the_traveler
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ORegon!
time is relative
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Nathanael
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Well, yeah, but I think most people aren't crossing the Rockies.
Stipulate that crossing the Rockies, with the big empty spaces, between major cities, is never going to be really competitive by train unless the airline alternative is non-existent. I'm not talking here about taking the Empire Builder, California Zephyr, or Coast Starlight across the mountains, I'm not talking about taking the Empire Builder across the frozen prairie, and I'm not talking about taking the Empire Builder, California Zephyr, Southwest Chief, or Sunset Limited across the empty desert. I think there are potential justifications for these trains, but they're different justifications, and most of them are weaker. (For instance, Empire Builder: serve communities with no airline service, poor road connections, and four US Senate votes; California Zephyr: serve skiiers; Southwest Chief: maintain connections between east and west networks, serve Albuquerque and Amarillo; Sunset Limited: serve Phoenix; etc. But we can discuss those some other time.)
But forget those. There's a hell of a lot of markets which are long enough to be worth running sleepers on, and longer runtimes than the airlines, but a lot shorter than "cross country". Syracuse, NY - Chicago is a pure overnight -- no time wasted, you had to sleep anyway, right? Omaha-Denver is the same. DC-Atlanta loses you an evening. Chicago-Denver or NY-Atlanta loses you an afternoon and an evening, which a lot of people would still find an acceptable tradeoff. Get a little more speed into the "corridor" end of either trip (for instance, run on the proposed 90mph route through Iowa or speed up Washington-Roanoke to 90 mph) and it will lose you less time.
Single overnights have a market.
Texan Eagle
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Provided you give single travelers an option to travel sleeping without ripping them off. Not everyone travels in pairs, and asking odd number of people to pay for even number of passengers for roomettes and bedrooms is something Amtrak needs to change, and change soon if they want go give any shot at single overnight markets.
Ryan
Court Jester
The single overnight markets (NY/WAS to ATL, NY to CHI, WAS to CHI) all seem to be doing just fine without having to worry about single travelers not wanting to get "ripped off".
Single travelers pay the same price for a hotel room as two people, so it's really no different.
Additionally, since the single travelers are paying one rail fare, not two (like the couples do), they actually aren't paying as much for a roomette as couples do. They're paying the same roomette upcharge but not the same overall fare. Again, I refer back to my hotel room reference, where a single traveler and a couple (or two friends, whatever) pay the same rate.
There might be some hotels out there that charge a little bit more for two people, but I've never run into that personally.
Additionally, since the single travelers are paying one rail fare, not two (like the couples do), they actually aren't paying as much for a roomette as couples do. They're paying the same roomette upcharge but not the same overall fare. Again, I refer back to my hotel room reference, where a single traveler and a couple (or two friends, whatever) pay the same rate.
There might be some hotels out there that charge a little bit more for two people, but I've never run into that personally.
Operations Research - a fuzzy area btwn math and comp sci.
Texan Eagle
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This is like a frog living inside a well thinking the well is the whole world. Oh let's run just one or two token trains per day, somehow that happens to fill up so everything is good with the world.
Okay. I was having fun coming up with things like "Organic Robotics" and "Organizational Rhetoric".
Texan Eagle
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THIS is exactly what America needs to stop thinking. A train is not a hotel, it is a mode of transport. If you want to run some serious overnight train service, give single passengers options to travel on their own.
International flights have First Class and Business Class with lie-flat beds. Does this mean they treat it like a hotel where you pay for 2 passengers even if you are traveling alone? Guess what, NO!
When do you pay for two passengers if only one is traveling (other than if traveling on points)? The second person has to pay railfare, which isn't extremely cheap or completely inconsequential.
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I think I like yours betterOkay. I was having fun coming up with things like "Organic Robotics" and "Organizational Rhetoric".
but OR is the art and science of algorithm design (and being able to quantify execution complexity and costs).This was exactly the point I made in the second part of my post. I'll quote it, since it was the gist of the post.
Texan Eagle
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Ok not exactly double, but single passengers do end up paying significantly more than per-passenger fare when 2 passengers are traveling. Here is a sample- SJC-LAX roomette for 2 passengers is $224. So how much should it be for 1 passenger? Elementary school math will tell you $112. But what does Amtrak charge? $166.
