Southwest Airlines vs Amtrak

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RichardK

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Southwest and Amtrak were started in 1971 a month apart. Southwest began with 3 airplanes serving 3 cities. Today it has over 3000 flights per day serving about 89 destinations with over 500 airplanes.

By comparison, Amtrak took over a failed private passenger rail system. What have they accomplished in the same 43 years?
Would they have been more successful by starting with a clean slate, possibly building a high speed rail system from the start?
 
Southwest and Amtrak were started in 1971 a month apart. Southwest began with 3 airplanes serving 3 cities. Today it has over 3000 flights per day serving about 89 destinations with over 500 airplanes.

By comparison, Amtrak took over a failed private passenger rail system. What have they accomplished in the same 43 years?
Would they have been more successful by starting with a clean slate, possibly building a high speed rail system from the start?
Apples to oranges, really. For starters, the airways are not controlled by a single monopoly which will not allow Southwest to operate more than one flight a day, unless they pay a gazillion dollars usage fees. If Amtrak had an open hand to start train services wherever the demand is, without freight railroads interfering, we would probably have a lot more trains in the country.
 
When you're handed a bunch of spoiled lemons by politicians who expect you to fail and the Lemonade is a hit or miss proposition, it's actually amazing that Amtrak is still Alive and Kicking!

If more airlines followed the SWA business Model (admittedly starting with a clean slate is easier) there would probably still be more Airlines instead of what looks like eventually we will end up with three here in the US!!

I think History will be kind to Amtrak, especially the Boardman Administration ,who have actually Grown the Company while using bailing wire,duct tape (LOL) and overcoming Congressional Micro- Managing by Arm Chair Engineers!

I like SWA and Alaska Airlines when I HAVE to Fly but I Love Amtrak yet I'm a frequent Arm Chair Engineer myself! LOL
 
RIchard K, how would you suppose that "building a high speed rail system from the start" would have been easier or more accomplishable than the strategy Amtrak used? That's like saying that SWA ought to have invented and manufactured supersonic airliners before starting business. Instead, SWA exploited underused public assets by concentrating on secondary airports at first. They offered bare-bones, one-class service, but kept a few distinctive passenger-friendly features such as free bag checking and no cancellation penalties (which Amtrak also offers). They chose a standardized fleet of 737s (Amtrak's still working on the last stages of fleet standardization, to the displeasure of us Heritage Fleet lovers).

Overall, I think the similarities between the two transportation companies are many. Amtrak just faces some unique difficulties. Imagine if those excess airport spaces hadn't been available, and Southwest was limited to the former slots of, say, Braniff Airways? Or if their startup funds had been limited to a lousy couple hundred million dollars, with no hope of additional private investment?
 
This is such an apples to oranges comparison is almost next to impossible to even write about it.......

One form of transportation was so overly regulated it was next to impossible to even consider such a thing as a high-speed passenger rail network. The other was just coming into its own in terms of D regulation and would soon have a gloves off ability to do whatever they wanted.

The bigger question is, what would happen if all of the infrastructure for all of the different transportation modes was owned by the public, and allowed private companies to compete for the services.? That is what we will never know

Remember, all of the different components of the infrastructure highways, construction, maintenance, signage,. Railroads, right-of-way, bridges, maintenance, construction.... Airports, FAA controllers, the airport maintenance, gate fees,. Intercoastal waterways, canals, locks,. Pipelines. The list goes on and on. Unfortunately we will never have the easy ability to compare these different modes of transportation of freight and passengers.
 
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This is such an apples to oranges comparison is almost next to impossible to even write about it.......

One form of transportation was so overly regulated it was next to impossible to even consider such a thing as a high-speed passenger rail network. The other was just coming into its own in terms of D regulation and would soon have a gloves off ability to do whatever they wanted.

The bigger question is, what would happen if all of the infrastructure for all of the different transportation modes was owned by the public, and allowed private companies to compete for the services.? That is what we will never know

Remember, all of the different components of the infrastructure highways, construction, maintenance, signage,. Railroads, right-of-way, bridges, maintenance, construction.... Airports, FAA controllers, the airport maintenance, gate fees,. Intercoastal waterways, canals, locks,. Pipelines. The list goes on and on. Unfortunately we will never have the easy ability to compare these different modes of transportation of freight and passengers.
Good point... If United, or Delta, or whoever owned the airports SWA would never have had landing rights and never got the first flight off the ground. Taxes on railroads paid for the beginnings of our road network (1910's "good road movement") and much of the airport development from the 1930's-1960's. If we ever can cut through the complex and cross subsidies of all modes of transportation (rail-air-road-water) and arrive at an even playing field (no cheap shots about my being off meds please) rail should be a clear choice for a medium distance, and even competitive for some long distance routes.
 
One of the other big differences between the startup Southwest Airlines versus Amtrak.....Southwest's founder Herb Kelleher hired all new employee's, and he hired them based largely on their personalities, with the strategy that most anyone could be taught a job, but personalities are pretty much set...

