11 ms·

Amtrak and the American Rail experience is dying because the current CEO of Amtrak is a former airline executive, and he's been filling the leadership ranks of

Amtrak and the American Rail experience is dying because the current CEO of Amtrak is a former airline executive, and he's been filling the leadership ranks of Amtrak with other former airline executives. There's certainly a broader discussion of rail finances in the US to be had compared to elsewhere in Asia and in Europe, given the vast size of the US and alternate means of transport. But the bottom line is that riding in trains in the US will likely start to have many of the same unpleasant experiences people have with airline travel, and that's a bad development.

echelon 7y ago
It sounds almost like regulatory capture. Are the airline people actively trying to destroy commuter rail? What can be done about this? I am more excited by rail than flying, and I know other Millennials that are as well. I thought it was starting to come back into vogue.
- dev_dull 7y ago
  Have you taken Amtrak anywhere recently? The people I know who are most excited about rail travel are people who have never used it outside of a small commute. Flight is much more convenient and in most instances cheaper.
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    > Flight is much more convenient And that’s a big deal when people don’t have 4+ weeks of vacation per year.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      Even those of us with quite a bit of vacation don’t generally want to spend a week of it riding across thousands of miles for what’s often a premium over business air. I get the attraction—just took the sleeper from London to Edinburgh—but it just doesn’t make sense for routine travel outside of a few relatively short routes like the northeast.
  - strken 7y ago
    Intercity rail travel in Australia is slightly faster and significantly more comfortable than a bus, at roughly the same price. Rail travel in the US somehow manages to be slower than Greyhound and more expensive than flying. I usually avoid flying when equivalent land transport is available and will take less than 8 hours, since it seems like a waste of fuel, but trains are absolutely not exciting when you're sitting in a 40 year old carriage lumbering along uncambered track at the same speed as freight.
  - xvilka 7y ago
    Rail transport is convenient enough in Europe and many Asian countries. It is just US railways are broken, old and nobody invest into high speed trains. Even the richest state in US failed to build just one track, which was supposed to be the fastest in US, but a snail-slow compared to Japanese or Chinese railways.
    - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
      > It is just US railways are broken No. Geography. American population centres are disparate. Comparisons to Europe, with its tightly-packed industrial centres among centuries-old farms, are silly.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Or people who never have to rely on it. My wife and I took Amtrak daily for two years between Wilmington and DC. It totally soured me in rail and government.
  - 333c 7y ago
    I rode the California Zephyr from Chicago to Emeryville in May and I LOVED it. The dining car was a big part of it, because I really enjoyed meeting strangers and having a chat with them. The food was decent for what it was. My roomette was small but it was enough space for me (traveling solo). Even though we were 13.5 hours late (due to weather outside Omaha), it was a great experience and I'd love to do it again.
    - jfim 7y ago
      The California zephyr is an awesome route, especially between Denver and Emeryville, and as you point out, the dining car was a fun experience that gets you to meet other people from other walks of life. Many seniors and retirees, but also people from the middle of the US (that I'd normally would never meet in California) that talked about their experience living there. I've been severely delayed on an Amtrak train as well, and IMO that's part of disconnecting. Depending on the train, you might have no Wi-Fi, no cellphone signal, and no control over when you get to your destination. Just need to relax, look at the scenery, and have a drink from the cafe car.
  - Jill_the_Pill 7y ago
    I take it weekly. A much calmer experience than flying. Get to the station and just walk onto the train.
- drtillberg 7y ago
  No, they're Quixotically trying to balance Amtrak's finances, which always has been bad. If Amtrak was an airline it would have declared bankruptcy over and over and over again through its history. This sounds like cyclical political pressure brought about when anti-train politicians are elected. It's virtue signaling. As for the underlying problem: imagine if interstate highways and airports were subjected to local property taxes the way rail infrastructure is.... conversely, imagine if the government built out high-speed rail infrastructure as aggressively as it did high-speed auto and air infrastructure....
