[AmtrakWPK]

And the real estate salespeople selling homes probably know the train schedules and do their best to make sure that they show homes when there are no trains scheduled, and tell folks that those tracks are hardly ever used.

[frj1983]

AmtrakWPK, on Mon, Jan 22, 2007, 08:33 PM, said:

And the real estate salespeople selling homes probably know the train schedules and do their best to make sure that they show homes when there are no trains scheduled, and tell folks that those tracks are hardly ever used.

Or more likely, people pay no attention to "those trains" because they're always passing through and who worries about them. Until you move into a house near the tracks. I once lived in a house right next to the tracks. Granted, it was not a main line, but many trains rumbled down the track with loaded coal cars to the power plant. Was it bothersome? for the first few weeks, and then it blended into the background. What bothers me more these days are those who have to drive their cars around with the music turned up so loud that the house rumbles. I guarantee you, those people will be deaf by their mid-thirties! Then they'll be looking for someone to sue.

In the meantime, the trains keep rolling!!

This post has been edited by frj1983: 23 January 2007 - 04:03 PM

[WICT106]

This Week at Amtrak; January 26, 2007

A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-6760, Electronic Mail info@unitedrail.org
http://www.unitedrail.org

Volume 4, Number 4


Founded over three decades ago in 1976 by Austin M. Coates, Jr., URPA is
a nationally known policy institute that focuses on solutions and plans
for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in
Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota,
California, Arizona, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and
Tennessee. For more detailed information, along with a variety of
position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at
http://www.unitedrail.org.


URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from
any outside sources.

1) So many of us have been wondering where the Sunset Limited is, east of
New Orleans. It's been AWOL since a couple of days before Hurricane
Katrina hit in 2005. Even though CSX, the host railroad for the Sunset
east of New Orleans released its post-hurricane rebuilt track to Amtrak
for the Sunset on April 1, 2006, there's been nary a Sunset in sight.

Amtrak hasn't notified its unions of a discontinuance, and it says the
train is coming back. But, when? And, what has been the delay?

Here's a glimmer of information which may shed some light on the subject.
SunHerald.com, the online web site of The Sun Herald in Southern
Mississippi, datelined a story from Pascagoula (Senator Trent Lott's
hometown) about Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour's recent appointment
of a new member to the Southern Rapid Rail Transit Commission, which is a
governmental body consisting of members from Mississippi, Alabama, and
Louisiana that promotes passenger rail along the Gulf Coast. This is the
same group that originally created the late, but successful Gulf Coast
Limited of the 1990s, that ran daily between New Orleans and Mobile,
Alabama, over the same tracks as the Sunset Limited.

Here's a quote from the story by Sun Herald staff writer Donna Harris:

[Begin quote]

Amtrak is in talks with the Southern Rapid Rail Transit Commission about
implementing various passenger services, including the Sunset Limited.
The Sunset line once ran from Orlando to Los Angeles, making stops in
Mobile, Gulfport and New Orleans.

The transit commission penned a resolution urging Amtrak to develop a
detailed corridor investment and implementation plan. The commission has
said it will work with Amtrak to pursue federal, state and local funding
for operational and infrastructure costs.

Commissioner Elizabeth Sanders of Mobile told the Associated Press in
November that the commission is asking for just under $22 million in
federal funding to improve the tri-state rail system. The funding must be
matched by the three states.

[End quote]

So, is the real culprit for the delay of putting the missing link of the
Sunset Limited and Amtrak's national system back into place that Amtrak
is just waiting for someone else to pony up the money to do this, even
though the Sunset has always been operated as part of the national
system, and has never had any individual state funding?

Is this the beginning of some sort of plan where all long distance trains
will be carved up into state-sponsored links where Amtrak seeks state
funding instead of using its own marketing muscle to attract riders to
earn revenue to operate trains?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with Amtrak seeking state funding for
corridor trains. California has proven the theory of good local marketing
for corridor trains easily replaces high state subsidies demanded by
Amtrak, as long as Amtrak has nothing to do with the local marketing.
But, holding a national system restoration hostage in exchange for all of
the benefits to the national system through matrix opportunities, plus
Amtrak's national mission to operate a healthy rail passenger system is
just wrong.

Jesse James at least had the professionalism and courtesy to use a gun
and a mask when he was robbing someone. If Amtrak is trying to do the
same thing to the Gulf Coast states, then shame on Amtrak.

2) Last week, we discussed much about how the national news media reports
incorrect facts about Amtrak, and how that hurts the company and its
efforts to operate a national long distance system.

One startling, incorrect fact was reported on National Public Radio's
Morning Edition on Tuesday, January 23rd. Reporter Nancy Solomon of NPR,
as if she was reporting gospel, said Amtrak's Northeast Corridor props up
the rest of the long distance trains in the country by generating more
cash, and therefore subsiding the alleged money losing long distance
trains.

Aaarrrggghhhhh!

How can any reporter that is supposed to be enlightened about the subject
they are reporting on, report such nonsense?

The answer is, because Amtrak corporate communications and Amtrak
executives have allowed this to happen for far too long, without
challenge or an attempt to present the true facts.

Even the federal Government Accountability Office gets it wrong, and
things like this make it into print, and people actually believe this
nonsense.

When is all of this going to stop?

Reviewing last week's TWA, for all of those sitting in the back of the
classroom, we discover ...
[Begin quote from last week's TWA]

[Amtrak's] own figures from FY 06 show 2,430,166,000 revenue passenger
miles were generated by the long distance train national network, while
the combination of all NEC trains, including Wondertrain Acela was just
1,482,448,000 revenue passenger miles, and the short distance trains,
which includes state supported trains, generated only 1,448,903,000
revenue passenger miles.

To put it another way so everyone can understand, 15 daily and tri-weekly
long distance trains in each direction generated 2.4 billion revenue
passenger miles, 40 daily NEC trains in each direction generated 1.5
billion revenue passenger miles, and 102 short distance daily trains
generated 1.4 billion revenue passenger miles.

Not to make too fine of a point, but 2.4 billion revenue passenger miles
from 15 trains (two of which aren't even daily) versus 2.9 billion
revenue passenger miles from 142 NEC and short distance trains hardly
seems like "lightly used long distance trains." ...

From a financial aspect, the 15 trains in the long distance network, on
average each generate $23,868,066 in gross revenue (before any subsidy),
and the 142 trains in the NEC and short distance networks only generate
$7,035,810 each on average in gross revenue. The total operating expense
(according to Amtrak figures) was $1.1 billion for the NEC and short
distance networks, and $841 million for the long distance train networks.

The average load factor on the 15 long distance network trains was 55.1%,
on the 102 short distance trains, 40.7%, and 45.2% on NEC trains.

As to the "money losing" aspect, that Amtrak figure is confusing and
needs to be cleared up. The FY 06 books show a positive cash flow for
Acela, without any subsidy necessary. But, the same books also show a
subsidy requirement for other NEC trains, which use the same stations,
same dispatching personnel, same tracks, and same reservation system as
the Acela trains. Please explain how one set of trains, Acelas, with
2,668,200 riders can "make money," while other NEC trains, with 6,840,200
riders, loses money.

We also know [Amtrak] executives have made statements that the long
distance system loses $300 million a year (and the FRA in the past has
put that figure at $100 million), but your FY 06 books show that figure
at $481.6 million. Where are the books being padded? What is being
charged against the long distance system that isn't being charged against
the short distance or NEC trains?

Is the difference in the cost of maintenance of way of the NEC, which you
are charging to capital costs instead of operating costs? Are you even
charging a set track fee to Acela and other NEC trains, or are you
dumping everything into a capital costs account the "pretty up" the
operating books? If the true federal operating subsidy is a total of $584
million, and you received $1.3 billion from the federal government, where
did the rest of the money go, after Railroad Retirement mandatory
payments and debt service?

[End quote]

Along this same subject was a Washington story generated last week by the
Associated Press and distributed nationwide. It ran in a number of
newspapers, and even in such places as Business Week magazine. There was
a time when those of us who used to be in the news business knew we could
depend on the AP for accurate reporting. Those days seem to be
disappearing.

The AP story was an interview of Amtrak President and CEO Alex Kummant,
and covered a wide range of topics. The AP reporter, Sarah Karush, seems
to have done some homework in preparation for the interview, but clearly
not enough homework.

Part of the story states:

[Begin quote]

The government-owned corporation reported record ticket revenue of $1.37
billion in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, an 11 percent increase over
fiscal 2005, with ridership ticking up 1 percent to 24.3 million
passengers. The system, created in 1970 to take over declining passenger
rail service, is heavily dependent on government funding; it received
$1.3 billion from Congress, including a $485 million operating subsidy,
for the 2006 fiscal year.

... A November report by the Government Accountability Office concluded
that long-distance routes -- such as the Sunset Limited from New Orleans
to Los Angeles and the Empire Builder from Chicago to Seattle -- account
for 15 percent of riders and 80 percent of Amtrak's losses, and provide
little public benefit.

[End quote]

The statement made by the GAO report is actually accurate, but totally
meaningless. Yes, when you look at raw ridership numbers, long distance
trains did account for 15 percent of warm bodies that stepped onto Amtrak
trains.

However, again, this statement means nothing, unless you're writing about
single-zone pricing in transit. Other than Amtrak - and this is a long
standing, self-inflicted wound by Amtrak for decades, now - no other
common carrier, whether it's an airline, bus company, or steamship
company, reports pure ridership numbers as a measure of success. These
numbers mean nothing. Revenue passenger miles are the only true
measurement, and they are the only measurement which is reported in the
national media when writing about airlines and bus lines and steamship
lines' success or failure.

So, why, when writing about Amtrak does the press continue to only write
incorrectly about ridership? How can the press continue to embarrass
itself this way? If they can't get something as simple as this correct,
what else is the press getting wrong?

Just for the sake of covering the same ground again, ridership is only a
measurement of the number of bodies carried. Ridership does not measure
how far each body is carried, nor how much is paid to the common carrier
to carry the body. Revenue passenger miles - a measurement of how much
revenue is generated by carrying each passenger one mile - tells the true
story.

Using FY 06 numbers, an average passenger traveling on the Ethan Allen
service in New England has an average length of trip of 191.1 miles, at
24.76 cents per mile of revenue. That means the average passenger
generates $47.31 per trip.

An average passenger on the Palmetto, which serves the East Coast between
New York and Georgia, has an average length of trip of 446.9 miles, at
16.55 cents per mile of revenue. That means the average passenger
generates $73.96 per trip.

Which passenger would you rather have? One that generates $47.31 per trip
on any given departure of the Ethan Allen on any given day, or one that
generates $73.96 per trip on any given departure of the Palmetto on any
given day?

Both riders count as one passenger when looking at the way the ridership
figures are incorrectly used. Yet, one passenger accounts for only 64% of
the revenue of the other passenger. This is why it is so important to
only talk in terms of revenue passenger miles.

You may wish to say "aha!," obviously what matters is the Ethan Allen
passenger generates more revenue than the Palmetto passenger, and,
therefore, the Ethan Allen is the superior business model.

Well, no, that's not true, either.

The Ethan Allen generated 21,447,884 available seat miles for FY 06, and
the Palmetto generated 147,065,912 available seat miles. At 24.76 cents
of revenue per mile, (21,447,884 total seat miles for sale multiplied by
24.76 cents per mile potential revenue), the Ethan Allen could
theoretically generate $5,310,496 in annual revenue. Using the same
formula for the Palmetto, $24,339,408 in annual revenue could
theoretically be generated. Again, which train is the best business model
to follow?

The Ethan Allen has a route length of 241 miles, and the Palmetto, 829
miles. The Ethan Allen has two exclusive stations to serve the route, and
the rest are shared with other trains. The Palmetto has no exclusive
stations; all are shared with other trains. The Ethan Allen uses the New
York City crew base, and overnights the train crews in Rutland, Vermont
at Amtrak's expense. The Palmetto uses the same crew base, and overnights
the train crews in Savannah, Georgia. Both trains have all reserved coach
seating, business class service, and lounge/café car service. The
Palmetto carries a baggage car, the Ethan Allen does not. The Ethan Allen
is primarily financed through the Vermont State Department of
Transportation, and the Palmetto receives no state financing.

Other than the baggage car, the only real difference between the two
trains is the route length and the number of cars on each train. Even if
the Ethan Allen carried an identical consist as the Palmetto, the shorter
route could still not hope to generate as much revenue as the longer
route.

The only difference in costs are fuel, train and engine crews, and train
mile costs. Most other costs remain very close. It's the great difference
in the revenue opportunities that distinguishes they two trains. This
also explains why it is so dangerous to only measure Amtrak success by
ridership, and not revenue passenger miles.

And, by the way, the Ethan Allen has a load factor of 38%, and the
Palmetto, 44%, which shows the Palmetto outperforming the Ethan Allen in
every category that matters.

In other parts of the AP narrative, the story says,

[Begin quote]

Amtrak's new president wants to upgrade the passenger railroad's image
and the tracks it shares with the nation's increasingly busy freight rail
carriers, and he expects the federal government to help.

... Alex Kummant said he found the much-maligned railroad in better shape
than he expected. But he said it could still do a better job taking
advantage of a growing appetite for rail travel fueled by high gas prices
and highway congestion.

"There is a lot of good news to talk about," Kummant told The Associated
Press in an interview in his office atop Washington's Union Station. "You
have to build the Amtrak brand for people."

Amtrak needs to work with states to expand service over medium distances
and improve the long-distance trains that account for most of its losses,
Kummant said. Government incentives to stimulate capital investment in
the nation's nearly maxed-out rail infrastructure are also key, he said.

Kummant, ... said expectations that Amtrak could be self-sufficient are
misguided. He noted passenger rail is subsidized throughout the world.

There could be room to partner with the private sector, he said, but
added: "You need to walk before you can run."

Amtrak supporters are hopeful the new Congress will pass legislation
introduced last week by Sens. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., and Trent Lott,
R-Miss., that would establish funding targets for Amtrak for the next six
years. It would also create a program of capital matching grants for
states that want to invest in "corridor service" -- the term Amtrak uses
to describe frequently traveled routes up to about 500 miles, such as the
northeast corridor running from Boston to Washington. Currently, 14
states pay Amtrak for service.

Kummant said the shorter routes are Amtrak's real growth opportunity.

"We can offer genuine solutions to public transportation problems with
that type of service," he said.

Rail service on such corridors can be competitive at 80 to 100 miles per
hour, without trying to provide capital-intensive high-speed service, he
said. Amtrak's fastest train, the Acela Express on the northeast
corridor, reaches 150 miles per hour, but such speeds require upgraded
electrical systems and tracks.

[End quote]

Much of this is refreshing to read. It's nice to know the company is in
better shape than expected, and Mr. Kummant wants to improve the sadly
tarnished Amtrak image, plus he is eager to expand the company to meet
the growing demand for passenger rail service. More power to him.

