Could Railroads return to passenger service?

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I hope your right, but I do tend to agree after reading some of the post that the overall cost would be significant to a rail road.

When all this discussion got off in to every railroad for it self, that was a good point. But perhaps it could be coordinated though a single reservation system that would be responsible for issuing the tickets making is much easier on the traveling public. Amtrak already uses a lot of the infrastructure so it is partly in place already as well.
 
When all this discussion got off in to every railroad for it self, that was a good point. But perhaps it could be coordinated though a single reservation system that would be responsible for issuing the tickets making is much easier on the traveling public. Amtrak already uses a lot of the infrastructure so it is partly in place already as well.
I agree with you on that point. If nothing else, a nation level outfit like Amtrak or some other outfit should be made responsible for acting as the multi-agency/company reservation and ticketing coordinator and clearing house that all passenger rail operators will need to subscribe to. The situation right now is an unmitigated disaster with every agency running passenger trains running (except those that run with Amtrak as contractor for ticketing) their own ticketing system and no subset of tickets that interoperate. Each agency can of course have their own special tickets too, but through ticketing should be possible from any station to any other station in the US with passenger service crossing operating agency/company boundaries.
 
The advantage of Amtrak or something like it is a uniform reservation and ticketing system, interconnected and shared equipment utilization, standardization, etc. Amtrak's ops could be separated into separate sub-corporations such as the NEC, state supported, and long distance trains. However, the idea of bringing in a different outside operator to take over from Amtrak some parts of the system would result in less coordination, more management expense, and less interconnected service. The freight railroads are private corporations responsible to stockholders and boards of directors and have to make a profit. They have no interest in getting back into the passenger operating business unless they can make money at it. So when gasoline hits $10 a gallon they might get interested. To run passenger trains they would have to set up the whole management and operating infrastructure all over again. A huge expense. Don't look for that to happen anytime in ours or the next generations lifetimes.
 
I do remember reading Sante Fe had second thoughts when they saw what Amtrak did to the Super Chief route,thus why it was the Southwest Limited. Yes, Sante Fe seriously flirted with the idea of taking its trains back,but do to the new contracts written with Amtrak made it not feasible.
 
I do remember reading Sante Fe had second thoughts when they saw what Amtrak did to the Super Chief route,thus why it was the Southwest Limited. Yes, Sante Fe seriously flirted with the idea of taking its trains back,but do to the new contracts written with Amtrak made it not feasible.
Yes, it was 1973. Amtrak was running their "Super Chief" with a loads of something over 400 people (they dropped the El Capitan name and the Super Chief/El Capitan was one train) and one 44 seat diner. That was apparently the last straw for Santa Fe management, which wasn't happy based on the reports of the Santa Fe people who were still working the train, pulled the rights for Amtrak to use any "Chief" name, which they had rights to. They felt that damaging the Chief name, closely associated with Santa Fe, damaged Santa Fe's image. The post-script is that Santa Fe deemed the Superliner version of train by 1983 good enough that they allowed them to use "Chief" in the name, and the Southwest Limited became the Southwest Chief. Don't know if anyone is paying attention to it now. Doesn't really look like it, and BNSF isn't even Burlington Northern Santa Fe anymore. It is just BNSF.

John Reed, the Santa Fe president, also once commented that the newly redecorated cars (in screaming purple, retinal burn orange, with some paisley thrown in), looked they belonged in "...a French bordello..."

I didn't know that Santa Fe considered taking them back. That is really interesting, it would be interesting to get the details of that. I do know that Reed has stated that if he could have kept only the trains kept by Amtrak, the Super Chief, the Texas Chief, and the San Diegans, Reed would have kept Santa Fe out of Amtrak and in the passenger business. But the law wasn't written that way, and they would have had had to have kept the San Francisco Chief, 23/24 (former Grand Canyon), the Tulsan and the La Junta-Denver connector until at least 1975 if they stayed out. It was too much. Even so, Santa Fe seriously considered not going in and didn't agree to join until mid-April 1971.
 
