on time performance

[GG-1]

Aloha

I've been looking athe on time performance of the three trains I will ride in September. All of them seem to run late but not enough to prevent connection.

Do you think Amtrak schedules are unrealistic? Should they adjust them for the actual times they arrive?

Mahalo for your thoughts.

 

[Bill Haithcoat]

No, I don't thnk they should be made even slower. If you compare with a timetable from the 50's, before the decline in the 60's (when the Interstate Highways and continually improved air service came into being, without any rail funding) you will find that most long distance trains are two or three hours slower today than they used to be.

The old Broadway Limited and 20th Century Limited went NY to CHI in 16 hours or less. The Panama Limited went overnight from CHI to NOL in about 16 hours. The Super Chief went CHI to LA in 39 1/4 hours. At times trains between NY and Miami were scheduled for 24 hours.

The Floridian, discontinued from CHI to Floridia in 1979, was running about thirteen (13) hours slower than the South Wind ran when it was put into service in 1941. It was also frequently late, even at that. Some stretches of track were so bad it could only go ten(10) mph. They kept changing its route between various places to find track that was even usable for passenger trains.

So------the schedules don't need to be slower---they are slow enough already. Trackwork and freight interference, guess those are the major problems.

But as you can see, some schedule slowdowns have ALREADY been put into effect to make the timekeeping more realistic. We can't just keep getting slower and slower and slower.....soon even WE FANS won't ride them!

And while many of us may enjoy the "cruise concept" of travel, I doubt that many of us really want the trains to be as slow as a ship!

 

[AMTRAK-P42]

I would have to agree. At this point, some schedules carry as much as 5 hours of padding. At some point enough needs to be enough. The only problem on these particular routes is that in the rare event they actually do run on-time,you risk having a problem of the train getting in so early that the passengers have no arrangements for a couple of hours and are left to sit trainside until their connection or ride arrives. This happend last summer once or twice on the Sunset Limited, where it arrived 1 hour and 24 minutes early, when the schedule arrival already called for a 640am arrival, it put #1 in LAUPT at around 5am, and the passengers were called to de-train.

 

[Bill Haithcoat]

I like what Amtrak P42 says, "At some point enough needs to be enough."

The poor Sunset Limited can't seem to get it right at all---as he points out, when it is on time it is often inconveniently early, which can also upset plans (for people picking you up, etc).

I think I will look at the Sunset's old schedule tonight and see how much slower it has gotten through the years.

At one time, the faster trains, the streamliners, were usually faster than the bus or than a car driven at legal speeds.And usually more on time than today. No longer the case.

 

[Anthony]

As I had quickly mentioned in the Sunday night Chat, I find it interesting how Amtrak pads their schedules to decrease "endpoint delays" while the train may have been rather late for the majority of its route. The Southwest Chief has something like one hour budgeted between Fullerton and L.A., when this trip does not take nearly that long - maybe one-fifth of that time. However, I find that the train conveniently is often about an hour or an hour and a half late coming into Fullerton, and so they end up adding it to their "on-time" list when it arrives into L.A. "early" or within its proper, but grossly inflated arrival time. Now, I am not necessarily complaining about this, because I catch the 9:15am northbound Surfliner rather often when connecting from the #3, and without that padding (i.e., if it really took an hour from FUL to LAX) I would miss this train every time and wait for three hours for the next one. It's just an interesting tactic and shows that the trains may not even be as "on-time" as Amtrak likes to say they are, if that sort of endpoint padding is common.

 

[Bill Haithcoat]

Oh, this is very common indeed, and always has been. My assumption is that they are arranging for it to be more on time at the larger stations, thus affecting more people.

The SW Chief is indeed, allowed just under an hour to go from e.b. from LA to Fullerton, but coming w.b. it is, indeed,given about 1.5 hours. This really is all about having a better chance of arriving in LA, as LA is much larger than Fullerton.(IMHO)

This is long-standing railroad practice, as long as I can remember, way before Amtrak. In fact, I find it unusual when a train does not have padding from the last small station to the next big one.

Maybe I am being naive but I do not think the actual intention is to make the stats look better, though clearly that is a by-product. But it did not originate with Amtrak, not by a long shot.

 

[engine999]

There is actually very little padding from Winter Park to Orlando.

 

[AlanB]

There is actually very little padding from Winter Park to Orlando.

Well Orlando isn't an end point city, Amtrak only pads the endpoints with big blocks of times.

However that said, I consider allowing 42 minutes (train 97) to cover the 5 miles between Winter Park and Orlando, some hefty padding. Especially when it's northbound sister is only given 18 minutes to cover that same distance. Frankly even 18 minutes is too long, at most it should take 10 minutes.

 

[engine999]

Its only 5 miles, although it is through downtown. The train has to be prepared to stop quicly dues to the large amounts of pedestrians in the areas around the station. Amtrak seems to padd, the schedules for terminal stations along the way too.

 

[Bill Haithcoat]

Its only 5 miles, although it is through downtown.  The train has to be prepared to stop quicly dues to the large amounts of pedestrians in the areas around the station.  Amtrak seems to padd, the schedules for terminal stations along the way too.

Yes, while the whole thing about padding is not consistent across the board, there are plenty of examples of padding at larger intermediate points as well as end points. That was meant to be kind of implicit in my earlier post (fourth before this). Look for example at the EB, both sides of St. Paul, the CZ each side of Denver, for some examples.

On the other hand, look at SW Chief each side of Kansas City and it is not done there. Look at the City of NO and it has padding north of Memphis, but not south.

So, it is not consistnet....but there is plenty of it.

Most trains have some padding n.b. from Alexandria into WAS. But not so much between Newark and NYP. Of course those trains can run through to NYP early anyway since they only stop to discharge passengers northbound from Alexandria . which really does not pertain to the matter at hand.

Anyway, there is nothing new to all this. This has been the standard railroad pattern as long as I can remember, well before Amtrak.