Here is the first glimmer of what may be questionable. Mr. Kummant says
Amtrak needs to work with various states to expand service over medium
distances and improve the long distance trains that account for most of
the losses.

Let's stop right here.

Again, here is the statement that long distance trains account for most
of the losses. Really? Is everyone sure? While Amtrak's books are being
untangled from years of Enron-style booking, are we really, really,
really sure the long distance trains account for most of the losses? How
is this so, if these trains have the highest load factors, generate huge
amounts of revenue passenger miles, and a single daily train route has
more financial muscle than a whole group of NEC or short distance trains?
Until we know for sure (and many of us are pretty sure that statement is
wrong about the long distance trains after a lot of research by some
impressive railroad professionals), can Amtrak and its executives and
spokespersons please stop using such declarative statements? Can we at
least have some modifiers on those statements that say, "we don't know
for sure, but we may suspect blah, blah, blah"?

Mr. Kummant says that 500 mile corridors can prove to be the hottest area
of growth for the company. That's well and good, depending on how those
corridors are put together. One very positive thing he says in the
article is rail service in these corridors can be competitive at 80 to
100 mph, without having the capital intensive costs of the normal
definition of high speed rail.

Somebody please give the gentleman a medal out of petty cash. Yes, yes,
yes. That is so very true. Rail can be very satisfying to the traveling
public at speeds which are easily achievable on most of today's
infrastructure, with few modifications for slightly higher speeds. Beyond
bragging rights, there is little incentive to create what is considered
true high speed rail at enormous capital costs before a mature system of
conventional speed corridors are developed at much lower investments.

Corridors averaging 500 miles in length, or even up to 700 or 800 miles
in length can easily host cheap to operate, but high passenger
satisfaction trains similar to the Palmetto of today. The Palmetto in its
various incarnations, has always been a nearly sold-out at times cash cow
for Amtrak that has been inexpensive to operate. One locomotive, a half
dozen or more cars, including a decent food service car, an upgraded
business class car, and coaches, plus a baggage car on a mostly daylight
schedule is a very attractive business model to follow. Staffing levels
are kept relatively low, there are good RPMs, and often only two train
sets are required for daily operation.

Use the route of the Crescent south of Washington, D.C. as an example of
how this type of operation can mesh well with long distance trains. There
are plenty of NEC trains between Boston and Washington without adding
another frequency. However, the trip from Washington to Atlanta, Georgia,
via Charlotte, North Carolina is about a 12 hour trip. The Crescent
travels over this segment of its route mostly at night. Add a daytime
frequency between Washington and Atlanta, a la the Palmetto. Since you're
already establishing a crew and turn maintenance base in Atlanta, add
another mostly daylight run, of, again, about 12 hours from Atlanta to
New Orleans, but off of the Crescent's current daytime portion of that
run by a few hours to provide the full benefits of a second frequency.
Suddenly, the route now has multiple frequency service with very
inexpensive operating characteristics, and the only new addition is a
small turn maintenance and crew base in Atlanta. Major cities like
Charlotte now have good daylight service on a route which was previously
only served at night.

Look at almost any other Amtrak long distance route, and working in 12 to
15 hour time frames for route lengths, see how many cheap and easy to
operate trains can be added to the Amtrak system. Then, start doing the
math. We know adding a frequency to a route more than doubles ridership
because more people have more travel opportunities at times that are
convenient for the passenger, not the Amtrak operating department.
Station and infrastructure costs go down because expenses which were
formerly the burden of one train are now spread out over two or more
trains.

Further in the AP story, the following was reported:

[Begin quote]

Kummant said he had no intention of abandoning long-distance routes,
loosely defined as those longer than 500 miles. But he said he is working
with Amtrak's board of directors, made up of appointees of President
Bush, to come up with a strategy that might include breaking some long
routes into multiple state corridors.

Amtrak is criticized for the losses in the long-distance routes, but if
those routes were eliminated, they would be very hard to re-establish,
Kummant said. Still, he predicted future growth will likely come from
corridor service, while long-distance ridership will remain flat.

[End quote]

If breaking some long distance routes into multiple state corridors means
augmenting the current long distance trains with the type of daylight
operations outlined immediately above, that is good. If this statement,
which desperately needs clarification, means ending seamless long
distance trains in favor of short distance corridor trains that would
require passenger transfers from one train to another, that is totally
unacceptable. If this statement means similar scenarios to the hijacking
of the Sunset Limited restoration for return in exchange for state funds,
that is also unacceptable.

Amtrak's mission is to operate a healthy national trains system, not a
disjointed series of corridors. As said before, that is nothing wrong is
corridors as support for a good long distance system. Corridors in place
of long distance trains goes against everything for which Amtrak was
created, and is painfully, again, transit mentality versus passenger
train mentality.

Mr. Kummant said long distance ridership will remain flat, that growth is
in corridors. Okay, why will long distance ridership remain flat? Because
in the last few years Amtrak has been systematically reducing train
consists, and, therefore having less product to sell to passengers?
Because Amtrak spends less than half on national system sales and
marketing that it spends on NEC marketing, and only slightly more than on
state supported corridor marketing? Is it possible that if Amtrak beefed
the consists back up to their original sizes of only less than a decade
ago, and actually spent a few dollars on long distance train marketing
and stopped keeping Amtrak as America's best kept secret that long
distance train ridership would not remain flat?

If long distance train ridership remain flat, that is only because Amtrak
management chooses to keep that ridership flat. Amtrak has resources to
increase the ridership, but it also must have the corporate will to do
so.


If you are reading someone else's copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can
receive your own free copy each week by sending your e-mail address to

freetwa@unitedrail.org

[MrFSS]

This Week at Amtrak; February 1, 2007

A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-6760, Electronic Mail info@unitedrail.org
http://www.unitedrail.org

Volume 4, Number 5

Founded over three decades ago in 1976 by Austin M. Coates, Jr., URPA is
a nationally known policy institute that focuses on solutions and plans
for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in
Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota,
California, Arizona, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and
Tennessee. For more detailed information, along with a variety of
position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at
http://www.unitedrail.org.

URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from
any outside sources.

1) (Sigh) There is Amtrak winter naughtiness again in Chicago. Many of us
had optimistically thought the Winter of '07 was going to be the winter
Amtrak got over its many bad weather operating problems in Chicago. Alas,
that doesn't seem to be the case.

Here's what Amtrak's internal daily report had to say about the Cardinal,
running from Chicago to New York City via Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and
Washington.

[Begin quote]

The report for January 31st says:

Train 50 [The Cardinal, complete with sleeping cars, dinette, and
coaches, departing Chicago on Tuesday, January 30th at 5:45 P.M., Central
Time] ... operating with locomotive 205 and 6 cars reported south at Dyer
[Indiana, 29 miles out of Chicago and one hour and 12 minutes after the
scheduled Chicago departure] that all toilets were inoperative account
frozen, except for (1) toilet in lounge car. Beech Grove mechanical
advised to meet train in Indianapolis, but advised that if they were able
to thaw toilets that there might be freeze damage and that toilets could
freeze again after departure. Due to health and sanitation issues with
one working toilet and unable to confirm repair of frozen toilets,
decision was made to arrange for busses and terminate train. (2) busses
were secured to meet train at Cincinnati where 46 passengers where
transferred to the busses to destination.

[End quote]

What the report doesn't say: The trainmaster in Chicago ordered the train
out of the initial Chicago terminal in this condition, with toilets
frozen, despite the protests of the train's conductor.

The train was terminated at Cincinnati, 319 miles out of Chicago and at
3:00 A.M. because of the unsanitary conditions.

Contrary to internal Amtrak advisories, operating employees report the
train came from the yard in this condition, and the conductor, upon
reporting the inoperative toilets, was ordered by management to depart
anyway. The crew was unable to do anything to fix the toilets and gave up
near Dyer, where they advised the Operations Center of the problem.
Mechanical personnel from Beech Grove Shops were to meet the train at
Indianapolis but said that even if they could thaw out the frozen
toilets, there could be leaks due to burst pipes, and the toilets could
freeze up again shortly afterwards.

Buses were called to meet the train at Cincinnati, where passengers were
transferred and taken to enroute destinations up to Washington, D.C.
Passengers for Northeast Corridor points north of Washington were handled
by NEC trains.

Food and beverages in the lounge/dinette car were loaded onto the buses
and provided complimentary to passengers; meal stops were made by the
buses on Wednesday.

Equipment was deadheaded from Cincinnati to New York.


Looking at this situation, one Washington wag commented, "Seems to be a
common problem. A terminal manager will push a train out of his area in
order to improve his on-time batting average and if it hits the fan later
on, well, it's someone else's problem.

"The other question is why the yard crews and management in Chicago still
can't find the 480-volt electrical service to keep the equipment warm
during layovers. [Installed and intended to avoid problems exactly like
this one.]"

At this early date, we know the Chicago Amtrak boss is a longtime
operations veteran and good railroader and will likely take action, but,
also, what does President and CEO Alex Kummant know about this
personally, and what will he do to rectify such problems?

2) Other folks in Illinois, not riding the Cardinal of January 30th, are
excited about the possibility of expanding Amtrak service in their state.
United States Senator Dick Durbin is among those pushing for expanded
service.

Reporter Thomas Geyer, writing in the Quad-City Times, on Saturday,
January 27th, which covers events in Rock Island, reported on a public
meeting about Amtrak.

[Begin quote]

"We've been going to Washington for many years in pursuit of rail service
for the Quad-Cities and we always came away empty," Rock Island City
Manager John Phillips said. "For years, the people there would just stare
at us blankly, not giving us any indication that things would ever be
different."

Now, he said, it seems as though things are different, "and with Amtrak's
success in Illinois and elsewhere, federal lawmakers are taking a fresh
look at things."

[Senator] Durbin, along with George Weber, chief of the passenger rail
division of the Illinois Department of Transportation, or DOT, and Ray
Lang, Amtrak's senior director for governmental affairs, gave their ideas
to a crowd of about 200 people during an hour-long meeting at Rock
Island's Abbey Station.

... Amtrak's goal is to double the number of riders nationwide by 2020,
he [Lang] said, adding that Amtrak is not looking at long-distance rail
service. The company's future is servicing corridors 300 to 500 miles.

He said Illinois is one of 14 states that have a rail service contract
with Amtrak.

[End quote]

Oops! What? Did the Quad-City Times reporter correctly quote Mr. Lang, a
long time Amtrak public affairs veteran and experienced spokesman, saying
"Amtrak is not looking at long-distance rail service. The company's
future is servicing corridors 300 to 500 miles."?

Putting two and two together, and hoping it doesn't add up to five, we
have last week's offering from Mr. Kummant in the Associated Press
article which was printed across the land that long distance train
ridership was expected to be flat, and reiterating the belief in state
sponsored corridors of 300 to 500 miles in length.

3) But, wait, there's more. Amtrak This Week, the company's internal
employee communication (and no relation to This Week at Amtrak),
prominently features Mr. Kummant's writings, saying:

[Begin quote]

Dear Co-workers,

Let me take a moment to bring you up to date on a couple of important
issues, one of which is the work we're doing to improve our long-distance
on-time performance. Because it's essential that we foster a productive
relationship with our freight partners at all levels, I've met with each
major host railroad CEO at least once, the most recent visits being to
BNSF and NS just this month. In addition to targeting some of our
chronically late trains, we're also identifying new ways to expand
capacity for growth and improved reliability in the future.

While I'm far from satisfied with the current state of long distance OTP,
we've seen some solid improvements on Auto Train and Silver Service
trains since we began targeting those trains with CSXT in August. Auto
Train OTP has improved 27 percentage points, Silver Meteor 38 percentage
points and Silver Star 22 percentage points (comparing Aug. 1 through
Jan. 25 to the same period last year).We still have work to do there, but
I know the crews aboard the trains have noticed the difference.

Poor OTP sets off a downward spiral that affects not only passengers'
confidence in Amtrak, but also taxes our crews and puts our equipment
cycling and servicing way out of whack.

I have another meeting with UP's CEO Jim Young next week, and I will
continue to keep you informed about what we're doing on this front.

[End quote]

Did you notice that one line neatly tucked into the statement: "In
addition to targeting some of our chronically late trains, we're also
identifying new ways to expand capacity for growth and improved
reliability in the future."?

Let's look at some of those words, again: "expand capacity for growth and
improved reliability in the future."

What type of growth are we talking about? Most likely corridor growth,
but, the majority of Mr. Kummant's writing seems to be about the long
distance network. Is it possible that Mr. Lang, who is far down the
corporate food chain from Mr. Kummant, was just continuing to spout the
company line as instructed, where Mr. Kummant may be signaling a change
in thinking about the many possibilities for growth and financial
improvement through the long distance system?

Time, of course, will tell, but this provides a possible glimmer of hope
that "someone gets it" when it comes to the many virtues of Amtrak's long
distance network of trains.

4) Another interesting note from Amtrak This Week; apparently Amtrak is
beginning a campaign to stop being America's Best Kept Secret:

[Begin quote]

Marketing and Product Management:

Amtrak Chairman David Laney and Westwood One's Jim Gray will present the
"Amtrak/Westwood One Player of the Year" award during the Amtrak Super
Bowl XLI halftime show on Westwood One Radio.

[End quote]

Well, if you're going to stop being a secret, it's nothing like making a
splash in radio during the Super Bowl. Good work, Amtrak.

5) An Amtrak/passenger rail update from here in Florida reveals that the
State of Florida, which under now retired Governor Jeb Bush in 2001 set
aside $60 million for implementation of Amtrak service over the Florida
East Coast Railroad from Jacksonville to West Palm Beach where the
service would join the existing coast service down to Miami on the old
Seaboard Air Line/CSX main line, still has the money waiting for use for
this project. Sources say Florida DOT and Amtrak are still having
discussions regarding the implementation of this service.

6) Beginning today, Jim Young of Union Pacific Railroad will become the
railroad's chairman of the board, following the retirement of Dick
Davidson, a 47 year UP veteran. Mr. Davidson was chairman of UP for 10
years.

Notable about Mr. Davidson's service to the UP was the indigestion of the
Southern Pacific Railroad takeover by the UP and the resulting and still
recurring problems with the Sunset Limited and Coast Starlight routes for
on time performance issues, plus, the comment by his former chief
spokesman labeling Amtrak passenger trains as "novelty transportation,"
as opposed to being a part of our nation's domestic transportation
network.

We wish Mr. Young, the new chairman of UP, every success in his
leadership of the company.

6) The Mobile, Alabama Press-Register reported Sunday, January 28th on
the death of the lead partner in the redevelopment of the former
L&N/CSX/Amtrak hurricane damaged station and office building on Mobile's
waterfront next to downtown.