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I do remember reading Sante Fe had second thoughts when they saw what Amtrak did to the Super Chief route,thus why it was the Southwest Limited. Yes, Sante Fe seriously flirted with the idea of taking its trains back,but do to the new contracts written with Amtrak made it not feasible.
Santa Fe was the last road to decide to join Amtrak before A-day. Only RI&P, DRG&W, and Southern chose not to. And irony of ironies, Southern's President became the longest serving president of Amtrak, although I contend he was senile at the end of his reign which was, in fact, the end of his life.

But Santa Fe never wanted to take the train back. They couldn't, and they knew it. It would have been bad for them to do so. The law was quite distinct. Reed was quoted as saying, "Unfortunately, there is no going back now." in 1973 when Amtrak lost the right to use the Chief brand. But they didn't regret it so much as to want to take on an unprofitable business.

Nobody ever believed Amtrak would survive to 1980, let alone 1990. We didn't think it would survive past the Warrington era. For all the god-awful hell he caused, us railfans have to admit, the person we have to thank for Amtrak being around today isn't Clinton. Or Gunn. Or Bush. Or Kummant. The man, perhaps indirectly, responsible for Amtrak's existence today is Osama Bin Laden.

Personally, I'd rather not have Amtrak then have had 9-11 happen. But there it is, and we can't deny it.
 
I'm surprised we've gotten this far in the discussion without mentioning two possible area where private railroads may want to re-enter passenger service:

- The NEC. Wasn't there some sort of study ordered into the costs of operating service on this corridor?

- High-speed rail. Although this seems unlikely for long-distance travel, isn't the regional approach to high-speed rail setting up the possibility of companies other than Amtrak operating on these lines?

Aside from those two points, I don't see private railroads going back into long-distance passenger travel. It's been too long and I don't think they would be able to recoup the startup costs without heavy outside support.
 
I'm surprised we've gotten this far in the discussion without mentioning two possible area where private railroads may want to re-enter passenger service:
- The NEC. Wasn't there some sort of study ordered into the costs of operating service on this corridor?

- High-speed rail. Although this seems unlikely for long-distance travel, isn't the regional approach to high-speed rail setting up the possibility of companies other than Amtrak operating on these lines?

Aside from those two points, I don't see private railroads going back into long-distance passenger travel. It's been too long and I don't think they would be able to recoup the startup costs without heavy outside support.

I think you're right on the NEC point--I recall hearing something about it, but the NEC is so far off my radar that I don't rightly recall.

Per the second point:

In the broad strokes, yes, the current thinking about high speed rail opens the possibility of third-parties building and operating them. I know that the TGV people in France have shown some interest in domestic high speed rail--they've been mentioned in Texas, at least. And there is some thinking out there that the last thing regional high speed rail needs is Amtrak, if for no other reason than Amtrak brings with it the can of worms that is political wind--a point made in this very thread. Commit to having Amtrak lead the way under a friendly administration and then what happens when the next administration (or Congress, for that matter) is not so rail friendly? Or what happens when so-and-so's district gets funding for rail versus another so-and-so's district?

Okay, having said that, let's back up for a minute.

The reality of implementing high speed rail, whether it's a national network or a regional one, is that there will very likely be no day where a state says "Okay, today's the day we begin the eminent domain process for our bullet train right-of-way." Or, further, no day where a state says "Okay, today's the day we break ground on our new bullet train right-of-way construction." A backyard example for me would be the reaction to Rick Perry's darling Trans-Texas Corridor, which raised enough ire to seriously make people think Perry would be political poison in the primaries/general election. I would have been personally affected by the TTC--my family property abuts US 59, which was (and probably still is) going to become I-69. The TTC would have included right of way for express trains, freight, as well as additional lanes for interstate traffic, plus pipelines.

Even though I was wary of the thing, it DOES show a lot of forward thinking, and in all likelihood would have been a boon to the state of Texas.

Probably the final nail in the coffin of the TTC was the much-publicized agreement with a Spanish coalition to build it and operate it. There never was much discussion beyond that point; the NIMBYs were already livid over the way the state was going to have to acquire the right-of-way ("land grabs") and this Spanish consortium gave them the additional ammunition they needed to get the whole smash taken off the table, essentially.

Applied to the current thread, my gut feeling is that the citizens of other states would likely react the same way as Texans did. The more vocal of them, whom I'll dub CAVE (Citizens Against Virtually Everything) people, are the proverbial squeaky wheels.

