NY Times: Anderson out, William Flynn in

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What resources were moved from LD to regional/corridor services? Speaking out in favor of expansion into corridor service doesn't mean that it has to come at the expense of the LD service. The FY 21 budget request (prepared under Anderson) included funding requests for LD locomotive and Superliner Replacements.

You made an argument some would agree with, that the bus bridge plan was just subterfuge to get additional money out of Congress. If that’s the case - it worked.

However, he was pretty clear in a variety of public interviews that we had too many LD trains and that corridor services were the future. I don’t believe that was subterfuge.

I just don’t believe he had the people skills, negotiation skills nor the salesmanship to get anyone in Congress over to his way of thinking.
 
The FY 21 budget request (prepared under Anderson) included funding requests for LD locomotive and Superliner Replacements.

Indeed, he deserves credit for insisting that new equipment was needed and attempting to do something about it. However, that also doesn’t prove he wasn’t anti-LD - because he repeatedly said we should have FEWER LD trains, not ZERO LD trains.

Most people here would consider a proponent of less LD as anti-LD.
 
Interview from the Skift Global Forum preview...

“Probably today, we operate 15 of them (LD trains), including Empire Builder across the northern western half of the U.S., the Zephyr from Chicago to San Francisco, the Southwest Chief, and the Coast Starlight. In an ideal state, we probably would operate somewhere between five to 10 and instead focus our efforts and resources on short-haul intercity transportation, because that’s where the demand indicators are for Amtrak.”

Complete interview here (thanks Jis):
Skift Global Forum Preview: Amtrak CEO Wants to Bring Airline Nimbleness to the Rails
 
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To me Anderson’s biggest issue was his complete lack of people skills. A CEO is the chief executive salesman for a corporation. Agree with it or not, Anderson had a vision for where he wanted to take Amtrak. With his people skills and 535 shareholders, he didn’t have a snowballs‘ chance in hell of succeeding on that front.
 
Put all of your funding into half of the trains and you get all the stuff back everyone complains about.

Absolutely true. Anderson’s stated vision in that article was 5-10 experiential trains and a significant expansion of corridor services. While I am somewhat torn - if he could have pulled it off it would probably be better than what we have today.

There are just 100 reasons why he couldn’t pull it off. Maybe soon we’ll see what kind of vision Flynn has, and if he is pragmatic enough to get it implemented.
 
State funded corridor expansion is a pipe dream with Red and Blue States so divided. I hope that changes in the next decade. 90/10 and 80/20 funding matches being turned down by Red State governors such as mine in Iowa is a disgrace but it is what it is. Andersons plans were meant to fail in my opinion. If the SWC experiment was allowed to proceed other LD routes would have fallen like dominos with very few if any corridors popping up.

It hasn’t been mentioned yet but I would bet money the Gullf States expansion will be cancelled now due to budget shortfalls with the involved States and localities resulting from Covid 19. It at least gives ammunition to those who were against it to revisit the issue.


Quad Cities Times Dec 26th 2013
“Iowa slams door on Amtrak”

“The Iowa extension was priced at $108.6 million, according to a previous estimate. Federal authorities would have covered $88 million, leaving the state’s share at about $20 million.”
 
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I understand the concerns perfectly and agree with them. They're not proof of an anti-LD agenda. The food comes from Congress. The bus bridge never happened, and instead strengthened the viability of the SWC by getting funds committed to the maintenance of the route.
Congress did NOT say that Amtrak had to serve sugar and microwaved "McAwful Muffins" for breakfast. They did not say Amtrak had to limit its lunch and dinner menus to 3 different meals combined for both lunch and dinner for months on end. They did not prohibit Amtrak from allowing pre-ordered alternate choices. They did not prohibit Amtrak from using convection ovens instead of microwaves. They did not order that all but one of the diner employees be removed from the train. They did not order Amtrak to force passengers to order and pick up their food at the counter then bus their own tables. They did not order Amtrak to run out of items part way through a one-night trip.
Amtrak made those decisions. And by all appearances, makes it look, IMHO, that it was done to make passengers scream and complain and/or discourage LD travel by sleeper passengers to "prove" that LD service was not viable.
And, as far as I know, congress did not prohibit Amtrak from allocating money differently between travel and dining so as to lessen the apparent "losses" so that, at the very least, Amtrak could have provided decent pre-packaged meals with more choices and more changes and provide better service.
And wasn't it public pressure by congressmen and others that got Amtrak to finally pony up the money it had promised to put towards fixing up the route and not Amtrak's sudden "revelation" that an attempt to dump the SWC route by downgrading its service was not a good idea?
 
Absolutely true. Anderson’s stated vision in that article was 5-10 experiential trains and a significant expansion of corridor services. While I am somewhat torn - if he could have pulled it off it would probably be better than what we have today.