The remaining partners in the project, which will demolish the old
building and build the 241-unit Water Street Landing, will still create
Mobile's first waterfront condominium project. The project will include
60,000 square feet of retail space, and will be built on the west side of
the existing CSX main line track. Water Street Landing will be built next
to the Mobile convention center, which is also built atop the CSX track,
creating a tunnel for all trains.

The Mobile station was the station with the worst damage from 2005's
Hurricane Katrina, and became unusable. The platforms still remain.

The lack of use of this station facility is one of the ongoing "the dog
ate my homework" excuses by Amtrak for not restoring the Sunset Limited
east of New Orleans and into Florida.

In reality, this new development should not hamper development of a new
or temporary Amtrak station while the project is being built. It is
merely an inconvenience that can be overcome by any Amtrak management
that may be interested in restoring this vital part of Amtrak's national
rail system.

7) One other notable retirement has occurred as of today, February 1st.
Capitol Hill is noting the departure of Glenn Scammel, as the Staff
Director and Senior Majority Counsel of the Rail Subcommittee of the
House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee.

Mr. Scammel was a long Republican Hill staffer, and before that, served
his country in the military in Judge Advocate General's work. Mr. Scammel
is a bona fide fan of trains and planes, and his passion showed in his
always excellent work. He has been highly active in successful efforts to
clean up Enron-style compulsions in Amtrak's daily corporate life, and
help guide the railroad on the road to ultimate success as a vibrant and
healthy company. Many of Mr. Scammel's labors haven't been seen by many
outside of Washington, but have been felt by nearly everyone.

Mr. Scammel was more than a bureaucrat, he was a visionary that demanded
compliance with the law, accountability of the people's money and
resources, and a workable plan for the future. Much of the good
legislation introduced by Republicans regarding railroads and Amtrak was
often the handiwork of Mr. Scammel and his staff.

He says that in the process of retiring from government service, he is
now "privatizing" himself, and plans to work in the private sector in
Washington. We are all fortunate this great public servant who has given
so much to his nation will continue to contribute to the public good
through new avenues of endeavor.

If you are reading someone else's copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can
receive your own free copy each week by sending your e-mail address to

freetwa@unitedrail.org

You MUST include your name, preferred e-mail address, and city and state
where you live. If you have filters or firewalls placed on your Internet
connection, set your e-mail to receive incoming mail from
brucerichardson@unitedrail.org; we are unable to go through any
individual approvals processes for individuals. This mailing list is kept
strictly confidential and is not shared or used for any purposes other
than the distribution of This Week at Amtrak or related URPA materials.

All other correspondence should be addressed to
brucerichardson@unitedrail.org

J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-6760
brucerichardson@unitedrail.org
http://www.unitedrail.org
mailto:freetwa@unitedrail.org

[Trogdor]

MrFSS, on Thu, Feb 1, 2007, 10:01 PM, said:

... Amtrak's goal is to double the number of riders nationwide by 2020,
he [Lang] said, adding that Amtrak is not looking at long-distance rail
service. The company's future is servicing corridors 300 to 500 miles.

He said Illinois is one of 14 states that have a rail service contract
with Amtrak.

[End quote]

Oops! What? Did the Quad-City Times reporter correctly quote Mr. Lang, a
long time Amtrak public affairs veteran and experienced spokesman, saying
"Amtrak is not looking at long-distance rail service. The company's
future is servicing corridors 300 to 500 miles."?

Anyone actually reading the article would already question whether the answer to that question is yes. The fact is, the statement (about Amtrak not looking at long-distance trains) is not put in quotes, meaning that the reporter is not directly quoting the Amtrak official, but rather paraphrasing what was said. Without the full quote and context of the statement, there's no way we could really know what he was talking about. He could have been just referencing that particular proposed service (to the Quad Cities), which would likely be run as a corridor rather than a long-distance train.

Then again, it's not like I expect anything from Bruce Richardson.

[haolerider]

rmadisonwi, on Fri, Feb 2, 2007, 12:27 AM, said:

MrFSS, on Thu, Feb 1, 2007, 10:01 PM, said:

... Amtrak's goal is to double the number of riders nationwide by 2020,
he [Lang] said, adding that Amtrak is not looking at long-distance rail
service. The company's future is servicing corridors 300 to 500 miles.

He said Illinois is one of 14 states that have a rail service contract
with Amtrak.

[End quote]

Oops! What? Did the Quad-City Times reporter correctly quote Mr. Lang, a
long time Amtrak public affairs veteran and experienced spokesman, saying
"Amtrak is not looking at long-distance rail service. The company's
future is servicing corridors 300 to 500 miles."?

Anyone actually reading the article would already question whether the answer to that question is yes. The fact is, the statement (about Amtrak not looking at long-distance trains) is not put in quotes, meaning that the reporter is not directly quoting the Amtrak official, but rather paraphrasing what was said. Without the full quote and context of the statement, there's no way we could really know what he was talking about. He could have been just referencing that particular proposed service (to the Quad Cities), which would likely be run as a corridor rather than a long-distance train.

Then again, it's not like I expect anything from Bruce Richardson.

Just a quick comment about Bruce Richardson's comments regarding Amtrak and the Super Bowl. Amtrak has been a sponsor of the Mondy Night Games on Westwood One radio network for almost 7 years and have made this presentation every year at the Super Bowl. It is not televised, but is certainly part of the radio broadcast, so this is not something new.
Bruce is like most people. Unless you hear or see something directly, most people assume there is no advertising and/or promotions - while the opposite is true. Amtrak does market and advertise, but not in all markets and not on the TV or radio station each of us may use. Different market segments call for different tactics.

[MrFSS]

This Week at Amtrak; February 16, 2007

A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-6760, Electronic Mail info@unitedrail.org
http://www.unitedrail.org

Volume 4, Number 6


Founded over three decades ago in 1976 by Austin M. Coates, Jr., URPA is
a nationally known policy institute that focuses on solutions and plans
for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in
Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota,
California, Arizona, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and
Tennessee. For more detailed information, along with a variety of
position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at
http://www.unitedrail.org.

URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from
any outside sources.

1) Thanks to all those who inquired about the missing editions of TWA
these last two weeks. Due to a pressing need to complete some large
projects, it was not possible to produce TWA and meet other deadlines. We
hope this has not caused any inconvenience.

2) According to the National Association of Railroad Passengers and other
groups and some media, the sky is yet again falling, and the Earth
continues to rush up to meet it.

Yes, it's that time of year when the reigning administration submits an
annual budget to Congress, and, of course, there is never enough money
suggested to please those who think government money grows on trees.

The Bush administration has suggested a small budget for Amtrak for
Fiscal Year 2008 of $900 million. Horrors. Just $100 million shy of a
billion dollars in free federal monies, and the fatalists think all of
the nation's passenger trains will grind to a screeching halt any minute,
now.

When cooler heads look at the budget picture, we know a couple of things
to be true, versus the dogmatic rhetoric that comes from all of the usual
suspects.

While $900 million is less than previously allotted by Congress in the
final budget figures (the only ones that really matter, by the way),
Amtrak usually gets $1.2 billion or more each year, lately. For FY 2006
and FY 2007, Amtrak got $1.3 billion each year.

Keep in mind all national operations and NEC operations together, plus
continuous upgrades to the Northeast Corridor can be accomplished with
this small budget request. So, even if this budget suggestion was
ultimately turned into law, Amtrak would not be shut down, nor would
passenger trains operations be curtailed.

Now, let's look at the crux of the problem of budgeting free federal
monies for Amtrak every year. Here is what the United States Department
of Transportation said regarding the FY 2008 Amtrak budget request.

[Begin quote}

Focusing Amtrak's Spending Priorities

The Administration believes that scarce taxpayer dollars must be spent
wisely, including the funds provided to Amtrak. Led by its Board of
Directors, Amtrak made some progress in 2006 to strengthen its finances
by increasing revenues and controlling costs. While Amtrak's recent
performance is encouraging, it continues to under perform overall.
Amtrak's system-wide on-time performance again dropped in 2006 to 68
percent, and it required $490 million in operating subsidies, mostly for
its money-losing long distance trains. When last measured for 2002, the
net Federal subsidy per thousand passenger miles traveled was $199.90 for
rail, $5.87 for commercial aviation, and -$.95 for highway users
according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. While Amtrak
carried 24 million passengers in 2006, domestic air carriers that year
flew 656 million passengers.

Historically, Amtrak has been hampered by a lack of accountability, poor
design, and mismanagement. The latest critical review of Amtrak comes
from the Government Accountability Office, which concluded, among several
findings, that Amtrak's long-distance trains "show limited public
benefits for dollars expended," and that "these routes account for 15
percent of riders but 80 percent of financial losses." To turn the
enterprise around, the Administration has urged basic reforms that would
empower local communities and ultimately customers to determine the most
efficient way to run trains. The Administration expects the Board's
newly-installed management to make significant changes required to enable
the company to succeed without Federal operating subsidies. The
Department plans to administer Amtrak's subsidy with this goal in mind.

The 2008 Budget proposes a subsidy that would require that Amtrak make
hard choices about its services and commit to running the railroad more
like a business. The request is part of a multi-year program to reduce
and then eliminate Amtrak's reliance on Federal operating assistance as
required by the Amtrak Reform and Accountability Act of 1997 (49 USC
24101). For 2008, the Budget recommends $900 million for intercity
passenger rail, but only $800 million for Amtrak directly. This amount
includes $300 million for operating costs, compared to the $490 million
Amtrak received in 2006, beginning the phasing out of operating
subsidies. The Budget continues to fund Amtrak's infrastructure needs
with a capital request of $500 million, which is equal to the 2006
enacted level. This level should underwrite Amtrak's ongoing efforts to
rehabilitate the Northeast Corridor between Washington, D.C. and Boston,
which is by far its most heavily used and important route. In addition,
the President's Budget requests $100 million for capital matching grants
to States for intercity passenger rail projects. This new program would
give local communities resources to direct investment in facilities that
reflect their top rail transportation priorities. The Administration
believes the Federal Government should help States fund capital projects
where there is strong demand for rail service, and help foster managed
competition among rail operators to encourage innovation and cost
control.

[End quote]

Look at some of the same, often useless and incorrect phrases used in the
budget request: "mostly for its money-losing long distance trains. When
last measured for 2002, the net Federal subsidy per thousand passenger
miles traveled was $199.90 for rail, $5.87 for commercial aviation, and
-$.95 for highway users according to the Bureau of Transportation
Statistics ... latest critical review of Amtrak comes from the Government
Accountability Office, which concluded, among several findings, that
Amtrak's long-distance trains "show limited public benefits for dollars
expended,' and that "these routes account for 15 percent of riders but 80
percent of financial losses.' ... should underwrite Amtrak's ongoing
efforts to rehabilitate the Northeast Corridor between Washington, D.C.
and Boston, which is by far its most heavily used and important route
..."

We know the long distance trains are not money losers, too many studies
have shown that above the rail, the long distance trains at the minimum
break even, and most even throw off extra cash to fund other parts of the
company and operations.

The most incredible statement comes abstractly from the Government
Accountability Office, saying Amtrak's long distance trains show limited
public benefit for dollars spent and that routes account of 15% of
riders, but 80 percent of financial losses. To Amtrak's credit, in the
original GAO report (GAO-07-15) of November 13, 2006, the company
responded by reminding the GAO that actually, the long distance trains
account for 47% of passenger miles generated system-wide.

The last incredible statement is that the NEC is by far Amtrak's most
heavily used and important route. While it may carry the most passenger
bodies, it does not generate the most passenger miles, and the importance
of the NEC would be debatable to anyone living outside of the NEC area
served, particularly if you live in one of the rural areas of America
where Amtrak is the only common carrier available for use.

What this boils down to is that the Bush administration is operating from
flawed data, simply because that is what it has been fed to use. We know
the GAO report is deeply flawed, because it has used bad data supplied by
... Amtrak. We know Amtrak's data is flawed, because its books are still
a financial quagmire that is taking months to just begin to untangle.
Also, in the past, Amtrak has always incorrectly highlighted the
importance of the NEC and its version of high speed rail at the expense
of the rest of the national system. Looking at Amtrak past marketing and
public relations exercises shows a distinct disdain for anything other
than the NEC, and these defective efforts are coming back to haunt Amtrak
as it tries to look at itself seriously as a national common carrier.
Most importantly, Amtrak itself has continuously, mostly for the benefit
of the NEC, used passenger body counts instead of the transportation
industry gold standard of revenue passenger miles to measure success. By
sheer body counts, the long distance trains do carry less passengers,
which is a meaningless statistic. By revenue passenger miles, the long
distance trains generate 47% of the system wide passenger miles, a huge
amount.

In summary, what we are seeing every year from the White House is a
budget decision based on flawed data, that ultimately was generated by
Amtrak. Until Amtrak can convince budget decision makers about the real
numbers and needs, bad budget requests will continue to flow into the
national debate.

The oddest, and funniest news story to come so far from this year's
budget discussions? New Mexico Business Weekly, on Tuesday, February 6,
2007 ran a headline saying, "Proposed Bush budget would banish NM's
Amtrak service." The story went on to say, in a declaratory fashion with
no attribution, "The president's 2008 budget proposal would cut Amtrak's
funding from $1.3 billion to $900 million and eliminate the Southwest
Chief and Sunset Limited passenger lines."

You can't make this stuff up. Where does such nonsense come from, in what
is supposed to be a respected business publication?

2) In good news, Amtrak seems to be putting together a new advertising
push. The bad news is that the advertising seems to be just for Acela
trains on the NEC, and not the whole system.

On February 9th, Adweek, a well-respected industry magazine of the
advertising and marketing biz, reported that Amtrak is making a
multimedia push for the winter and spring travel season. The campaign is
based on research that shows travelers are taking less vacation time and
are therefore more concerned with the comfort and quality of their
leisure-time activities.

Adweek says the campaign seems to mostly be aimed towards NEC Acela
trains. There is no mention of the much more important national system
trains which generate greater amounts of revenue passenger miles and cash
for the system.

Here's the distressing part: Amtrak spent slightly less than $20 million
on ads last year, down 66 percent from the previous year. Why such a
drop? Was this due to the Acela trains being out of commission last year,
so Amtrak didn't think it was important to advertise the rest of the
system?

In terms of advertising spending, $20 million, for a company the size of
Amtrak, is, at best, trivial spending for something like advertising.

Now, here's an interesting twist to the whole advertising scenario.

On February 7th, Amtrak announced it has contracted with a multi-cultural
marketing communications firm to launch a multi-cultural advertising
campaign for both Acela trains and the long distance system. The firm,
based in Atlanta, Georgia, will help Amtrak develop promotions, special
events, and public relations. These are all things Amtrak desperately
needs, and undoubtedly will help Amtrak gain new riders.

