Cutting Rail Services Now Will Hobble Us in the Future
Passenger rail ridership is growing across America, on routes urban and rural, over distances great and small. Very little of it is producing profitable rail service, but neither should it have to. Every form of transportation in America is subsidized to one extent or another. But it’s rail that is usually held to a higher standard – unlike freeways or airports, passenger trains are increasingly expected to pay their own way. And if they don’t, then they’re increasingly perceived as failures and should be cut.
The problem is if we do cut, we’re going to screw ourselves when it comes time to massively expand passenger rail service to meet economic and climate needs. And that time is already here.
One of the reasons for the ideology that rail alone should be held to a profitability standard is that for a short but crucial time in the second half of the 20th century, passenger rail was seen as obsolete. Cars and planes, it was believed, were the wave of the future. By the 1960s this ideology had come to dominate life in both the United States and in Britain.
Passenger rail was indeed struggling financially in the 1960s. But what turned out to be a short-term problem created by a unique set of circumstances – namely, oil that has never been that cheap again – left in the minds of many a lasting belief that rail really was obsolete. For people who came of age in the 1960s and early 1970s, the narrative of trains as something from the past, with no place in a modern society, became gospel. It’s something they still believe today, though tellingly, younger people who have no memory of dying rail service tend to be much stronger rail supporters.
One of the most high-profile examples of the ’60s-era attitude that rail was obsolete came in Britain in 1963. Known as the “Beeching Axe” after the government minister in charge of British Railways, the cuts closed about 8,000 kilometers of rail across the country, with 50% of stations and 30% of the overall network being closed down. As private car ownership was soaring during the postwar boom, Beeching believed he could make the system profitable by cutting these supposedly underused routes, many of them providing excellent service to towns across the country.
By the end of the decade most of the cuts had been implemented, but British Railways was never profitable. Only £30 million was saved while losses ran at £100 million. During the 1980s Conservatives argued the problem was public ownership of the rail network. So it was privatized, but that hasn’t worked out either. Profit-seeking companies skimped on maintenance, leading to deadly crashes. The government has renationalized some parts of the system it had previously sold off. Today 75% of Britons want the railways renationalized as the public is convinced that privatization has been a failure.
But the legacy of the Beeching Axe remains, as The Guardian explains:
Today the makeup of UK transport looks very different from the one envisaged by Dr Beeching. Rail passenger figures have almost doubled over the past 10 years; commuter trains are crammed; young people are deserting the car for the train; and Britain’s railway bosses are struggling to meet soaring demands for seats. The legacy of Beeching – dug-up lines, sold-off track beds and demolished bridges – has only hindered plans to revitalise the network, revealing the dangers of having a single, inflexible vision when planning infrastructure.
What Beeching and the public thought was a permanent situation in 1963 turned out to have been a temporary problem. Today, demand for passenger rail service is soaring, but the cuts have made it difficult and more costly to meet the demand.
Christian Wolmar, whose books on privatization’s failures have become central to the debate, put it clearly in The Guardian article:
“There are countless examples like these,” says Christian Wolmar, author of Fire and Steam: How the Railways Transformed Britain. “Transport planners in the 60s simply could not conceive of the idea that a line, once closed, would need to be reopened. Their mindset saw trains as dirty and futureless. Reopening a closed rail line was simply not a possible option. So British Rail just sold off the land whenever it could, a policy that is costing us dearly today.”
The problem is that in a new era, with new needs such as saving money on transportation as oil prices soar and as the climate crisis worsens, the earlier cuts have made it difficult to restore service. And in Britain, as in the US, it’s young people in particular that are driving the demand:
“In the 60s, young people – when asked by pollsters – often said they would rather have a car than the vote,” says Professor David Begg, chief executive of Transport Times. “Today they are more likely to say they would rather have an iPhone than a car.”
Underlying factors for this disillusion with the car include road congestion and spiralling costs of driving, particularly for the young: car insurance has increased by 80% for young people in the past two years, for example, compared with a 20% rise for those aged 50, while numbers of those aged 17-19 who take the driving test have dropped by a fifth in the past five years. At the same time, rail companies have been aggressive in promoting cheap deals for the under-25s.
“Young people simply cannot afford to run cars and that has driven up rail passengers numbers at a rate of about 6% a year at a time when we are going through major financial depressions,” adds Begg. “It is quite extraordinary.”
Well, it’s only extraordinary if you aren’t expecting it or living it. For many of us, it’s just common sense. Sitting on a train, even a long-distance one (if you’ve got the time) is much more comfortable than sitting in a car, plus you’re able to use your smartphone. You can’t currently do that on a plane, yet even if and when that rule is changed, soaring oil prices will lead to demand for trains over planes too.
Britain’s experience with passenger rail over the last 50 years, from massive cuts to soaring demand that can’t be met because of those cuts, is a stark reminder to those who argue for cutting American passenger rail service in order to save money – you probably won’t save as much as you think in the short-term, and you’ll spend a lot more than you expect in the long term when demand forces you to restore what you cut.
You just replace an ideology of “trains = unprofitable =bad” with an ideology of “trains = unprofitable? = I like trains!”. In reality there are costs and benefits. The benefits should not be measured in terms of the profitability of just the line itself, but in a larger societal contest — but the benefits should still be measured! And the cost-benefit ratio should be positive, at least eventually.
synonymouse Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 10:23 am
Cost-benefit ratios are not applicable to politicized projects. Any negative to a “fix” are quickly suppressed, recanted.
