United Rail Passenger Alliance

Volume 7, Number 11

As Amtrak continues to say the right things, and to do a few as well, the logic of incrementalism is making inroads… but the “old-think” that stunted our passenger rail network for half a century hasn’t gone away yet.

Amtrak’s Fleet Plan (pdf), released at the end of February, is one of the most positive of their publications issued. Parts of it read almost as a reply to the calls to action reprinted in this column a few short months ago:

The modeling that has been undertaken to underpin this plan is based on anticipated growth in all major lines of Amtrak business, the Northeast Corridor (NEC), long distance services and state corridors (both existing and new). This approach is consistent with the goals that have been set within Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008 (PRIIA), which reauthorizes Amtrak and establishes new programs for the development of the intercity passenger railroad system within the United States, and the experience of recent years with the increase in demand for the current services.

It cannot be emphasized enough that new equipment is a vital pre-requisite to the process of delivering enhanced passenger rail as envisioned by PRIIA. Moreover, a sustainable passenger service requires regular investment in equipment. Rebuilding existing equipment is always a temporary solution and does not save money in the long term. If passenger rail service is to be sustained and grown, equipment investment has to be accepted as part of the process…

Based upon demand analysis and the defined [lifespan] policies, Amtrak needs to buy the following equipment over the next 14 years:

• 780 single level cars
• 420 bi-level cars
• 70 electric locomotives
• 264 diesel locomotives
• 25 high speed trainsets…

That certainly counts as “saying the right thing.” According to Business Week on March 23rd, Amtrak is proceeding apace with the plan:

Amtrak, the U.S. long-distance passenger railroad, asked Congress for $446 million to begin replacing locomotives and passenger cars…

Joseph Boardman, chief executive officer of Washington- based Amtrak, told a House Appropriations Committee panel today the railroad needs to raise its budget from the requested $2.1 billion for the next fiscal year…

“Between 2002 and 2008, Amtrak increased its ridership by 32 percent without buying a single piece of new rolling stock,” Boardman testified at the transportation subcommittee hearing. “That’s a remarkable accomplishment, but one that cannot be sustained indefinitely.”

In this space previously, we have opined that Amtrak has rarely gone to Congress with a request for specific growth targets. For the first time in recent memory, they have.

(Speaking of adding service, North Carolina announced yesterday a third daily train between Raleigh and Charlotte, creating basically a train leaving each endpoint of the corridor roughly every five hours between 7am and 5pm. Service begins June 5th.)

As Amtrak makes the first moves toward expanding capacity, the high speed rail advocates have begun speaking a little about the importance of the “conventional” train as part of a matrix.  Chicago’s WBBM reported this week:

Advocates for high-speed rail passenger service, meeting in Chicago, said Saturday that this is the year to seek what they want from Washington and laid out an ambitious agenda that calls for higher-speed passenger trains nationwide…

While Harnish’s immediate goal is a true high-speed, 220 mile-an-hour, rail link between Chicago and St. Louis by 2020, he wants to see a series of other steps funded that will make Chicago the nation’s high-speed rail hub.

“Four bullet train routes, upgrading the rest of the system to at least 100 miles an hour, filling in some very key gaps and at least doubling frequency on all routes. That’s what I’d like to see,” Harnish said.

Harnish’s last point is the strongest. Certainly it would be nice to have something like the ICE, TGV, or Thalys whizzing across the Midwest, in California or Florida, or one day between Georgia and Maine (though the concept of an Augusta-Augusta train is too much alliteration for this author to contemplate); but it is the raising of average speeds, the expansion of the route matrix, and the increase from daily to multiple frequencies that will create the need for the few high-speed trains.  As we have discussed here before, running trains between two cities (oh, say, Tampa and Orlando) without connecting to downtowns, local transit, the network regional or “conventional” train service, and all the airports on the route is a recipe for failure. Projects like Wisconsin’s, connecting Madison with the Chicago hub, are the sensible ones and should be the “immediate goals” because they start serving people in a relatively few months, not ten years from now.

As to the critics, Joseph Vranich, in his 1997 book “Derailed: What went wrong and what to do about America’s passenger trains”, writes:

Amtrak’s goal of operating at 100 mph outside the Northeast Corridor was a throwback to past railroading practices. Steam engines pulling passenger trains on the Milwaukee Road and Chicago & North Western Railroads more than fifty years ago [in the 1940s] were hitting that speed, and trains elsewhere were close to it. If 100-mph trains were unable to keep their customers when airports and highways were underdeveloped, then they sure won’t build traffic in today’s competitive environment.

Let us momentarily set aside modern railroad safety requirements that have limited top speeds.