Whereas Amtrak 'inherited' the likes of former Penn Central and Southern Pacific employee's who came from a somewhat passenger hostile company culture....

and of course Southwest had no union's I believe (in the beginning), while Amtrak had to contend with a whole bunch of them with many archaic work rules...
 
Amtrak would not have been better off starting with a clean slate then building HSR everywhere. They might have been better off starting with a clean slate but not with HSR.

Richard, I hate to say this, but you seem to be one of those people who think HSR is the same in the US as it is in Europe or Asia. You seem to think we should have an extensive, nationwide HSR network, even through the middle of the Great Basin, with frequent, on-time service. Sorry, I think your idea is not viable and nigh impossible, even if Amtrak had much more subsidies.
 
".............even through the middle of the Great Basin, with frequent, on-time service.........."

One word : China.
 
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Another big difference. Amtrak was formed to take over a failing 19th century transportation model. Dirty, slow, not very profitable, and with its best years behind it in the eyes of the its users and certainly not as"glamorous" as the airplane was in the mid 20th century.

Meanwhile public subsidies in highway construction and big oil helped play a role in the demise of passenger rail in the 1950's and 1960's.

Customers deserted in favor of their own cars and to the faster airplane.

No longer did passenger trains play an important part in long distance business and vacation travel.

Business deserted to the air and personal and vacation travel for the most part went by automobile.

The railroads that were in existence in the 1950's and 60's had to pay local property taxes to jurisdictions in addition to shouldering their own maintenance

of railbed and structures and equipment including passenger car fleets. Eventually, the deterioration of freight traffic to trucks, diminished passenger loadings and onerous union regulations did them in and one by one, thru the railroad friendly ICC, abandoned any vestige of passenger service that existed on their lines.

Amtrak was created by Congressional legislation from this rubble, and due to its Congressional mandates and structure was doomed to fail (or so it was thought).

Of course, airlines were heavily regulated at that time, but the ICC regulated fares back then and service standards. Airports were built and paid for by

public taxpayers and air traffic control was and is a government program. Certainly the playing field was not level then nor is it today between highways, airports and railroads.
 
Joeker,
I have to disagree with any characterization of the ICC post-WW2 as "railroad friendly". Their handling of the Penn Central merger and the resulting fiasco should be evidence enough for that. It wasn't passenger trains that did in the Penn Central (or the New Haven, or any of a number of others), but rather the unbelievable tangle of branch lines with little use, freight or passenger, that many roads were forced to keep up for decades. The New Haven, for example, was trying to rid itself of non-performing track on the old Bay Colony Railroad from the 1930s onwards, to the point of disowning their lease on it.

A "railroad friendly" ICC would have been granting branch line train-offs all over the place, and I suspect from a bottom line perspective there are more than a few roads that would have gladly preferred to rid themselves of such tracks at the price of keeping reasonable passenger service on their mainlines (where they could at least defray ROW depreciation and use already-paid-for equipment) than the other way around.
 
The ICC was best described as a friend of the status-quo, "do what we were doing last year". Which is not really a good position for any organization to take.
 
Yes, Anderson is right in his post, but I still contend that the ICC was quick to relieve the railroads of their passenger train burdens, especially in light of

US Postal Service pulling its mail contracts from most routes in the early to mid 1960's.

I think this one act was a major death blow to any hopes to keeping marginally profitable passenger trains operating as there was no other way the railroads could or would underwrite the losses for those trains.

This and coupled with all the above reasons really was the end of passenger trains operated by the host railroad.

At the same time the postal contracts was moved to trucks as well as to airplanes for transport further strengthening those forms of transportation.

Don't forget the Interstate Highway Bill called the" Eisenhower National Interstate and Defense Highways Act" further diluted the role of railroads as a

mover of LTL and general cargo freight (reserving them for bulk commodities) to trucks and passenger traffic to autos and Greyhound and other bus lines that easily plied the newly constructed highway system.
 
Joeker,

I have to disagree with any characterization of the ICC post-WW2 as "railroad friendly". Their handling of the Penn Central merger and the resulting fiasco should be evidence enough for that. It wasn't passenger trains that did in the Penn Central (or the New Haven, or any of a number of others), but rather the unbelievable tangle of branch lines with little use, freight or passenger, that many roads were forced to keep up for decades. The New Haven, for example, was trying to rid itself of non-performing track on the old Bay Colony Railroad from the 1930s onwards, to the point of disowning their lease on it.

A "railroad friendly" ICC would have been granting branch line train-offs all over the place, and I suspect from a bottom line perspective there are more than a few roads that would have gladly preferred to rid themselves of such tracks at the price of keeping reasonable passenger service on their mainlines (where they could at least defray ROW depreciation and use already-paid-for equipment) than the other way around.
Another glaring example of the inept ICC, was the destruction of the Rock Island, as in not allowing the UP to purchase it in the seventies....no good reason, as they did not 'compete' at all except perhaps somewhat between Denver and KC/Omaha....
 
".............even through the middle of the Great Basin, with frequent, on-time service.........."