A "Welcome On Board" ad will encourage audiences to consider Amtrak long
distance trains when planning trips, especially family vacations. An
Acela campaign will target business travelers.

Hey, this sounds great. Promoting the long distance system, getting some
good public relations going, and special events.

But, the ads will only target multi-cultural audiences via print, online
and radio advertising in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington,
and Miami. Both campaigns will be aired only through African American and
Hispanic media outlets.

What about the rest of us? Is Amtrak saying that no one other than
minorities ride long distance trains? What about the other thousands of
media markets outside of the major centers listed above? Don't people in
the other 40+ states want to ride passenger trains, too? Or, will they
just have to figure out things the best way they can and discover Amtrak
on their own?

These two campaigns are a bare minimum start, but nothing more than that.

3) In the last issue of TWA, we read about a meeting held in Illinois
regarding expansion of Amtrak service in that state. The following quote
appeared:

[Begin quote]

Oops! What? Did the Quad-City Times reporter correctly quote Mr. Lang, a
long time Amtrak public affairs veteran and experienced spokesman, saying
"Amtrak is not looking at long-distance rail service. The company's
future is servicing corridors 300 to 500 miles."?

Putting two and two together, and hoping it doesn't add up to five, we
have last week's offering from Mr. Kummant in the Associated Press
article which was printed across the land that long distance train
ridership was expected to be flat, and reiterating the belief in state
sponsored corridors of 300 to 500 miles in length.

[End quote]

This has a happy ending. Ray Lang was apparently misquoted, as often
happens in the press. A sharp-eyed TWA reader, Eliot A. Keller of Iowa
City, Iowa sent the following e-mail to TWA:

"He was misquoted.

"I was there in Rock Island.

"He said the biggest growth in ridership was expected in the future on
trains serving those routes." [Meaning corridors, and not long distance
routes; that the company is still looking at long distance routes.]

That is a great improvement over what was reported in the Quad-City
Times. Thank you, Mr. Keller for helping clarify that issue. That puts a
much more positive spin on things.

4) Two very different weather and train operation reports and statements
were made February 13th and February 14th as harsh winter weather rolled
across North America.

Amtrak issued an internal System Operations Flash Report on February
14th, warning of the coming weather, and made plans to cancel or
terminate early 50 trains in the Midwest and Northeast.

VIA Rail Canada, on the other hand, on February 13th, warming to the
conditions of the same storm, issued this public announcement:

[Begin quote]

VIA Rail Canada is preparing for major winter storm

Montreal - In light of the major storm that is expected to hit Central
Canada and the Maritimes over the next couple of days, VIA would like to
remind its passengers that is has taken all the necessary steps to offer
safe and reliable travel to those using its intercity and longer distance
trains in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes. While heavy snow and severe
weather can shut down highways and airports, trains are typically not
affected to the same degree.

As weather predictions worsen, VIA normally faces increased demand. VIA
will add cars to accommodate the demand but urges customers to call ahead
to be certain of available space. To book, customers can call 1-888-VIA
Rail, (842-7245), TTY 1-800 268-9503 (hearing impaired). Tickets are also
available at kiosks in major Corridor stations, online at www.viarail.ca,
or through travel agents.

VIA offers a stress-free, safe and comfortable winter travel alternative.
For a complete listing of train departures, station and on-board services
as well as fare plans, visit VIA's Web site at www.viarail.ca (
http://www.viarail.ca/en_index.html )

[End quote]

Our tough Canadian cousins seem to relish winter, not be afraid of it.
Come on Amtrak, get with the plan.


If you are reading someone else's copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can
receive your own free copy each week by sending your e-mail address to

freetwa@unitedrail.org

You MUST include your name, preferred e-mail address, and city and state
where you live. If you have filters or firewalls placed on your Internet
connection, set your e-mail to receive incoming mail from
brucerichardson@unitedrail.org; we are unable to go through any
individual approvals processes for individuals. This mailing list is kept
strictly confidential and is not shared or used for any purposes other
than the distribution of This Week at Amtrak or related URPA materials.

All other correspondence should be addressed to
brucerichardson@unitedrail.org

J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-6760
brucerichardson@unitedrail.org
http://www.unitedrail.org

[haolerider]

MrFSS, on Mon, Feb 19, 2007, 12:32 PM, said:

This Week at Amtrak; February 16, 2007

A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-6760, Electronic Mail info@unitedrail.org
http://www.unitedrail.org

Volume 4, Number 6


Founded over three decades ago in 1976 by Austin M. Coates, Jr., URPA is
a nationally known policy institute that focuses on solutions and plans
for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in
Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota,
California, Arizona, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and
Tennessee. For more detailed information, along with a variety of
position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at
http://www.unitedrail.org.

URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from
any outside sources.

1) Thanks to all those who inquired about the missing editions of TWA
these last two weeks. Due to a pressing need to complete some large
projects, it was not possible to produce TWA and meet other deadlines. We
hope this has not caused any inconvenience.

2) According to the National Association of Railroad Passengers and other
groups and some media, the sky is yet again falling, and the Earth
continues to rush up to meet it.

Yes, it's that time of year when the reigning administration submits an
annual budget to Congress, and, of course, there is never enough money
suggested to please those who think government money grows on trees.

The Bush administration has suggested a small budget for Amtrak for
Fiscal Year 2008 of $900 million. Horrors. Just $100 million shy of a
billion dollars in free federal monies, and the fatalists think all of
the nation's passenger trains will grind to a screeching halt any minute,
now.

When cooler heads look at the budget picture, we know a couple of things
to be true, versus the dogmatic rhetoric that comes from all of the usual
suspects.

While $900 million is less than previously allotted by Congress in the
final budget figures (the only ones that really matter, by the way),
Amtrak usually gets $1.2 billion or more each year, lately. For FY 2006
and FY 2007, Amtrak got $1.3 billion each year.

Keep in mind all national operations and NEC operations together, plus
continuous upgrades to the Northeast Corridor can be accomplished with
this small budget request. So, even if this budget suggestion was
ultimately turned into law, Amtrak would not be shut down, nor would
passenger trains operations be curtailed.

Now, let's look at the crux of the problem of budgeting free federal
monies for Amtrak every year. Here is what the United States Department
of Transportation said regarding the FY 2008 Amtrak budget request.

[Begin quote}

Focusing Amtrak's Spending Priorities

The Administration believes that scarce taxpayer dollars must be spent
wisely, including the funds provided to Amtrak. Led by its Board of
Directors, Amtrak made some progress in 2006 to strengthen its finances
by increasing revenues and controlling costs. While Amtrak's recent
performance is encouraging, it continues to under perform overall.
Amtrak's system-wide on-time performance again dropped in 2006 to 68
percent, and it required $490 million in operating subsidies, mostly for
its money-losing long distance trains. When last measured for 2002, the
net Federal subsidy per thousand passenger miles traveled was $199.90 for
rail, $5.87 for commercial aviation, and -$.95 for highway users
according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. While Amtrak
carried 24 million passengers in 2006, domestic air carriers that year
flew 656 million passengers.

Historically, Amtrak has been hampered by a lack of accountability, poor
design, and mismanagement. The latest critical review of Amtrak comes
from the Government Accountability Office, which concluded, among several
findings, that Amtrak's long-distance trains "show limited public
benefits for dollars expended," and that "these routes account for 15
percent of riders but 80 percent of financial losses." To turn the
enterprise around, the Administration has urged basic reforms that would
empower local communities and ultimately customers to determine the most
efficient way to run trains. The Administration expects the Board's
newly-installed management to make significant changes required to enable
the company to succeed without Federal operating subsidies. The
Department plans to administer Amtrak's subsidy with this goal in mind.

The 2008 Budget proposes a subsidy that would require that Amtrak make
hard choices about its services and commit to running the railroad more
like a business. The request is part of a multi-year program to reduce
and then eliminate Amtrak's reliance on Federal operating assistance as
required by the Amtrak Reform and Accountability Act of 1997 (49 USC
24101). For 2008, the Budget recommends $900 million for intercity
passenger rail, but only $800 million for Amtrak directly. This amount
includes $300 million for operating costs, compared to the $490 million
Amtrak received in 2006, beginning the phasing out of operating
subsidies. The Budget continues to fund Amtrak's infrastructure needs
with a capital request of $500 million, which is equal to the 2006
enacted level. This level should underwrite Amtrak's ongoing efforts to
rehabilitate the Northeast Corridor between Washington, D.C. and Boston,
which is by far its most heavily used and important route. In addition,
the President's Budget requests $100 million for capital matching grants
to States for intercity passenger rail projects. This new program would
give local communities resources to direct investment in facilities that
reflect their top rail transportation priorities. The Administration
believes the Federal Government should help States fund capital projects
where there is strong demand for rail service, and help foster managed
competition among rail operators to encourage innovation and cost
control.

[End quote]

Look at some of the same, often useless and incorrect phrases used in the
budget request: "mostly for its money-losing long distance trains. When
last measured for 2002, the net Federal subsidy per thousand passenger
miles traveled was $199.90 for rail, $5.87 for commercial aviation, and
-$.95 for highway users according to the Bureau of Transportation
Statistics ... latest critical review of Amtrak comes from the Government
Accountability Office, which concluded, among several findings, that
Amtrak's long-distance trains "show limited public benefits for dollars
expended,' and that "these routes account for 15 percent of riders but 80
percent of financial losses.' ... should underwrite Amtrak's ongoing
efforts to rehabilitate the Northeast Corridor between Washington, D.C.
and Boston, which is by far its most heavily used and important route
..."

We know the long distance trains are not money losers, too many studies
have shown that above the rail, the long distance trains at the minimum
break even, and most even throw off extra cash to fund other parts of the
company and operations.

The most incredible statement comes abstractly from the Government
Accountability Office, saying Amtrak's long distance trains show limited
public benefit for dollars spent and that routes account of 15% of
riders, but 80 percent of financial losses. To Amtrak's credit, in the
original GAO report (GAO-07-15) of November 13, 2006, the company
responded by reminding the GAO that actually, the long distance trains
account for 47% of passenger miles generated system-wide.

The last incredible statement is that the NEC is by far Amtrak's most
heavily used and important route. While it may carry the most passenger
bodies, it does not generate the most passenger miles, and the importance
of the NEC would be debatable to anyone living outside of the NEC area
served, particularly if you live in one of the rural areas of America
where Amtrak is the only common carrier available for use.

What this boils down to is that the Bush administration is operating from
flawed data, simply because that is what it has been fed to use. We know
the GAO report is deeply flawed, because it has used bad data supplied by
... Amtrak. We know Amtrak's data is flawed, because its books are still
a financial quagmire that is taking months to just begin to untangle.
Also, in the past, Amtrak has always incorrectly highlighted the
importance of the NEC and its version of high speed rail at the expense
of the rest of the national system. Looking at Amtrak past marketing and
public relations exercises shows a distinct disdain for anything other
than the NEC, and these defective efforts are coming back to haunt Amtrak
as it tries to look at itself seriously as a national common carrier.
Most importantly, Amtrak itself has continuously, mostly for the benefit
of the NEC, used passenger body counts instead of the transportation
industry gold standard of revenue passenger miles to measure success. By
sheer body counts, the long distance trains do carry less passengers,
which is a meaningless statistic. By revenue passenger miles, the long
distance trains generate 47% of the system wide passenger miles, a huge
amount.

In summary, what we are seeing every year from the White House is a
budget decision based on flawed data, that ultimately was generated by
Amtrak. Until Amtrak can convince budget decision makers about the real
numbers and needs, bad budget requests will continue to flow into the
national debate.

The oddest, and funniest news story to come so far from this year's
budget discussions? New Mexico Business Weekly, on Tuesday, February 6,
2007 ran a headline saying, "Proposed Bush budget would banish NM's
Amtrak service." The story went on to say, in a declaratory fashion with
no attribution, "The president's 2008 budget proposal would cut Amtrak's
funding from $1.3 billion to $900 million and eliminate the Southwest
Chief and Sunset Limited passenger lines."

You can't make this stuff up. Where does such nonsense come from, in what
is supposed to be a respected business publication?

2) In good news, Amtrak seems to be putting together a new advertising
push. The bad news is that the advertising seems to be just for Acela
trains on the NEC, and not the whole system.

On February 9th, Adweek, a well-respected industry magazine of the
advertising and marketing biz, reported that Amtrak is making a
multimedia push for the winter and spring travel season. The campaign is
based on research that shows travelers are taking less vacation time and
are therefore more concerned with the comfort and quality of their
leisure-time activities.

Adweek says the campaign seems to mostly be aimed towards NEC Acela
trains. There is no mention of the much more important national system
trains which generate greater amounts of revenue passenger miles and cash
for the system.

Here's the distressing part: Amtrak spent slightly less than $20 million
on ads last year, down 66 percent from the previous year. Why such a
drop? Was this due to the Acela trains being out of commission last year,
so Amtrak didn't think it was important to advertise the rest of the
system?

In terms of advertising spending, $20 million, for a company the size of
Amtrak, is, at best, trivial spending for something like advertising.

Now, here's an interesting twist to the whole advertising scenario.

On February 7th, Amtrak announced it has contracted with a multi-cultural
marketing communications firm to launch a multi-cultural advertising
campaign for both Acela trains and the long distance system. The firm,
based in Atlanta, Georgia, will help Amtrak develop promotions, special
events, and public relations. These are all things Amtrak desperately
needs, and undoubtedly will help Amtrak gain new riders.

A "Welcome On Board" ad will encourage audiences to consider Amtrak long
distance trains when planning trips, especially family vacations. An
Acela campaign will target business travelers.

Hey, this sounds great. Promoting the long distance system, getting some
good public relations going, and special events.

But, the ads will only target multi-cultural audiences via print, online
and radio advertising in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington,
and Miami. Both campaigns will be aired only through African American and
Hispanic media outlets.

What about the rest of us? Is Amtrak saying that no one other than
minorities ride long distance trains? What about the other thousands of
media markets outside of the major centers listed above? Don't people in
the other 40+ states want to ride passenger trains, too? Or, will they
just have to figure out things the best way they can and discover Amtrak
on their own?

These two campaigns are a bare minimum start, but nothing more than that.

3) In the last issue of TWA, we read about a meeting held in Illinois
regarding expansion of Amtrak service in that state. The following quote
appeared:

[Begin quote]

Oops! What? Did the Quad-City Times reporter correctly quote Mr. Lang, a
long time Amtrak public affairs veteran and experienced spokesman, saying
"Amtrak is not looking at long-distance rail service. The company's
future is servicing corridors 300 to 500 miles."?