Now, a dozen years after Vranich’s remarks, you can no longer re-enact Dinah Shore seeing the U.S.A. in your 1957 Bel-Air Chevrolet because your pothole-plagued Interstate is plugged from 5am to 9pm; and if you care to endure the traffic to the airport, the demand to see your papers please and the strip-search followed by sitting in a seat that feels nine inches wide for two hours with no peanuts let alone bathroom breaks while waiting for a takeoff slot, then you can fly. Seriously — No market for convenient train service between our towns and cities?

Ronald Sheck, in his 1982 report “Amtrak 90: A Route to Success” writes,

Amtrak trains outside of the Northeast Corridor are slow not only in comparison with passenger trains operated on main-line railroads in other parts of the world, but they are frequently slower than trains two decades ago on the same routes. While more than $2 billion has been spent in upgrading the 456-mile spine of the Boston-New York-Washington Northeast Corridor for 125-mile-per-hour operation, there is no need to make an investment of that magnitude in order to bring overall passenger train speeds up to competitive levels. Figure 12 shows target end-to-end travel speeds, and some sample journey times for 1990 illustrate goals for the planning period. Speeds in these suggested ranges are considerably above automobile trip times and for journeys of up to 300 miles may equal or better aircraft times if airport-to-downtown travel is included.

Note that, almost three decades later and even after the Acela project and its further billions, there are still few miles in the Northeast Corridor that see speeds higher than 125 mph.

From his Figure 12 let us excerpt these sample goals and examples:

Long Distance   50-55 mph   Chicago-Los Angeles  40 hours
Medium Distance 60-65 mph   Los Angeles-Tucson   8 1/2 hours
Short Distance  70-75 mph   Tampa-Miami          3 3/4 hours

In 1937, Santa Fe advertised its Super Chief as making the run from Chicago to Los Angeles in “39 3/4 hours.”  In 1956, with equipment not unlike today’s trains, performance was nearly the same, leaving Chicago at 7pm and arriving L.A. the following morning at 8:30. Today’s Southwest Chief departs Chicago at 3:15pm and arrives the following morning at 8:15 — three and a half hours slower than in 1956. Yes, there route differences (especially in greater Los Angeles) and station stops have changed somewhat, but we are talking endpoints here. Sheck’s 40-hour goal should be easy, if not inexpensive, equalling the 1937 schedule one with modern technology.  Building Harnish’s Midwest network of 100-mph corridors would be a start.

Similarly, the Sunset Limited, America’s oldest name train, likewise in July 1956 left Los Angeles at 07:30pm, arriving New Orleans on the third day at 4pm. Today, Amtrak’s version leaves Los Angeles at 2:30pm — five hours earlier than 1956 — and arrives on the same third day at 2:55pm — about one hour earlier. Today’s train is four hours slower than in 1956.

Here are comments submitted by Anthony Haswell — widely known as the “Father of Amtrak” — circa 1998 to the Surface Transportation Board (“under 49 USC §24308(a), Finance Docket 33469.”) The subject at that time was the addition of Express to Amtrak’s trains, but the facts remain:

Amtrak passenger trains over many of its route-miles outside the Northeast Corridor are anything but “modern”. Amtrak trains between many city-pairs are slower than the trains operated between the same points 45 to 60 years ago.

                   Railroads' Time/MPH  Amtrak Time/MPH
City-pair            December 1941        October 1997 

New York-Chicago         16:00 / 60        18:26 / 52
New York-Pittsburgh       8:25 / 52         9:20 / 48
New York-Miami           24:00 / 58        26:25 / 53
New York-New Orleans     28:30 / 49        30:10 / 46
Washington-Chicago       15:45 / 49        18:00 / 43
Washington-Pittsburgh     6:40 / 44         7:28 / 40
Chicago-Detroit           4:45 / 60         6:00 / 47
Chicago-Cleveland         6:00 / 57         6:46 / 51
Chicago-Cincinnati        5:15 / 58         8:45 / 37
Chicago-Carbondale        4:26 / 70*        5:30 / 56
Chicago-New Orleans      15:30 / 59*       19:25 / 48
Chicago-St. Louis         4:55 / 58         5:30 / 51
Chicago-Kansas City       7:00 / 64         7:55 / 53
Chicago-Omaha             8:00 / 62         9:00 / 56
Chicago-Milwaukee         1:15 / 68         1:32 / 57
Chicago-Minneapolis       6:45 / 62         7:59 / 52
St. Louis-Fort Worth     14:55 / 50**      16:17 / 46
St. Louis-Kansas City     5:00 / 56         5:30 / 51
New Orleans-Memphis       6:30 / 61*        8:35 / 47
New Orleans-Houston       7:30 / 48**       9:13 / 39
Fort Worth-San Antonio    6:23 / 50** %     7:22 / 39
Oakland-Los Angeles       9:47 / 47        10:45 / 43
Oakland-Bakersfield       5:40 / 56         6:05 / 52
Oakland-Portland         15:00 / 47**      18:50 / 39     

* June 1948   ** June 1953  % Dallas-San Antonio
Source: Amtrak October 26, 1997 timetable
Official Guide of the Railways, 12/41, 6/48, 6/53

In some instances, there are small differences in mileage between Amtrak routes and the earlier routes. These differences were taken into account in computing the average speeds.