One word : China.
What are you talking about? China hasn't built HSR to Urumqi, Kashgar, or Lhasa. Those are regular locomotive-hauled trains, in fact I have ridden the train to Urumqi, which is essentially the Chinese equivelent of crossing the Great Basin. It was hauled with multiple locomotives that got changed at major stations, and the consist was just standard Type 25 railcars. Not HSR!

Yes, Anderson is right in his post, but I still contend that the ICC was quick to relieve the railroads of their passenger train burdens, especially in light of

US Postal Service pulling its mail contracts from most routes in the early to mid 1960's.

I think this one act was a major death blow to any hopes to keeping marginally profitable passenger trains operating as there was no other way the railroads could or would underwrite the losses for those trains.

This and coupled with all the above reasons really was the end of passenger trains operated by the host railroad.

At the same time the postal contracts was moved to trucks as well as to airplanes for transport further strengthening those forms of transportation.

Don't forget the Interstate Highway Bill called the" Eisenhower National Interstate and Defense Highways Act" further diluted the role of railroads as a

mover of LTL and general cargo freight (reserving them for bulk commodities) to trucks and passenger traffic to autos and Greyhound and other bus lines that easily plied the newly constructed highway system.
Wait, don't put the blame on Greyhound and the "other" bus lines, they're suffering just as much from cars and planes as Amtrak is. Auto travel is vaslty more common than Greyhound travel.
 
Good History lesson. What is the best answer? Some have said privatize Amtrak, some have said franchaise Amtrak ,while others say shut it down. What ever is done with Amtrak ,it is going to have to be a financial advantage for the freight railroads. Many different avenues To be taken with Amtrak, but I believe it boils down to Competition.
 
Most countries in the world eventually went with nationalization of track, precisely parallel to nationalization of the roads. (Britain, interestingly, *started out* with a lot of privately owned toll roads, and nationalized most of them during the Victorian era as they went bust one by one) Even the CEO of Norfolk Southern has suggested that the model of government track ownership makes sense (well, it means he can get on with running trains, rather than pouring money into track maintenance).

In the US, however, it is often considered very important to make sure that rent-seeking monopolists own and control vital transportation and communications links. I don't understand why. Thatcher did something even more irresponsible in Britain with privatization of the drinking water supply, so it's not *unique* to the US. But it is bizarre.
 
It was not the ICC that chose to take the mail off trains. That was the US Post Office that did that.

In most companies the railroads were government entities from the beginning. Those that weren't were nationalized early. There are some government owned railroads in the US that go way back. The NS line between Cincinatti and Chattanooga is owned by the city of Cincinatti. NS has a long term lease on it. The major rebuilds and clearance improvement done on this line in the 1960's were paid by city issued bonds that were paid off by an increase in the lease payments. The CSX line between Chattanooga and Atlanta is owned by the state of Georgia, again operated under long term leases. (In both these cases, the current lease is not the original.) The North Carolina line over which the state supported trains operate is owned by the state and leased to NS. The improvements to the line that have been done and are being done are being funded by NS's lease payments to the state.

China is not an apt comparison to anything railroad happening in the US. The Chinese have been building railroads like mad for many years. They simply changed from building ordinary railroads to building high speed lines in recent years. There rate of railroad construction in total has not really changed that much with the start of high speed line construction, only the type of railroads being constructed has changed. Their railroad network in total is still far smaller than that in the US. They also do not have to do with such minor aggravations as Environmental Impact Statements, NIMBYs, posturing politicians, and many other things that result in the serious engineering phase taking longer than the construction itself.
 
British Rail was formed by the nationalisation of privately owned British railways in 1948, 46 years after Victoria's death.

Chinese railroad builders also have the great advantage that they don't have to prove to lenders the economic advantage of the line being constructed. If the politicians want it, it gets built.
 
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In most companies the railroads were government entities from the beginning.
Not really. Most railroads were privately owned during the original railway mania period.
It can be a bit confusing when they were owned privately by noblemen who were also the lords of their own fiefdoms, as happened in parts of Germany and India. All the French Railways were private when constructed. Nearly all the South and Central American railways were originally private. And most of the Mexican and Canadian ones. And the African ones.

They were mostly nationalized during the very late 19th century or the early 20th century, with Britain waiting until 1946, and the US not managing to do it at all.

Britain nationalized its railways much later than it nationalized its carriage/automobile roads. I didn't learn about the former existence of large numbers of private "turnpikes" until I was researching something else a few years ago; this extensive private road system was mostly nationalized in the UK during the late Victorian era.
 
There are some government owned railroads in the US that go way back.
It is true that there were a lot of railways in the US and Canada which were government-run from day one. The US and Canada have made a particular habit of *privatizing them*, which as far as I can tell is plain plumb stupid, from the original Main Line of Public Works in Pennsylvania to the privatization of CN.
 
I am always interested when folk say stuff about "the unions", either for or against... Just wondering why having a union is seen as so problematic to running a decent business in America?

Ed. :cool:
 
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