Putting two and two together, and hoping it doesn't add up to five, we
have last week's offering from Mr. Kummant in the Associated Press
article which was printed across the land that long distance train
ridership was expected to be flat, and reiterating the belief in state
sponsored corridors of 300 to 500 miles in length.

[End quote]

This has a happy ending. Ray Lang was apparently misquoted, as often
happens in the press. A sharp-eyed TWA reader, Eliot A. Keller of Iowa
City, Iowa sent the following e-mail to TWA:

"He was misquoted.

"I was there in Rock Island.

"He said the biggest growth in ridership was expected in the future on
trains serving those routes." [Meaning corridors, and not long distance
routes; that the company is still looking at long distance routes.]

That is a great improvement over what was reported in the Quad-City
Times. Thank you, Mr. Keller for helping clarify that issue. That puts a
much more positive spin on things.

4) Two very different weather and train operation reports and statements
were made February 13th and February 14th as harsh winter weather rolled
across North America.

Amtrak issued an internal System Operations Flash Report on February
14th, warning of the coming weather, and made plans to cancel or
terminate early 50 trains in the Midwest and Northeast.

VIA Rail Canada, on the other hand, on February 13th, warming to the
conditions of the same storm, issued this public announcement:

[Begin quote]

VIA Rail Canada is preparing for major winter storm

Montreal - In light of the major storm that is expected to hit Central
Canada and the Maritimes over the next couple of days, VIA would like to
remind its passengers that is has taken all the necessary steps to offer
safe and reliable travel to those using its intercity and longer distance
trains in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes. While heavy snow and severe
weather can shut down highways and airports, trains are typically not
affected to the same degree.

As weather predictions worsen, VIA normally faces increased demand. VIA
will add cars to accommodate the demand but urges customers to call ahead
to be certain of available space. To book, customers can call 1-888-VIA
Rail, (842-7245), TTY 1-800 268-9503 (hearing impaired). Tickets are also
available at kiosks in major Corridor stations, online at www.viarail.ca,
or through travel agents.

VIA offers a stress-free, safe and comfortable winter travel alternative.
For a complete listing of train departures, station and on-board services
as well as fare plans, visit VIA's Web site at www.viarail.ca (
http://www.viarail.ca/en_index.html )

[End quote]

Our tough Canadian cousins seem to relish winter, not be afraid of it.
Come on Amtrak, get with the plan.


If you are reading someone else's copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can
receive your own free copy each week by sending your e-mail address to

freetwa@unitedrail.org

You MUST include your name, preferred e-mail address, and city and state
where you live. If you have filters or firewalls placed on your Internet
connection, set your e-mail to receive incoming mail from
brucerichardson@unitedrail.org; we are unable to go through any
individual approvals processes for individuals. This mailing list is kept
strictly confidential and is not shared or used for any purposes other
than the distribution of This Week at Amtrak or related URPA materials.

All other correspondence should be addressed to
brucerichardson@unitedrail.org

J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-6760
brucerichardson@unitedrail.org
http://www.unitedrail.org

Sometimes a little information is a dangerous thing!

Amtrak has a long distance train advertising campaign, as well as an Acela (NEC) campaign for the spring, so there should be no fear that the long distance trains are being forgotten.

As far as the Multicultural/Diversity agency running ads in large market areas, this is no different than what has been done in the past. There has always been a portion of their budget set aside for diverse market segments and those ads are funded from the national budget. Other cities/regions will use the same ads and place them in the smaller market cities.

No fears Bruce - Amtrak will market to everyone - even URPA followers.

[AlanB]

haolerider, on Tue, Feb 20, 2007, 05:01 PM, said:

Sometimes a little information is a dangerous thing!

Amtrak has a long distance train advertising campaign, as well as an Acela (NEC) campaign for the spring, so there should be no fear that the long distance trains are being forgotten.

As far as the Multicultural/Diversity agency running ads in large market areas, this is no different than what has been done in the past. There has always been a portion of their budget set aside for diverse market segments and those ads are funded from the national budget. Other cities/regions will use the same ads and place them in the smaller market cities.

No fears Bruce - Amtrak will market to everyone - even URPA followers.

I can only guess that he used selective reading when browsing Amtrak's press releases. After all here it is clear as day, a full description of the ads for the long distance service.

[MrFSS]

A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-6760, Electronic Mail info@unitedrail.org
http://www.unitedrail.org

Volume 4, Number 7


Founded over three decades ago in 1976 by Austin M. Coates, Jr., URPA is
a nationally known policy institute that focuses on solutions and plans
for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in
Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota,
California, Arizona, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and
Tennessee. For more detailed information, along with a variety of
position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at
http://www.unitedrail.org.

URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from
any outside sources.

1) What is your world view of Amtrak? Do you consider it an essential
public/social service? Do you consider it mostly a regional commuter
service? Do you consider it a provider of long distance transportation
as part of our national transportation matrix? Do you consider Amtrak a
fascinating part of your hobby world that you hope the federal
government will continue to fund endlessly for your enjoyment?

People who are interesting in Amtrak make up disparate parts of the
national population. While many are indifferent to the fate of Amtrak,
others are passionate about its existence. Many who are passionate about
Amtrak are also mostly ignorant about the realities of Amtrak, and what
it takes to run a passenger railroad.

From the outside, an easy answer to almost all of Amtrak's problems is
to throw more money at the company. Just give it more money and
everything will be fine. Well, no, that is probably the worst possible
scenario for Amtrak because more money only enables bad corporate
behavior and provide no incentive for improvement.

On the money front, the current Amtrak board of directors and
administration has quickly learned how to play the ongoing Washington
game of requesting free federal monies, and getting most of what they
want. It's the Amtrak apologists and mostly politically naive "Amtrak at
all costs, right or wrong" supporters who don't seem to want to
understand the process.

During the past two federal budget cycles, we have seen Amtrak, with all
due respect accorded to its money managers on Capitol Hill, create a
budget request process that has been done professionally and with
forethought. This year, the Bush administration requested $900 million
for Amtrak through its annual budget process. Keep in mind the term
"process." A Republican administration has made a request of a Democrat
congress. That means at best, the Republican request is a faint
blueprint for what Congress will actually enact in final legislation.

Amtrak has made for FY 2008 a direct request to Congress of $1.53
billion, up from the FY 06 and FY 07 budget of $1.3 billion.

Now, here the comes the part most people don't seem to want to grasp or
understand, and which no one outside of the budget writers at Amtrak
will every know the real answer to: How much of Amtrak's budget request
is "blue sky, best case scenario"? Anyone savvy in the ways of
negotiation - and Amtrak's annual Congressional free federal monies are
always a product of negotiation - knows that you always start high, and
settle for less than you requested. That's simply the way the process works.

Most people would be hard pressed to name any federal agency which
receives 100% of its requested annual budget. Some people in Congress
are always likely to say, "Well, we can do X if we cut 1 or 2 % from
everyone else's budget." That is simply the way things get done in a
civilized society.

Those individuals and organizations like the National Association of
Railroad Passengers who want to hold their collective breaths until they
turn blue because in their view Amtrak isn't getting every red cent it's
requesting simply aren't living in the real world.

An amusing aside to the budget debate this year has been NARP's public
disappointment in the new Democrat controlled congress. Apparently,
there has been too much wishful thinking that once "our people" were in
control, all of Amtrak's problems would be solved because Democrats
would be much more sympathetic to every one of Amtrak's needs. Whoops!
The reality is, those who are in power and show some personal
responsibility, do what is best for the commonweal, not always what is
best for perceived favorites.

For those of us intimately familiar with politics, we know that once in
power, everyone who joined our side to get us into power usually did so
for a specific agenda, and then demand their agenda be followed. That's
just not possible. When you are an elected leader, you do what is right
either from a moral or ethical basis (hopefully, both) and follow the
law. If personal agendas interfere, then you were not the right person
to be elected. While Amtrak supporters and apologists may think they are
right, they are probably not taking a global vision of everything in the
transportation field that must be considered in a budget process. An
Amtrak apologist's "emergency" is not an airline foamer's "emergency."
It's up to the budget writers on Capitol Hill to figure out the real
emergencies and allocate monies accordingly.

2) We continue to hear the same drivel that no passenger railroad system
in the world can exist without public monies. Why is this considered a
basis for Amtrak funding? We note in the latest Amtrak budget request to
Congress the company has announced that despite an increase in operating
expenses, it plans to hold the line on its request for an operating
subsidy at the same as previous years, $485 million for the entire
system. In other words, Amtrak is saying it would rather first help
itself, either through internal savings, an improvement in the way it
does business, or (gasp!) improved ridership and revenue, than simply
ask the federal government for more money.

Finally, we have arrived at Valhalla. Amtrak has said, "No, thank you, I
can help myself." This is a red letter year for Amtrak.

Real businesspeople, looking at passenger rail from a real business
standpoint instead of through the rose colored glasses and soft bigotry
of lower expectations, know that passenger rail in a truly competitive
environment can not only be self-sufficient in many areas, but it can be
profitable, too, in the context of traditional passenger rail, such as
long distance trains.

Looking at Amtrak as it currently is shaped, the company will never be
able to charge enough for tickets on corridor trains as demonstrated on
the Northeast Corridor to fully support the cost of those trains and the
infrastructure required to operate them. But, in a more mature long
distance system, the numbers show those trains throwing off large
amounts of excess cash (called "profits" in the real world, which by the
way is not an obscene term), and those trains can be more than
self-sufficient.

3) How do you strike a balance between these two systems? In pre-Amtrak
days, many of the private railroads, such as the Pennsylvania, Southern
Pacific, Illinois Central, Milwaukee Road, Chicago Northwestern, and
others operated commuter businesses in addition to fleets of long
distance trains. Some digging through musty archives shows that the
commuter operations, which we operated by government direction, the same
as public utilities, rarely made money. It was the long distance fleets
that covered many of the expenses of the commuter trains.

In today's Amworld, those economics have been nearly reversed. More
emphasis has been placed on high cost, low revenue commuter operations
as public utilities, and little interest has been paid to low cost, high
revenue long distance trains. To make matters worse, anyone from those
days of yesteryear that understood the true economics of pre-Amtrak
passenger trains are either 25 years into retirement, living in a
nursing home, or simply dead.

Amtrak has become - as often happens when a private industry passes into
public hands - a social tool rather than a fully functioning passenger
railroad. Politicians and Amtrak apologists have succeeded in turning
Amtrak away from its original mission of providing a robust, national
passenger rail system into a series of competing-for-budget-dollars
disparate corridors loosely linked by scarce long distance trains.

4) We are seeing an emphasis by Amtrak on the development of 100 to 500
mile corridors, hopefully paid for by individual states which have an
interest in these trains. To no one's surprise, in Illinois, which has a
whole host of new corridor trains this year, ridership has soared. We
have no real reported figures on the success of these trains, because we
only know ridership, which is just a count of warm bodies. We don't know
revenue passenger miles, which show real results. But, we do know that
ridership has soared.

Two other areas are looking at expanded service, both which will be
important additions to Amtrak's national system, but will most likely be
supported by state monies. The first is reintroducing the Coast Daylight
in California, between the San Francisco Bay area and Southern
California. This is about a 500 mile run, and it will nicely connect all
of the Southern California corridor services with all of the Northern
California corridor services, creating a huge opportunity destination
matrix for connecting passengers. Best of all, the train will mostly
duplicate the route of the Coast Starlight, which should not only free
up a lot of revenue space on the Starlight for passengers traveling
outside of California on that high revenue train, but it will also
spread out station and other infrastructure costs to two trains, instead
of all costs being heaped on the Starlight.

In other words, this will be a low cost train to implement, an extra
frequency should drive up demand and create greater revenue passenger
miles, and more space will be available on the Coast Starlight for
passengers traveling long distances and connecting to other trains,
which, in turn, will generate even more revenue. There is no downside to
the creation of this train.

The next good opportunity is coming from residents in Oklahoma and
Kansas who want an extension of the state supported Heartland Flyer,
which currently runs between Fort Worth, Texas and Oklahoma City. This
spunky little train, which currently connects with the Texas Eagle in
Forth Worth, has huge potential if it is expanded to its natural
endpoints in Kansas City (or, better yet, Chicago) and San Antonio.

A renewed Heartland Flyer running San Antonio; Fort Worth; Oklahoma
City; Newton, Kansas (picking up the current route of the Southwest
Chief at that junction); Kansas City, or even on to Chicago would be
another powerhouse train that would be cheap to operate, have a route
over the friendly BNSF Railroad versus the difficult Union Pacific
Railroad, and become an important passenger corridor.

Advantages include twice daily service between San Antonio and Fort
Worth in a vibrant part of Texas, and twice daily service on the
Southwest Chief route between Newton, Kansas and Kansas City. Again, you
have the same advantages as found in California, with a sharing of costs
between two trains instead of all costs heaped on one train, and the
connection matrix possibilities go through the roof, providing huge new
opportunities for passenger demand and revenue passenger miles.

5) This demonstrates the tricky shoals which must be navigated between a
policy of only developing relatively short corridors, or looking
globally at what can be accomplished to benefit the entire Amtrak system
by being just slightly more creative in thinking in terms of
connectivity and passengers who may wish to travel further than what one
state may be willing to pay for each budget year.

Think something like this won't work? It already does, in the case of
the Carolinian in North Carolina, which runs between Charlotte, North
Carolina and New York City. The State of North Carolina, one of the
leaders in promoting responsible passenger rail service, shares the cost
of the Carolinian with Amtrak, even though the train travels far beyond
the borders of North Carolina.

This same type of thinking needs to be applied to an expansion of the
Heartland Flyer beyond Texas and Oklahoma. As a stand-alone train, the
Heartland Flyer is mildly successful, but expensive to operate. As an
expanded train between to natural endpoints instead of artificially
created endpoints, it has much greater potential to earn more revenue,
serve more passengers, and, with proper accounting (not necessarily
accounting as we have historically experienced at Amtrak), can cost less
and less in state subsidy to operate because it has more and more
revenue from a greater pool of sources.

How many other examples like this can be found, just waiting to be
exploited?

6) There are more signs of an improved and enlightened Amtrak
management. In the February 20th edition of the employee newsletter
Amtrak This Week, the first item says, "Note: We appreciate the hard
work put in by all of the employees - from the train crews to those who
kept the railroad open and moving - who did their best despite the very
tough winter weather conditions we experienced last week. Thank you for
your dedication and commitment."

And, the next item speaks volumes, and hopefully will have a huge
impact,"Mechanical: Distribution of seatback cards with information
about the new Trip Ratings program (passenger survey) is being completed
on Acela, Regional, Keystone, Vermonter, and all long-distance trains."

Now, let's hope somebody reads these survey cards and reacts
appropriately. This should be a tremendous tool for improvement.