Some of the Amtrak trains make more stops than the fast trains of earlier years. I submit that this is not of major significance. For people travelling between endpoints or larger intermediate cities, the fact is that their train is slower today than what would have been available to them two generations ago, while air and highway transportation has improved exponentially. Furthermore, it is not unreasonable to expect that a half-century later, intercity passenger trains should be able to make more stops while at least equalling the earlier end-to-end schedule time. In at least two instances — Chicago-New Orleans and St. Louis-Kansas City — the impressive historical performance included more stops than Amtrak makes today.

Many of Amtrak’s trains have a poor on-time performance even on their slow schedules…

The timekeeping of trains like the Sunset Limited has happily improved from the dark first days of the Union Pacific – Southern Pacific merger. Amtrak can continue to improve performance by making sure their trains are always ready to leave on time; but it will be the incremental upgrades of a siding here, a straightened curve there, and a new automatic-switched station throat track to eliminate a five-minute delay, that will move the average speed upward, and whittle away the minutes between endpoints.

Stepping back to a broader picture — Passenger rail facing stiff competition from publicly subsidized highways and airlines; the need to repair and modernize the passenger fleet; a push to do more with existing trains and stations; and a productive relation with labor.  When are these headlines from? 2010? No — let us look back to 1947 and Robert R. Young, the “Populist of Wall Street” who, at that moment, controlled the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway and was poised to take chairmanship of the New York Central:

“Competition on land, sea, and in the air, the steady decentralization of industry, and the carriers’ inability [primarily through regulation] to increase the price of their product as much as other prices have increased, are again working to reduce their [the railroads'] share of the national income… They have got to make money the hard way. They have got to try to expand their passenger business, the only part of their business inherently expansible…”

“…Young himself is absolutely sure the unions will come his way [on reforms] ‘Labor is with me,’ he explains airily. ‘I told them it was a choice between an efficient low-cost operation and a high-cost dying operation. They said they understood it the same way, but could never get the management to go along.’” Fortune describes how Young’s team implemented suggestion boxes, long resisted by management, and how “employees identify themselves with Young… morale of the rank and file seems remarkably high.”

Another of Young’s controlled railroads, the Pere Marquette, inaugurated its “Detroit-Grand Rapids streamliner… in August 1946; the train reversed the national trend of declining passenger revenues, hauling 76 per cent more people between Grand Rapids and Detroit than its predecessor did in the same period of 1945…”

“[Young] wants to replace practically all the Central’s fleet of 2,100 cars, of which only some 700… are of the so-called lightweight type. This would cost no less than $100 million… The Central’s present management is, to put it mildly, distinctly cool to the whole notion. ‘If Governor Dewey puts through his $200-million superhighway from New York City to Buffalo,’ President Metzman says flatly, ‘we’re bound to lose still more people to the highways.’”

As to Young’s “almost endless inventory of ideas, some pneumatic and some substantive, about passenger service… most of [them] are a bit dusty; anyone who reads Railway Age, the industry’s excellent trade paper, will recognize them readily… Yet the fact remains that whereas others only talk about their wonderful ideas and then put them on ice, Young is doing something about them, and right on the C.&O.”

– Fortune magazine, May 1947, page 96, “Mr. Young and his C.&O.”

Hold the line, please! What was that quote again?

“They have got to make money the hard way. They have got to try to expand their passenger business, the only part of their business inherently expansible…”

There you have it — Fortune at the late date of 1947 suggesting that passenger trains, run properly, could make money for the railroads. With, indeed, the caveat about publicly funded superhighways.

The operative parallel between 1947 and now is that Amtrak is asking itself the question, How can we raise revenues faster than expenses? This we could call at least “cutting their deficit” while the more optimistic among us might postulate such an idea, sufficiently nurtured, eventually resulting in phrases like “small operating profit.”

If we can stop trying to build superfast toy trains that don’t connect to anything, and keep doing what Amtrak and states like North Carolina and Wisconsin have started these past few months, then we might finally be getting something done.