Businesses deal with profits: politics deal with payoffs.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 11:14 am
The cost/benefit for going through Palmdale looks quite good to people in Los Angeles who want to go to Las Vegas and vice versa.
synonymouse Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 12:05 pm
All Californians will be underwriting Angelenos dumping their money in another state. So pollyanna airhead, so Socal.
Detroit is the new trendsetter.
Peter Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 12:21 pm
They already dump their money there anyway. Why do you think XpressWest is a viable concept to begin with?
synonymouse Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 1:02 pm
DesertedXPrss is no more viable than TehaVegaSkyRail.
James M in Irvine, CA Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 7:42 am
Hey, Synonymouse,
You often use “TehaVegaSkyRail” in your comments. I tried to google it, but it only exists on your threads. Can you explain what it refers to, please? I genuinly want to know the reference.
Thank you,
Jim
synonymouse Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 10:44 am
I know it is a dumb moniker but it is the best I can come up with:
Teha = the DeTour over, under and around the Loop
Vega = Sin City – Reid turf
SkyRail = every gadgetbahn every Bechtel-PB ever pimped to a inane public.
James M in Irvine, CA Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 4:07 pm
Thanks for the info.
Jim m
adirondacker12800 Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 1:19 pm
As if people in Greater Los Angeles don’t pay taxes.
synonymouse Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 1:45 pm
And they are just getting started.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 2:48 pm
I’m sure they have been paying state taxes since there was a state to pay taxes to.
synonymouse Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 10:47 am
What is Garcetti’s position on Palmdale-centrism?
Why don’t they simply elevate Villa to alcalde-caudillo for life and spare Sac or DC in the future?
Peter Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 10:26 am
It should be possible to calculate the overall societal benefits to providing rural communities with Amtrak service, especially when those communities have no long-distance public transportation alternative.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 11:16 am
There is no public transport where I live. It was that way when I moved here. I don’t have any expectation that it will change, unless cars are banned. It’s too bad they live out in the middle of nowhere.
Nathanael Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 12:56 pm
Cars are actually a pretty good form of rural transportation. They just suck for urban transportation and for intercity transportation.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 1:34 pm
I forget the exact quote and can’t remember who said it: Cars are the ideal form of transportation for places few people want to go to at times not many of those few want to go there.
Cost-benefit analysis itself is a politicized process. Government projects have such diffuse benefits (and usually easily-quantified costs) that it’s a simple matter to rig the benefit calculations to ensure your desired outcome.
Alon Levy Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 2:45 pm
It sounds a lot like the stupid arguments against census sampling: accurate sampling can be politicized, so let’s not do it at all and instead use a method that’s guaranteed to produce inaccurate results.
Derek Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 3:44 pm
That’s an argument for keeping the data and calculations open to the public, not an argument for ignoring the costs and benefits.
I like to imagine a world where we discuss and debate these details and learn the unpoliticized truths before deciding whether to go ahead with big infrastructure projects.
joe Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 7:43 pm
That approach sure beats talking to cab drivers.
Nathanael Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 7:13 pm
Everyone who’s tried to do a halfway-honest cost-benefit analysis has found that both passenger rail and freight rail are better investments than expressways in the same corridor. When the difference is that dramatic, the imprecisions or politicization really fade away into the background.
(I’m being quite specific here. Expressways really have terrible cost-benefit ratios. Even people who are trying to tilt the numbers in the favor of expressways cannot manage to get good cost-benefit ratios out of them. Roads with intersections often seem to have good cost-benefit ratios — but they have limits to their usefulness, and if you want to exceed those limits, BUILD RAIL.)
Nice to see the SMART line being restored. It was left for dead before SMART was proposed.
The Haystack Landing bridge will be replaced this year by the former Galveston Bascule bridge.
Video of installing the new Galveston Bridge and removing the SMART bridge:
http://www.cianbro.com/ProjectsMarkets/Transportation/GalvestonCausewayRailroadBridge.aspx
Petaluma Bridge relocation shown on pg. 3:
http://tinyurl.com/d9fku6a
The new Haystack bridge is reported to have arrived in the NAPA pipe yard where it will be restored and placed on a barge to take it to Petaluma for installation later this year.
Little Galveston has more traffic on a single track causeway than mighty San Francisco peninsula has on a double-track. But then Galveston is still a working port.
J Baloun Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 5:56 pm
Related Topic: Restoring old rail lines to passenger operations.
BNSF runs 20 to 30 trains a day bi-directional on the mostly single track Galveston division. Another branch line is being considered for restarting the Galveston-Houston commuter rail line. In this case the freight and passengers would share only the causeway.
Some interesting quotes:
http://forum.dallasmetropolis.com/showthread.php/7499-Houston-Galveston-Commuter-Rail
Quote
The Galveston-Houston Commuter Rail Study estimates it would cost between $380 million to $415 million to revive commuter service on the 140-year-old Galveston-Houston and Henderson rail corridor that parallels Interstate 45.
That’s a bargain compared with the estimated $2.2 billion cost of a two-way bus lane carrying the same number of passengers, according to the study.
“If people ask if we can do it, I say it’s impossible for us not to do it,” said Barry Goodman, whose Goodman Corp. conducted the study.
…….
A commuter rail line would carry about 11,480 passengers per year when it is completed in 2030, reducing travel by vehicles by 51.7 million miles per year, the study says. That translates into a 509-ton annual reduction in air pollution, the study says.
