do with the passenger trains as well.

And if you read those three-and-a-half pages you will probably react with the same sense of deja vu that I did.

According to Rush, skyrocketing ridership growth on passenger trains is nothing new in this country. Even the passenger-train advocates may have forgotten it, but the kind of ridership growth we’re seeing today already happened 35 years ago..

Rush tells this part of the story through the eyes of Jim McClellan who retired a couple of years ago from Norfolk Southern.

But when Amtrak started up in 1971 Jim McClellan went to work there as a long-range planner in the marketing department. And McClellan was there when a very interesting figure named Harold Graham left Pan American World Airways and joined Amtrak to become vice president of marketing.

I’ll tell what happened in Rush’s own words, based on his interviews with McClellan:

“Amtrak’s marketing vice president was a rotund, highly personable man with a big white walrus mustache who had come from Pan American World Airways, and he started promoting trains to the masses like he had pushed flights to Paris and Puerto Rico. The American public responded and started sampling the trains again. Ridership was growing at about 15 per cent a year. McClellan had foreseen this, projecting a growth rate in this range for Amtrak’s first year or so, a rate the operations department could easily handle. But he grew concerned that traffic would surge beyond expectations if such a marketing program continued. Noting that a similar promotion had doubled business on the Canadian National Railway and it had not been able to handle the volume, McClellan warned his superiors in a memo that they were headed for trouble. ‘The results could be disastrous,’ he warned. ‘It’s hard to get a growth curve and then turn it off.’ His memo did not endear him to the marketing vice president or to Roger Lewis, Amtrak’s chairman.”

Loving goes on to point out McClellan’s importuning irritated Roger Lewis, who “shot the messenger” by firing McClellan in 1972.

But, in Loving’s words, “…by 1974 his worst fears had come true. Traffic surged, and Amtrak was not able to handle it.”

I can confirm Jim and Rush’s testimony personally.

At the same time as the events in this account were taking place, I was earning my college money working for Amtrak as a ticket agent and station-services representative at Chicago Union Station.

I can confirm to you that every night we were putting out a sold-out 18-car Broadway Limited to Philadelphia and New York, and that every night I had to tell several dozen travelers who arrived at Union Station without reservations that we had no space for them.

I can confirm to you that summertime demand for space on the Western trains was so great that Amtrak ran not only the Southwest Chief but also temporarily revived the Chief on a “flipped” schedule that allowed a morning departure from Chicago, an evening arrival in Los Angeles and convenient daytime departures for intermediate stops that the Southwest Chief served only in the wee hours.

I can confirm to you that we ran not only the California Zephyr to Oakland but the Denver Zephyr as well to handle the overflow demand that didn’t need to ride all the way to California.

I can confirm similar market demand existed for what today is called the Chicago Hub service. On major holidays, and on many weekends, we would run second sections following the Turbo Trains to St. Louis, Detroit and Milwaukee.

When I came back to work extra at Thanksgiving and Christmas, I found Amtrak running 10-car trains to Quincy, even borrowing commuter cars from the railroads in those pre-Metra days.

We did the same thing on football weekends when there were big games at Champaign, Carbondale, Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor. … As Rush Loving points out, this demand had to be contained. The burgeoning demand for passenger rail service alarmed the railroads. They were under the impression that ridership would continue to dwindle.

The rail carriers believed that in five or six years the government would remove the passenger trains from their rails for good and allow them to downgrade their tracks to the 40-mile-per-hour standards of the coal and grain trains that were believed to be their sole remaining lines of business.

Rampant passenger-train demand also had alarmed the auto manufacturers, the highway builders, the airlines and the petroleum industry.

These industries had been assured that demand for passenger trains did not exist and that the federal government would invest only in transportation projects that favored their interests.

The demand also alarmed Congress, which had been assured Amtrak would be a modest program that would not last long and would not cost a lot of money.

There simply was no real appetite among policymakers for a passenger-rail buildup at the time. So the demand had to be squelched.

The U.S. government made a fundamental decision: It would not respond to the growing demand for passenger trains.

Funding for growth was to be withheld.

Existing rolling stock would be replaced, but only on a one-for-one basis.

The size and capacity of the fleet would not be expanded.

New routes would not be opened.

Additional frequencies would not be scheduled.

New stations would not be built.

Service levels would not be upgraded to attract more passengers or to enable Amtrak to enter new markets.