  - mentalpiracy 7y ago
    Honestly attempting to balance Amtrak’s finances at this time is the wrong choice - there are some serious operational realities that need to be changed before it can run with balanced finances while providing worthwhile service.
ghaff 7y ago
Well, they’re different bad experiences—which, unlike the airlines, you can’t really buy your way out of to a significant degree.
light_hue_1 7y ago
Yup. Amtrak continues to spiral to its doom by simply not offering services that people want. Ridership is not an issue. The Northeast corridor is full of people who want to ride on Amtrak, but it's so wasteful much of the time and so inconvenient that there's hardly a reason to do it. I want to go with my bike to new places, but I can't. Amtrak won't allow bikes on most trains unless they're boxed. I want reasonable food for a day trip. All we get is a horrible boxed lunch. I want a late train so I can have a reasonable day trip. I want to know that the train will get me home on time. The delays on Amtrak are insane. It's more expensive than flying. What's the point? They offer an uncertain service, at a bad price, with poor hours. Compare that to Europe, where trains are on time, the hours are good, there are many destinations, I can take my bike, etc. The Northeast is more than dense enough. Amtrak just doesn't care.
- killjoywashere 7y ago
  My dad was an industrial engineer for BN and designed natural gas powered locomotive systems (not just just the engine, but the tender, the gas pipelines and filling stations, etc). He was a railroad fanatic. A quarter of the basement was dedicated to model railroading. I have eaten on one of Burlington Northern's executive dining cars. A phenomenal experience, far nicer than anything I've ever seen in any airplane's first class cabin. Wood paneling, brass, sauteed salmon and glass windows so clean you forgot they were there. He went to the Soviet Union during Glasnost and had his own KGB agent. The Russians came to the US to negotiate technology transfer. I grew up in awe of the railroads. Our neighbor worked for Union Pacific. In my world, men worked in rail. I learned research was hard, and development was even harder but the national scale of the endeavor is what made it worthwhile. I never understood why we never went anywhere on the trains. I went to Tokyo and was floored by the immensity of the passenger rail system. Even in San Diego I would ride my bike 17 miles down to the nearest station and take the Coaster into National City to go to work. And then, I was in DC for a month and I took the overnight Acela Amtrak Express from DC to Boston and back. Gritty, dirty. Like a noir film type ... gritty. For another $50 I could have taken a 1 hour flight after dinner and been in bed at a decent hour. As a citizen, I'm a fan of the idea of passenger rail. As a customer, I'm not a huge fan of Amtrak, at least under current management.
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> Amtrak and the American Rail experience is dying because the current CEO of Amtrak is a former airline executive What would you prefer? Delta is a well-run airline. Its former CEO knows B2C transport. Flying is, broadly speaking, preferable for business travellers to rail. That is due to service failures by Amtrak. Failures someone who has tackled these problems is uniquely qualified to solve. The alternative, hiring rail enthusiasts with no understanding of competition, is what got us unto this mess.
- ghaff 7y ago
  I agree with you general point. But business travelers also take air on most routes because it’s a lot faster. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t justify the time or the money as business expenses to start taking 24 hour overnight train trips rather than a 2-3 hour flight.
acdha 7y ago
The real reason is politics: Amtrak has never had the funding needed to provide decent service but if they ever talk about reducing service they’re going to hear about it from every member of Congress whose constituents use the affected service. If we invested in capacity building (as climate change says we need to) they might have enough traffic to support those routes, and if we formally dropped the political angle they’d just drop the unprofitable route. As with the USPS, this in-between status is forcing a lot of visible symptoms which people rarely look beyond.
- rayiner 7y ago
  That’s not true. Amtrak subsidies work out to about $0.24 per passenger mile. That’s three times higher than the UK’s per mile subsidies: https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/government-subsidies-to-uk-rail-companies-fall-by-almost-40-in-five-years https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/government-subsid...
  - acdha 7y ago