Development would flourish along the rail line, increasing property and sales tax values by an estimated $131 million within 1,500 feet of transit stations, the report says.
End Quote
J Baloun Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 5:58 pm
I think they meant 11,480 passengers a day.
GGT wanted to pave the ROW. The two upside to SMART are the reconstruction of Novoto south and as a standard gauge bulwark against the Great Satan BART.
California High Speed Rail filled the last of its senior management posts naming Russell Fong as CFO.
Some years ago, I stumbled over the official Beeching report, and I was shocked. At that time, I was in my post-graduate studies in industrial engineering, and I think if I had delivered something comparable to the Beeching report, they would have kicked me out of the course. For one, Beeching (et al) carefully tabulated all the numbers for each and every station. So far so good, but with their conclusion, they looked only at single lines, or single stations. They completely actively ignored that they were actually looking at a network. In other words, they completely ignored traffic from one line to another, or the feeder effect.
OK, one thing is that the operation cost were high, considering the high number of steam engines used. If I remember correctly, the did not look over the channel, for example to Germany, where a light railbus (the “Schienenbus” of the DB, or the “Ferkeltaxe” of the DR) slashed operation cost considerably.
To me that report looked as if the actual order was to cut down the network, and the reoprt was just the justification for that.
Well, when ideology reigns, reason has a very hard stand…
Alon Levy Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 2:45 pm
Yes, but. In the context of Amtrak, the routes that rail reformers want to close, the long-distance ones, aren’t really feeding any traffic to the short-distance corridors. The ridership on the NEC and other relatively high-performing corridors is local; very, very few people are traveling from (say) Boston to New York to connect to a long-distance train to Miami.
These lines also suffer from high operating costs (sleepers are expensive to operate, even if the revenues are high) and low revenue per unit distance: ¢17/p-mi revenue vs. ¢48/p-mi on the Regional and ¢85/p-mi on the Acela.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 2:51 pm
the foamers on Rairoad.net claim that extending the Silver Services to Boston would generate great big thundering herds of passengers. Amtrak might actually have the equipment to test that theory once they get some new cars…..
MarkB Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 3:00 pm
A year or two ago in California, track work in the north caused problems for the Zephyr, and ridership took a hit. The network effects were significant on both the Capitol Corridor and the San Joaquin.
I forget the details and the specific percentage drops, but I remember clearly the linkage of not just short distance feeding long distance, but long distance feeding short distance.
I also seem to remember reading a report that when Amtrak last axed a bunch of long distance routes, the expected savings never materialized because ridership on the remaining routes (long and short, collectively) dropped enough to offset the savings.
The network effect (or Matrix Effect as Herzog [sic?] calls it) is a powerful driver of ridership, even if a line-in-isolation analysis doesn’t show it.
Keith Saggers Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 4:08 pm
viva the network effect
Nathanael Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 7:22 pm
Alon, you’re simply wrong, as MarkB notes. There are a lot of people who go from Chicago to New York (or the other way, or from somewhere in upstate NY or PA or Ohio or Indiana) and continue on one of the (many many) short-distance trains from Chicago or New York. You can see the dips in “corridor” ridership every time there’s a problem with the Chicago-NY trains.
Now, the two three-a-week trains are substandard and don’t feed much ridership to anyone including themselves — and Amtrak recognizes this and wants to make them daily. By contrast, the daily single-overnight trains are an absolutely key part of the network. This is a class of trains which has been retained in every rail system in Europe.
You also don’t understand Amtrak’s cost structure on long-distance trains.
Sleepers pay for their own incremental costs.
The coach seats (not considering the diner yet) have worse cost recovery than on short corridors for two reasons: first, because the amount people will pay is not proportional to distance or time, but the cost of operating the train is (so MAKE THE TRAINS FASTER), and second because *there’s only one train per day* and they have to cover a bunch of quasi-fixed costs (fixed in terms of trains per day).
What really doesn’t pay for itself is the diner, and that’s what makes the numbers look *so* much worse. The trouble is, *you need a diner when the trip takes that long*. If you can speed the trip up enough, you can get rid of the diner and suddenly the cost profile will look much better. So again, MAKE THE TRAINS FASTER.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 7:37 pm
One way to look at it is that if they are losing money on the diner they aren’t charging enough for the food. Of course if they charged enough for the food people wouldn’t buy it meaning they have to charge higher prices… eventually no one would be using them.
People whine and moan that the Albany-NYC trains don’t have a cafe car. But when there was a cafe car on, they whined and moaned that the prices were high and didn’t patronize it….
James M in Irvine, CA Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 8:29 am
What about serving good food at a reasonable price? Any restauranteer knows it’s seats filled and food, drinks, and dessert ordered that make money. If the food is reasonably priced and good quality then more people will use that service and leave the picnic-type dining at home.
(I have eaten on a Surfliner from San Diego once, but I have not had a long-distance dining experience yet, so take my comments with a few grains of salt…).
Jim M
Nathanael Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 1:03 pm
It’s really not the food which is the issue, it’s the cost of staffing a diner.
You have to pay more than you would pay for an on-the-ground restaurant because the workers have to be trained in doing things in a moving vehicle, and in various safety things. You have a smaller number of seats to spread the kitchen staff across. You have a smaller *kitchen* making for less efficient operations. The cost of extra space is enormous (whereas for a restaurant on the ground it’s cheap). Et cetera.
