Will Americans ever take sleepers again?

[Anderson]

I'm going to take the idea of 10x daily trains that was cited from the FRA in a now-hidden post, give or take, and run with it for a moment. This works on a number of medium-distance city pairs (say, WAS-NYP on the NEC, MIA-ORL on FEC, or LAX-SAN in California). In a lot of cases you can stitch corridors like that together pretty nicely (so in the case of the NEC, you get BOS-NYP, NYP-WAS, and WAS-RVR strung together).

Here's the thing: When you get over six hours, some of those frequencies start having to do very odd things. Let's take Hampton Roads as a handy example: Norfolk is presently about five hours from Washington, DC (it's a bit less, but for the moment that's close enough to illustrate). In order to get a train into Washington by 0900, you basically have to leave Norfolk at 0400 (which, backing things up, means waking up at or before 0300). Norfolk is one market where this sort of thing may sell, but that's because you have a military-heavy travel constituency in the mix. The market is still good for a host of reasons, but the travel options here start bordering on the obscene to make those arrivals work. On the other end of things, the 1900 departure from WAS arrives a bit shy of midnight. IMHO midnight is passable whereas 0400 gets to be a problem.

Swinging around to the western part of Virginia, you start getting similarly bad times if you try to consolidate your crew/equipment base out to Roanoke (which is a reasonable candidate for substantial daily service in the long run...the market just isn't big enough for any of the airlines to really bother with and it is part of a string of workable markets in Lynchburg, Charlottesville, and so on)...a commuter-timed train into Washington would have to have a pretty bad time, and it is worth noting that train scheduling issues mean that you would probably end up with someone's train getting pushed aside by at least half an hour...leading to some truly nasty possibilities like departures from Roanoke in the middle of the night. And all of this sets aside service aimed further up the NEC...where a string of markets (NYP, PHL, BAL, etc.) are quite significant (if not on the scale of WAS) for Virginia.

Now it is true that in some of these cases the train is making what I will call a "revenue equipment move" (i.e. the move is being made more for operational reasons than revenue reasons and the extreme ends of the trip are being run fairly empty to allow consolidated crew bases), but at some point sleeper ops become feasible on routes like this for the "oddball" departures (i.e. allowing occupancy of a sleeper at 2300 for a train leaving at 0200). I feel compelled to point out that you don't need a mass of riders to sell out a sleeping car...a pair of Viewliner II cars operating in tandem with no turnover would sell out at 20,440 riders/year assuming all spaces take double occupancy and 16,425/year assuming double occupancy of the bedrooms and 1.5x occupancy of roomettes. This is, frankly, not a huge number and that may be one problem (a pair of similarly-constrained LD Amfleets adds 43,070 riders/year while a pair of NEC Coach Amfleets adds 52,560; if I'm fretting about my topline figures, 52.5k sounds a lot better than 16.4k).

There are other examples scattered through the system (KCY-STL-CHI is a good case in point...the first train out of STL extends back to KCY with a decent evening departure while the last one out of CHI would hit KCY in the morning), almost all involving through operations between 2+ corridors. Honestly, a major shuffle in Chicago akin to what I've mentioned for New York might make sense (DET-CHI hovers at 5:30, STL-CHI at about the same, CLE-CHI at about 7:00, and so on). Additionally, a morning "wave" of these trains coming in around 0600-0700 (i.e. before the commuter trains swamp the station) would allow transfers to other reasonably local markets without killing a FULL day in transit.

I'm going to run a reboot while I have good Wifi, and then I'm going to try and stick together a hypothetical system for the NEC to illustrate what sort of thing should be able to work.

 

[neroden]

As for the 5 "problem routes", the Empire Builder and Coast Starlight consistently outperform the other 3, and will continue to do OK even with the "empty gaps". For the Empire Builder, there's no parallel superhighway and plane flights are very expensive. For the Coast Starlight, I'm not sure why it remains so popular -- Redding to Eugene is simply *way too slow* (9.5 hours vs. 5 hours driving). There may be some cultural effect, there being more of a "train habit" in California, Washington and Oregon.

Starlight runs over three different rail corridors (Surfliner, Capitol Corridor, and Cascades) which will make it look better (since it can function as an extra frequency and/or final train) and probably has a plurality of travel within California (56.5% of its boardings/alightings are within CA). There's also a fourth pseudo corridor given the Thruway bus frequencies between Sacramento and Redding.

Ah... so Redding to Eugene *is* bad, but the other parts have stronger ridership.

----

In response to twa904's comment, it's very expensive for planes to take off and land. It's really quite cheap for trains to stop and start, by comparison.