7) During the past year, much has been said and done about Amtrak
onboard food service. Extreme measures have been taken to allegedly save
money, while overall downgrading the level of dining car service and
cutting important employees.

There is one area which has been overlooked. Many of the progressive
chains of fast food restaurants have found new profits and more loyal
customers through longer hours of being open. Many quick service
restaurants, which previously closed at 10 P.M. or earlier, have
extended their hours to 1 A.M. or later, and some have gone to offering
24 hour service.

Amtrak briefly experimented with this on the Sunset Limited in 1999 and
2000 with the 24 hour dining car concept, which was well received by
both passengers and onboard employees.

Best of all "the numbers" worked, and the participating union thought
enough of the idea to allow the successful experiments to take place
while temporarily waiving union rules for when onboard crews are
supposed to have guaranteed hours of when to sleep (This had nothing to
do with the number of hours available for sleep, but rather when those
hours would occur.).

Since Amtrak is already running food service cars, no extra
infrastructure is required; just one or two more employees, the cost of
which are quickly covered by the increased utilization of the dining car.

Amtrak has partially moved to this concept by beginning to offer "all
day dining," from early morning to midnight. This helps tremendously,
but still leaves a large gap during nocturnal hours, which many
passenger are entraining and detraining, and would like some sustenance.

Amtrak already has the completed studies on this (Of which this writer
was paid to do, as well as conducting the onboard test runs), and has
the proof positive that this idea is not only a good idea, but a
financially rewarding idea, as well.

8) The ongoing saga of the missing Sunset Limited east of New Orleans,
now missing for 18 months, is getting some strong goosing from the
Florida Coalition of Rail Passengers under the leadership of its
president, Jackson McQuigg, and several dogged members who have a strong
interest in the return of the train.

Working professionally, the group has begun to put pressure on members
of Florida's congressional delegation, including both Corrine Brown and
Ander Crenshaw of Jacksonville. Congresswoman Brown plays an important
role on the House Transportation committee and is keeping this issue
alive. Pressure is also being brought to the office of Senator Mel
Martinez, Florida's junior senator. The Sunset also serves the district
of Representative John Mica, who has also played important roles on the
transportation committee.

The best wisdom available is that Amtrak is trying to hold out for the
affected states to cough up money to operate this long distance train
that has been a part of the long distance system since 1993 east of New
Orleans. It will be interesting to see how this continues to play out
with new Congressional pressure being brought to bear on Amtrak.

The Florida Coalition of Rail Passengers has been doing important work
for the restoration of the Sunset. In combination with other pressures
being brought to bear on the subject, success can't be far away.

9) The Rail Passenger Association of California & Nevada and NARP are
holding a joint membership meeting and conference March 17 in Los
Angeles. The keynote speaker for the event will be Amtrak President and
CEO Alex Kummant. A number of other speakers will be present, notably
URPA Vice President of Law and Policy Andrew Selden. He will participate
in a panel discussion regarding "Amtrak and the Future" along with some
lesser participants. Further details can be found at www.railpac.org.


If you are reading someone else's copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can
receive your own free copy each week by sending your e-mail address to

freetwa@unitedrail.org

You MUST include your name, preferred e-mail address, and city and state
where you live. If you have filters or firewalls placed on your Internet
connection, set your e-mail to receive incoming mail from
brucerichardson@unitedrail.org; we are unable to go through any
individual approvals processes for individuals. This mailing list is kept
strictly confidential and is not shared or used for any purposes other
than the distribution of This Week at Amtrak or related URPA materials.

All other correspondence should be addressed to
brucerichardson@unitedrail.org

J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-6760
brucerichardson@unitedrail.org
http://www.unitedrail.org

[MrFSS]

This Week at Amtrak; March 1, 2007

A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-6760, Electronic Mail info@unitedrail.org
http://www.unitedrail.org

Volume 4, Number 8


Founded over three decades ago in 1976 by Austin M. Coates, Jr., URPA is
a nationally known policy institute that focuses on solutions and plans
for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in
Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota,
California, Arizona, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and
Tennessee. For more detailed information, along with a variety of
position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at
http://www.unitedrail.org.

URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from
any outside sources.

1) Oh, my, it seems that some "amateurs" are trying to do the wrong
thing, according to National Association of Railroad Passengers Executive
Director Ross Capon.

The restoration of the Sunset Limited east of New Orleans has been high
on the passenger rail agenda for many of us here in Florida and along the
Gulf Coast. Gone since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the absent Sunset has
created a large hole in Amtrak's national network of trains. CSX, the
Sunset's host railroad east of New Orleans, released a newly repaired
main line to Amtrak for service April 1, 2006, after damage from Katrina
was fixed. Some station damage has remained, but nothing worse than
Amtrak has routinely dealt with in other locations while still providing
passenger train service.

Most of Amtrak's excuses for not restoring the Sunset have been in the
"the dog ate my homework" category. It appears that Amtrak is holding
out, hoping a coalition of Gulf Coast states will cough up money to pay
for a restored Sunset Limited. This dangerous precedent would make any
long distance route vulnerable to discontinuance until local money was
found to run a train.

URPA has been pushing hard for this restoration, along with the excellent
and independent efforts of the Florida Coalition of Rail Passengers, and
several well-connected individuals in Florida who fully understand the
need for this service. A number of mayors from cities and towns along the
abandoned Sunset route have joined the effort, as well as distinguished
members of Congress who represent districts and states along the forlorn
route.

NARP's Mr. Capon, however, sees things differently. Here is an e-mail Mr.
Capon sent, in effect, telling everyone to cool their jets and let the
"experts" at NARP handle the matter.

[Begin quote]

Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2007 2:25 PM

Friends--

There is no possibility that Amtrak will reinstitute a train that serves
Mobile at bad times, which would be needed to produce a reliable same-day
connection from #2 to a restored New Orleans Florida service.

Making the case for any restoration is tough enough without advocates
burdening the case with specifics that most outsiders would regard as
micromanaging--including politically connected outsiders whose help we
need to press for restoration.

--Ross

[End quote]

Well. The entire future of the Sunset route depends on a small city like
Mobile, Alabama have a marketable time? Hmmmm ... let's look at some
other major cities and their "marketable" times.

Columbia, South Carolina, Silver Star - 1:44 A.M., southbound; 1:12 A.M.,
northbound
Cleveland, Ohio, Capitol Limited - 2:31 A.M., westbound; 2:06 A.M.,
eastbound
Cleveland, Ohio, Lake Shore Limited - 3:27 A.M., westbound; 4:02 A.M.,
eastbound
Cincinnati, Ohio, Cardinal - 1:03 A.M., westbound; 3:02 A.M., eastbound
Carbondale, Illinois, City of New Orleans - 1:21 A.M., southbound; 3:16
A.M., northbound
Fargo, North Dakota, Empire Builder - 3:35 A.M., westbound; 2:13 A.M.,
eastbound
Spokane, Washington, Empire Builder - 1:40 A.M., westbound; 1:15 A.M.,
eastbound
Lincoln, Nebraska, California Zephyr - 12:08 A.M., westbound; 3:56 A.M.,
eastbound
Salt Lake City, Utah, California Zephyr - 11:33 P.M., westbound; 3:15
A.M., eastbound
Topeka, Kansas, Southwest Chief - 1:09 A.M., westbound; 5:20 A.M.,
eastbound
Little Rock, Arkansas, Texas Eagle - 3:10 A.M., westbound; 11:34 P.M.,
eastbound
San Antonio, Texas, Sunset Limited - 3:00 A.M., westbound; 10:25 P.M.,
eastbound

And, there are, of course, other examples. Apparently, "marketable times"
are not a factor for Amtrak service in these cities. One must realize
that any long distance train will serve some markets at good times, and
other markets at bad times. When scheduling a train like the Sunset
Limited that literally is the only train in North America to travel coast
to coast, some markets will not receive the best times.

When dealing with people - like this writer who used to have some
responsibility for the marketing of the Sunset Limited - making decisions
about which markets to emphasize and which to realize will have less than
perfect service, and adding in the needs of the host railroad, and also
adding in the operating characteristics of each train, there has to be
some hard decisions made and some "give and take" as schedules are
tweaked for optimum performance.

The easiest solution is to run at least two schedules on each route, with
a "flip" schedule, and markets served at less than perfect times of one
schedule are then afforded good service on the flip schedule. Also
helpful is to fill in some markets with short "daylight" service on
corridors where corridor and long distance trains complement each other
and share expenses and provide better travel opportunities to generate
higher revenue passenger mile counts.

Mr. Capon also seems to not understand the economics and dynamics of the
Sunset Limited. While as typical of any long distance train, the Sunset
provides lots of "local" service between numeral intermediate station
stops, much of the success of the train is because of its important place
in Amtrak's passenger matrix of delivering passengers from one passenger
junction to another. A good deal of the business of the Sunset east of
New Orleans consisted of passengers who were "bridge" traffic, moving
from points west of New Orleans to either Jacksonville, where the train
connected with Florida service trains, or to the train's ultimate
destination of Orlando, the single largest vacation destination in the
country. While Mobile, Alabama is an important small city on the route,
the operations of the Sunset east of New Orleans were not wholly
dependent on Mobile's business.

We know NARP has had a too-cozy relationship with Amtrak for a long time,
including taking payments from Amtrak for operating a customer advisory
panel. We also know NARP is Amtrak's greatest apologist, and seldom seems
willing to prod Amtrak to do anything different than what Amtrak is
willing to do on its own.

2) For those who may wish to question Mr. Capon specifically on his
choice of words and explain exactly what he meant in the above e-mail, he
will be appearing with URPA Vice President of Law and Policy Andrew
Selden in Los Angeles on Saturday, March 17 at a joint membership meeting
of NARP and the Rail Passenger Association of California & Nevada. Mr.
Capon and Mr. Selden will be featured on a panel with the topic of
"Amtrak and the Future," after the keynote speech by Amtrak President and
CEO Alex Kummant.

The meeting should provide an excellent forum for the discussion of the
topic of the Sunset Limited at length, with views from all parties. For
more information on the meeting location and time, visit the RailPac web
site at www.railpac.org

3) Dealing with some old, but fun business: A few Amtrak locomotives,
fresh from the paint shop, were sporting misspellings on their sides.
Someone in Amtrak's shops affixing decals of Amtrak's logo on the
locomotives, had a bad moment and reversed two letters of the Amtrak logo
on the engines. What was supposed to be "AMTRAK" came out "ATMRAK"
instead. The fun part is that these locomotives passed inspection by
several pairs of eyes and made it out into main line service for a period
of time before anyone noticed the problem.

At first, no one believed this, thinking photos of the engines with the
typos were merely hoaxes that had been conceived used the popular Adobe
Photoshop computer program. But, it turns out, the photos - and the typos
- were real, and the decals had to be corrected and re-affixed.

Any of us who regularly deal with words and proofing know it's far too
easy to look at something you see everyday and read the whole word the
way we imagine it to be, instead of reading letter-for-letter. Sadly,
this column is often proof enough of that concept, even though it is
rigorously edited and sent through a thorough spell checking several
times before publication. It's just hard to believe something as large as
an Amtrak locomotive got past so many eyes before the error was
discovered.

4) Chicago and the Midwest have taken the brunt of a lot of winter
weather misery this year, not to mention the failure of the Chicago Bears
to win the Super Bowl. Here's a report of what happened in the Chicago
Amtrak yards the Monday after the Super Bowl.

[Begin quote]

The Chicago melt-down on Monday was pathetic. Apparently all the
mechanics and yard crews laid off for the Super Bowl. Train 301(5)
departed 43 minutes late but that was only AFTER its frozen cars were
swapped for the Superliner set that was supposed to be for 303(5); but
even that one had never been serviced after coming in on Sunday night.



Pity the passengers and crew who were on 303(5); even after additional
time to service the all-Horizon consist, it had frozen toilets in every
car and left Chicago over 3 hours late, arriving in
STL just a shade under 5 hours late.


They all KNEW that the Horizon set for 301 had frozen toilets but the
crew was told that Mechanical was working it; in reality there was not a
single mechanic to be found, either inside the train or servicing it
outside. There WAS an oil heater aimed at the toilet tank of one of the
frozen Horizon cars, but it was stone cold; not even turned on!



The mechanical foreman claimed only one pipefitter showed up and he
needed three, so nothing was going to get done.

[End quote]

One has to suppose that football beats passenger service, every time.

5) On a positive note the Amtrak Central Division News, distributed to
all employees in Chicago and elsewhere in the Midwest, featured a front
page story in its December issue with the headline "Save the service,
serve the snacks." The story exhorts onboard personnel to use "emergency"
snacks provided on all trains to appease passengers who may be angry or
distraught because of delayed trains.

[Begin quote]

If you've been on a train that is delayed, you know what can happen:
Passengers begin to wonder what's happening and why. Try as you might to
inform, calm and appease them, sometimes it's all for naught. That's when
it may become necessary to introduce service recover meals. Do you know
about these?

These individually wrapped, "emergency" snack packs include bottled
water, cheese and crackers, a cookie and some trail mix. They can work
wonders on delayed long-distance or short-haul trains, according to
Cynthia Winslow, Assistance Superintendent of On-Board Services.

"They've given us an easy and effective option for service recovery,"
Winslow said. "The snacks seem to be well-received and appreciated by our
passengers, because sometimes all they're looking for is that good-faith
effort and attentiveness on our part."

Learn where these service recovery meals are on your train, and find out
from a manager or supervisor under what circumstances you are to use
them."

[End quote]

(Sigh) "Do you know about these?" That's just depressing there would be
anyone working as part of an Amtrak onboard crew that doesn't know about
these simple and good examples of making service recovery efforts. And,
apparently, they are to be used only after OBS personnel have tried to
"inform, calm, and appease" passengers. So, the snacks are only a last
resort? Not to be used except in extreme emergencies? No chance this
simple gesture could be made without OBS employees being painted into a
corner by passengers?

The story also indicates that some crews may not be making a "good-faith
effort" or providing "attentiveness" on the part of Amtrak. Why is the
concept of good passenger service so hard to grasp?

6) Old Amtrak employees may go away for a while, but eventually they seem
to return to their past haunts. Anne Witt, formerly Anne Hoey of the
George Warrington era of Amtrak has returned to the company as vice
president of Strategic Partnerships and Business Development. The newly
formed department focuses on Amtrak's growth strategy and encompasses
state corridor and commuter contracts, freight railroad relationships,
real estate and other business development opportunities.

Ms. Witt rejoins Amtrak from another high profile, customer focused
agency, the District of Columbia Department of Motor Vehicles. Her
previous positions with Amtrak included vice president in a number of
departments, such as Service Standards, Service Operations; Reservations,
Sales and Customer Relations; Customer and Corporate Communications and
Corporate Management.