Diners were introduced because *prior* to diners, trains had to make “meal stops” of an hour at a time. Effectively, this is actually what the Lake Shore Limited does right now at Albany, NY. Roughly speaking, if the runtime for a train runs across two mealtimes, you have to introduce a diner or people won’t tolerate it. (Across one mealtime, you can get away without a diner.)
adirondacker12800 Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 2:18 pm
Lost revenue too. The advance purchase fare between NY and DC is $49. Regionals are about half full on average. So roughly $2,000 a trip in ticket revenue. A very quick surf through Craiglist comes up with a dollar a square foot per month for commercial space. Or $850 a month for something the size of a dining car. It would have to be a very very busy reasonably priced diner to come up with $667 an hour in sales much less profit – to pay Amtrak enough rent to cover the lost fares.
James M in Irvine, CA Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 4:05 pm
THnaks for a stronger perspective. What if each passenger subsidized the diner’s cost by $1.00 a ticket? Might not be much, but it helps offset the cost.
Jim M
adirondacker12800 Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 4:56 pm
so on a 500 passenger train that would cut the lost revenue from $2,000 dollars to $1,500. The very very busy diner would have trouble ringing up $500 an hour instead of $667.
Alon Levy Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 4:46 pm
The problem with reducing the LSL’s length to one meal is that the average speed required is more than can be reasonably accommodated on freight-primary legacy track. Going down to about 15 hours is aggressive but achievable, but that’s still two mealtimes. Going down to ~12 hours and one mealtime requires Acela average speed.
Steve S. Reply:
March 11th, 2013 at 2:16 pm
If you look at the old schedules, you’ll notice that the LSL’s precessor–the 20th Century Limited–did NYC-Chicago in almost exactly 15 hours. So that means that with a well-maintained physical plant and proper highballing, a 15 hour run is achievable within the existing property envelope*. Getting it faster than that would require new infrastructure (electrification! cutoffs!) and the capital that entails.
________
*Keep in mind that in the 20th Century‘s day the mainline was quad-tracked throughout, the train always had priority, and there were IIRC exactly two stops. Since it has more stops, the LSL would more likely cap at 18 hrs in the heritage profile, unless substantial efforts were made to provide complimentary passenger service such that the LSL only needed to make two stops.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
March 11th, 2013 at 3:53 pm
15 hour to Chicago because Chicago is in the Central Time Zone and 17 hours to get to New York because New York is in the Eastern Time Zone.
D. P. Lubic Reply:
March 11th, 2013 at 5:11 pm
“Getting it faster than that [15 hours actual running time] would require new infrastructure (electrification! cutoffs!) and the capital that entails.”
“Keep in mind that in the 20th Century‘s day the mainline was quad-tracked throughout, the train always had priority, and there were IIRC exactly two stops. Since it has more stops, the LSL would more likely cap at 18 hrs in the heritage profile, unless substantial efforts were made to provide complimentary passenger service such that the LSL only needed to make two stops.”
Actually, I think you could do better even without electrification and cut-offs, at least based on what the NYC did in that time. Some of the things not noted:
(1). Even with intermittent automatic train stop equipment, the NYC still had a policy of an 80 mph speed limit. Although capable of more, the glorious Hudsons (4-6-4s) of that line normally wouldn’t have been worked over this. As it was, some test runs in the postwar era had the 4-6-4s peaking out at 95 mph or so.
(2). In steam, and to a certain extent with diesels, there were additional servicing stops and crew changes. The train may have had two scheduled stops for the public, but the actual number was a bit higher, including at least one stop to load coal in steam days. This was even with tenders that greatly sacrificed water capacity for coal, relying on track pans and retractable scoops on the tenders to replenish the water supply without stopping.
The Century’s time came from very precise running, which in turn came from what, as noted, was a very dedicated management that gave it priority over everything, plus track capacity. That management dedication–what is called political will in that sphere–is what is in the shortest supply today. Get that, and you get the faster running, and the electrification and other things, too.
About the precision–there was one stretch where the Century was timed to average a speed of about 76 mph over something like 90 miles start to stop, and it normally had to do so without exceeding the 80 mph limit.
Just for fun:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0AGYIVjNIg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXr6RZCIR2A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcC9laB3UFU
Not shown in any of the available clips are the Central’s Niagara types (4-8-4). These were in some ways a Union Pacific 800 series condensed down to fit in the tight clearances of an eastern railroad. They were the engines that gave the diesels a run for the money, with power, speed, and endurance to spare. Only 27 of them on the roster, where the Mohawks (4-8-2s) numbered 600 and the Hudsons numbered 275, yet they ran up mileage far in excess of what the small roster number would suggest. Most interesting is a copy of a time-speed graph I have from the tests which compared these 4-8-4s with diesels and earlier steam engines. A Pacific type topped out at something like 85 mph, the Hudsons topped out a bit over 90, and the diesels could hit around 95. The Niagara would start out a little on the slow side, while the diesel would accelerate faster in the lower speed ranges (typical of electric traction motors), but at about 50 mph the Niagara matched the diesel, and from there on it was no contest. At some point before the diesels hit maximum speed, the Niagara’s speed line ran off the graph at 100 mph–and the speed was still climbing rapidly at that point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NYC_Niagara
D. P. Lubic Reply:
March 11th, 2013 at 5:17 pm
http://www.steamlocomotive.com/northern/nyc6000-hechtkoff2.jpg
http://www.steamlocomotive.com/northern/nyc6000-hechtkoff3.jpg
http://i147.photobucket.com/albums/r293/VIEWLINER/0907/TT02.jpg
http://ainoko.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/niagara_edwhittekind.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jIfjOJ62RFs/TeJN-hYV4NI/AAAAAAAAAEk/j5WbO1dEo0c/s1600/NYC+Syracuse+%25236026.jpg
adirondacker12800 Reply:
March 11th, 2013 at 5:54 pm
You’d have to check with the NYCentral foamers, there were some short stretched of three track in the more remote parts of Ohio, IIRC.