----

I feel compelled to point out that you don't need a mass of riders to sell out a sleeping car...a pair of Viewliner II cars operating in tandem with no turnover would sell out at 20,440 riders/year assuming all spaces take double occupancy and 16,425/year assuming double occupancy of the bedrooms and 1.5x occupancy of roomettes. This is, frankly, not a huge number and that may be one problem (a pair of similarly-constrained LD Amfleets adds 43,070 riders/year while a pair of NEC Coach Amfleets adds 52,560; if I'm fretting about my topline figures, 52.5k sounds a lot better than 16.4k).

On the other hand, if you're looking at topline *financials*, the overnight coaches really don't sell terribly well. Over an entire run, it seems that revenue per coach is more or less equivalent to revenue per sleeping car (varying by service), but this disguises the fairly obvious fact that the sleeping cars sell better at night and the coaches sell better during the day.

 

[Anderson]

True, though in the case of private rooms I think some of this is down to bad marketing. If Amtrak were inclined to advertise things differently they could probably increase daytime sales of roomettes on various segments. For example, rephrase "sleeper roomette" on a daytime train into a "private room with a fold-out desk and complementary meals and a power outlet" and it sounds like a better proposition for daytime sales. Of course, if Amtrak could make wifi happen on some of those segments...*sighs*

 

[jis]

They could also help by pricing pure daytime sales a little more attractively, and perhaps sell them only if they are not needed for longer journeys or to fill in after they have already been used for overnight.

 

[Paulus]

I'm going to take the idea of 10x daily trains that was cited from the FRA in a now-hidden post, give or take, and run with it for a moment. This works on a number of medium-distance city pairs (say, WAS-NYP on the NEC, MIA-ORL on FEC, or LAX-SAN in California). In a lot of cases you can stitch corridors like that together pretty nicely (so in the case of the NEC, you get BOS-NYP, NYP-WAS, and WAS-RVR strung together).

Here's the thing: When you get over six hours, some of those frequencies start having to do very odd things. Let's take Hampton Roads as a handy example: Norfolk is presently about five hours from Washington, DC (it's a bit less, but for the moment that's close enough to illustrate). In order to get a train into Washington by 0900, you basically have to leave Norfolk at 0400 (which, backing things up, means waking up at or before 0300). Norfolk is one market where this sort of thing may sell, but that's because you have a military-heavy travel constituency in the mix. The market is still good for a host of reasons, but the travel options here start bordering on the obscene to make those arrivals work. On the other end of things, the 1900 departure from WAS arrives a bit shy of midnight. IMHO midnight is passable whereas 0400 gets to be a problem.

Keep in mind that 2.5-3 hours is basically the sweet spot that you want to aim for with intercity rail travel; if you're aiming for a 0900 arrival in DC, that needs to be because there's a Richmond-DC travel market for it and you're expecting a sufficient travel demand to be at Richmond before 0630. Honestly, for leisure or business travel, a departure from Norfolk between 0800-0900 is probably better off.

Swinging around to the western part of Virginia, you start getting similarly bad times if you try to consolidate your crew/equipment base out to Roanoke (which is a reasonable candidate for substantial daily service in the long run...the market just isn't big enough for any of the airlines to really bother with and it is part of a string of workable markets in Lynchburg, Charlottesville, and so on)...a commuter-timed train into Washington would have to have a pretty bad time, and it is worth noting that train scheduling issues mean that you would probably end up with someone's train getting pushed aside by at least half an hour...leading to some truly nasty possibilities like departures from Roanoke in the middle of the night. And all of this sets aside service aimed further up the NEC...where a string of markets (NYP, PHL, BAL, etc.) are quite significant (if not on the scale of WAS) for Virginia.

Commuter trains require commuter distances; half an hour to an hour max. There's just not going to be much in the way of patronage otherwise.

Now it is true that in some of these cases the train is making what I will call a "revenue equipment move" (i.e. the move is being made more for operational reasons than revenue reasons and the extreme ends of the trip are being run fairly empty to allow consolidated crew bases), but at some point sleeper ops become feasible on routes like this for the "oddball" departures (i.e. allowing occupancy of a sleeper at 2300 for a train leaving at 0200). I feel compelled to point out that you don't need a mass of riders to sell out a sleeping car...a pair of Viewliner II cars operating in tandem with no turnover would sell out at 20,440 riders/year assuming all spaces take double occupancy and 16,425/year assuming double occupancy of the bedrooms and 1.5x occupancy of roomettes. This is, frankly, not a huge number and that may be one problem (a pair of similarly-constrained LD Amfleets adds 43,070 riders/year while a pair of NEC Coach Amfleets adds 52,560; if I'm fretting about my topline figures, 52.5k sounds a lot better than 16.4k).