So what we're left with is the incremental approach to high speed rail, which begins not with bullet trains and catenary, but with the process looking more like this:

1) Increase frequency of traditional rail service on already-serviced lines.

2) Taking advantage of the inroads from step 1 (which would likely require some degree of capital improvement) begin to increase the average speed of already-existing services. The upshot here is that the equipment is already good for a modest speed increase, and the new FRA requirements are going to set the table for increased speed (although on who's dime hasn't quite been ironed out.)

3) Pause here and focus on chasing a higher AVERAGE speed rather than a higher TOP speed (this is where, in many ways, the business side and the railfan side diverge--average speed of 39MPH isn't as sexy a pet project as top speed of 200MPH--even if the train only assumes that speed for a mile or so.)

4) Begin to add additional services that connect and/or feed existing ones, again following the basic template of steps 1, 2, and 3.

Then, sometime in the future, true high speed rail MIGHT come into the picture. But I'm not so sure that's step 6. It might be step 56, or step 256. To crib from the film "Apollo 13," we have 500 things that have to occur in order. We're on step 3.

Why is this relevant to the original question? Because look back at those incremental steps and ask yourself, "Who is the entity involved or potentially involved?" Without a major change in policy, the answer is "Amtrak." Set in stone? No. But pretty difficult to divest them from the process. That's likely why Amtrak is presenting itself as the de facto standard builder/operator for the future. And, in a large way, they do have a lot of experience and expertise. If the political baggage wasn't so heavy, they might even be the absolute best choice--I've met some of the folks in Amtrak management, and contrary to a lot of public opinion, they do know their railroading. They also know the realities of operating in the American political climate. That makes them realists, which I'm afraid many/most railfans are not. Enthusiasm has to be tempered by realism/pragmatism.

Just my .02.

Edited to add:

Focusing on step 3 for a second--I just ran some quick and dirty calculations that really illustrate the diminishing returns for chasing speed. Assuming a 500 mile route, the largest jump in time improvement occurs between the average speeds of 35 and 45 MPH. That cuts the travel time by 21%. With each 10MPH improvement, the results diminish:

45-55 = 15%

55-65 = 10%

65-75 = 8%

75-85 = 4%
 
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The only route that makes a "profit" if you accept that profit is against operating expenses only, is the NEC. Throw in the capital costs however and the NEC is still a money loser, a major loser for that matter.
The Lynchburger has been throwing up surprisingly good numbers, but I don't know if they bring it close to a "profit" under any meaningful definition of "profit".
 
Freight railroads went to a lot of trouble to get rid of passenger service. They don't want it back.
For the most part. however, didn't the UP a few years ago actually campaign for Caltrans to start up a commuter train operation on UP's former WP

Bay area line?

And didn't Amtrak have to compete with other company(s) for the operation and management of MBTA's Boston commuter trains?

And perhaps a few other examples around the country.

So perhaps freight railroads don't want to return to total passenger train operation on their own, they do see some potential for profit in operating the service for a public authority.
I guess my questions would be: "What would make any of us think the freight railroads would operate any more efficiently or with better levels of service than Amtrak?" What would happen to the current Amtrak employees? Would they be transferred to the "new companies" based on seniority, route selection, union work rules, etc? Where would the freight railroads get their equipment? Would it be transferred to their new companies much like they transferred their old and worn out equipment to the new Amtrak? Why would the government subsidize these new companies, since they continue to demand Amtrak lessen their subsidy?

None of this makes any sense to me and I just can't see it happening. It is not logical - not saying that governmental decisions are always logical!!
 
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The only route that makes a "profit" if you accept that profit is against operating expenses only, is the NEC. Throw in the capital costs however and the NEC is still a money loser, a major loser for that matter.
The Lynchburger has been throwing up surprisingly good numbers, but I don't know if they bring it close to a "profit" under any meaningful definition of "profit".
The Lynchburger doesn't yet appear on Amtrak's monthly reports which is where I was looking for the numbers that I provided, so I didn't even think about that one. Additionally I skipped all the State Sponsored trains anyhow, since at least as far as Amtrak is concerned, they don't loose money.

And of course the jury is till out on whether that's due to the "Oh, let's go check this out" factor coupled with the Holidays that occured at launch time.
 