Wikipedia says the Niagaras had 6.700 horsepower and hauled around 92.000 pounds of coal and 18,000 gallons of water ( 144,000 pounds ) or in metric 5.000 kilowatts, 41 tonnes of coal and 65 tonnes of water. An AEM7 is called and AEM7 because it produces 7,000 horsepower before the HEP load. ( 5200 kilowatts ) and the HHP8 is… the High Horse Power 8 with 8,000 horsepower. Electrons don’t weigh much even when the locomotive is sucking down 6 megawatts. It’s flat and straight between Rochester and Chicago. No reason why the grade crossings put in for 126 MPH couldn’t be hosting trains that go 220.
Derek Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 4:49 pm
If the diner is ever completely full, the prices are too low at that particular time.
If the diner is ever less than half full, the prices are too high at that particular time, or the quality of the food needs to be increased.
If the diner is always mostly full of people and still loses money, then it needs to be downsized to half a train car, or the train needs to be made longer to bring in more customers.
Alon Levy Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 6:51 pm
Okay, here’s how Amtrak diners actually work. The capacity of a diner is way less than that of the rest of the train. So they do multiple seatings – I believe 3, but I may be overgeneralizing from the Auto Train. They seat you with 3 other people who may be complete strangers.
In case you wonder, yes, some people have proposed at-seat or at-sleeper-cabin food options as an alternative. Friendlier to introverts, too.
Alon Levy Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 10:34 pm
The Empire Builder and such don’t even serve New York, so they’re not feeding the NEC. Maybe they’re feeding the hagfish trains that go to Michigan, but those trains lose money too, just less than the LDs; the only ones that consistently don’t are the Virginia services. The Viewliner trains heading south from Washington do go on the NEC, but you can’t even use them to book intra-NEC trips, just Alexandria-New York, and so again they’re not really feeding the southern half of the NEC, which is the really high-performing one. There’s the Late Shore Limited, but that’s one train a day, with ridership that’s a few percent of NEC ridership; it can’t be contributing thaaat much.
The diner is one car in a large consist.
Nathanael Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 1:21 pm
The diner is one car with 4-6 staff members and *no* ticketed space. The cafe car has 1 staff member and no ticketed space. Each sleeper has 1 staff member (and up to 26 ticketed passengers). Each 2-3 coach cars have 1 staff member and a whole lot of ticketed passengers.
Do the math yourself. Adding a diner adds a huge amount of staffing cost. It’s very hard to recover that from the food prices.
The solution, in the long run, is to speed up the sleeper trains enough that people get on *after dinner* and get off *before breakfast*. (Though as I said if people are only onboard for one meal, they will tolerate a cafe-only service.) You can make some short term improvements by getting enough passengers that you can add a “table car” and have a single kitchen supply two cars worth of passengers, as happens on the Auto Train. This requires more rolling stock of course.
And yes, I am focused on the Lake Shore Limited, since that’s “my train” to Chicago, and when people make casual and thoughtless comments about “long distance trains”, with the Sunset Limited in their heads, they put the LSL route, which absolutely needs more service, at risk of cuts.
The Capitol Limited is in a similar situation to the LSL and so is the City of New Orleans.
The Southern and Western trains are different. It’s worth noting that over half the passengers on the California Zephyr get off or on at Denver; that is really several separate routes stuck together back-to-back, of which the Denver-Chicago route has the most untapped potential. The Empire Builder is also basically a collection of different routes glued together, and so is the Crescent (New Orleans – New York) — the trouble is that even if you unglue them, most of the individual travel markets aren’t currently fast enough to run without diners. So SPEED THE TRAINS UP. (I admit to not understanding the dynamics of demand for the Florida-NY trains.)
The LD trains are feeding the Chicago corridor trains. I don’t give a damn whether the services “lose money” according to the completely worthless “fully allocated” accounting, and you shouldn’t either. The fully allocated accounting allocates some of the NEC costs to the Viewliner trains, but those costs would be there even if all the Viewliner trains were cancelled, so the Viewliner trains are simply making the NEC look good.
The correct question is whether the trains are, in fact, feeding overall ridership numbers and therefore the overall income/loss statement. At least some of the long-distance trains — specifically, the single-overnight links between cities with extensive rail connections, such as the Lake Shore Limited and Capitol Limited — would clearly be doing so if not for the diner costs.
jimsf Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 3:17 pm
I don’t think the diners are staffed with 6 people any more. More like 3.
Steven Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 3:56 pm
Sure. But who here thinks that any money we save cutting the long-distance routes would still go to Amtrak… or any other rail reform? There are worse things to waste our money on… namely all the things we’d waste our money on if we didn’t have the Sunset Limited.