Your assumptions aren't quite right. Going back to the spreadsheet in the Viewliner thread, after accounting for crew use, there's only about one sleeper passenger for every two sleeper seats (basically every roomette at single occupancy). Coach ranges from 0.8-1.1 passengers per seat (ignoring the Cardinal).

I feel compelled to point out that you don't need a mass of riders to sell out a sleeping car...a pair of Viewliner II cars operating in tandem with no turnover would sell out at 20,440 riders/year assuming all spaces take double occupancy and 16,425/year assuming double occupancy of the bedrooms and 1.5x occupancy of roomettes. This is, frankly, not a huge number and that may be one problem (a pair of similarly-constrained LD Amfleets adds 43,070 riders/year while a pair of NEC Coach Amfleets adds 52,560; if I'm fretting about my topline figures, 52.5k sounds a lot better than 16.4k).

On the other hand, if you're looking at topline *financials*, the overnight coaches really don't sell terribly well. Over an entire run, it seems that revenue per coach is more or less equivalent to revenue per sleeping car (varying by service), but this disguises the fairly obvious fact that the sleeping cars sell better at night and the coaches sell better during the day.

With revenue, keep in mind that the coach prices are ridiculously low on the long distance trains, especially compared to the NEC. Assuming the same coach seat turnover on the NEC as on the LDs (likely underestimating things by a third), and the same 50% occupancy as the Viewliners currently receive (thus selling 14 "seats" per day), you'd need to have fares averaging $307 to match coach revenue. More, of course, if you're adding in diner service and whatnot.

 

[neroden]

Commuter trains require commuter distances; half an hour to an hour max. There's just not going to be much in the way of patronage otherwise.

Tell that to the LIRR, Metro-North, and NJT. Yeah, I know, New York City is weird...

With revenue, keep in mind that the coach prices are ridiculously low on the long distance trains, especially compared to the NEC

Which is partly 'cause it's hard to sell a coach seat at night. How full is #66/67 and how much does it charge? It might be the most appropriate comparison to the long-distance routes where they run at night. Actually, it's interesting that Amtrak doesn't break it out as a separate line item; arguably it should be broken out separately.

 

[Paulus]

Commuter trains require commuter distances; half an hour to an hour max. There's just not going to be much in the way of patronage otherwise.

Tell that to the LIRR, Metro-North, and NJT. Yeah, I know, New York City is weird...

New York's large enough that there can be a significant population base even for outliers, but even then I suspect it's mostly within that 30-60 minute range, even for lines that are longer for maximum distance. By way of analogy, there's not too many people going from Oceanside to Los Angeles on Metrolink, but there's an awful lot going Oceanside to Irvine and Irvine to Los Angeles.

With revenue, keep in mind that the coach prices are ridiculously low on the long distance trains, especially compared to the NEC

Which is partly 'cause it's hard to sell a coach seat at night. How full is #66/67 and how much does it charge? It might be the most appropriate comparison to the long-distance routes where they run at night. Actually, it's interesting that Amtrak doesn't break it out as a separate line item; arguably it should be broken out separately.

Break it out separately and allocation is going to look all funky (though I do wish Amtrak would report boardings/revenue per individual train system-wide). Still, even a low bucket #66/67 is about 17¢ per mile (BOS-WAS). Palmetto (including business class) and Crescent do slightly better in terms of per-mile yields, but it's not astoundingly so.

 

[jis]

My guess is that Amtrak tries to avoid giving too much per train info, as much as it can manage to get away with, because such information is like red meat to a lion for the Congressional micro managers and they are not going to go away any time soon. Heck, I'd be the first one to like to see those numbers, but I can sort of understand their reticence.

 

[Anderson]

Paulus,
I actually have to call BS on the "commuter distance" point. You have a significant number of commuters going from Charlottesville into DC (which is about two hours on Amtrak), though many drive for want of properly-timed rail service, and Fredericksburg into DC (which is 90 minutes on VRE), while Carmel Church (about halfway between Fredericksburg and Richmond) has also been suggested as a commuter town location for Washington. Another example is Martinsburg/Harpers Ferry, which are a slight bit beyond that arbitrary hour mark.

Jis,
They already do that. Witness my stupid roomette tricks. The rub is that those are something that only a handful of people really know about that as far as I can tell. The option simply isn't promoted, period.

As to information, the issue there isn't just Congresscritters gone wild...there was some information posted in Virginia a few years back that triggered the establishment of a competing bus line.

