You Want More Rail Passenger Service? You Need The Long Distance Trains!

The greatest risk to the future of long distance trains in this country is Amtrak management. Amtrak has again threatened to eliminate all long distance trains if they don't get a substantial increase in Federal subsidy. Historically the long distance trains have brought in well over half of all passenger revenues for Amtrak. Long distance trains also generate traffic for other trains with passenger transfers. When Amtrak has eliminated long distance trains in the past in efforts to "save money", the results have always been for Amtrak's financial status to get worse, not improve. As service has gone downhill in the last few years on long distance trains, their ability to generate revenues has declined which is a major factor in Amtrak's current financial mess. If Amtrak were to go ahead with their threats and eliminate the long distance trains, the rest of the Amtrak system would soon collapse.

The last people on earth who want to see long distance train services disappear are members of Congress. At least no one in Congress wants to be blamed for losing train service in their district! In order to have broad based support for Rail Passenger Service in this country there needs to be a National System with long distance trains in as may Congressional districts as possible. It is not enough to simply "save" trains. For the last thirty years long distance train ridership has been stagnant at best, and the trains treated by Amtrak as unwanted stepchildren. Things are so bad now that this summer Amtrak may not have enough cars to provide service on all trains. This is because Amtrak had not been repairing cars damaged in accidents. When these cars are not on the railroads, they are not generating revenue. No airline or truck company would leave a plane or truck sit idle in need of repair that they were making payments on.

The Amtrak Reform Council was created by Congress to see what could be done to improve Amtrak's service and finances. There has been charges that the ARC is out to "destroy " Amtrak. According to the ARC, they have had a great deal of trouble getting cooperation and hard data from Amtrak. It is easy to understand the fear some people have for the ARC. Many people equate efficiency with job loss, and in particular the loss of their job. But to continue the way things are will destroy the long distance rail system, which in turn will pull down what is left of Amtrak. Only by running more cars, with more trains carrying more passengers that bring in more revenues can jobs be saved and created on the railroads!

The ARC doesn't expect all of their recommendations to be accepted. They admit they were often working in a vacuum because of want of hard data. But their work deserves an honest appraisal and there is much good that can come from it. One of their proposals that have created a lot of criticisms is talk of "privatizing" train operations. Oddly the model the ARC uses for privatization of Amtrak was the Metrolink Commuter operation of Southern California.. Metrolink is a very small organization with very little bureaucracy. Most of the operations are handled by contracts to other agencies and companies. Ironically one of Metrolink's most important contractors is Amtrak.. Critics of Amtrak privatization claim that experiences in Britain "prove" the folly of privatization. Yet, since Britain has privatized rail passenger operations, ridership as exploded and the private operators are using their own capital in many cases to buy new equipment. One of the biggest rail operators in Britain is the Virgin Company best known for their Airline. In fact Virgin now carries more passengers by rail than by air and uses their airline to feed passengers to their rail services.

Where there are problems in Britain with privatization was with the company that took over the rights of way. Instead of making money, this company went broke. The situation is different in this country because Amtrak owns only a small percentage of the nation's rights of way. Most of the right of way that Amtrak owns is on the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington. Most of Amtrak's overhead and employees are concentrated on the NEC. The one similarity with Britain is the ownership of right of way part of Amtrak is the area hardest to make money. The ARC is recommending that the infrastructure costs of Amtrak be accounted independently from the operating cost of trains. This is a position RailPAC has championed for a long time. Most of the confusion and questions about Amtrak's accounting comes from arbitrarily assigning different levels of overhead costs to different trains. That can make all the difference in making a train a "winner " or a "loser".

It would be advantageous to take ownership of the NEC off of the back of Amtrak. Most of the talk about other modes of transportation being publicly subsidized is based on public ownership of infrastructure. Trucking companies don't own roads, barge companies don't own canals and airlines don't own airports or the air traffic control service. Without the NEC, Amtrak would be in a position to compete with other modes of travel on a level playing field. The model for this again could be Metrolink. The counties served by Metrolink in many cases own much of the right of way that Metrolink and in some cases Amtrak run on. The Railroads were quite happy to sell some of their rights of way, for a good price. The railroad in many cases freed themselves of the worry of maintaining these expensive rail lines and was free of most of the liability problems. The railroads insured that they kept exclusive freight rights and now carry more freight than ever on their old lines now greatly improved that they don't have to maintain.

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I especially disagree with this statement: "Without the NEC, Amtrak would be in a position to compete with other modes of travel on a level playing field." Here, the writer assumes that the NEC reverts to public ownership, which it would not. Again, this puts Amtrak at the mercy of yet more (new) host railroads that will put their trains first. Reliability of NY-Washington train service, especially, would suffer; also, let's assume that the ownership of Amtrak's NEC falls to commuter railroads or private railroads—would a state-run commuter agency be willing to foot all of the cost of catenary maintenance? Certainly, no private railroad would—witness how Conrail de-electrified many of its former PRR lines, for example.

It's also worth noting that wherever Amtrak owns its rails, there is effort expended to increase the running speeds of its trains. Metroliners between New York & Washington have been operating at 125 mph for at least two decades, something that would have never transpired had any other agency or private concern been controlling the NEC. One thing that the Amtrak Reform Council did (to Amtrak's detriment) was make Amtrak panic over its "self-sufficiency" deadline and thus rush the planned HSR upgrade of the NEC, which, sadly, resulted in a job badly done.