The LD trains aren’t keeping us from investing in good transportation options; Congress–among other things–is. Reform Congress, and then we’ll see real rail reform.
Comments and perspectives on this from a heritage railroad site:
http://www.rypn.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=34643
And check the fourth comment in the thread below:
http://www.rypn.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=34650
adirondacker12800 Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 5:58 pm
..yes people buy the cheap real estate near the tracks and then complain… that they live on the cheap real estate near the tracks…..
D. P. Lubic Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 9:32 pm
Something else:
http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/10264001.Fifty_years_on_from_Beeching___North_York_Moors_Railway_is_world_s_busiest_heritage_line/
Maybe my jokes about making the Caltrain Peninsula line a heritage railroad that also hauls commuters with steam engines aren’t so far fetched after all. . .
Not really sure what Robert is getting at here. The services most likely to be cut in the USA are the long distance passenger trains. If that happens the routes will remain for freight, with the possible exception of the central section of the Southwest Chief. At least in theory these routes could again host passenger trains just as may happen on the route of the former Desert Wind between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The UK experience he quotes, and the work of the great and good doctor, has little relevance to the USA today. BR in the 60′s had slid into deficit for a number of reasons but there were steam operated branch lines which required an army to operate and maintain, that carried almost no passengers, and that were a drain on the system. Many should never have been built and were the result of the desperation of small towns not to let the nineteenth century leave them behind. But Beeching did believe in the intercity network, in unit freight trains of coal and containers and other commodities, and in replacing steam with diesel and electrification.
Nathanael Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 7:34 pm
Paul, since you’re extremely slow, I’ll spell it out for you.
The US lost more routes during the destruction of our rail network than Britain lost under the Beeching Axe, and we’re *already* suffering from it. For instance, there is no good route left from Chicago to Indianapolis; it would have to be new-build at this point. Also, the only above-flood-level route out of New York City is gone. The best route east out of Seattle is now a hiking trail. *All* the reasonable routes from Philadelphia to Bethelehem/Allentown are being encroached on. The NY-Scranton route at least has preserved ROW, but it’s turning out to be a bear to rebuild the line. Amtrak’s Chicago-Florida train was discontinued due to track deterioration and it’s basically impossible to reinstate it without new-build construction now. Similar stories can be told across the country
Although Britain’s rail network was clearly overbuilt, the “irrationalization” of Britain’s railway network had seriously idiotic components to it, such as the demolition of the Great Central Line (much needed now as a low-curvature, high-clearance route) or the Lewes line (now needed as a relief line for the Brighton line). While some branch lines needed to be “trimmed back” as the density of stations was extraordinary, there was no logic to shutting the entire Minehead branch, for another example.
There’s a reason Beeching is considered to have been stupid. Switching to diesel and electricity was the right thing to do; changing freight-handling practices was the right thing to do; but selling off railway right-of-ways was obviously wrong.
Nathanael Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 7:36 pm
Oh, more for ya! The fast route from New York to Detroit via Canada (the Canada Southern) is out of service.
Alon Levy Reply:
March 4th, 2013 at 10:21 pm
But what’s being talked about isn’t actual abandonment, except as Paul notes in a few cases of lines that are genuinely unnecessary like the section of the Southwest Chief cut off by the Southern Transcon or the section of the Empire Builder serving Minot cut off by the Northern Transcon. Nobody needs to maintain hundreds of kilometers of line for passenger rail service to La Junta. Nobody would miss such a line, just as nobody in Jersey misses the Camden and Amboy or the parts of the New Jersey Railroad serving Princeton now cut off by the NEC.
jimsf Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 9:05 am
The amount of money spent annually to keep these routes is a nearly invisible drop of the federal budget each year. Of all the things to complain about being a waste of money why choose this? Because you have an ideological problem with amtrak and the american railroad industry. Its not the way you think it should be so its bad.
If you are worried about spending, there is plenty of more significant waste to cut than amtrak, which whether you like it or not, people enjoy, locals, tourist, international tourists. And its a great way to see the country, and its an important part of americana. We can well afford a few nickels to keep it going for those reasons.
You can’t even find the money on the map
VBobier Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 12:07 pm
Yeah, like the incredibly bloated F35 program with it’s cracked turbine blades, there goes more money and the 51 F35 fighters that are in the military now cost at least $130,000,000.00 per plane and the Military wants 2500-3000 of them, I could see $1 Million per plane, but $130 Million? Somebody is trying to make a killing off of America…
Program cost increases and further delays of the F35 Lightning
At $130 Million A Plane, Critics Question The Cost Of The F-35
And people say HSR is expensive, Hypocrites…
VBobier Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 12:13 pm
It gets worse here: F-35 Lrip Costs Per Aircraft – Over $200 Million
synonymouse Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 12:17 pm
“Somebody is trying to make a killing off of America…”
You nailed it. Business as usual.
Nathanael Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 1:30 pm
Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex.
Nathanael Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 1:25 pm
Alon: if the Cardinal is cut, you can expect actual abandonment of most of the route.
If the California Zephyr is cut, UP may eventually decide to abandon the mountain route (not much online traffic) in favor of the Wyoming route (much easier to operate).
After the Broadway Limited was cut, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s mainline across Ohio and Indiana was downgrade and is now a very-low-speed branch line. And I already mentioned the Canada Southern.