 

[Paulus]

Paulus,

I actually have to call BS on the "commuter distance" point. You have a significant number of commuters going from Charlottesville into DC (which is about two hours on Amtrak), though many drive for want of properly-timed rail service, and Fredericksburg into DC (which is 90 minutes on VRE), while Carmel Church (about halfway between Fredericksburg and Richmond) has also been suggested as a commuter town location for Washington. Another example is Martinsburg/Harpers Ferry, which are a slight bit beyond that arbitrary hour mark.

It's not arbitrary, it's acknowledging that the average commute, in pretty much every locale, is half an hour, and that the bast majority of commutes will be within no more than double that. Per OnTheMap, Charlottesville, VA has 71 commuters into DC (about on par with Pittsburgh's 66 or Chicago's 68), Fredericksburg has 324, and Martinsburg is 116. Looking instead at Metro/micropolitan areas, Charlottesville is 328. Now, the Census could very well be off somewhat, but I don't think its wildly so. Is it perhaps worthwhile to extend NERegional 148 or 184 to CVS? Maybe, if a significant portion of those commuters are available to be captured and ride daily or near daily enough, but I wouldn't be surprised if other times emerged as having better ridership and revenue potentials.

 

[Bradenmeridian]

I'm sure someone has made this point, but when making a multi-city trip, business or otherwise, an overnight train can make very good sense because you save on a hotel and even your meals are included, so the costs are comparable. Also for someone who lives in a suburb, to get up before dawn to get to an airport to try and make it to an early business meeting, it's a viable option to get to the train the evening before provided the train arrives early and is DEPENDABLE enough. About four years ago I had to go NYP to CLE in a snowstorm for work. This makes the Lake Shore the ideal train because any hours lost gets you into Cleveland at a human hour, instead of, what, 3:30, and then the kitchen has opened and you get breakfast before you arrive. That night, the entire east was closed down due to the storm: roads, airports. Another sleeper passenger was headed home to Chi from meetings, and said he'd never taken the train and realized it was the only choice that had a chance. That train arrived in a timely manor, only an hour delay at Rennsalaer (sp).

 

[Lawdude]

Now, there are some routes where you could conceive of a point-to-point sleeper service that leaves at 9 pm and gets in at 7 the next morning or something, and such a thing is theoretically convenient compared to all the headaches of air travel. But then you run into the problem that the tracks are shared with freight and commuter railroads, and there's no guarantee they will be cooperative in allowing Amtrak to run such a schedule.

The so-called "commuter" railroads are pretty cooperative. The so-called "freight" railroads have mostly been openly hostile to passenger service of any sort for 50 years, for reasons which became irrelevant decades ago -- though their attitudes have slowly been changing.
Don't consider train service to be competing with air travel on time or price; it doesn't *need* to. Train service competes with air service on quality, because air travel is utterly miserable for a lot of people, for various reasons. On time and price, the key is to compete with driving.

That's not quite right. Train service competes directly with planes on corridor routes. Sometimes quite well (such as in the case of the Northeast Corridor), sometimes less well (LA-San Francisco).

It's possible to conceive of a sleeper train that could compete with plane service as well. I alluded to that-- if you leave one city center at 9 pm and get in at 7 the next morning in another city center, that's a service that people might very well choose to take instead of flying. But that train would be on a commuter railroad's inbound tracks, in many instances, during morning rush hour, and would also need the usual freight railroad cooperation as well.

But it's problematic to talk either about the relative comfort of train travel or competition with driving. With respect to comfort, there's very little evidence that the average traveler cares about it. Rail enthusiasts care about it a lot, of course. But ordinary people seem to repeatedly reject even paying minimal costs to avoid the worst aspects of air travel. They want to get to their destinations fast, and only a tiny percentage of the traveling public wants to give that up to be more comfortable. Heck, they don't even want to pay $100 more to the airline to be more comfortable.

As for competition with driving, in my experience, people tend to drive long distances for two big reasons: (1) it's cheap, and (2) they have their car at their destination. I don't see any scenario where Amtrak can compete with that. With respect to cost, Amtrak's fares are already subsidized by the government. Whatever the future of those subsidies, I don't think anyone sees a scenario in the near future where they get bigger. And they'd need to get much bigger to compete with driving. In a car that gets 30 mpg on the highway, it takes about 16 gallons of gas to drive roundtrip between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. With one passenger in the car and $3 a gallon gas, that's about $24 per passenger. Whatever you could possibly hypothesize a LA-Las Vegas train charging, it's not going to be anything comparable to that.

And with respect to having the car at the destination, outside of the very specific and specialized example that is the Auto Train, I doubt that's very doable (and it's going to be expensive even if it is).

