Will Americans ever take sleepers again?

[Anderson]

1) Where are you getting all these transfers from? By the time the Authority hits San Jose, Caltrain will be electrified, so it'll be a straight shot in to downtown San Francisco, just not as many frequencies doing so until full buildout.

2) IOS is Merced to San Fernando Valley (likely LAUS actually, lots of pushing for that and it's a cheap extension) in 2022 which gets you a five hour one or two seat ride LA-SF (depends on whether transfer at Merced or diesel locomotive hauls from there).

3) 2026 is one seat three hour ride LA-SF

4) LA-SF via the CV by diesel is 11 hours, not 8. It's five hours over Tehachapi and fat chance of getting an agreement to use that.

(1) With the transfers, I was assuming 40 minutes on the transfer to the HSR train and 20 minutes on the transfer from the HSR train as a matter of travel budgeting. The HSR train is, presumably, going to be reserved; I know the frequencies are supposed to get up into the once-every-ten-minutes range at peak hours...but I don't put full faith in 100% OTP (things go wrong) and last minute rebooking has a habit of getting expensive, so my figuring is a 30-minute pad there, and 20 minutes on the other end for connection timing outside of the peak direction.

(1b) One point you did get me on was Caltrain (I didn't know if electrification was anywhere substantial in process...it's been talked about for so long I'd stopped believing it was anywhere on the horizon), though even there...would there be the capacity to run CAHSR's trains up the corridor? Caltrain is planning on running 6x hourly trains, but there's no mention made of capacity for another 3-6x trains per hour in each direction.

(2) I know the IOS is Merced-San Fernando Valley (and I know there's been pushing for LA-Burbank to happen sooner rather than later, though on that I'll believe it when the funds get committed).

(3) This is another place where I don't quite believe the timetable. Also, it's 2028 that has that in the current reports, not 2026.

 

[Bus Nut]

Anderson, could you expand on sleepers being cheaper?

I have seen cheap sleeper prices on day sections on LD trains but it seems like on most train the overnight sleeper prices get knocked into higher buckets pretty fast. Congress doesn't even allow the super cheap wowwee train filler fares and it seems like since 2000 that Amtrak has hardly needed them, with prices going up and up and consumers gladly paying them. There are periodic issues with trains that have horrible reliability (mudslides and stuff like that) and corridor trains getting price pressure from Boltbus or Acela going back and forth with the airlines. But mostly it's been ridership and revenue up, maybe ridership is going faster than revenue lately due to competition.

So could you show me some real dollar and inflation adjusted sample fares and perhaps offer some info as to why they would be cheaper now?

With less sleepers available is demand still that much weaker compared to '71? Are costs really down a lot from scaling down food and service? Killing a bunch of trains? Just curious. I don't think this gets talked about often.

 

[Anderson]

First, a response to point 4 (which I omitted as I had to shift locations): I am assuming at least some part of the HSR alignment (notably access between Bakersfield and either Palmdale or Burbank) being available. Going with a five-hour trip time, that doesn't allow one to start much after 1900 to get to one's destination by close to 0000...which means that a 2000 departure could use the northbound track with plenty of room to spare (effective temporal separation).

As to the situation in 1971, bear in mind that at the time you had a hard-and-fast fixed fare for a given city pairing. There were no buckets and few discounts (the first attempt at buckets was the Red/White/Blue fares on either CN or CP, and that was a radical change). Here's what I ran in 2011:
http://discuss.amtraktrains.com/index.php?/topic/37529-rail-fares-then-vs-now/?p=281288&fromsearch=1&do=findComment&comment=281288

To use a handy example, a Pullman Roomette ORL-NYP would run you $80.01 in 1967, somewhere around $500-550 in 2009 terms. In 2011, the equivalent accommodation would run you between $317 and $631. The Pullman Roomette would, in otherwords, have run you about 4th bucket. FWIW, I went with Seaboard's fares since that precludes any chance of the fares being a result of Amtrak botching things up.

To answer your question as best I understand it:

(1) Demand is a lot stronger as of late than it has been in a while...but demand sort of went to pot in the 80s amid a bunch of cuts as I understand it. I also seem to recall the Warrington fiascoes not helping things, either. Things are falling back into line with what they were before now.