Alon Levy Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 4:04 pm
I believe Colorado said that it would buy the line if it were put on sale. If UP wants to abandon then it means high maintenance costs for whoever runs the passenger trains, but it also means the trains have a good chance of running on time and there could be trains timed to connect Denver to the ski resorts and such.
Paul Dyson Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 9:19 am
@ nathaniel: Robert’s commentary was, I thought, about current and future policy rather than what happened in the past in the USA. Don’t tell me that you could not run a train from Chicago to Florida without “new build construction” whatever that means, there are plenty of combinations of routes available. You don’t say that you cannot run a train out of Seattle, only that the “best” (in your opinion) route is gone, implying that there are other routes available.
Your meagre intellect does not allow you to put yourselves in the shoes of those in the UK that had to make some very tough decisions. Clearly in hindsight some of these were wrong but at the time trains were running (contributing to global warming no doubt) with a handful of passengers or one or two waggons of low paying freight and no prospects of a radical change. Something had to be done. Whether you like it or not, people wanted cars.
Jim Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 9:54 am
“people wanted cars”. Perhaps they did, but the chronology doesn’t work. I was living in England when the Beeching cuts occurred. Before the cuts, it was possible to get anywhere in Britain by train. Few people in the street I grew up on had cars. After the cuts, there were many places in Britain that could only be reached by car. Gradually the people on my street acquired cars. By the time I left for the US, the street was heavily parked. I came back to visit my parents in ’75 or ’76 and saw that many people had paved over their front gardens and torn out their garden wall so that they could park. The cuts came first, the explosion in car ownership came later. Before the cuts, people may have wanted a car, but they didn’t need one. And cars were expensive. So they held off buying one. After the cuts, they could no longer reach the place they’d previously holidayed, or perhaps the village that Aunt Edna lived in. Now they had a reason to buy a car: there was some journey they wanted to make that could only be made by car.
It isn’t that car ownership caused the cuts, rather the cuts caused car ownership.
Andy M Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 10:21 am
and today, despite virtually everybody having a car and cars being first choice, we see interesting developments. Property values are higher when there’s a passenger station in the vicinity. The madness of closing parallel routes is felt for example in the London area where the surving routes are squeezed to capacity. The Chiltern Line out of Marylebone escaped closure by a hair’s breadth and today it is difficult to imagine where we’d be without it as it is providing valuable relief of overcrowded parallel routes. Beeching created scenarios where freight has to take enormous detours (as is the case between Southampton and Didcot – even though a perfectly direct good and direct double-track main line existed between the two places before Beeching came along, much of that alignment is now lost under highways). So whereas it is true that competition led to duplication of acapcity and many parallel routes, the increase in population and mobilioty thathas occureed since has created a rasion d’etre for many of those lines even if this was not the case at the time.
Meanwhile the US rail system has been similarly pruned to meet the routes of freight. Routes that were of value to passenger trains but of less value to freight have often been lost. Freight traffic is often not time critical so hubbing and detours is much more practical than it is for passengers. The routes that remain are thus mostly attuned to the needs of freight and passenger trains running on them are almost by definition suboptimal. At the same time Amtrak is moaning that it doesn’t own the tracks and has to play second fiddle to freight. the solution would be to move back to the better and faster passenger routes. Only where is the money going to come from to reinstate the lost mileage?
Paul Dyson Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 5:43 pm
Southampton to Didcot via Basingstoke and Reading West Junction is not an “enormous detour”. There simply wasn’t enough traffic to justify maintaining that route via Newbury and there isn’t today.
Andy M Reply:
March 6th, 2013 at 1:33 am
Except that one of the justifications being put forwards for the multi-million remodelling of Reading is that freights cause too much congestion on the flat junctions at Reading West / Cow lane. Ditto for gauge widening of the SouthWest main line and proposed AC electrification (the line already is DC electrified which is good enough for passenger trains). That electrification might have made more sense going the shorter route via Newbury had the route been safeguarded back then. As for volumes, Southampton is today one of the fastest growing ports in the UK, with a lot of both import and export being handled there. The roads around Southhampton are pretty badly congested with trailer trucks going into and out of the port. Railfreight could have a bigger share of that if had easier access to the port from the Midlands, in other words Birmingham – Oxford – Didcot – Newbury – Southampton as AC electrified freight backbone.
Paul Dyson Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 10:31 am
My father never owned a car but the Beeching cuts made no difference to our journeys, and I would say that was true for the majority. People didn’t travel as much and you may recall that the bus services were very comprehensive and usually cheaper than train tickets, at least in my part of the world (rural West Surrey). Car ownership was low but growing and it was precisely those that could afford to travel more that could buy cars. As for holiday services, Beeching was against owning and maintaining rolling stock and fixed assets that were used for perhaps 10 weekends a year to serve seaside branch lines. Again, in hindsight, you may say that they were worth preserving but today the subsidy to retain those that still exist is enormous. Retaining those lines for these past 50 years, even with dmus and automatic signalling, would have represented such a drain on the network that I doubt we would have as much main line electrification or the HST.
Andy M Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 10:55 am
I think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you have a rail system that covers all the needs of the public and that does so efficiently, people will rally behind that system and demand that their elected leaders use their tax money to look after and improve it. If you dismantle that system under the pretence of saving costs to the public purse, you also gamble away that support and very soon nobody will be in favour of paying even the reduced cost that you have brought about.