So outside of corridor services, which do compete with airlines, and the possibility of 1 night sleeper services on routes that fall in the sweet spot in terms of distance, which would also compete with airlines, what IS Amtrak competing with? What sorts of customers are its long distance trains trying to attract?

Well, one big possibility is people who ride the Greyhound Bus. These people are price-sensitive, may want to travel between points where there is no nearby airport (or only a small operation with high fares), have a fair amount of time, and may not own a car. That's a viable market, though it's not a particularly large one. It's also one that I would argue it is in the public interest to serve. If there's train tracks between two places and the freight railroad allows the traffic, why not run a long distance train that functions as a sort of cheaper version of Essential Air Service for small communities like Deming,New Mexico and Chemult, Oregon?

Another possibility is people who want a land cruise. There's no particular public interest in serving these people (so there's no reason to subsidize them), but if they paid the full cost of the dining cars, sleeping cars, and lounge cars they enjoy, there's nothing wrong with serving that market. The thing is, I suspect that group contains a fair number of price sensitive folks (such as older Americans on fixed incomes) who might get sticker shock if Amtrak charged them the full cost of pulling sleepers and diners across the West.

And then there are a handful of people who are afraid to fly, have lots of time, want to experience a train trip, etc. But that does not a market make.

 

[neroden]

Commuter trains require commuter distances; half an hour to an hour max. There's just not going to be much in the way of patronage otherwise.

Tell that to the LIRR, Metro-North, and NJT. Yeah, I know, New York City is weird...

New York's large enough that there can be a significant population base even for outliers, but even then I suspect it's mostly within that 30-60 minute range,

A lot of people really do have routine 2-hour commutes on the LIRR or Metro-North, and most of them work in Manhattan. I'm not sure how they can stand the long commutes, but I guess the benefits of the Manhattan jobs make it worth the commute, and it is a pretty comfortable ride. Longer than 2 hours seems very unusual, though.

You're quite right that if you're looking for commuter (daily trip to work) traffic, you don't want to look at long trips.

even for lines that are longer for maximum distance. By way of analogy, there's not too many people going from Oceanside to Los Angeles on Metrolink, but there's an awful lot going Oceanside to Irvine and Irvine to Los Angeles.

Yeah, the pattern is different around NYC. It's extraordinarily centralized; the densest places after Manhattan are the part of Brooklyn next to Manhattan and the part of the New Jersey shoreline next to Manhattan. Commuting which doesn't enter that core is still quite weak. California's much more spread out. The rest of the country is probably more like California, though.

Which is partly 'cause it's hard to sell a coach seat at night. How full is #66/67 and how much does it charge? It might be the most appropriate comparison to the long-distance routes where they run at night. Actually, it's interesting that Amtrak doesn't break it out as a separate line item; arguably it should be broken out separately.

Break it out separately and allocation is going to look all funky (though I do wish Amtrak would report boardings/revenue per individual train system-wide). Still, even a low bucket #66/67 is about 17¢ per mile (BOS-WAS). Palmetto (including business class) and Crescent do slightly better in terms of per-mile yields, but it's not astoundingly so.

Boy do I hate allocation.
Anyway, I think Amtrak has made a conscious decision to raise prices on the NEC due to inability to run more trains or longer trains. Coach demand on most other routes (with the current relatively low frequencies) is still low enough that they aren't running into equipment shortages except on peak days; the Empire Corridor trains are typically six coaches + cafe/business class, and at the moment they're still usually running half-full.

I'm pretty sure most of the state corridors have even lower ticket prices than the 'long-distance' trains, but you may have the numbers to check that. There's definitely some policy choices by Amtrak which do not necessarily reflect demand levels. I know that LSL coach and Empire Service coach prices are synchronized as far west as Buffalo; which is interesting because the LSL is routinely a lot more crowded than the other Empire Service trains.

 

[Anderson]

Well, the LSL has two things going on. One is that it presumably has a bit less coach space than the Empire trains (if nothing else, 59 seats vs. 72 seats assuming six coaches each), and a 2-1 BC with 18 seats isn't going to make up the difference. The other is that it has through traffic to deal with, while the two Empire trains terminate around Buffalo/Niagara and the Maple Leaf heads off to Toronto.

It's worth noting that there's a bottleneck around ALB-SDY on the Empire Corridor right now...for example, if the Adirondack sells out, it is very often for a short stretch right there (since south of ALB there are a bunch more trains while north/west of there I think you tend to get net passenger discharges heading outbound). I can't actually tell what the capacity numbers are on those routes, but based on six coaches and a half BC car, I'd be inclined to peg the capacity at about 2/3 of something like the Lynchburger west of ALB, with turnover at ALB being an open question.