Outside of Amtrak, Ms. Witt has been busy holding senior-level positions
at other large agencies, including Montgomery County Maryland's
Department of Environmental Protection, the D.C. Department of Public
Works, and the Children's National Medical Center.

One can conclude Amtrak is not through recycling lifetime government
bureaucrats that go endlessly from one government job to the next, and
back again.

7) Here is an interesting essay from Paul Weyrich, former member of the
Amtrak Board of Directors, and currently the Chairman and CEO of the Free
Congress Foundation in Washington.

[Begin quote]

Free Congress Foundation Commentary

Why the Next Conservatism Should Bring Back Streetcars

By Paul M. Weyrich

January 31, 2007

Streetcars? What could conservatism have to do with streetcars? Some of
you may be wondering if I have slipped my trolley.

Maybe I have, but wanting to bring electric streetcars back to our cities
is no sign of it. In an earlier essay on the next conservatism, number
ten in this series, I argued that conservatives should want to bring our
cities back. Too many of them have become cold, hard, empty places,
devoid of life and unable to perform the important functions cities have
in any culture. Well, it turns out that if you want to bring cities back,
you also want to bring back streetcars.

A great new book, Street Smart: Streetcars and Cities in the 21st
Century, explains why. Streetcars, it seems, are one of the most powerful
tools for reviving cities. Several American cities have already brought
the streetcars back, with tremendous positive effects on re-development.
Kenosha, Wisconsin, brought streetcars back for just $6.2 million, and
the new streetcar line has already brought $150 million in development,
for a return on investment of 2,319%. Portland, Oregon, put in a downtown
streetcar loop 4.8 miles long for $55 million; it generated over three
billion dollars in new development. A 1.2 mile extension of the original
loop brought in another $1.35 billion in development.

Why do streetcars bring new development? There are several reasons.
First, middle-class people with significant disposable income like riding
streetcars. That is not true of buses. Second, streetcars are "pedestrian
facilitators." People who ride through a city on a streetcar tend to get
off and on, walking for a while, then riding some more. While they are
walking, they go in stores, stop in restaurants for something to eat,
maybe see a movie or get tickets for a show. In other words, they spend
money downtown. Middle-class pedestrians are the life blood of a city,
and streetcars make it easy for them to get around.

Third, from a developer's perspective, a streetcar line is a guarantee of
high-quality public transportation that will be there for decades. That
is not true of buses; a bus line can be here today, gone tomorrow. The
investment in track and overhead wire streetcars require means their
routes don't get up and move. Not surprisingly, bus service does little
or nothing for development.

Beyond their positive effects on re-development, there is another reason
the next conservatism should want to bring back streetcars, and passenger
trains for that matter. Thanks to trains, streetcars, and interurbans
(which were big, fast streetcars that ran from cities far out into the
countryside), travel in America used to be a lot more enjoyable than it
is now.

Today, we don't really travel. Instead, we are just packaged and shipped.
That is true of air travel, which has become an ordeal, and also of much
driving. One interstate highway is much like another and driving in or
around cities often means getting caught in traffic congestion, which
everybody hates.

The next conservatism's theme of Retroculture wants to bring back good
things from the past that we have lost. Pleasure in travel, in the
journey itself, should be one of those good things. Life is too short to
make travel into misery, when it can be fun.

Yes, riding streetcars is fun. Our grandparents used to enjoy riding the
streetcars. They have a feel to them that is completely different from a
bus. You can take my word for it. I have ridden streetcars all over the
world. Better, the next time you are in a city that has streetcars, or
Light Rail, take a ride. You will see the city in a whole different way.
And I think you will enjoy the experience.

A few years ago, I was in Denver with a friend, a United States Senator,
who was a strong opponent of rail transit. Denver has a Light Rail
system. I asked him if he would take a ride on it with me, and he agreed.
About half way through our ride, he turned to me and said, "This is
nice."

Our cities, if they are to be living cities, need streetcars. The next
conservatism should work to bring the streetcars back, as one of many
nice presents the past can offer the future. Resurrecting good things
from the past is what conservatism should be about.

[End quote]


If you are reading someone else's copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can
receive your own free copy each week by sending your e-mail address to

freetwa@unitedrail.org

You MUST include your name, preferred e-mail address, and city and state
where you live. If you have filters or firewalls placed on your Internet
connection, set your e-mail to receive incoming mail from
brucerichardson@unitedrail.org; we are unable to go through any
individual approvals processes for individuals. This mailing list is kept
strictly confidential and is not shared or used for any purposes other
than the distribution of This Week at Amtrak or related URPA materials.

All other correspondence, including requests to unsubscribe, should be
addressed to brucerichardson@unitedrail.org
J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-6760
brucerichardson@unitedrail.org
http://www.unitedrail.org
_______________________________________________
TWA mailing list
TWA@unitedrail.org
http://lists.unitedr...an/listinfo/twa

[frj1983]

OK my PC froze up as I was responding to a message and seemed to just post incompletely what I was trying to say. For my own edification, is there any way to competely delete a message and start over?

This post has been edited by frj1983: 02 March 2007 - 09:05 AM

[AlanB]

frj1983, on Fri, Mar 2, 2007, 08:56 AM, said:

OK my PC froze up as I was responding to a message and seemed to just post incompletely what I was trying to say. For my own edification, is there any way to competely delete a message and start over?

There is no way for you to delete a message, you would have to ask one of the moderators to do that for you. Of course you can edit your post and simply replace whatever did show up with what you really want.

[frj1983]

AlanB, on Fri, Mar 2, 2007, 06:55 AM, said:

frj1983, on Fri, Mar 2, 2007, 08:56 AM, said:

OK my PC froze up as I was responding to a message and seemed to just post incompletely what I was trying to say. For my own edification, is there any way to competely delete a message and start over?

There is no way for you to delete a message, you would have to ask one of the moderators to do that for you. Of course you can edit your post and simply replace whatever did show up with what you really want.

OK

That's what I thought thanks for letting me know Alan!

[MrFSS]

This Week at Amtrak; March 8, 2007

A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-6760, Electronic Mail info@unitedrail.org
http://www.unitedrail.org

Volume 4, Number 9


Founded over three decades ago in 1976 by Austin M. Coates, Jr., URPA is
a nationally known policy institute that focuses on solutions and plans
for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in
Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota,
California, Arizona, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and
Tennessee. For more detailed information, along with a variety of
position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at
http://www.unitedrail.org.

URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from
any outside sources.

1) Amtrak has started its winter/spring leisure travel advertising
campaign for 2007 by placing ads in 12 top markets. Target marketing, of
course, is very important, and getting the biggest bang for every
marketing buck is critical, too. However, Amtrak does serve over 500
destinations in the continental United States, plus some locations in
Canada. It's kind of tough to expect many results from just advertising
in the top 12 markets ...

2) Here's a fascinating bon mot turned up by one of URPA's numbers
crunchers, derived directly from Amtrak data: Revenue and ridership are
up, but during the last fiscal year (2006), passenger miles dropped once
again to 5,361,517,000. In FY 05 the figure was 5,419,720,000, and a
decade or more ago, it was around 6.5 billion revenue passenger miles per
year.

This means even though the false measurements of increased ridership and
revenues may be climbing, the actual number of revenue passenger miles -
the only true measurement used in the real world of common carriers - has
declined.

The most likely cause of this is an increase in short haul trains (which
are the most expensive to operate and can't cover their costs with true
accounting numbers that include all appropriate allocated expenses) and
small increases or decreases in long distance train travel, most likely
due to the alarmingly short consists of most long haul trains as compared
to a decade ago when much more of Amtrak's long distance fleet was
roadworthy.

3) A regular commuter rider on Amtrak's Empire Service in and out of New
York City provided this fascinating use of an Amtrak diesel locomotive:

[Begin quote]

... (I)t was pretty interesting. That was a day last summer when one of
our favorite conductors, Artie, earned his stripes as a true hero of the
people. On our way home after some violent summer squalls had been
through, a big tree ended up right across the tracks a bit south of the
Rhinecliff station.

The southbound train had already beaten us to it and CSX had been
notified. So a couple of hours passed, with the conductors bugging CSX to
come and do something, and CSX basically just making promises without
giving any real information on where they were in the process. So after
going to the grapevine they eventually got wind of the fact that in all
that time, CSX had gotten as far as contacting the members of a road crew
that was on its way to meeting up for deployment - from Syracuse, about
200 miles away. It would have been well past midnight before the crew
even arrived.
So Artie went out and conducted a slow and delicate dance in the waning
daylight. He had his train push north while the southbound train pushed
south, and together they slowly rotated the tree so that it ended up
lying between the northbound and southbound tracks. I wonder what the CSX
ground crew thought when they arrived.

[End quote]

Good going, Conductor Artie. Nothing like taking some personal
responsibility and using some initiative to take care of your passengers
and your train. This guy should get a medal.

4) URPA stalwart Dennis Larson, Vice President of the Minnesota
Association of Railroad Passengers, shares some numbers from the cold,
Upper Midwest.

[Begin quote]

March 2 - The second major snowstorm in Minnesota and Wisconsin within
the last week, along the Empire Builder route, is now wrapping up with
over a foot of snow and more, once again.

People were sleeping at the airport due to delayed flights and most
schools and events were closed or cancelled as were some business places.
Highway travel was discouraged and I-35 south of the Twin Cities from
Albert Lea to Ames, Iowa was closed by the highway patrol as was I-90
west of I-35 to the South Dakota border. There are railroad-type cross
arms that block the entrance ramps when these highways are closed.

But Empire Builder arrivals are not doing all that bad though considering
the poor weather conditions. The evening arrivals of the Empire Builder
from Chicago to the St. Paul Midway Station are below-

2007-03-01: Scheduled: 10:31 PM Actual: 12:04 am Delay: 93 minutes
2007-02-28: Scheduled: 10:31 PM Actual: 11:31 PM Delay: 60 minutes
2007-02-27: Scheduled: 10:31 PM Actual: 10:24 PM Delay: 0 minutes
2007-02-26: Scheduled: 10:31 PM Actual: 10:23 PM Delay: 0 minutes

The morning arrivals of the Empire Builder to the St. Paul Midway Station
from the Pacific Northwest are below-

2007-03-02: Scheduled: 7:05 am Actual: 7:01 am Delay: 0 minutes
2007-03-01: Scheduled: 7:05 am Actual: 7:02 am Delay: 0 minutes
2007-02-28: Scheduled: 7:05 am Actual: 6:46 am Delay: 0 minutes
2007-02-27: Scheduled: 7:05 am Actual: 7:15 am Delay: 10 minutes
2007-02-26: Scheduled: 7:05 am Actual: 7:01 am Delay: 0 minutes
2007-02-25: Scheduled: 7:05 am Actual: 7:19 am Delay: 14 minutes
2007-02-24: Scheduled: 7:05 am Actual: 6:29 am Delay: 0 minutes

[End quote]

5) Things haven't been quite so rosy for the Empire Builder's sister
transcontinental train, the California Zephyr, which operates between
Chicago and Emeryville (San Francisco), California.

Mr. Larson made this note from a November Zephyr report:

[Begin quote]

Looking over Amtrak's California Zephyr report for November, I see it has
nearly 5 hours of make up time [automatically built into the schedule] so
they have been sitting for 11 hours [due to delays] plus another 5.
Amtrak makes big talk about dining car losses but an Amtrak train person
with overtime collects on average a bit over $27 per hour.

So Amtrak is paying out at least an extra $300 per person in wages plus
all those mis-connect charges, which amounts to thousands.

Their report of November 2006 shows the California Zephyr was standing
for 38,203 minutes, or 26 ½ days! Amtrak-caused delays amounted to over
60 hours for the month. Most of the delays attributed to the host
railroads were slow orders amounting to 10.6 days.

[End quote]

And, then there is this, also from Mr. Larson.

[Begin quote]

Regarding references to on time performance of the California Zephyr
[which operates on the BNSF from Chicago to Denver, and the Union Pacific
from Denver to Emeryville, California] ...

In December of 2005 the Zephyr had an on-time record of 5% and the
average delay minutes per trip was 552 minutes. Figure in the recovery
time of 299 minutes and the train arrived on average 4 hours 13 minutes
late. In November of 2006 the train arrived on average 5 hours and 29
minutes late. At this rate of decline, the train will not only be
standing still longer than it is rolling, but every single mode of
transport including horseback and a very slow boat on the river will
operate at higher average speeds than the Zephyr in a very short time.
All this on the all-weather mode that is suppose to save America from
highway and air gridlock.

This information is buried in Amtrak's monthly report on its website.

[End quote]

6) Amtrak shares this with us via the company's employee newsletter,
"Amtrak This Week" of February 12, 2007, about what it is doing to
improve cold weather service.

[Begin quote]

Overhauled Horizons Withstand Cold

Last week, some service in the Midwest was cancelled due to freeze damage
to Horizon equipment as a result of bitter cold conditions in Chicago. A
collaborative effort between the Transportation and Mechanical
departments that included redeploying preventive maintenance employees to
help thaw and prep the trains helped get the schedule back on track.
While this work required more time and manpower in the extreme cold, by
Thursday, full service from Chicago had resumed.

As part of the company's drive toward a state of good repair, a Horizon
overhaul program - the first for the 17- year-old cars - was begun in FY
'05. The four-year program includes modifying the equipment for winter
weather conditions, and of the 41 cars overhauled, only three were
affected by the extraordinarily cold temperatures last week. Why the
three were affected by the weather is being investigated, and
modifications will be made accordingly. Of the trains not yet overhauled,
root-cause analysis is currently being performed on the failures to
better target problem areas as part of the overhaul process.

The Horizon fleet is about 50 percent overhauled, with five cars
currently at Beech Grove, 8 scheduled for overhaul this fiscal year and
another 21 next year. The company's aggressive state-of-good-repair goals
over the past several years have contributed significantly to improved
reliability, and there's still more work to be done.

[End quote]

Next question: When is Amtrak's "state of good repair" mantra going to
extend to the long distance Viewliner and Superliner fleets so enough
equipment can get out on the road and start generating some high value
revenue and revenue passenger miles for Amtrak, not to mention fulfilling
Amtrak's original mission of providing America with a true nationwide
network of passenger trains?

7) Here's a reminder of the Saturday, March 17th joint meeting in Los
Angeles of the Rail Passenger Association of California & Nevada and the
National Association of Railroad Passengers. Featured speakers will be
Amtrak President and CEO Alex Kummant, and URPA Vice President of Law and
Policy Andrew Selden, along with others.

Also appearing will be Ross Capon, NARP Executive Director, on a panel
regarding the future of Amtrak.

For decades, RailPac has long been closely associated with URPA, and much
of the senior leadership of RailPac have been contributing members of
URPA. This meeting should prove to be fascinating as Mr. Selden and Mr.
Capon advance ideas on the future of Amtrak, and Mr. Kummant's keynote
address possibly may provide a glimpse of his ideas about the future of
the company he now heads.