International flights Business Class where also you get flat bed and premium service example- JFK-LHR for 2 passengers $2192. For 1 passenger- $1096, exactly half.
buddy559
Service Attendant
There had to be some premium a single passenger pays to occupy a 2 passenger space. If it was exactly half then couples would opt for 2 roomettes, if it was the same price as 1 roomette with 2 people in it. The airline example doesn't really apply because the airline can sell all available seats. Amtrak does not collect rail fare on the unoccupied roomette seat, but also can not sell it.
MattW
Conductor
The current schedules say it would work well by the numbers. What's interesting is going Charlotte to Washington via Raleigh takes only 90 minutes longer than via Lynchburg. Leaving Atlanta at 3pm puts the train in Charlotte at 8:17pm, Raleigh at 11:34pm, Washington at 5:46am, and New York at 10am. If your goal is an evening train to Charlotte and overnight North Carolina to the northeast, these times aren't bad at all. Richmond kind of gets shafted with a nearly 3am calling time, but that's not really the market for this train.
Southbound, if you leave New York at 9pm, that's Washington at 12:20am, Raleigh at 6:07am, Charlotte at 9:29am, and Atlanta 14:57. Again, Richmond is kind of bad at 2:20ish am, but again, not the market here.
I know this isn't exactly the times you mention, but I shifted the numbers around to give our prime market (ATl-CLT-RGH) better times. All times use the current scheduled times of the Crescent and Carolinian. With this train hypothetical train, the Atlanta-Charlotte corridor gets a late-afternoon/evening train and a morning train as well as overnight (decent North Caroline business traveler times, not the worst either for Atlanta business travelers).
However, the problems creep in when looking at trainsets and crew schedules. The existing Crescents can have arrival/departure times at New York so close together presumably because it's the train's "home" base, but as you can see, you'd have the trainset sitting in Atlanta for 24 hours (unless you can turn the set in 3 minutes!) which I'm not sure is viable for an "away" terminal, plus, unless you have a corridor crew working multiple trains, the crew from Charlotte also sits around for 24 hours before heading back (assuming Charlotte as crew base; Atlanta as crew base could work since the layover at Charlotte would be over 12 hours).
Of course the elephant in the room is Atlanta's current station. While it seems to serve its purpose fairly well, as has been mentioned before, there is no way it could support another train, especially not one laying over for nearly 24 hours. One small bit of good news is that this wouldn't necessarily HAVE to be state-supported as the route length is 900+ miles, well over the 750 funding limit, but of course Amtrak isn't eager to add any routes right now either.
Exactly.
Barciur
OBS Chief
I suppose the European style sleepers with 2/3 beds in a room for 2/3 strangers wouldn't work in America just like a couchette wouldn't?
I'm still not convinced about couchettes not working - heck, if people travel for 20-30 hours in coach, couchette would be much, much better - and it would sell to the segment that is priced out of the premium segment of roomettes at the moment BUT it is willing to spend more than just coach.
domefoamer
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What a hot topic! This one's wandered aplenty since it was first started 32 hours ago...but it seems like just 24, since I was asleep last night. And that's the great thing about overnight trains-- they keep you moving while you sleep, so when the next day comes, you're in the next state. Those hours of slumber just don't count against the travel time for me. Slow and steady may not win the race, but it gets closer.
Here's an example: my high school daughter is interested in visiting prospective colleges in Portland, Tacoma and Vancouver, BC. We live in Denver, so it's far away, but her Spring Break is nine days long. I've just used points to book two roomettes for the three of us on the CZ and CS, about as long a one-zone trip as you can do. While I wish it was shorter (Pioneer, I never knew ya), it makes a certain amount of sense. My overworked scholar always hits weekends and breaks with one thing on her mind: "Sleeeep!" When we board early Saturday morning, she'll be free to rack out in her room as soon as she wants. I wouldn't ask her to face a long flight and border crossing, trek to a hotel, and immediately go out and face a college tour and interview the next morning. If we flew, I would wait an recovery additional day before departing Sunday. That day, we'll be cozily crossing the Sierras. It's harder to justify the long layover in Sacramento, but the third day should be pure railfan's pleasure. We should be able to take part in one of the last wine tastings. Let's hope it's not a last trip in the PPC, too, but it will be my first in that rare rolling stock.
Bottom line, I figure we'll lose only one day to the train's extra travel time. We'll arrive fresh and rested, and certainly not rushed. It ought to be a mellow, contemplative start to a trip that will help shape her future, whether or not she returns to one of those campuses. On the return trip, out of points and time, we'll fold myself into Southwest's sardine can and count the minutes till it's over.