 

[neroden]

]And then there are a handful of people who are afraid to fly,

This is actually a minimum of 6.5% of the US population last I checked and is a very large market. Estimates of people who are *uncomfortable* with flying, and so will preferentially choose driving if they can get away with it are up to 20%.
Add in the people who should not fly for medical reasons (which seems to be another 5% of the population, roughly), and you have an extremely large market.

It's a MUCH larger market than you think it is.

Most of them -- even the ones going to New York City -- are currently driving. Many will pay slightly more than the driving cost to have a more comfortable trip on a train.

With respect to cost, Amtrak's fares are already subsidized by the government.

Common misconception. Actually, on the majority of routes, Amtrak's fares cover the variable costs of operation, same as your private car, or Greyhound, or the airlines. The fixed costs are subsidized, just as the airlines get subsidized airports, while cars and buses get subsidized roads.
Where the roads are less subsidized, Amtrak is more popular. This is true in North Dakota along the route without an Interstate, and it's true in the New York-Chicago nexus where the expressways are toll roads and parking is pricey.

Whatever the future of those subsidies, I don't think anyone sees a scenario in the near future where they get bigger. And they'd need to get much bigger to compete with driving.

No, they wouldn't need to -- not where it matters.
Between New York and Chicago, Amtrak in coach is already routinely cheaper than driving, and Amtrak could raise prices and still be cheaper than driving. Three points:

(1) Very high parking costs in NY. Also in Chicago. (And Philadelphia. Etc.)

(2) Tolls.

(3) People *from* New York City -- including those in fairly high social classes -- often don't have cars at all and would have to rent them.

I found an estimate of the direct cost of driving from NYC to Chicago a few years ago: gas & tolls. Estimate was $167. Coach on the LSL is cheaper than that. If you don't want to drive 12+ hours straight, add in a $50 hotel room (if you can stand to sleep in Pittsburgh) to get $217.

Sleeper on the LSL from NY to Chicago is currently significantly more expensive than this, but people have proven that they're willing to pay for it. I think this is because if your alternative involves staying overnight in a hotel room, *it's actually faster* than driving.

----

I mentioned that in NYC a lot of people will tolerate longer commutes than you would expect -- the "commuter belt" is larger than it would be in other cities.

Similarly, certain types of cities "punch above their weight" in terms of how much intercity passenger train usage they will generate. In these cities, the "corridor belt", the time range where people will seriously consider taking a train rather than driving or flying, extends out more hours, and starts to extend to overnight trips, and indeed overnight + a day trips. (Theoretically it could extend even farther, but there are no examples in the US.)

These "punch above their weight" cities are cities with:

- large percentages of people with no cars

- lots of colleges (college students are less likely to have cars with them)

- expensive parking

- substantial road tolls

- few expressways

- substantial road congestion

These are the "versus driving" factors. The reason why there are no good routes which are double-overnight is that by the time you've gone that far away from New York, you're west of Chicago and there are no tolls, no road congestion, free parking, etc.

These "punch above their weight" cities are also cities with:

- airports way outside of town (New York, Chicago O'Hare, DC Dulles, Denver, San Francisco), train station in town

- really congested airports (New York)

- really slow airports (Denver, which can take a full hour to walk from the ticket counter to the gate)

These are the "versus flying" factors.

And these "punch above their weight" cities are cities with:

- substantial urban/local rail systems

This is the final factor and I'd call it the "train habit", but it also might reflect how easy it is to get around without a car when you arrive.

The extreme case for pretty much all of these factors is New York City, and I think it's completely unsurprising that sleeping car services out of New York City, as a whole, do better financially than sleeping car services not out of New York City.

For some reason, whenever anyone talks about sleepers or "long-distance" trains, everyone immediately thinks of those 5 "problem trains" in the West. The train which touches neither New York nor Chicago nor DC -- the Sunset Limited -- seems to have the lowest price per mile for sleeping cars.

When people talk about sleepers or "long-distance" trains, I want people to think New York City routes. I believe there is a real growth market for sleeper service, but I believe it's in the east, on routes out of New York City, and to a lesser extent out of Chicago/Boston/Philadelphia/DC.

 

[neroden]

It's worth noting that there's a bottleneck around ALB-SDY on the Empire Corridor right now...

The overbooking on the LSL on my last trip was actually SDY-UCA. (Believe it or not there were a fair number of people transferring from the southbound Adirondack and Ethan Allen to the westbound LSL.)
The Adirondack and Ethan Allen relieve the SDY-ALB traffic flow a bit, and the addition of the Boston section helps as well, but west of Schenectady there's just the four trains per day, 1 to Erie/Cleveland/Chicago, 1 to Toronto, and 2 to Niagara Falls.