Instead, the government would spend the next 35 years propagating a series of urban legends suggesting that demand for passenger trains actually was shrinking rather than growing.

One of these legends claimed that the American people had embraced highways and airlines as their sole preferences for intercity travel.

This legend continued to be propagated even after USA Today reported in August of 2001 — a month before 9/11 — that 41 per cent of Americans contacted in a poll said they will not fly. Whether out of fear, dislike of the flying experience, or some other factor, nearly half of all Americans simply shun air travel.

Yet the legend that Americans love to fly persists even today, when no comedian can open his routine without talking about what happened to him at the airport or what happened to a planeload of passengers trapped on a grounded jet for 10 or 12 hours.

It was a masterful and very daring use of the Big Lie technique, and it’s had a very long run.

Even today, when the demand for passenger-train service has become too big and too noisy to dismiss, the Big Lie has mutated in order to stay alive.

In the current version, passenger trains are now O.K. and people seem to want them, but only if they are of the type known as “corridor trains.”

Another species of train known as “a long-distance train” is now being portrayed as “not O.K.,” and travelers are said to be rejecting them.

The only problem is that demand for space on the long-distance trains is growing too, even though those trains get even less promotion than the so-called corridor trains.

Why is this new version of the old urban legend succeeding?

One reason is the power of vocabulary. Policy wonks and journalists have a predisposition to believe that every distinction in language signals a difference in the real world.

It would not occur to these people that both types of trains are used the same way: The bulk of the people who ride the so-called long-distance trains actually them use them as corridor trains: They get on or off at the intermediate points, not the end points, traveling only for a fraction of the train’s total itinerary.

I am very grateful to our friend Rick Harnish, who did a study that pointed out all these facts nearly three years ago. Rick’s study was written up by Fritz Plous in the August, 2004, issue of the Midwest Rail Report.

Rick pointed out that only 9 per cent of the Empire Builder’s passenger traveled the whole distance from Chicago to Seattle or Portland.

The other 91 per cent traveled on 929 other trip permutations averaging only 845 miles.

That meant that for the price of one long-distance train, Amtrak was getting the equivalent of five or six corridor trains — a terrific bargain.

Think how much more it would have cost to base separate crews, rolling stock, maintenance forces and commissaries at St. Paul, Fargo, Minot and Spokane. Amtrak avoids all that by running a single daily train from Chicago to Seattle.

Rick also found out that the Empire Builder was getting two subsidies — one from Amtrak and one from its own sleeping-car passengers.

The first-class ticket-holders made up only 16 per cent of the passengers, but they were paying 43 per cent of the train’s costs.

Those first-class fares helped hold down the cost of travel for the coach passengers. But that big source of revenue wouldn’t have been there if the Builder weren’t an overnight long-distance train.

Look behind the curtain and you find the real reason why the federal government has decided corridor trains are O.K. and long-distance trains are not O.K.

The word “corridor” is actually a proxy for the term “state-sponsored.” Corridor trains are deemed good because the federal government — and Amtrak — can get state governments to pay for them.

Long-distance trains are deemed “bad” because it’s impossible to get states to collaborate on funding trains with a multi-state route structure.

The corridor trains are an Amtrak commission. The long-distance trains are not a commission, but a mission — belonging solely to Amtrak and its tightwad sponsor, the federal government.

Thirty-five years later the campaign to get passenger trains off the federal budget and into somebody else’s continues.

But this time there’s a difference: The campaign isn’t working. Congress isn’t buying it, and the last we heard, the new CEO of Amtrak isn’t buying it either. At the very least, he’s having doubts about its utility, if not its appropriateness.

As I said, the debate is over. The American people want to ride trains.

But if the debate is over, the fight isn’t. I said I wanted to arm you with some arguments that would take the debate to the next level.

And the next level is simply this: More trains, on more routes — expansion of the system.

And not just what we now characterize as “corridor” trains or “long-distance” trains, but trains that use contemporary business and trip-generation models to attract and efficiently serve all varieties of domestic travel.

We’ve saved our trains enough. Now it’s time to grow them.

And there’s only one way to do that, and that’s to convince the federal government — not just Congress, but the administration too — that a passenger-train buildup is a federal responsibility along with highways and civil aviation — and that it’s needed and wanted.

No more excuses this time.

Especially that feeble and obsolete excuse that “Americans just won’t ride trains.”

If you believe that, I’ve got a state I’d like to show you.

Thank you. …