    That’s only part of the picture: you also have to factor in ridership levels and infrastructure before you can accurately compare systems. For example, Amtrak has constant scheduling issues because they don’t have priority over freight trains and many shared chokepoints which are very expensive to fix. If you’re comparing their performance to a system with dedicated right of way or priority scheduling, you need to include the costs spent building that infrastructure to avoid a completely misleading comparison. Similarly, a system which has high ridership needs less subsidy since it has higher fare revenue for the same base operating costs (think about how those passenger miles change going from 60% occupancy to 80% when the operating cost of basically unchanged). Since the U.S. has massively subsidized car travel and often deliberately avoided rail improvements (think Chris Christie wasting a billion dollars to avoid expanding the congested NJ-NYC connection), there are many cases where American routes have the same operating costs but aren’t as competitive as the same route would be in Europe or Asia because we’ve chosen to subsidize road travel instead. Any meaningful discussion needs to at least acknowledge the difficulties of comparing numbers.
alexhutcheson 7y ago
If you’re a passenger rail fan, I’d highly recommend reading Randal O’Toole’s book “Romance of the Rails: Why The Passenger Trains We Love Are Not The Transportation We Need”[1]. The author is a passenger rail super-fan, but does an excellent job detailing the extremely high costs that make it difficult for passenger rail to compete with other transportation options, and explaining the history of how we got to the current state. Even if you’re a skeptic of his thesis, I think you’ll enjoy the details of the book. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Romance-Rails-Passenger-Trains-Transportation-ebook/dp/B07JHDG29Y https://www.amazon.com/Romance-Rails-Passenger-Trains-Transp...
- cozzyd 7y ago
  Is this the same Randall O'Toole who lobbies against any public transportation anywhere?
  - alexhutcheson 7y ago
    Yes - he definitely lobbies against various rail projects, for reasons that are spelled out in the book. He’s advocated in various cases for buses as an alternative, so I don’t think “against any public transportation anywhere” is a fair characterization. You don’t have to agree with his thesis to find the book valuable though. It’s useful to understand where people on the other side of the debate are coming from, and even someone with opposite views will probably enjoy the detailed history of passenger rail in the US that he presents.
toddmorey 7y ago
That’s a really bad development, especially with increased scrutiny on the environmental impact of domestic air travel, which is growing exponentially. It’s a horrible product with a worsening customer experience that’s harming our planet yet enjoys a near monopoly in the U.S. I have been closely watching the Texas Bullet Train ambitions to use Shinkansen trains to connect Houston and Dallas. 90 minutes. Privately funded at $15 billion. Interestingly, current legal debate is whether or not the organization can call themselves a railroad before they are actually operating a railroad. They have 30% of the route’s land needs secured, but they’d absolutely need to exercise eminent domain to complete the project. And to do that, they need to be a railroad. I often think that if Elon really wanted to combat climate change, he’d take on domestic air travel, and to do that well would likely mean some sort of rail project. Maybe self-driving cars and better battery tech will get us there first; I’m just doubtful. Meanwhile I’m headed to a funeral this week and my only viable option is an airplane on an airline that wants to nickel and dime me to death and punish me for being a customer. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/04/texas-central-railway-high-speed-bullet-train-cost-route/587743/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/04/texas-central...
tssva 7y ago
The American rail experience is dying because of the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008. Anderson and the management he has brought in are implementing the goals mandated by Congress. Amtrak may be dying as we have known it but it is not dying. It is transforming into mostly a regional passenger train service focusing on the highly profitable Northeast corridor. If the public values the traditional American rail service they need to let Congress know this and that they are willing to continue to subsidize it to a large degree. To date they have not.
- ghaff 7y ago
  And it at least may be worth mentioning that Amtrak came into being in large part because essentially all its predecessors had been losing money and merging--culminating in the largest bankruptcy in American history up to that point in 1970 (Penn Central). I have a sometimes hankering at least for the idea (if not the likely reality) of taking a long-distance Amtrak train trip. But I'm not sure I could really justify why middle-class American taxpayers should subsidize my Chicago to Seattle train ride. Maybe there's a market for private luxury long-haul trains with a "flexible" schedule across routes in the West.