I think the main effect going on is, simply, that the LSL is the only train running to Erie and points west, so it gets all of that traffic. But it's also in a prime timeslot for the NY-Buffalo traffic.

The point I was actually making, however, is that with the pattern of demand, Amtrak could probably jack up the bucket prices on the LSL from Buffalo-NY above the prices on the other Empire Service trains. But Amtrak has not done so.

 

[Anderson]

It's worth noting that there's a bottleneck around ALB-SDY on the Empire Corridor right now...

The overbooking on the LSL on my last trip was actually SDY-UCA. (Believe it or not there were a fair number of people transferring from the southbound Adirondack and Ethan Allen to the westbound LSL.)
The Adirondack and Ethan Allen relieve the SDY-ALB traffic flow a bit, and the addition of the Boston section helps as well, but west of Schenectady there's just the four trains per day, 1 to Erie/Cleveland/Chicago, 1 to Toronto, and 2 to Niagara Falls.

I think the main effect going on is, simply, that the LSL is the only train running to Erie and points west, so it gets all of that traffic. But it's also in a prime timeslot for the NY-Buffalo traffic.

The point I was actually making, however, is that with the pattern of demand, Amtrak could probably jack up the bucket prices on the LSL from Buffalo-NY above the prices on the other Empire Service trains. But Amtrak has not done so.

I don't think they can. They've done it on the Acela on the NEC, but beyond that from what I can tell, coach is coach is coach. There may be exceptions where coach gets locked to a high bucket on the LD train (I've seen this RVR-WAS, for example), and it might be possible for a state to jam a lower bucket in per PRIIA 209...but if Amtrak were to try and bump the buckets up by 20% ALB-BUF and then get NY to offset with an even deeper "sale" price per PRIIA 209, I suspect there would be hell to pay.

Of course, in VA the answer is that the trains are already running on NEC pricing (it is, for example, often cheaper to buy a ticket NYP-MIA than NYP-RVR) while south of Richmond the non-LD frequencies are thin to say the least.

Back up in NY...there may well be a case for extending at least one more train out of ALB and to the west at least partway, but the economics of doing so are complicated...

Segment TR Tick. Cost
NYP-ALB 51.7 47.5 56.3
ALB-TWO 29.5 24.7 29.0
ALB-MTR 12.6 7.5 12.4
ALB-RUD 5.1 2.9 5.5
Total 98.9 82.6 103.2
I threw the Ethan Allen, Adirondack, and the two Empire lines (NYP-ALB and ALB-TWO) up...it seems that tickets cover 85% of ALB-TWO, 84% of NYP-ALB, 60% of ALB-MTR, and 53% of ALB-RUD...but there is, of course, the question of cost and revenue allocation on all of those routes (I speculated that the "other" revenue, rolled into TR above, probably includes all of the cafe stuff being allocated away from NYP-ALB and onto the other three lines).

 

[Guest]

To amend my previous post, the following "corridors" can exist for AMTRAK's current intercity Limiteds, scheduled to depart after hours at around 6pm and to arrive before business or work at around 6am at these points, while still being available for longer-distance through travelers on the same trains. These schedules are also based on host railroads' Through freight and, or, commuter Local train speeds. On these schedules, an AMTRAK Limited would only take one train "slot" (time) on the host railroad. The resulting on-time performance of running in harmony with the host railroads' other services, and, the usability and resulting reliability of daily revenue from loyal passengers willing to pay for such desirable service (instead of being forced, by taxation, to pay for largely undesirable and unusable service as is) by straightforward, uniform, flat-rate, un-gouging fares of $7 per coach seat, $14 per sleeping car berth, $28 per roomette, or $56 per bedroom, between adjacent stations traveled, can, by AMTRAK's own estimates of their current ridership and the costs incurred by AMTRAK for running the service as is (provided no management positions be gratuitously created for unnecessary hiring to fill those positions and soak up AMTRAK's profit by those hires), allow AMTRAK to pay the fair cost of using the host railroads' tracks for AMTRAK's trains:

Boston and Richmond (proposed one-way fares of $112 coach/$224 berth/$448 roomette/$896 bedroom), and Buffalo ($77/$154/$308/$616)

New York and Charlottesville ($70/$140/$280/$560), Pittsburgh ($112/$224/$448/$896), and Montreal ($133/$266/$532/$$1,064)