(2) The presence of less sleepers does not necessarily translate into unlimited price increases. Demand eventually gets rather elastic as people opt not to travel, so there is a ceiling.

(3) Also remember that in the 1960s and early 1970s, airfares had not been deregulated, so it's not like Amtrak was facing heavy price competition on that front.

(4) Next, consider that low bucket fares are not always available; the answer with those fares is that in 1967 there is a good chance that SCL was either running shorter trains on some weekdays or had space empty on those days, while peak seasons got either longer trains or more trains. Amtrak runs the same train almost every single day...so for example, Amtrak can't find enough space to put people on the Zephyr in summer, while they've looked at reshuffling equipment in the winter to deal with the lack of demand on that route in the middle of the winter.

(5) Finally, I do need to update those figures...but between March 2011 and June 2014:
Coach fares rose by nearly 20% (high bucket and low bucket alike) ORL-WAS

Roomette LB went up by 13.5% ORL-WAS

Roomette HB went up by 12.9% ORL-WAS

I am rather comfortable in saying that the CPI did not rise by nearly that much lately.

Edit: Low bucket is still going to be well below the Pullman charges of that era, but middle bucket is closing in on it.

 

[Anderson]

Just going in a bit deeper on this:
The issues that a number of LD trains are having is that in high(er) seasons, they do not have the capacity they need to meet demand. The Florida trains are a pretty good example of this, though the Cardinal, Crescent, and CONO are as well. The Sunset Limited is not horridly far off of it, either. This has limited the ability of Amtrak to harness increased demand to jack up revenue.

Let's run an illustrative scenario out with the Silver Meteor: Presently it runs with three sleeping cars on almost all days. Let's bounce that up to a whopping nine cars (i.e. tripling the sleeper capacity) but implement the 2 attendants per three cars reform that has been suggested. Generally speaking, you'd probably have the following adjustments:
-Double sleeper attendant costs (you'd go from three attendants to six).
-Double labor costs in the food service cars. I'm putting this in loosely, but you'd need a second diner (though two dining cars should suffice with 48-seat diners)
--Food in the FSCs is a more open question (there would be no impact on the coach side, but you'd be roughly tripling sleeper passenger food needs in the diner). The question of a second cafe is, at this point, open...I would assume that you might not need one if you could make the diner-club option work.
-You /might/ add another conductor, but in all likelihood most of the effort here would just be outsourced to the SCAs.
-No other increase in operating crews beyond an additional assistant conductor.
-There would be an increase in fuel/power costs, but that is hard to estimate. A 10-car train would become a 17/18-car train, but the increase is not going to be proportionate.
-Track access fees would not change.
-Station costs, etc. would not be impacted appreciably. There should be no impact, but I wouldn't rule out some shift-shuffling to ensure an extra Red Cap on hand (since the sleeper is probably going from an effective capacity in the 60s to somewhere just shy of 200).

In short, there's a lot of stuff that scales up to the effective limit of platforms along the route (which are, at a surprising number of stations, roughly long enough to accommodate a train of 16-18 cars). As such, if you could pull off this example, trading in a one-time hit of 5-10% to sleeper PPR would be worth it.

Obviously this is an academic example, and obviously I have not listed all costs, but there are a lot of costs that are fixed and others which aren't fixed but which provide scaling opportunities.

Moving around to the fares themselves, in the 1967 example I gave your average ORL-NYP fare would have been $80.01 (I'm going to call that $80 so I don't have to fight with loose pennies) since that was the only fare available. Let's go to a crude five-bucket system where the available fares are $60, $70, $80, $90, and $100. Obviously, anyone paying $60 or $70 is getting a better deal than the fixed fare, and the opposite is true of anyone at the $90/100 levels. However, if fares are distributed such that every $70 fare is matched by a $90 fare (and every $60 fare a $100 fare), the net impact is null on paper...

...until it comes to periods with more and less travel. Let's take a midweek day in October or February (generally a slow time, even on the Silvers). With demand being lower you load in more $60/70 fares and less $90/100 fares to try and fill space. On the other hand, at Thanksgiving or Christmas you might just not make anything lower than $80 available.