There are just 100 reasons why he couldn’t pull it off. Maybe soon we’ll see what kind of vision Flynn has, and if he is pragmatic enough to get it implemented.
If something like VIA's Canadian is what is meant by an experiential train, I'd much rather have what we have now. While the Canadian is likely a very enjoyable trip and I hope to ride it some day, at this point it has basically no transportation value. Coach fares are twice that on Amtrak, trains only run twice a week, and schedules are extremely unreliable. Amtrak is intended to be a transportation provider, not a museum or attraction. I happen to use Amtrak often just for the enjoyment of the ride as do many members here, but I don't think there's a very strong argument that Amtrak's LD network should be preserved for that reason alone. Instead, the system should be designed to transport as many people as possible as well as provide essential service to rural areas. Dining cars and other amenities are nice, but they should be designed to increase profit/decrease losses like they would anywhere else.

Anderson and I likely agree on this point of maximizing transportation value, but the difference is that he seemed to see little use for LD trains. Preserving 5-10 routes for experiential uses may have just been his way of appeasing railfans while maintaining system connectivity. I think the LD routes should be optimized to increase their transportation value and increase efficiency. However, I think the best way to do that is expansion of frequencies, rather than minimizing the route structure.
 
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There are a lot of points that I'd like to talk about, one of them being food service on overnight trains. From what I have dug up on long haul flights, airlines budget between $6 and $9 for business class flights. I don't see how sleeper fares and what they charge for meals doesn't cover the cost of operating dining car service or why the downgrade to "Contemporary Dining" wasn't something more like what Airlines offer to long haul business class passengers.

As for corridor vs long distance "division", my personal view as I've stated many times is we need both, not one or the other. Personally, until we get a leader in Amtrak willing to argue for a dedicated subsidy for corridor service on top of a subsidy for long distance services, we probably aren't getting that many more state supported trains anytime soon. I'm also one of the few people that don't see an issue with states like Ohio benefiting from a setup like this so long as all states can benefit from the new funding.

As for the long distance trains, most (if not all) of them should be running twice a day. There are plenty of city pairs that would have conveniently times trains if the second run ran between 8 to 12 hours offset the current schedule. Of course there would need to be an adequate amount of equipment, but that's a given when talking expansion or getting rid of the 750 mile rule.

But my overall point in bundling both long distance and expanded, federally funded corridor trains is that you need buy in. Why would a representative from Texas care that much about the Sunset Limited getting expanded to a daily train with plans to get it twice daily? Compound this by the fact that there are a lot of "fiscal conservatives" in Texas that would get their dander raised by what they see as needless spending and a lot of voters who could easily be swindled onto voting someone out based on that alone. Bundling expanding the Sunset Limited in with getting a portion of say $10 billion to operate local trains within Texas would not only be easier to sell as a justifiable expense but could get more buy in from the rest of the Texas delegation. Then rinse and repeat for other less than friendly states.
 
State funded corridor expansion is a pipe dream with Red and Blue States so divided. I hope that changes in the next decade. 90/10 and 80/20 funding matches being turned down by Red State governors such as mine in Iowa is a disgrace but it is what it is. Andersons plans were meant to fail in my opinion.
I don't think Anderson was pitching corridors with the intent that his/Amtrak's efforts fail. 🤔Part of his plan on corridors was, part of the budget and legislative request Amtrak sent to Congress still IS, a fund for Federal funding of start-up corridors. IMHO, $300 million seems a bit modest for the purpose, but it seems to me the idea is to break the ideological deadlock of state legislatures unwilling to vote state funding for passenger rail by getting new services going with federal funds and cooperation from the state DOT but little or no state funding. The initial funding will run the service only for a few years, but an operating service would have a constituency (riders, town governments and chambers of commerce in towns with service, etc.) by then. Several new services could be started from even the modest $300 million per year if new services cost, say, $10-50 million each for capital and a few years of operation.

As I've commented on this before, the barrier in red states seems to be around starting new service where no service or essentially no service (Ohio, for instance) exists. There, the constituency for new service is abstract while the ideological opposition to "wasteful" government spending is concrete. When there are no trains to ride now, the opposition can argue with a straight face that nobody will ride the new service and it's a waste of money. Pointing to other states with successful service does little good, as the opposition will argue that "our people are different than those folks in California/Illinois/North Carolina and won't give up the freedom of car travel." By comparison, GOP legislatures in red states with robust passenger rail service that existed before passenger rail became a culture-wars football (North Carolina, Oklahoma with the Heartland Flyer, Virginia until recently) were/are willing to maintain and in some cases expand that existing service. In those states, the nobody-will-ride argument falls mostly on deaf ears because people in that state are already riding.
 