The Auto Train is the best performing route, only missing covering its operating expenses by $6.6 Million last fiscal year, but it still lost money. The LSL however is one of the worst performing routes, as is the Crescent, both losing more than $30M last year. The Capitol Limited is kind of middle of the road at $17.7M lost against operating expenses.
Of course one of the ongoing problems that has been argued endlessly is Amtrak's method of cost allocation to trains for the purposes of computing these numbers. I have never been able to convince myself that they actually have a viable computation of these numbers so I tend to take all of them with a pinch of salt as many others do too.

But then again, given that this is all we have in the way of disclosures, what else can you do? But one must keep in mind that an outfit that has shown relative lack of interest in running LD trains would tend to find a cost allocation algorithm that would show them to be worse losers than they probably are too. In short I don't know for sure, but I don't fully trust the Amtrak provided numbers yet. However, I am open minded and am willing and eager to be convinced that they are indeed credible.
Actually the numbers that I've used represent direct costs charged to that train and FRA allowed charges for expenses to the trains. Here are the definitions for FRA and direct costs:

Total FRA Defined Costs represents Host Railroad MofW and Performance Incentives, Fuel andPower, T&E Crew, OBS and Commissary costs, Car and Locomotive maint. and Turnaround

Costs, Commissions, Reservations, Call Centers, Psgr Inconvenience, and Route Stations.

-Total Remaining Direct Costs include Shared Stations, MoE Supervision and Training,

Maintenance of Way, Yard Ops, Marketing and Distribution, Insurance, Terminal Payments,

Procurement/Purchasing, Police/Environmental and Safety, and T&E Overhead.
So this is before some of the more questionable/shady charges that we have all wondered about for years. But it's before capital expenses, so the idea of foisting off some of the costs of the NEC onto the LD's doesn't come into play here.

That said, I suppose we could still debate things like is Amtrak actually dividing the call center costs by the number of trains to allocate, or do they base it upon the number of reservations/queries per train line. And we know that Amtrak California handles their own calls because they weren't happy with what Amtrak was charging them for the call centers.
 
Freight railroads went to a lot of trouble to get rid of passenger service. They don't want it back.
For the most part. however, didn't the UP a few years ago actually campaign for Caltrans to start up a commuter train operation on UP's former WP

Bay area line?

And didn't Amtrak have to compete with other company(s) for the operation and management of MBTA's Boston commuter trains?

And perhaps a few other examples around the country.

So perhaps freight railroads don't want to return to total passenger train operation on their own, they do see some potential for profit in operating the service for a public authority.
UP and BNSF do operate routes for Metra in the Chicago area under contract. The railroads provide the crews, while Metra provides the equipment and other management services. I believe CSX operates trains for MARC that run on CSX tracks, but off hand I don't know of any other places where freight railroads are directly involved in commuter train operations other than contracting out for use of their tracks. So I guess it's possible that a freight railroad might be interested in running some kind of intercity service under a contract with a state or transit authority, but I'm sure no freight railroad would operate a passenger train on its own without some kind of government-backed contract. After all, the reason they got out of the passenger business is because passenger don't make money. If passenger trains had been making money for the companies back in 1971, Amtrak would have never been created.

Several private companies run commuter trains under contract with government agencies. Herzog and Veolia being the most prominent. Other transit agencies run their own trains, i.e. on Metra on some rourtes, New York MTA (Metro North and Long Island), N.J. Transit, SEPTA and NICTD (South Shore). Boston's commuter trains are run by a company called Boston Commuter Railroad not affiliated with the other privates firms. Amtrak operates commuter trains for CalTrain, MARC (on the Northast Corridor) and soon, Metrolink. Amtrak recently lost the contract to run the Virgina Railway Express trains to a French company. Several years ago, some Illinois legislators proposed turning over the state-funded intercity trains to Metra, believing Metra would be a better job of operating them than Amtrak, but there were some legal hurdles to that move and Amtrak seems to have stepped up to improve its operation of the Illinois trains.

So, there are a variety of train operators out there.

Operation of some of the new high speed raillines, especially California and Florida, might be contracted out to European or Japanese firms, Herzog or Veolia, or even Amtrak. We have to wait and see. Variety, of course, is the spice of life.

The "denationalization" of railroads in Great Britan has created what seems to be a nightmare of operating companies, track-owning entity (once private, now nationalized again), equipment owning companies, etc. While some routes run at a profit under the current system, most routes receive some kind of government funding.
 