One other thing I will note here, though I did note it elsewhere: In 1967, a round-trip ticket got you a discount on the coach fare (but not the Pullman charge) of some amount that was set. Amtrak doesn't normally do such discounts now, but that would have effectively nudged your ticket price down a bit (between 6% and 10%)...the savings in a roomette would have been, in effect, about 3-6% on the round trip.

 

[Anderson]

This is a version of what I've said before, but...

Ideally, if the Coast Daylight happens alongside CAHSR, I would be interested to see the Starlight flipped for a morning arrival/evening departure at LAX. At that point, the reasoning is a bit more complex than it would be at the moment:
(1) You'd enable a CAHSR-to-Starlight transfer without dealing with really bad hours of the night (i.e. around midnight at SAC if/when that happens)

(2) You'd avoid cannibalization (this is one of the very few cases where I see cannibalization as an issue, mainly because the trip times are not terribly different from one another and I'm not aware of a desperate capacity crunch).

(3) A Coast Daylight-Capitol Corridor guaranteed connection would enable service (albeit with a transfer) from LA up to Oakland and Sacramento on this route as well.

(4) See the earlier discussion on legal connections at LAX and EMY (as well as a connection to San Diego that does not involve getting there at close to midnight).

 

[neroden]

To answer your question as best I understand it:

(1) Demand is a lot stronger as of late than it has been in a while...but demand sort of went to pot in the 80s amid a bunch of cuts as I understand it. I also seem to recall the Warrington fiascoes not helping things, either. Things are falling back into line with what they were before now.

Brief History of Demand For Intercity Passenger Rail In the US

* There was a demand drop throughout the 1950s and 1960s, for reasons explained elsewhere.

* Ridership & ticket yields rose during the 1970s (probably largely due to the oil crises)

* Ridership & yields dropped from 1979 to 1982 (cheap oil, the misguided Carter or Boyd Cuts). 1981 was a low point for Amtrak.

* Ridership & yields rose slowly from 1982 to 1990 (rising oil prices, shift in public tastes)

* Ridership was roughly flat from 1990 to 1994; yields were rising

* Ridership (& probably yields) crashed from 1994 to 1997. This was most likely due to mismanagement by Thomas Downs.

* Ridership & yields rose slowly from 1997 to 2006

* Ridership & yields rose quickly from 2006 to 2008

* Ridership & yields dropped in 2009 due to the Great Crash

* Ridership & yields jumped right back and started growing quickly again from 2009-2014

Worth noting: Warrington gets a lot of blame on some discussion forums, but Amtrak ridership & revenue actually improved under Warrington. It's really Thomas Downs who trashed Amtrak service, and it shows up in the numbers very clearly.

The 1990s were a period which was good for passenger rail in general, with lots of light rail and commuter rail lines opening or expanding, and older systems setting ridership records. The decline in Amtrak ridership during the same period is aberrant, and indicates mismanagement by Downs.

Gunn (2002-2005) actually cut a lot of service (including throwing the Clockers to NJT and SEPTA and cancelling the Three Rivers) and it's possible that ridership would have been rising quickly from 2002-2005 if Gunn hadn't been cancelling trains out from under the passengers. So demand may have started rising quickly as early as 2002.

Anyway...

To use a handy example, a Pullman Roomette ORL-NYP would run you $80.01 in 1967, somewhere around $500-550 in 2009 terms. In 2011, the equivalent accommodation would run you between $317 and $631. The Pullman Roomette would, in otherwords, have run you about 4th bucket. FWIW, I went with Seaboard's fares since that precludes any chance of the fares being a result of Amtrak botching things up.

In the next few years, Amtrak can probably get back to that fare level (as an average -- third bucket of five, or whatever) even with substantially larger numbers of sleeping cars. Cars, the main competition, are if anything much more expensive to operate than they were in 1967.
Airfare + hotels may be cheaper (in some markets), but (a) I've always said Amtrak is primarily competing with roads, not airplanes, and (b) the cost trends in the airplane industry are bad; with high fuel-dependence, costs are likely to go up faster than inflation, and the prices will probably have to follow.

In short, within a few years, the roomettes in the new sleeping cars will probably actually be charging *higher* prices than they are now, after inflation adjustments.