echelon 7y ago

It sounds almost like regulatory capture. Are the airline people actively trying to destroy commuter rail? What can be done about this? I am more excited by rail than flying, and I know other Millennials that are as well. I thought it was starting to come back into vogue.

dev_dull 7y ago
Have you taken Amtrak anywhere recently? The people I know who are most excited about rail travel are people who have never used it outside of a small commute. Flight is much more convenient and in most instances cheaper.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  > Flight is much more convenient And that’s a big deal when people don’t have 4+ weeks of vacation per year.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Even those of us with quite a bit of vacation don’t generally want to spend a week of it riding across thousands of miles for what’s often a premium over business air. I get the attraction—just took the sleeper from London to Edinburgh—but it just doesn’t make sense for routine travel outside of a few relatively short routes like the northeast.
- strken 7y ago
  Intercity rail travel in Australia is slightly faster and significantly more comfortable than a bus, at roughly the same price. Rail travel in the US somehow manages to be slower than Greyhound and more expensive than flying. I usually avoid flying when equivalent land transport is available and will take less than 8 hours, since it seems like a waste of fuel, but trains are absolutely not exciting when you're sitting in a 40 year old carriage lumbering along uncambered track at the same speed as freight.
- xvilka 7y ago
  Rail transport is convenient enough in Europe and many Asian countries. It is just US railways are broken, old and nobody invest into high speed trains. Even the richest state in US failed to build just one track, which was supposed to be the fastest in US, but a snail-slow compared to Japanese or Chinese railways.
  - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > It is just US railways are broken No. Geography. American population centres are disparate. Comparisons to Europe, with its tightly-packed industrial centres among centuries-old farms, are silly.
- rayiner 7y ago
  Or people who never have to rely on it. My wife and I took Amtrak daily for two years between Wilmington and DC. It totally soured me in rail and government.
- 333c 7y ago
  I rode the California Zephyr from Chicago to Emeryville in May and I LOVED it. The dining car was a big part of it, because I really enjoyed meeting strangers and having a chat with them. The food was decent for what it was. My roomette was small but it was enough space for me (traveling solo). Even though we were 13.5 hours late (due to weather outside Omaha), it was a great experience and I'd love to do it again.
  - jfim 7y ago
    The California zephyr is an awesome route, especially between Denver and Emeryville, and as you point out, the dining car was a fun experience that gets you to meet other people from other walks of life. Many seniors and retirees, but also people from the middle of the US (that I'd normally would never meet in California) that talked about their experience living there. I've been severely delayed on an Amtrak train as well, and IMO that's part of disconnecting. Depending on the train, you might have no Wi-Fi, no cellphone signal, and no control over when you get to your destination. Just need to relax, look at the scenery, and have a drink from the cafe car.
- Jill_the_Pill 7y ago
  I take it weekly. A much calmer experience than flying. Get to the station and just walk onto the train.
drtillberg 7y ago
No, they're Quixotically trying to balance Amtrak's finances, which always has been bad. If Amtrak was an airline it would have declared bankruptcy over and over and over again through its history. This sounds like cyclical political pressure brought about when anti-train politicians are elected. It's virtue signaling. As for the underlying problem: imagine if interstate highways and airports were subjected to local property taxes the way rail infrastructure is.... conversely, imagine if the government built out high-speed rail infrastructure as aggressively as it did high-speed auto and air infrastructure....
- mentalpiracy 7y ago
  Honestly attempting to balance Amtrak’s finances at this time is the wrong choice - there are some serious operational realities that need to be changed before it can run with balanced finances while providing worthwhile service.