Jacksonville and Florence ($42/$84/$168/$336), Columbia ($28/$56/$/$112), and Miami ($105/$210/$420/$840 by train 97 or 98; $119/$238/$476/$952 by train 91 or 92)

Greenville and Birmingham ($105/$210/$420/$840)

Chicago and Buffalo ($70/$140/$280/$560), Pittsburgh ($63/$126/$252/$504), Memphis ($91/$182/$364/$728), St. Louis ($63/$126/$252/$504), Kansas City ($49/$98/$196/$392), Omaha ($63/$126/$252/$504), St. Paul/Minneapolis ($70/$140/$280/$560), Port Huron ($70/$140/$280/$560), and Pontiac ($98/$196/$392/$784)

Minot and Shelby (which could be a great booster of the economies between those points) ($49/$98/$196/$392)

Denver and Salt Lake City ($56/$112/$224/$448)

La Junta and Albuquerque ($35/$70/$140/$280)

Little Rock and Ft. Worth ($63/$126/$252/$504)

Spokane and Seattle ($42/$84/$168/$336), and Portland ($35/$70/$140)

Seattle and Eugene ($63/$126/$252/$504)

Reno and San Francisco Bay ($56/$112/$224/$448)

Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay ($77/$154/$308/$616), and Flagstaff ($63/$126/$252/$504)

 

[Paulus]

So you want me to pay more than I would for airfare for a coach seat (or I could pay more than even the average airfare for a tiny room with an uncomfortably small bed) so that I can leave at an incredibly inconvenient hour and arrive at an ungodly one? You know, I don't think your scheme's going to be quite as popular as you might think.

 

[Anderson]

Ok, one second here...

Guest_Guest, are you a regular poster here? I'm just asking because I know I've been stuck posting while logged out as well...but I'm trying to sort out who all is debating here.

 

[Paulus]

Ok, one second here...

Guest_Guest, are you a regular poster here? I'm just asking because I know I've been stuck posting while logged out as well...but I'm trying to sort out who all is debating here.

He was posting as the timetableflagman guest earlier.

 

[neroden]

The point I was actually making, however, is that with the pattern of demand, Amtrak could probably jack up the bucket prices on the LSL from Buffalo-NY above the prices on the other Empire Service trains. But Amtrak has not done so.

I don't think they can. They've done it on the Acela on the NEC, but beyond that from what I can tell, coach is coach is coach.

But it's a different train number.... are you saying that ARROW can't handle it?
The LSL is explicitly not funded by NY, so it isn't subject to the PRIIA 209 rules; there should be no *legal* issue.... You couldn't do this with the Maple Leaf, which is NY-funded, not without agreement from NY.

Maybe the accounting for the "long-distance" trains which overlap corridors is even weirder than I thought?

There may be exceptions where coach gets locked to a high bucket on the LD train (I've seen this RVR-WAS, for example), and it might be possible for a state to jam a lower bucket in per PRIIA 209...but if Amtrak were to try and bump the buckets up by 20% ALB-BUF and then get NY to offset with an even deeper "sale" price per PRIIA 209, I suspect there would be hell to pay.

Why?

The issue going on is that the LSL is overcrowded while the other trains west of Albany aren't. The standard short-term way of fixing this is to raise the prices on the LSL to encourage price-sensitive customers to switch to the other trains. Since the LSL isn't state-sponsored and the other trains are state-sponsored, if customers switch from the LSL to buying tickets on the state-sponsored trains, it reduces the subsidies paid by New York, right?

 

[Paulus]

Starlight has prices both higher and lower than the Surfliner on the same segment. LSL weirdness shouldn't have anything to do with Arrow limitations. It's possible that New York contracted to keep LSL prices low as part of the Empire Service contract, but that doesn't make any sense to me.

 

[jis]

I think the excessive overcrowding of the LSL is caused partly by the fact that it is the last train of the day west of ALB. Perhaps the fix is to add another frequency after the LSL, maybe even a short turn at Rochester for the first run east after Rochester is rebuilt. Then make the first eastbound out of NFL at 5:45am instead of the current ridiculous 3:45am.

Of course there will be CSX to deal with. But I think this is the sort of solution NY State and Amtrak should be striving for.

 

[neroden]

I think the excessive overcrowding of the LSL is caused partly by the fact that it is the last train of the day west of ALB. Perhaps the fix is to add another frequency after the LSL, maybe even a short turn at Rochester for the first run east after Rochester is rebuilt. Then make the first eastbound out of NFL at 5:45am instead of the current ridiculous 3:45am.

Of course there will be CSX to deal with. But I think this is the sort of solution NY State and Amtrak should be striving for.

Absolutely. This would be excellent. Question how much ransom CSX will ask, of course.