 

[Anderson]

Two notes on your analysis, but I like most of it:
(1) At least as far as the Western cuts, IIRC Downs got stuck with deciding how to handle a slash to the operating budget. Giving credit where it is due, he tried to save a broad network. The effort was a disaster, but I feel compelled to credit an effort that might well have paid off in the mid-2000s: Presuming the equipment was still available to run the trains, for the last few years Amtrak has probably had enough room in their operating grant to reinstate some of the cut services.

(2) On oil, while I agree that the long-term trend is up, I get a feeling we're going to have relatively cheap oil and gas for the next few years due to an odd mix of the new oil fields up in ND, the ban on exporting oil from the US, and rising auto fuel efficiency. How long that "next few years" is depends...it could be 5, it could be 20.

 

[J Smith]

Absolutely! Sleepers sell out quite often. There's still a demand for them. Yes, they can be expensive but, with enough rewards points you don't have to pay!

 

[jis]

Warrington gets blamed for frittering away resources on the material handling car project which was unlikely to succeed due to conflict with host carriers and was not part of Amtrak's charter. Many had hoped that he'd order more passenger cars instead of freight cars.

Also, no one believed in his "glide to self-sufficiency" using high value freight instead of passengers plan. I wonder if even he believed it, or it was just "clever propanda" to keep Congress at bay.

Sent from my iPhone using Amtrak Forum

 

[neroden]

Downs managed to cause Amtrak to run out of cash with a *friendly administration* and *relatively friendly Congress*. He had a record of cost overruns and inability to keep to budget on his previous projects. :-(

Warrington gets criticized for loading Amtrak up with debt, but it was better than running out of cash before borrowing, which is what Downs managed to do (somehow). Downs also appears to have been involved in one of the thoughtless and self-destructive rounds of amenities cuts. (Boyd, of course, was involved in the first such round.)

I can't really fault Downs for cutting the Pioneer, or the Vegas-Denver service. Those were expensive, low-population routes. And I understand that he couldn't save the Phoenix branch.

Cutting the Houston-Dallas service and dropping the other Texas service down to three-a-week again -- that, I can and will fault him for. Also losing the service via St Albans to Montreal. Also losing the Toledo-Dearborn service. These were all appallingly stupid moves. The states have been struggling for years to recover these particular lost services, and the gain from the cuts was practically nonexistent.

Downs doesn't seem to have had a clue about how to run a railroad, frankly.

(Another continuous thorn in Amtrak's side is due to the Carter/Boyd cuts -- the Cardinal was daily before that.)

(2) On oil, while I agree that the long-term trend is up, I get a feeling we're going to have relatively cheap oil and gas for the next few years due to an odd mix of the new oil fields up in ND, the ban on exporting oil from the US, and rising auto fuel efficiency. How long that "next few years" is depends...it could be 5, it could be 20.

A note: Even with temporarily cheaper oil, the cost of driving continues to go up. Cars are more expensive to buy (as standards increase), insurance premiums are rising very fast (as drivers education vanishes), etc...

 

[Paulus]

Didn't Downs have to deal with an absolute mess of deferred maintenance on cars thanks to Claytor?

 

[Anderson]

Didn't Downs have to deal with an absolute mess of deferred maintenance on cars thanks to Claytor?

I've always heard it as Downs (and/or Warrington) being responsible for the deferred maintenance, not Claytor.

 

[Paulus]

Didn't Downs have to deal with an absolute mess of deferred maintenance on cars thanks to Claytor?

I've always heard it as Downs (and/or Warrington) being responsible for the deferred maintenance, not Claytor.

INTERCITY PASSENGER RAIL: Financial and Operating Conditions Threaten Amtrak's Long-Term Viability

To cope with funding shortages, in the late 1980s Amtrak started reducing car maintenance. By the end of 1993, costly heavy overhauls were overdue for 40 percent of its nearly 1,900 cars. Amtrak also deferred renovating and modernizing its outdated maintenance facilities, which has contribute to costly and inefficient operations.

Focusing exclusively on the shortfall in operating funds masks the critical problem of Amtrak’s capital needs. Today, the average age of Amtrak’s cars is about 22 years—similar to what it was when Amtrak first began operating. Amtrak now estimates that it needs to invest about $1.5 billion of equipment overhauls and new equipment, primarily locomotives. Over the past 10 years, Amtrak’s equipment and facilities have depreciated at the rate of $200 million per year, while investment has averaged only $140 million.