ghaff 7y ago

Well, they’re different bad experiences—which, unlike the airlines, you can’t really buy your way out of to a significant degree.

light_hue_1 7y ago

Yup. Amtrak continues to spiral to its doom by simply not offering services that people want. Ridership is not an issue. The Northeast corridor is full of people who want to ride on Amtrak, but it's so wasteful much of the time and so inconvenient that there's hardly a reason to do it. I want to go with my bike to new places, but I can't. Amtrak won't allow bikes on most trains unless they're boxed. I want reasonable food for a day trip. All we get is a horrible boxed lunch. I want a late train so I can have a reasonable day trip. I want to know that the train will get me home on time. The delays on Amtrak are insane. It's more expensive than flying. What's the point? They offer an uncertain service, at a bad price, with poor hours. Compare that to Europe, where trains are on time, the hours are good, there are many destinations, I can take my bike, etc. The Northeast is more than dense enough. Amtrak just doesn't care.

killjoywashere 7y ago
My dad was an industrial engineer for BN and designed natural gas powered locomotive systems (not just just the engine, but the tender, the gas pipelines and filling stations, etc). He was a railroad fanatic. A quarter of the basement was dedicated to model railroading. I have eaten on one of Burlington Northern's executive dining cars. A phenomenal experience, far nicer than anything I've ever seen in any airplane's first class cabin. Wood paneling, brass, sauteed salmon and glass windows so clean you forgot they were there. He went to the Soviet Union during Glasnost and had his own KGB agent. The Russians came to the US to negotiate technology transfer. I grew up in awe of the railroads. Our neighbor worked for Union Pacific. In my world, men worked in rail. I learned research was hard, and development was even harder but the national scale of the endeavor is what made it worthwhile. I never understood why we never went anywhere on the trains. I went to Tokyo and was floored by the immensity of the passenger rail system. Even in San Diego I would ride my bike 17 miles down to the nearest station and take the Coaster into National City to go to work. And then, I was in DC for a month and I took the overnight Acela Amtrak Express from DC to Boston and back. Gritty, dirty. Like a noir film type ... gritty. For another $50 I could have taken a 1 hour flight after dinner and been in bed at a decent hour. As a citizen, I'm a fan of the idea of passenger rail. As a customer, I'm not a huge fan of Amtrak, at least under current management.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago

> Amtrak and the American Rail experience is dying because the current CEO of Amtrak is a former airline executive What would you prefer? Delta is a well-run airline. Its former CEO knows B2C transport. Flying is, broadly speaking, preferable for business travellers to rail. That is due to service failures by Amtrak. Failures someone who has tackled these problems is uniquely qualified to solve. The alternative, hiring rail enthusiasts with no understanding of competition, is what got us unto this mess.

ghaff 7y ago
I agree with you general point. But business travelers also take air on most routes because it’s a lot faster. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t justify the time or the money as business expenses to start taking 24 hour overnight train trips rather than a 2-3 hour flight.

acdha 7y ago

The real reason is politics: Amtrak has never had the funding needed to provide decent service but if they ever talk about reducing service they’re going to hear about it from every member of Congress whose constituents use the affected service. If we invested in capacity building (as climate change says we need to) they might have enough traffic to support those routes, and if we formally dropped the political angle they’d just drop the unprofitable route. As with the USPS, this in-between status is forcing a lot of visible symptoms which people rarely look beyond.