Imagine the billions of dollars it would take to increase the speeds on our LD trains by one third, to a 120 mph top speed. Wouldn't it be cheaper to provide affordable sleepers and overnight schedules to the present rail infrastructure? We need to sleep about a third of our days. Overnight trains exploit that fact; in context with our schedules, they're all, in effect, high speed trains.
Here's an example: my high school daughter is interested in visiting prospective colleges in Portland, Tacoma and Vancouver, BC. We live in Denver, so it's far away, but her Spring Break is nine days long. I've just used points to book two roomettes for the three of us on the CZ and CS, about as long a one-zone trip as you can do. While I wish it was shorter (Pioneer, I never knew ya), it makes a certain amount of sense. My overworked scholar always hits weekends and breaks with one thing on her mind: "Sleeeep!" When we board early Saturday morning, she'll be free to rack out in her room as soon as she wants. I wouldn't ask her to face a long flight and border crossing, trek to a hotel, and immediately go out and face a college tour and interview the next morning. If we flew, I would wait an recovery additional day before departing Sunday. That day, we'll be cozily crossing the Sierras. It's harder to justify the long layover in Sacramento, but the third day should be pure railfan's pleasure. We should be able to take part in one of the last wine tastings. Let's hope it's not a last trip in the PPC, too, but it will be my first in that rare rolling stock.
Bottom line, I figure we'll lose only one day to the train's extra travel time. We'll arrive fresh and rested, and certainly not rushed. It ought to be a mellow, contemplative start to a trip that will help shape her future, whether or not she returns to one of those campuses. On the return trip, out of points and time, we'll fold myself into Southwest's sardine can and count the minutes till it's over.
Imagine the billions of dollars it would take to increase the speeds on our LD trains by one third, to a 120 mph top speed. Wouldn't it be cheaper to provide affordable sleepers and overnight schedules to the present rail infrastructure? We need to sleep about a third of our days. Overnight trains exploit that fact; in context with our schedules, they're all, in effect, high speed trains.
Ryan
Court Jester
Where exactly did you get the idea from my post that all is well in the whole world and that Amtrak should't run more than the trains they currently run? One would think that you would have learned basic reading comprehension at your time at Virginia Tech, it's embarrassing to see that you didn't.
Comparing how many trains are run each day and how Amtrak charges for their accommodations is like comparing apples and footballs. If Amtrak is filling up the space that they are running, they have exactly zero reason to charge less for a room if it's only going to be used by one person out of some misguided notion of fairness.
I say misguided because (as has already been pointed out to you), when you buy a roomette, you're buying two seats and two berths. Amtrak can't sell that second berth like they can a separate seat in business class on an airplane. It'd be great if Amtrak was able to offer that sort of rolling stock and price things to your liking, call up Congress and ask them to give Amtrak the capital funding to make that happen.
The problem isn't with Amtrak pricing, it's that they don't offer the kind of accommodation you're looking for.
jis
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That IMHO is a distinction without a difference. A chicken and egg problem if you will. The pricing is that way because a kind of accommodation is not provided? Wait, or is it that the accommodation is not provided because there is a desire to make the pricing the way it is?
Amtrak used to have such accommodation (Slumbercoach), and as a business decision they chose not to continue them. So for at least those of us who were born early enough to have experienced such, we at least have a case to say that Amtrak has failed to continue serving single sleeper travelers as well as they used to be served, even by Amtrak. Of course for those too young to know such, it is probably all random nonsense
Just having an explanation for why something happened (which I provide a lot of all the time) is no justification for not pointing out that what happened is wrong. After all it is not like any natural laws of Physics or Mathematics are getting violated. Most are considered, may be ill considered, human decisions.
And of course the inexorable beat of increasing prices for reduced services goes on.....
Amtrak used to have such accommodation (Slumbercoach), and as a business decision they chose not to continue them. So for at least those of us who were born early enough to have experienced such, we at least have a case to say that Amtrak has failed to continue serving single sleeper travelers as well as they used to be served, even by Amtrak. Of course for those too young to know such, it is probably all random nonsense
Just having an explanation for why something happened (which I provide a lot of all the time) is no justification for not pointing out that what happened is wrong. After all it is not like any natural laws of Physics or Mathematics are getting violated. Most are considered, may be ill considered, human decisions.
And of course the inexorable beat of increasing prices for reduced services goes on.....