...

As the backlog grew, Amtrak officials recognized that the railroad’s preventive maintenance/overhaul program was not adequate. Cars looked shabby and were breaking down with increasing regularity. When the fiscal year 1994 budget provided no increase in funding, the Mechanical Department began to implement a new “progressive maintenance” program in October 1993.2 Under this program, Amtrak performs heavy maintenance when a car breaks down and also a limited overhaul each year on every car. Every third year, the annual overhaul will be more comprehensive but still less extensive than the heavy overhaul performed before.

The FDA thing was on Claytor's watch as well.

 

[jis]

Part of the problem with the Montrealer was that it was an even more hopeless money loser than the Adirondack when it was canned, and no state was willing to step upto the plate and save it in its through service to Montreal overnight form. That is what I heard was the reality faced back then, no matter how much many of us wanted it saved.

Sent from my iPhone using Amtrak Forum

 

[Anderson]

While the subject is up...what is/was the "FDA thing"?

 

[Paulus]

While the subject is up...what is/was the "FDA thing"?

Major brouhaha, or so I'm told, about rodent infestations and other unsanitary issues with Amtrak's dining cars back in 1992.

 

[neroden]

Didn't Downs have to deal with an absolute mess of deferred maintenance on cars thanks to Claytor?

Arguably, yes. Deferred maintenance builds up over the course of years.

Claytor did seem to duck out at exactly the right moment, when a bunch of trouble had built up, but before the trouble came to the surface.

...still, Downs's other moves seem to show a failure to understand principles of transportation network design. And frankly, anyone who comes into a mess of problems after a pile of deferred maintenance -- and doesn't realize what he's getting into -- is *the fall guy*. You know, it's possible that Claytor saw a bunch of problems which he couldn't solve, and set Downs up as the guy to take the fall for them. Downs proceeded to fill that role by not solving them, and making things worse. It is perhaps likely that nobody who knew better would have taken the job.

Warrington knew what he was getting into. He did a bunch of Hail Marys, but he walked out with a better railroad than he'd walked into.

 

[jis]

Warrington knew what he was getting into. He did a bunch of Hail Marys, but he walked out with a better railroad than he'd walked into.

Except possibly financially, since his Hail Mary's required some financial jiggery pokery.

 

[Anderson]

Warrington knew what he was getting into. He did a bunch of Hail Marys, but he walked out with a better railroad than he'd walked into.

Except possibly financially, since his Hail Mary's required some financial jiggery pokery.

Yeah, but everyone since him has had to do some version of the same, and it's not like he mortgaged Penn Station in the process, either.

 

[Lawdude]

Chicago-Florida is rather unlikely to be any cheaper than airplane with fees for a sleeper (breaks down to about 23¢ per mile on the old Floridian timetable with $310 per passenger cost; on CONO+Sunset East it's 18.3¢: average sleeper yield is about 27.2¢). And honestly, there's a problem in that you're trying to justify heavily subsidized routes against profitable competition: How much would the sleeper fare be if they actually had to pick up the slack and make the train profitable to run? The incremental revenue of a sleeper has always, from the numbers I've seen published, been quite low, at best, and such a routing is unlikely to have significant coach ridership, which is where most incremental revenue is on a long distance train.

Edit: Actually, worse than that. Airfare is round trip, Amtrak is one-way. So you'd be looking at sleeper revenues of 9-12¢ per mile; less than current coach yields.

This is the real answer to OP's question.

Overnight train service on particular routes is actually potentially viable. There's plenty of examples that have been given in this thread.

But not with roomettes and bedrooms with free dining car food! Sleeping car space on Amtrak is priced well below cost. And if they priced them at fixed and allocated variable costs plus a reasonable profit, they would be prohibitively expensive versus flying even if you make comparisons favorable to Amtrak (i.e., assuming that people will actually pay checked bag fees when flying rather than finding a way to avoid them, which isn't hard to do on the major carriers).

If you really wanted a competitive train service, it would probably be something along the lines of current Amtrak coach, or maybe some form of barebones sleeper service such as a sectional sleeper or a slumbercoach. And no free food from a dining car. You'd have to keep the costs way down so that Amtrak can actually make money on the service while charging a fare competitive with the airlines, which would then allow the railroad to add capacity and perhaps frequency of service.