rayiner 7y ago
That’s not true. Amtrak subsidies work out to about $0.24 per passenger mile. That’s three times higher than the UK’s per mile subsidies: https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/government-subsidies-to-uk-rail-companies-fall-by-almost-40-in-five-years https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/government-subsid...
- acdha 7y ago
  That’s only part of the picture: you also have to factor in ridership levels and infrastructure before you can accurately compare systems. For example, Amtrak has constant scheduling issues because they don’t have priority over freight trains and many shared chokepoints which are very expensive to fix. If you’re comparing their performance to a system with dedicated right of way or priority scheduling, you need to include the costs spent building that infrastructure to avoid a completely misleading comparison. Similarly, a system which has high ridership needs less subsidy since it has higher fare revenue for the same base operating costs (think about how those passenger miles change going from 60% occupancy to 80% when the operating cost of basically unchanged). Since the U.S. has massively subsidized car travel and often deliberately avoided rail improvements (think Chris Christie wasting a billion dollars to avoid expanding the congested NJ-NYC connection), there are many cases where American routes have the same operating costs but aren’t as competitive as the same route would be in Europe or Asia because we’ve chosen to subsidize road travel instead. Any meaningful discussion needs to at least acknowledge the difficulties of comparing numbers.

alexhutcheson 7y ago

If you’re a passenger rail fan, I’d highly recommend reading Randal O’Toole’s book “Romance of the Rails: Why The Passenger Trains We Love Are Not The Transportation We Need”[1]. The author is a passenger rail super-fan, but does an excellent job detailing the extremely high costs that make it difficult for passenger rail to compete with other transportation options, and explaining the history of how we got to the current state. Even if you’re a skeptic of his thesis, I think you’ll enjoy the details of the book. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Romance-Rails-Passenger-Trains-Transportation-ebook/dp/B07JHDG29Y https://www.amazon.com/Romance-Rails-Passenger-Trains-Transp...

cozzyd 7y ago
Is this the same Randall O'Toole who lobbies against any public transportation anywhere?
- alexhutcheson 7y ago
  Yes - he definitely lobbies against various rail projects, for reasons that are spelled out in the book. He’s advocated in various cases for buses as an alternative, so I don’t think “against any public transportation anywhere” is a fair characterization. You don’t have to agree with his thesis to find the book valuable though. It’s useful to understand where people on the other side of the debate are coming from, and even someone with opposite views will probably enjoy the detailed history of passenger rail in the US that he presents.

toddmorey 7y ago

That’s a really bad development, especially with increased scrutiny on the environmental impact of domestic air travel, which is growing exponentially. It’s a horrible product with a worsening customer experience that’s harming our planet yet enjoys a near monopoly in the U.S. I have been closely watching the Texas Bullet Train ambitions to use Shinkansen trains to connect Houston and Dallas. 90 minutes. Privately funded at $15 billion. Interestingly, current legal debate is whether or not the organization can call themselves a railroad before they are actually operating a railroad. They have 30% of the route’s land needs secured, but they’d absolutely need to exercise eminent domain to complete the project. And to do that, they need to be a railroad. I often think that if Elon really wanted to combat climate change, he’d take on domestic air travel, and to do that well would likely mean some sort of rail project. Maybe self-driving cars and better battery tech will get us there first; I’m just doubtful. Meanwhile I’m headed to a funeral this week and my only viable option is an airplane on an airline that wants to nickel and dime me to death and punish me for being a customer. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/04/texas-central-railway-high-speed-bullet-train-cost-route/587743/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/04/texas-central...

tssva 7y ago

The American rail experience is dying because of the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008. Anderson and the management he has brought in are implementing the goals mandated by Congress. Amtrak may be dying as we have known it but it is not dying. It is transforming into mostly a regional passenger train service focusing on the highly profitable Northeast corridor. If the public values the traditional American rail service they need to let Congress know this and that they are willing to continue to subsidize it to a large degree. To date they have not.

ghaff 7y ago
And it at least may be worth mentioning that Amtrak came into being in large part because essentially all its predecessors had been losing money and merging--culminating in the largest bankruptcy in American history up to that point in 1970 (Penn Central). I have a sometimes hankering at least for the idea (if not the likely reality) of taking a long-distance Amtrak train trip. But I'm not sure I could really justify why middle-class American taxpayers should subsidize my Chicago to Seattle train ride. Maybe there's a market for private luxury long-haul trains with a "flexible" schedule across routes in the West.