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Personally, if the stars were to align and the infinite powers of Christ were to make Congress see the error of their ways and start funding Amtrak adequately, I don't think adding new corridor services should be 100% up to the states if federal funding was made available to start and operate the services. The only way this would happen is if there was a large sum of money put towards rail (like in the multiple of billions) with billions added to run trains annually and the funding was required to be split between the states proportionally.

So lets just for the sake of numbers assume we got $100 billion for state corridors and $10 billion for operating trains and the money was required to be split between the states based on their population and the money couldn't be redirected. Ohio would get around $3.6 billion in capital funding and $360 million to run the trains. If Ohio still said no, even if they didn't have to put up any extra money, I see no reason why Amtrak shouldn't be allowed to use the money to start and run services within Ohio without the state's cooperation.

But this is assuming we could get adequate funding and that funding had to stay within a state. Frankly, I don't see state services expanding in hostile states and I suspect there won't be much growth in the friendlier states anytime soon. We just came out of what was supposed to be the greatest economy in decades and all the states added together probably didn't add more than 12 round trips over the last decade. As I have mentioned before, we need a major funding package for rail that includes money to expand state corridors, interstate corridors and long distance trains. I don't see piecemeal plans at the federal level or state to state plans getting much mileage anymore.
 
Personally, if the stars were to align and the infinite powers of Christ were to make Congress see the error of their ways and start funding Amtrak adequately, I don't think adding new corridor services should be 100% up to the states if federal funding was made available to start and operate the services. The only way this would happen is if there was a large sum of money put towards rail (like in the multiple of billions) with billions added to run trains annually and the funding was required to be split between the states proportionally.

So lets just for the sake of numbers assume we got $100 billion for state corridors and $10 billion for operating trains and the money was required to be split between the states based on their population and the money couldn't be redirected. Ohio would get around $3.6 billion in capital funding and $360 million to run the trains. If Ohio still said no, even if they didn't have to put up any extra money, I see no reason why Amtrak shouldn't be allowed to use the money to start and run services within Ohio without the state's cooperation.

But this is assuming we could get adequate funding and that funding had to stay within a state. Frankly, I don't see state services expanding in hostile states and I suspect there won't be much growth in the friendlier states anytime soon. We just came out of what was supposed to be the greatest economy in decades and all the states added together probably didn't add more than 12 round trips over the last decade. As I have mentioned before, we need a major funding package for rail that includes money to expand state corridors, interstate corridors and long distance trains. I don't see piecemeal plans at the federal level or state to state plans getting much mileage anymore.
Your points are well taken. I believe many short haul corridors will develop on their own. Miami to Orlando and Houston to Dallas are two examples. Amtrak’s biggest bang for the buck is building up the long distance routes. Two frequencies a day on most routes with more robust connecting services creates any number of corridors for a limited number of terminal maintenance facilities. In addition, a new product line which would include overnight trains in certain markets; Richmond-Washington-NYC-Boston, Washington-NYC-Montreal and Toronto; LA-SFO-Sacramento, along the lines of Britain’s Caledonian Sleeper and Europe’s resurgent night trains. These two concepts would not cost huge amounts of money in comparison to developing corridors, but would give you much the same juice for the squeeze. Meanwhile, this more robust national system can assist in the impetus for corridor development by states, the private sector, or public/private partnerships. Amtrak may even earn some revenue contracting maintenance, reservations, or shop services at Beach Grove or Bear. Relatively modest public money could leverage a lot of gain.
 
Your points are well taken. I believe many short haul corridors will develop on their own. Miami to Orlando and Houston to Dallas are two examples. Amtrak’s biggest bang for the buck is building up the long distance routes. Two frequencies a day on most routes with more robust connecting services creates any number of corridors for a limited number of terminal maintenance facilities. In addition, a new product line which would include overnight trains in certain markets; Richmond-Washington-NYC-Boston, Washington-NYC-Montreal and Toronto; LA-SFO-Sacramento, along the lines of Britain’s Caledonian Sleeper and Europe’s resurgent night trains. These two concepts would not cost huge amounts of money in comparison to developing corridors, but would give you much the same juice for the squeeze. Meanwhile, this more robust national system can assist in the impetus for corridor development by states, the private sector, or public/private partnerships. Amtrak may even earn some revenue contracting maintenance, reservations, or shop services at Beach Grove or Bear. Relatively modest public money could leverage a lot of gain.

You still missed the point I made earlier which is that piecemeal improvements to long distance trains isn't getting through any more than asking a few states to pony up funding for corridors across the country. And all of the options you listed might be well and good, but none of them are going to happen without federal funding and the one in California won't because the state doesn't care.