Switzerland has one of the most efficient railways in the world. At the same time electors are almost always in favour of projects that will enhance it even more. It is difficult to say which is the chicken and which is the egg, and so decide whether the system is so good because people wanted it thus, or whether people wanted it thus because it fulfilled their needs. But obviously once the snowball is rolling it gets better and better. The railways pre Beeching were already pretty grubby, had not fully recovered from wartime maltreatment, but were making good steps to overcome the damage. Beeching could have put in a special effort to create a Swiss-style positive spiral. Instead he applied the brake and reversed the spiral.
Andy M Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 10:58 am
It is maybe no coincidence that the transport minister of the day was also the president of a major highway building consortium, and when it was pointed out this might be a conflict of interest, he nominally signed the company over to his wife. The railways were enginnered to fail. It was not something that just happened.
synonymouse Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 11:49 am
Of course it was not something that just happened. But it would be a mistake that the anti-rail, anti-electric holy war merely proceeded from the top, the transport ministry. Or to conclude that the highway lobby was entirely responsible.
Much of the worst damage was carried out by quislings in transit management and amongst the “expert” consultancy. We’re talking Bechtel-PB and the irrepressible tendency toward fadism and the gadgetbahn du jour. How many trolleybus operations were trashed by this same class of bozos currently designing and imposing the DeTour and only a few years ago.
You need to slap a choke collar on these “experts” and monitor them like a hawk. They are a worse threat than the Reason Foundation because they are on the inside and can do enormous damage. Ergo BART Indian broad gauge.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 11:56 am
How many trolleybus operations were trashed by this same class of bozos currently designing and imposing the DeTour and only a few years ago.
The people who made the decisions to bustitute the streetcars and trolleybuses have been dead for a long time. Pelosi mind rays can only be generated by living people.
synonymouse Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 1:55 pm
Not so. The expert dumbf**ks still abound. I am sure there plenty of Jetsons fanboys at PB.
http://www.edmonton.ca/transportation/ets/about_ets/ets-trolley.aspx
But you can always peddle a monorail to hook the stupid, as in Vegas. SkyBus anyone?
Paul Dyson Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 5:37 pm
To Andy M: I agree with much of what you say about the UK but remember that a whole generation’s experience of railways was either wartime or immediate post war when journeys were miserable or travel was discouraged. Ernie Marples and Marples Ridgeway are prime suspects in the destruction of much of BR but there was little serious questioning of the fundamental policy as the railways had such a bad reputation. A few dozen people showing up for the last train on a little used branch line did nothing to slow the momentum of closures.
Most of today’s crowding is on the major routes that were untouched by the cuts.
Nathanael Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 1:28 pm
“there are plenty of combinations of routes available”
No, there aren’t. I’ve gone through them all and so have other people. Unless you build from scratch, there’s no way to run a time-competitive passenger service from Chicago to Florida. The good routes have been ripped up or reduced to very low speed. I suppose this is because this is simply not a freight traffic route; the freight goes east-west or goes along the coasts.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 2:30 pm
Even when there’s full fat HSR from Minneapolis to Miami the train from Chicago to Atlanta isn’t going to be time competitive with flying. The full fat HSR train from Atlanta to Jacksonville might be. Atlanta to Miami, probably not. Chicago to Miami definitely not.
Paul Dyson Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 5:37 pm
There are plenty of routes for an Amtrak style service. There never was a high speed route.
Nathanael Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 1:33 pm
“Robert’s commentary was, I thought, about current and future policy rather than what happened in the past in the USA.”
Do you realize HOW RECENTLY we lost the Canada Southern? Heck, Canada’s quite likely to lose all service to the Maritimes, and the tracks will probably be ripped up next. This isn’t old news, this is ongoing! Cuts cause further cuts.
Alon Levy Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 6:41 pm
The problem with Canada’s passenger rail is that outside the Corridor, speeds are atrocious. I don’t even mean Amtrak bad. I mean slower-parts-of-Amtrak bad. The Ocean averages 64 km/h.
As Keep Houston Houston has just noted, HSR compresses travel time along the line, which means that a post-HSR legacy rail network would look different from a pre-HSR network. For example, Boston-Halifax is probably about the same track length as the Ocean but can be built to higher speed (and also points to New York), and then Montreal-Halifax could be rerouted through Albany and Boston (with HSR Montreal-Boston is 2 hours, less than the possibly time savings).
adirondacker12800 Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 7:53 pm
There aren’t enough people in places not between Windsor and Quebec City to have rail service.
60 percent of all Canadians live in Ontario or Quebec. Most of those live in or near the Corridor. Everyplace else is too far away from anyplace else to make sense. Fly
Halifax is 700 road miles from Montreal. If it doesn’t make sense to send trains 500 miles from Kansas City to Denver it doesn’t make sense to send them across the empty spaces of Maine and New Brunswick either. Not to get to thriving cosmopolitan Halifax with metro population of 300.000.
And no it doesn’t make sense to do for people who don’t live in metro Halifax, the population of New Brunswick is only 750,000
Alon Levy Reply:
March 6th, 2013 at 3:48 am
What are we in British Columbia – chopped liver?
Kidding. Of course nobody is proposing extra rail service from Vancouver to anywhere else in Canada. Seattle would be nice; the main obstacle there is that border control is run by assholes, and after that barrier to incremental upgrades is lifted, there’s a barrier to full HSR coming from less than perfect terrain.
Jonathan Reply:
March 5th, 2013 at 7:27 pm
what did the Northlander average?