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While there's probably a market for something like a couchette or open section, I suspect it's small enough that in most cases it wouldn't make sense to bother with a car for it. If it would equate to 20% of the sleeper market, you'd basically want one car's worth of open sections out of every 4-6 sleeping cars on a train. You'd therefore be looking at either a single pair of spaces per sleeper or a different sleeping car layout for one or two sleepers per train. If Amtrak was operating a pool of 500 sleepers, that would be one thing, but with two pools of 50 (soon to be 75) single-level and 125 bilevel sleepers it's just not big enough to justify the different layouts, extra spares, etc. you'd need.
Ispolkom
Engineer
The problem is that section sleepers, the equivalent of couchettes, *didn't* work after World War 2. They were increasingly unpopular when passengers were given choices. If you're going to show that they would be popular now, you'd have to demonstrate that Americans want *less* privacy now, which to me is self-evidently false. All I have to do is look at the shock when I explain couchettes to my coworkers or mention that Mrs. Ispolkom and I are staying in a hotel room with shared bathroom. There seems to be an important distinction between sharing a coach car with 40-60 strangers and sharing a compartment with one or two or three.
I imagine that something like a slumbercoach, a sleeping car with small, individual compartments, might do well. Would it give enough additional revenue to make it a better choice than a conventional sleeper car, and also make enough more to justify a new car type? That's an interesting question.
One thing that I don't think would work well is airliner-style lie-flat seats. Given the frequency with which I encounter broken seat backs, leg rests and tray tables in Superliner coaches, I don't expect that Amtrak could maintain anything more mechanically complex than what is now used.
Sleeping cars are vastly better than sleeping in coach, but I still think the vast majority of people would rather fly and sleep in a hotel bed, rather than take a sleeper car overnight. I'm sure your teenaged daughter will have no difficulty sleeping, but that's not everyone's experience. In my experience, complaints about sleeping are the first or second conversational gambit at the dining car breakfast table.
jis
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I agree, and this brings us around to the discussion in another thread of the inherent destructiveness of flexibility that was obtained by going for bi-level Sleepers instead of a uniform single level sleeper fleet. Maybe Santa Fe knew something that was not learned from them by Amtrak.
BTW, to some extent Slumbercoaches were invented in order to work around the general lack of acceptance of Section in the WW II and later timeframe. Don't know what caused that cultural shift though.
Charlie and I have discussed this at great length, and I've discussed it with some other people. Not only do the bilevel sleepers create a flexibility problem (you can't exactly move a couple of Superliners off of the Builder and put them on the Meteor during the winter, while I'm pretty sure Amtrak did a variant of this back in the 70s to staff longer/extra seasonal Florida trains), but they also create a political one as well (since bilevel equipment is inherently "Western" while single-level equipment is inherently "Eastern", the equipment tends to always be "someone else's"...witness all the kvetching on here over "we got more Viewliners but no Superliners...Joe hates the Western trains!" and then consider how equipment requests would be looked at in DC).
I may open up a thread on the topic in the rail advocacy forum, but basically Amtrak needs to put the Superliner sleepers into "retreat" and start replacing them with Viewliners (or some other single-level option). The remaining Superliner sleepers can be kept on a few routes (where they'd serve longer trains and/or some trains that would simply become too massive with single-level equipment) until replacement. Under such a model, having the Superliners "fall back" to the Starlight and Auto Train could probably be sustained over the course of 30-50 years, even accounting for equipment breaking.
I've heard rumblings that this may ultimately be Amtrak's long-term plan, but nothing I can actually cite with any confidence.
I'm one of the old fogies that jis refers to and I used to ride in a Slumber Coach from WAS-ATL Regularly back in the Southern Crescent and Amtrak Crescent days! I've also experienced riding in a Section on the Canadian and thought it was Great considering how Much Cheaper it was than the Roomettes (Cabin for One) and Bedrooms! :wub:
I agree with Barcuir's Post generally but feel that most Americans Wouldn't want to spend the night in a Small Room with 3-5 Strangers as happens in other parts of the world,( it was fine with me! YMMV) but I do think that having at least One Slumber Coach on the LD Trains, if offered @ a Fair Upgrade in Price, Would Sell Out most Nights especially on the Two Night LD Trains in the West!
I agree with Barcuir's Post generally but feel that most Americans Wouldn't want to spend the night in a Small Room with 3-5 Strangers as happens in other parts of the world,( it was fine with me! YMMV) but I do think that having at least One Slumber Coach on the LD Trains, if offered @ a Fair Upgrade in Price, Would Sell Out most Nights especially on the Two Night LD Trains in the West!
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