As for the cost, the costs are doable for state corridor services. Going with the same $100 billion example, Ohio's $3.6 billion dollar share would be more than enough to start the 3C's Corridor. Based on the numbers I've found in my own digging, 400 miles of double track can be built, 120 new cars bought and 25 engines with the $3.6 billion and there would still be $1.94 billion left over. That would be more than enough to build new stations and a maintenance facility.

Yes it will cost money, but so does everything. Hell we had to put $70 billion into the Highway Trust Fund a couple years ago just to keep it solvent. And we do this every few years. Asking for $100 to $300 billion to be put into conventional rail is frankly, a justifiable ask when roads get dedicated funds and a blank check whenever its "needed". Not to mention investments in rail are generally cheaper than highways, save money overall, and to top it off, the Federal government even admits that. But the catch is, most of the studies are done on services that run more than once per day.
 
You still missed the point I made earlier which is that piecemeal improvements to long distance trains isn't getting through any more than asking a few states to pony up funding for corridors across the country. And all of the options you listed might be well and good, but none of them are going to happen without federal funding and the one in California won't because the state doesn't care.

As for the cost, the costs are doable for state corridor services. Going with the same $100 billion example, Ohio's $3.6 billion dollar share would be more than enough to start the 3C's Corridor. Based on the numbers I've found in my own digging, 400 miles of double track can be built, 120 new cars bought and 25 engines with the $3.6 billion and there would still be $1.94 billion left over. That would be more than enough to build new stations and a maintenance facility.

Yes it will cost money, but so does everything. Hell we had to put $70 billion into the Highway Trust Fund a couple years ago just to keep it solvent. And we do this every few years. Asking for $100 to $300 billion to be put into conventional rail is frankly, a justifiable ask when roads get dedicated funds and a blank check whenever its "needed". Not to mention investments in rail are generally cheaper than highways, save money overall, and to top it off, the Federal government even admits that. But the catch is, most of the studies are done on services that run more than once per day.
I did not miss the point. I agreed. It’s a Federal program and needs to be federally funded. I am not talking about piecemeal improvements to the national system, but a focused, systematic expansion of Amtrak in a responsible and cost effective way. Introducing a new product line in certain markets makes sense. No, states are not reliable partners. They might assist in certain corridors, and that’s great. If a state wants or needs something, then they can help support it and move the process along. But the Amtrak system is a national system, and should be funded and supported as such. Just like we don’t have state by state air traffic control or interstate highways, we shouldn’t have a state by state rail system.
 
I understand the concerns perfectly and agree with them. They're not proof of an anti-LD agenda. The food comes from Congress. The bus bridge never happened, and instead strengthened the viability of the SWC by getting funds committed to the maintenance of the route.
So an agenda that fails to achieve its goal ceases to be an agenda at all? Going by Anderson's own words and actions his goal was to promote more corridor trains while removing long distance service from areas of lower traffic and higher operational cost with little regard for how these changes might affect the rest of the network. Congress took Anderson at his word when he threatened permanent bus bridges and I saw no evidence that his threats were a secret ploy to strengthen anything.

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." - Maya Angelou
 
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But the Amtrak system is a national system, and should be funded and supported as such. Just like we don’t have state by state air traffic control or interstate highways, we shouldn’t have a state by state rail system.
Great idea! Let the airlines and states fund intra-state flights. Or just make flights of less than 700 miles have their FAA and other costs funded by the states. Same things with roads. After all, it's only fair.
 
Just like we don’t have state by state air traffic control or interstate highways, we shouldn’t have a state by state rail system.
The federal government still funds the lion's share of highway improvements. By your own logic, widening a 10 mile stretch of highway should get $0 federal dollars. Currently it gets anywhere from 40% to 90% of its cost covered by the federal government. I'm saying the in state Amtrak services should be funded the same way. Fair is fair and local highway projects are considered federal concerns when widening a highway in my neck of the woods has virtually no direct impact on the economy of the country as a whole.
 
Mr. Flynn has spoken to the press. There are a few articles floating around but they are pretty much the same.

What Amtrak service could look like once stay-at-home orders are lifted



During a conference call with reporters, Flynn said part of the discussion is determining what customer sentiment is going to look like once things begin to reopen. Social distancing and more options for contactless interactions for passengers will be key parts of that discussion.

Stephen Gardner, senior executive vice president for Amtrak, said technology will play an important role in helping to reduce interactions during the train-riding process.

The company is working to speed up planned enhancements in technology. The deployment of new, more modern kiosks, and improvements to the system — which notifies passengers about their rides via text — will provide more information to riders.

The goal is to reduce the number of people who need help finding where they need to go at the train station.

Also in the works, according to Gardner, is speeding up improvements to Amtrak’s website and app. Both would improve not only the ticket-buying process, but also services offered during trips. The ability to buy food from the food car from your seat is among the features.

“We can receive your order in advance and process that order and then you can come and pick it up and have again, less interaction,” Gardner said.
 
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