Related to: Why Americans don't ride trains

[jis]

If you are going to low earth orbit into weightlessness, you'll probably just get tubes full of goop to suck on anyway

 

[Tokkyu40]

Only $1.5 million? A new modern Superliner these days would cost more like $4 million! The Viewliners cost, what, $2.3 million? $1.5 million for a Superliner was in 1978, there's been lots of inflation since then.

Why are they so expensive?

There is a fixed overhead cost to running the facility and making the tooling. This overhead is distributed over the production run.

If it costs $50 million in overhead costs to produce a run of rail cars and $750,000 to build each car, then the total cost per car on a run of ten cars would be $5.75 million, but a run of 100 cars would only be $1.25 million. Larger batches spread the fixed costs over more units.

As for the Japanese short lines, most companies monetize the stations pretty heavily. Even small stations have a gift shop. Tokyo station has enough business venues, hotels, restaurants and stores you could probably live your whole life without ever needing to leave the property.

 

[SarahZ]

I would be curious to see how much of a difference that would make. It is possible that sleeping would be a lot more comfortable in coach, because my beef with coach for overnight is that I just keep on waking up and I wake up sore and tired. With a 50" pitch it isn't like the seats would get in each others way too much, even if the person in front of you kept their seat reclined during the day.

It would be cool to see a seat that reclined further than the current ones.

If they could get the coach seats to recline more, I'd be SO happy. There's not enough room to get them to lay flat, but going back farther than they currently do would be awesome.

Sounds like we'd both hugely appreciate it. My impression is that they currently only go back 10-15 degrees... a doubling of that would be a delight.

Given that this is a standard conversation topic in coach... wonder why the current "range" of declining was selected, and if the same seats couldn't be modified to buy a few more inches. And I agree, even if they went back another three or four inches there would be no interference with the passengers immediately behind.

Agreed. When the person in front of me reclines all the way, my tray barely moves, and I still have a ton of leg room and "personal space". Those seats could go back practically flat, and they still wouldn't be all up in my business.

 

[Tokkyu40]

The reason I don't ride Amtrak is because I live in the San Diego area and my family is south of Tucson.
If I take a week off and visit the family I sleep in and do nothing on Saturday, spend Sunday traveling to LA and then take the overnight to Tucson.
I then have 3 and a half days to hang out with family and see the sights, then I catch the train back on Thursday evening and get back to LA on Friday, with the whole weekend to wander around San Diego.
Because of Amtrak's schedule I would lose half the week getting ready to travel and coming back from travel when I could have a full six days if I ride the scooter.
For longer trips my vacation would consist of riding Amtrak slowly across the American landscape. Nice if Amtrak is my destination, less nice if Amtrak is how I get to my destination.
To be practical, Amtrak needs to cut their travel time by at least 30%.
For me, it's the schedules that keep me from riding.

 

[Oldsmoboi]

The reason I don't take Amtrak as much as I'd like is solely scheduling and service density. Adding an additional Pennsylvanian and Capitol Ltd. would make Amtrak more usable for me, though I know that really isn't possible. I'll probably log 75k air miles this year with most of that being north east and upper mid-west destinations, both reachable by Amtrak, but unfortunately without scheduling that works.

 

[Nathanael]

The reason I don't ride Amtrak is because I live in the San Diego area and my family is south of Tucson.

If I take a week off and visit the family I sleep in and do nothing on Saturday, spend Sunday traveling to LA and then take the overnight to Tucson.

I then have 3 and a half days to hang out with family and see the sights, then I catch the train back on Thursday evening and get back to LA on Friday, with the whole weekend to wander around San Diego.

Three a week really sucks, doesn't it?
With a daily train, you could leave San Diego on Friday after work at 6:15 PM, leave LA on Friday, arrive Tucson on Saturday morning. Leave Tucson next Saturday evening, arrive LA on Sunday morning, arrive San Diego on Sunday mid-day.

Three a week has to go; it's too close to useless.

I've tried to plan a trip on the Cardinal four or five times and it keeps coming out to be on the wrong days of the week, making it impossible.

 

[Rob Creighton]

When I lived in Indiana and could ride the Hoosier State or Cardinal in and out of Chicago, it was the schedule, travel time from Union Station from where I wanted to go in the suburbs and the cost that kept me from doing the ride. It was flexibility mainly. I could leave Lafayette at 8am, be where I needed to be by 10:30, and stay as late as I wanted to. With one train in and out per day, it just was limiting. And when my cost for gasoline vs. a ticket was a wash. It was easier to take the car and not what I'd call a "tough" drive. Now, Chicago to Pontiac Michigan to visit family is a different story. The train takes an hour longer, but the drive isn't easy and while driving would allow me to do the trip in a day-- it's a tough thing for me to do, unless absolutely necessary. (Actually, Amtrak would to, if I'm just visiting in Pontiac. I'd have about 2 hours.) If I'm staying over, the train becomes THE hassle free way to do it.

A big part of riding the trains for me is flexibility, travel time and ease. Sometimes, due to lack of equipment, funding, what have you Amtrak doesn't meet my needs so I'll do something else. I'd love to ride Amtrak to places 2 or 3 hours away that I need to go, but if the schedule doesn't work and the drive isn't bad, I'm hopping in the car. (Of course, I live in Lubbock, where the only passenger service is the Polar Express around Christmas time that doesn't really take you anywhere. Although if you ask the older folks, one of the school field trips was riding the Santa Fe from Lubbock to Plainview. The cruel part of it was having to ride a school bus back to Lubbock.)

 

[Ziv]

I look at the Amtrak/State partnerships here in Virginia and wonder just how far that idea could be taken to get more trains in other areas. For instance the North coast Hiawatha would be a great train to bring back, but Amtrak can't afford to buy the cars and locomotives to make it work. But if the states involved would get together and work out an equitable way to share the cost of building the cars/locomotives, perhaps Amtrak would be well served to try to make the old route, or a new adaptation of it, work again.

Or to keep it simpler, perhaps the states that the Empire Builder covers could set up a way to pay for enough new train sets so that the EB was twice daily each way.

And I realize there are state governors that are anti-Amtrak, but you won't find many anti-Amtrak governors where there are few transit options. And many of the anti-Amtrak governors believe that transportation should be a state matter, not a federal one, so their resistance would be less extreme, if they still opposed it at all.

For instance, I think Scott has supported the FEC railway, which indirectly will help the All Aboard Florida passenger line from Orlando to Miami.

And here is Scott on All Aboard Florida's lease of public land...

“This lease is another example of how our economic policies work to create private-sector jobs for Florida families and develop the best transportation and infrastructure system in the country,” Gov. Rick Scott said in a statement on Wednesday.

http://www.sunshinestatenews.com/blog/florida-reaches-agreement-help-connect-orlando-and-miami-passenger-rail