The freight railroads are only going to be interested in passengers if they can show a profit by it, or they are forced legally to do so to meet their common carrier obligations. Perhaps a better question is what market forces need to change to make passenger rail pay for the freight railroads. Remember also the tremendous potential liabilaty that the RRs were able to get out from under with Amtrak.

Look at the dynamics of the railroad industry, findiing the most profitable spot of bulk loading (full trains if possible) and discarding passengers, mail, lcl, thousands of single carload shippers, etc. At the same time being an extremely labor intensive operation and finding the technology and practices to reduce labor needs. Air brakes, automatic couplers, deisel-electric locomotives, telegraph then telephone then computer communications, and the list goes on. Along the way they discarded as much excess track as they could. Suddenly in the 1990's the trend to less labor stopped or slowed almost to a standstill and the rising rate of fuel/labor started shifting intermodal traffic to rail and the railroads started showing serious profits again. The railroads got busy in the 2000's and suddenly realized they needed more capacity for peak business. Passenger rail became an inconvience at best.

Currently serving passengers (through Amtrak, a freight rail owned Amtrak, or individual RR's) is going to be a money loser due to the way highway subsidies and taxes are structured, and the way air lines are allowed to use publicly funded airports (if they had to OWN or fly into private for profit fields watch the price go UP). The only way the freight RRs would have a benefit is if heavy subsidies are provided in a manner they can show a profit, or their is enough streamlining of red tape processes that having the compelling use of passenger services will be net them value.

The hidden option is to give the freight railroads Amtrak, compelling them to provide a decent level of service to fulfill common carrier obligations. This would be IMHO worse than subsidizing Amtrak today as the freight railroads would go from mostly apathey to mostly sabotoge.

Bottom line. NO
 
A couple of quick thoughts on this subject -

- I think, given capital costs, that Railroads would demand the government provide equipment and capital for service facilities for any passenger trains they ran. This would result in duplicate facilities in many cases as different railroads had similar facilities rather than one common facility.

- I would be concerned about pork barreling on the part of the railroads in the absence of Amtrak as something of a gate keeper. Consider the proposal for the Northern Flyer extension through Kansas - BNSF wants the government to double track major parts of one subdivision for TWO TRAINS a day. Imagine if railroads controlled all trains including existing. UP would love it, no doubt any issues on the Sunset would require major capital to double track the remainder of the line. (As it is , I have worries that Amtrak management isn't pushing back hard enough against the railroads, given the last three route studies all included massive capital requirements for limited services).

- Amtrak should, when functioning well, be very focused on route improvements, expansion, and service improvements. Would the railroads have a similar focus, or would they just do what they had to do to collect the checks in the mail monthly?

- Privatization in and of itself does not result in a repeal of the rules of the universe. Services which cost more than attainable revenue continue to lose money regardless of who issues the checks. Yes, a private operator can cut wages of front line staff, reduce maintenance, raise prices, etc, but in many cases they have shareholders to pay, senior managers who earn large salaries, and the like. There have been way too many cases where municipal services and schools have been privatized only to result in higher user costs, reduced services, or outright failure.

In my youth, I would have reflexively said that the private sector would be better at providing good customer service. As I've gotten older, it seems more and more like privatization simply adds another level of overhead to services, doesn't automatically guarantee efficiency gains, but does result in greater income inequality in the new privatized organization. I think the focus needs to be to help improve Amtrak now, and not assume a private operator will accomplish something magical.
 
The "denationalization" of railroads in Great Britan has created what seems to be a nightmare of operating companies, track-owning entity (once private, now nationalized again), equipment owning companies, etc. While some routes run at a profit under the current system, most routes receive some kind of government funding.
Anyone who talks about using Great Britain's "Privatization" of rail to justify privatizing Amtrak brings to mind the end of a educational documentary I once watched about Holland's dikes and levys. It was made in, I think, 2003, and in that documentary, a Dutch offical was quoted as saying that Holland was looking to improve their preparedness for floods by "studying the excellent system in New Orleans."

A statement that the man will probably regret to his grandchildren on his deathbed. An entirely serious documentary turned into a tragic comedy with one sentence and a natural disaster about a year later.
 
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