 

[Lawdude]

That they may, but I was pointing out that you can't claim sleeper vs airfare is an unfair comparison because of meals without also counting the effect of extra travel time for the train.

True. We choose to enjoy that extra travel time, whenever possible. It is all about the attitude.

Amtrak is a perfect fit for some situations. It is contraindicated in other situations.

Agreed. I can actually give an example on this front:

I got stuck, due to the OTP situation, f**ing much of the way to/from the NARP conference (I was able to make something of a vacation of the trip, but there was a limit). I will admit that I enjoyed much of the experience in question, though that was down to flying Virgin First. However, the flight was an inconvenient one insofar as Virgin doesn't go to SLC, so I flew to SFO and caught the next morning's Zephyr. Yes, I spent about a day and a half in transit, minimum...but it was one direct flight and then a train with an overnight in Oakland, not a string of connecting flights. Note that I picked this in no small part because when I went to look at flying, everything heading to SLC either had a connection tactically placed to cut the flight short of meal service (the Houston connections seemed to do this) or involved flying on a third-party "express" flight with nothing but very tight coach seating (which was the case in Denver).

Again speaking personally, a lot of why Amtrak won out over flying is that I simply got used to having legroom and whatnot. Something is screwed up when an airline's "first class" product is roughly on par with Amtrak's long-haul coach. The airlines that ran passenger rail out back in the 50s and 60s had baseline seating in the mid-30s in terms of seat pitch and included a lot more amenities in many respects (as well as less hassles). In many regards I strongly suspect that, caveats about pricing notwithstanding, the airlines of today wouldn't have had nearly such an easy time beating the railroads, particularly on the not-super-long routes. NYC-LAX is one thing, but again I turn back to the shorter routes and that's where Amtrak is at least contraindicated a lot less.

I don't think the airlines, strictly speaking, "beat" the railroads. The passenger car got there first. Just about every history of American railroads says that the decline started in the 1920's-- at a time when almost nobody was flying. And it intensified in the 1950s-- at a time when still, very few Americans had ever flown a commercial flight. But the 1920's saw the construction of the US national highway system, and the 1950's saw the construction of the interstates.

The reason that airline service has declined is because it has gone from being a province of the rich (remember the term "jet set"?) to a province of the working and middle classes. It cost over $900 in today's dollars to fly across the country in the early 1980's-- now it costs $400. I wasn't around in the 1950's and 1960's, but airfares, adjusted for inflation, were even higher back then.

But that's a product of the airlines' popularity and profitability. It's not causing people not to fly at all-- airlines are making record profits. Instead, it's a result of so many people flying. A ton of air travelers are price sensitive consumers, and airlines have to make drastic service cuts to keep fares low to get these people to fly.

But all this happened long after the railroads were being crushed. It was the automobile that did that.

 

[Lawdude]

(5) And air travel isn't any better. Legroom has dropped from the middle 30s to the high 20s on many airlines (28-30 inch coach seating is increasingly pervasive), security is unpleasant, and a number of airports are slamming into capacity issues. Again, contrast with the 60s when many of those airports were new, security was non-existent, and (as noted) coach then was more like a lot of business class seats are now

This is somewhat overstated. No major airline has a seat pitch less than 30 inches, and most major airline seats are at 31 or 32. The three legacy carriers offer competitively priced premium economy at 34 inches or more. Spirit and Allegiant, with their tiny seat pitches, have small market shares. And 31 or 32 inch seat pitches were common in the 1970's, actually.

It's true that there has been some shrinkage-- in hell, everyone flies in Recaro slimline airline seats. But it's actually much more of a perception issue-- Americans have gotten fatter and planes are getting fuller, so they notice the cramped conditions more.

At any rate, the reason I only say it is somewhat overstated is that it is nonetheless true that Amtrak has a big competitive advantage on the issue of legroom.

 

[Lawdude]

I despise flying since past flights have made me airsick. Furthermore, I tried taking overnight Greyhound buses and found that such trips invariable leave me fatigued at the end. Thus, I will always try to book a sleeper for Amtrak if there is overnight travel involved.

Furthermore, the size of this country means that demand for sleepers will always exist. This is in contrast to smaller countries like Japan, for example, where sleepers have almost disappeared completely due to its small size and availability of high-speed rail and air travel there.

Japan is an unusual case for a whole host of reasons. Of course, one thing rarely mentioned is that the original plans for the Shinkansens (which I probably misspelled) was to run overnight services as well. That largely fell by the wayside due to maintenance issues more than anything (having the tracks closed for five hours per night is useful for doing work without disrupting service).

Also, most Shinkansen aficionados do not realize that there are 48 daily flights between Tokyo and Osaka (various airports), the two anchor points of the Tokaido Shinkansen (translates roughly to Tokaido New Line, the original) most of them using wide bodies (767, 777, 787) between JAL and ANA. The nature and size of that market is way beyond anything that we can conjure up apparently.

Can you imagine a flight every 20 mins from New York area airports to Washington area airports with wide bodies and in addition a Shinkansen level intensity of service on the NEC?

I can imagine it, but not with wide-bodies...though that is more a side-effect of mediocre transit from the airports that can host them into the cities (EWR and IAD are a good distance out from NYC and Washington, respectively). My understanding is that in Japan, the local transit connections are quite good by comparison (and if I'm not mistaken, there are a couple of private transit systems that are listed on the stock exchange there[!]). Of course, that brings to mind a serious question: Is airport security in Japan less of a mess than it is in the US?

I suspect the widebody issue is a result of taxation. If you tax per passenger, as we do, and you allow airlines to control slots, it's rational for airlines to use lots of small planes-- you get greater frequency and you freeze out potential competitors.

But if you tax by LANDING, suddenly, it becomes much better to use a nice fuel efficient 747 with 500 people on it.

 

[neroden]

Overnight train service on particular routes is actually potentially viable. There's plenty of examples that have been given in this thread.

But not with roomettes and bedrooms with free dining car food! Sleeping car space on Amtrak is priced well below cost. And if they priced them at fixed and allocated variable costs plus a reasonable profit, they would be prohibitively expensive versus flying...

I don't think the airlines, strictly speaking, "beat" the railroads. The passenger car got there first. Just about every history of American railroads says that the decline started in the 1920's-- at a time when almost nobody was flying. And it intensified in the 1950s-- at a time when still, very few Americans had ever flown a commercial flight. But the 1920's saw the construction of the US national highway system, and the 1950's saw the construction of the interstates....

This gets back to what I've said before: Amtrak doesn't *need* to be competitive with flying. Amtrak simply needs to be competitive with driving.

Yes, airline usage has gone way up, and the occasional airline makes a small profit after being bailed out of their most recent bankruptcy.

Nearly all US airlines either went bankrupt, sometimes multiple times -- or were recapitalized by scooping up the remains of a bankrupt airline cheaply, sometimes multiple times. They nearly all needed a bailout in 2001, and it wasn't the first; there was a round of bailouts in the early 1980s too. I think Southwest is the only exception to this sad history, and studying its business model is interesting. It has some rather sharp limits: it's not scalable in certain ways.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/operations/2012/06/southwest_airlines_profitability_how_the_company_uses_operations_theory_to_fuel_its_success_.html

By doing strictly point-to-point flights, strictly with 737s (a particularly good aircraft design, by the way), Southwest makes sure that it doesn't compete at all in most markets, including any market pair which can't fill a 737; and it makes sure that the available departures per day are few, by not adding a departure until they can fill two. By using smaller downtown airports (which is generally a good move for customers) Southwest puts an absolute cap on the number of flights it can run to major cities per day. It's a solid business model, but it simply abandons large numbers of trips to the competition.

Airline usage is really not displacing automobile usage much at all. Autos are the big competition.

 

[Larry H.]

I wish Amtrak offered the couchettes that European City Night Line's offer. There are rooms with 4 or 6 beds to a room that fold into seats when not in use. They allow travelers to lay down overnight without having to pay for an entire sleeper. They're essentially hostels on wheels. I'd love an Amtrak option to lay down horizontally with no frills - share space, no dining meals included. I'd like to think that could be offered affordably.

I believe that canadian trains still offer Upper and Lower bunks which are somewhat like what your talking about. For some reason they disappeared on american trains in the 70s for the most part.