Also up for discussion will be institutional views on the future of the
Sunset Limited east of New Orleans, which has not been in operation since
prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. URPA has been strongly advocating for
the return of this vital part of Amtrak's national network, and other
organizations outside of Florida and the Gulf Coast states have taken a
less vigorous approach, apparently in fear of losing favor with Amtrak
management.

If you're near Southern California and can attend this meeting, the $35
advance registration fee ($40 at the door) should be a small price to pay
for an informative day. Further information is available at
www.RailPac.org

8) Word has come of a needed second Amtrak frequency between Seattle and
Vancouver, British Columbia. Amtrak's Cascades service has been a popular
cross-border passenger train, and a second trip is being made possible by
expansion of BNSF's line between the two cities.

There is one area of dissension, however. The Vancouver Sun reports the
Surrey United Naturists Association is planning to register the group's
dismay over what it considers the imposition of a second Cascades train
along Surrey's coast line by staging a mass mooning under the banner
"BNSF Butt Out of the Beach."

The nudist group appears to want the beach alongside which the new Amtrak
train will run all to itself, and feels a new Cascades train full of
gawking passengers will interfere with the privacy of the group.
Actually, it's tough to wrap your mind around the fact this group is
worried about privacy.

BNSF officials expect to complete the track improvement by the summer of
2008, in time for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. The project has
been in the works for over six years.

9) A private web design in Peoria, Illinois (You remember the hackneyed
phrase, "Let's see if it will play in Peoria.") has come up with an
interesting service for those who wish to monitor Amtrak's on time
performance levels.

The company has provided a free web site which will provide a three week
accounting of Amtrak on-time history for any given train to any given
destination. The site can be found at
http://web.peoriades...mtrak/train.cgi to keep track of
your favorite trains.

Faraz Hussain of Peoria Design Web explains how the site was developed:

[Begin quote]

My motivation for developing the on-time performance calculator was so I
could schedule my squash matches with my opponents at my destinations.
Squash is similar to racquetball in that it is an indoor court sport. I
live in Peoria where there are not many squash players so I travel to
Chicago and St. Louis often from Bloomington to play better players.

So knowing the statistical delays helps me realistically plan my day when
I arrive at my destination. The program is just a program that retrieves
information from Amtrak site behind the scenes. I based it off a similar
search engine I developed, Medreport.org. Medreport.org lets you create
reports by scanning up to thirty websites and extracting content based on
your search criteria.

The program did not take more than half a night to develop as I was able
to copy/paste a code from Medreport.org . I knew this tool would benefit
many others which is why I invested more time to make it robust and easy
to use. I am now working on a 'Catch a train' script that finds where a
particular train is on its route.

[End quote]

This could easily prove to be a user-friendly tool that will benefit many
Amtrak-watchers.

10) The United Transportation Union has published a six-point plan it
feels will help improve both Amtrak and the life of its union members who
work for Amtrak.

[Begin quote]

Highlights of the six-point Amtrak reform plan include:

. Congress must pass a long-term authorization bill that provides at
least $2 billion per year, to be fully funded by appropriators.

. Labor/management relations must be reformed. Amtrak must stop
withholding reasonable wage increases by blaming unpredictable federal
financing for the carrier. Most Amtrak employees are entering their
eighth year with no general wage increase.

. A new Amtrak board of directors should be created with members -
including a voice for employees - who actually believe in maintaining and
strengthening a national Amtrak system. Board members who pursue
self-destructive policies for Amtrak do not serve in the interest of the
company, its workers or the 25 million passengers who depend on Amtrak
service.

. After 30 years of under-funding, Amtrak has taken on substantial debt
that should be paid down with federal assistance.

. The way Amtrak security costs are paid must be reformed. Specific
expenses associated with the defense against terrorism should be borne by
the Department of Homeland Security.

. To ensure independent oversight, the Inspector General of Amtrak should
be separated from the company. It should not work as an extension of
Amtrak management as it does today.

March 7, 2007

[End quote]

11) Here's a nugget of information from an Amtrak daily operations report
that shows someone cares about Amtrak trains and passengers.

[Begin quote]

Train 6(04) [Eastbound California Zephyr] Delayed at Omaha, NE by
Mechanical Failure

The outbound crew reported (3) blower bearing adapter bolts on coach
34001 axle #1 were missing. The contractor that waters the train was able
to obtain bolts at a local hardware store and replaced them. The
contractor also reported the plates that hold the bolts in were upside
down.

Delay: 6(04) 41"

[End quote]

Note to the Amtrak Mechanical Department: Sometimes, just a quick trip to
the corner hardware store can solve a host of problems.

12) And, this, from another Amtrak internal operations report about train
no. 91, the southbound Silver Star, preparing to leave New York City for
Florida:

[Begin quote]

Train 91(06) Late Departure, New York, NY

Train 91(06) was delayed in Sunnyside Yard account [passenger cars]
C/25091 and C/25097 shopped/cut due to frozen waste lines. C/25014 and
C/25015 were substituted then C/25014 shopped/cut due to frozen waste
line, C/25082 was substituted. Also necessary to thaw frozen lines on
C/25005.

Delay: 91(06) 1'43"

[End quote]

Apparently, Amtrak's winter weather woes are not just limited to Chicago.

13) What's the latest on the restoration of the Sunset Limited east of
New Orleans, into Florida? Nobody seems to know.

A number of concepts seems to be floating around, including putting back
the short-lived late 1990s Gulf Coast Limited daily service between New
Orleans and Mobile, Alabama, and then adding a separate tri-weekly
service between New Orleans and Orlando, which would operate separately
from the Sunset Limited, and originate in New Orleans. No direct
connection from the Sunset would be available eastbound; an overnight New
Orleans stay would be required. Westbound, a same day connection would be
available.

Other reports still circulate regarding extending the City of New Orleans
from New Orleans to Orlando.

One obvious connection which would greatly extend matrix opportunities
would be to re-extend the Palmetto south from Savannah to Jacksonville,
where hubbing opportunities with a Florida Panhandle/New Orleans service
could be restored. The Florida Coalition of Railroad Passengers under the
able leadership of President Jackson McQuigg continues to take a strong
leading public role in the effort.

14) In the "What Were These Guys Thinking?" Department, comes this story
from a TWA reader from Omaha, Nebraska, who was on the California Zephyr
February 19th.

The Associated Press reports that five men forced off the Zephyr for
smoking marijuana were discovered to be carrying a simple cardboard box
holding $700,000 in U.S. savings bonds, allegedly stolen from a Nevada
home.

The men were traveling from Sacramento, California to Chicago to
illegally launder the bonds. The five men, whose ages range from 24 to 42
were smoking pot on the train. When they were asked to leave the train
because of the pot smoking at Helper, Utah, about 100 miles south of Salt
Lake City, they were met by local authorities and a drug-sniffing dog.
The dog reacted strongly to two bags. The Helper police searched the bags
and found the bonds inside the cardboard box.

All five of the men were released on bond.

The moral of this story? When you're running from the law carrying huge
amounts of stolen federal bonds, don't do something stupid like smoke
dope in public places along the way. Then, again, it doesn't take a
rocket scientist to be a bond thief, so these same non-rocket scientists
probably wouldn't think twice about smoking dope, either.


If you are reading someone else's copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can
receive your own free copy each week by sending your e-mail address to

freetwa@unitedrail.org

You MUST include your name, preferred e-mail address, and city and state
where you live. If you have filters or firewalls placed on your Internet
connection, set your e-mail to receive incoming mail from
brucerichardson@unitedrail.org; we are unable to go through any
individual approvals processes for individuals. This mailing list is kept
strictly confidential and is not shared or used for any purposes other
than the distribution of This Week at Amtrak or related URPA materials.

All other correspondence, including requests to unsubscribe, should be
addressed to brucerichardson@unitedrail.org

J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-6760
brucerichardson@unitedrail.org
http://www.unitedrail.org


SPECIAL NOTE:
TWA (for those who are direct subscribers; not recipients through a list)
is now sent through a new system, and has a Sender address of
twa@unitedrail.org

If you have e-mail filters on your system, you may wish to adjust your
filters inorder to continue to receive This Week at Amtrak. If you do
miss any issues, every issue is archived at www.unitedrail.org
_______________________________________________
TWA mailing list
TWA@unitedrail.org
http://lists.unitedr...an/listinfo/twa

[AlanB]

MrFSS, on Thu, Mar 8, 2007, 08:24 PM, said:

Next question: When is Amtrak's "state of good repair" mantra going to
extend to the long distance Viewliner and Superliner fleets so enough
equipment can get out on the road and start generating some high value
revenue and revenue passenger miles for Amtrak, not to mention fulfilling
Amtrak's original mission of providing America with a true nationwide
network of passenger trains?

I guess Bruce didn't comb through those Amtrak reports hard enough to see all the numbers that were there.

In fiscal 2006 Amtrak completed major overhaul work on the following for long distance trains.

21 Amfleet II coaches.
2 Amfleet II lounges.

22 Superliner II sleepers
16 Superliner II lounges
15 Superliner II diners
11 Superliner II dorms

17 Superliner I sleepers remanufactured
27 Superliner I coaches
10 Superliner I lounges
10 Superliner I diners

8 Viewliners

In fiscal 2005 we saw:

25 Amfleet II coaches

10 Superliner II sleepers
5 Superliner II lounges
8 Superliner II coaches
7 Superliner II diners
8 Superliner II dorms

20 Superliner I sleepers remanufactured
23 Superliner I smoker-coaches converted to baggage-coaches

MrFSS, on Thu, Mar 8, 2007, 08:24 PM, said:

9) A private web design in Peoria, Illinois (You remember the hackneyed
phrase, "Let's see if it will play in Peoria.") has come up with an
interesting service for those who wish to monitor Amtrak's on time
performance levels.

The company has provided a free web site which will provide a three week
accounting of Amtrak on-time history for any given train to any given
destination. The site can be found at
http://web.peoriades...mtrak/train.cgi to keep track of
your favorite trains.

Faraz Hussain of Peoria Design Web explains how the site was developed:

[Begin quote]

My motivation for developing the on-time performance calculator was so I
could schedule my squash matches with my opponents at my destinations.
Squash is similar to racquetball in that it is an indoor court sport. I
live in Peoria where there are not many squash players so I travel to
Chicago and St. Louis often from Bloomington to play better players.

So knowing the statistical delays helps me realistically plan my day when
I arrive at my destination. The program is just a program that retrieves
information from Amtrak site behind the scenes. I based it off a similar
search engine I developed, Medreport.org. Medreport.org lets you create
reports by scanning up to thirty websites and extracting content based on
your search criteria.

The program did not take more than half a night to develop as I was able
to copy/paste a code from Medreport.org . I knew this tool would benefit
many others which is why I invested more time to make it robust and easy
to use. I am now working on a 'Catch a train' script that finds where a
particular train is on its route.

[End quote]

This could easily prove to be a user-friendly tool that will benefit many
Amtrak-watchers.

Congratulations to Faraz for making the news.

[AmtrakWPK]

Alan, thanks for the data compilation. Actually a pretty impressive list.
The only thing that I wish Richardson had added to the mention of the train-status bot was that it only accesses the Amtrak site when someone makes a request for information about a specific train to a specific station, and that it is not an unattended data-miner. One would expect Amtrak to probably complain about an unattended data-miner but that they would be more likely to tolerate something like what Faraz's tool actually is, because it does not contact the Amtrak site unless and until someone specifically asks it to check on a particular train for a particular station.

[MrFSS]

A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-6760, Electronic Mail info@unitedrail.org
http://www.unitedrail.org

Volume 4, Number 10


Founded over three decades ago in 1976 by Austin M. Coates, Jr., URPA is
a nationally known policy institute that focuses on solutions and plans
for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in
Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota,
California, Arizona, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and
Tennessee. For more detailed information, along with a variety of
position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at
http://www.unitedrail.org.

URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from
any outside sources.

1) URPA analyst Dr. Paul Wilson breaks down the many aspects of today's
American passenger rail network.

[Begin quote]

By Paul A. Wilson, Ph.D.

Unique Positive Aspects of Conventional Speed Passenger Rail

1. Passenger trains serve big cities, suburbs and small towns equally
well, without creating untoward disruption and NIMBY backlash. Indeed,
suburbs that are a part of a healthy railroad system, both long distance
and commuter, contain some of the most valuable and desirable real estate
in the country.

2. Trains easily pick people up enroute at multiple stops, offering a
robust matrix of origins and destinations to the traveling public. Even
single route trains offer high levels of connectivity between online
stations and adjoining communities.

3. Outside of cruise ships, no one else in the travel industry offers
moving sleeping accommodations. Rail sleeper accommodations match the
privacy of the private automobile, without the difficulties of providing
the vehicle driver.

4. Onboard amenities are potentially without parallel, at least on land.
No other form of transportation offers full meal service from a broad
menu, space to walk around while in transit, or a full service beverage
lounge open for extended hours. Passenger train travel also is provided
without a necessary level of high security measures, avoiding the
necessity of intrusive luggage and personal searches. There are no banned
materials or legal substances on passenger trains; passengers may travel
with all of their legal needs at all times.

5. Adding new destinations along existing routes can be achieved at low
cost. Stations are relatively inexpensive and the costs of stopping and
starting an enroute train are low.

6. Adding new routes or extensions of existing routes on existing
railroad rights-of-way is relatively low cost, at conventional speeds (79
MPH maximum).

7. For a conventional speed passenger railroad, the rights-of-way already
exist or have been land banked for the most part. No one's property need
be seized or disrupted. This is not true for most High Speed Rail
schemes.

8. Steel-wheel-on-steel-rail technology offers energy efficiency that's
nearly impossible to match. It's hard to argue with the immutable laws of
physics.

9. Passenger railroads operate on an environmentally-friendly basis, with
relatively quiet operation and they do so on narrow rights-of-way, quite
unlike super-highways and airports.

Current Problems with Intercity Passenger Rail in the continental United
States

1. An atrophied, now skeletal national network means high unit costs and
low productivity, due to Amtrak's inability to realize economies of
scale.

2. Privately-owned railroad infrastructure in most cases is subject to ad
valorem taxation by localities.

3. Inefficient labor practices due to a small network, high operating
subsidies, poor management, and a historical legacy of strict craft
separation mean Amtrak has a high-cost, low-productivity work force.

4. Outside of the few Amtrak-owned lines, passenger trains compete with
freight trains for access to routes owned and dispatched by freight
railroads.

5. The current method of non-scheduled operations of freight trains on
freight lines makes timekeeping difficult for time-sensitive passenger
trains.

6. Unreliable and poorly maintained passenger equipment and locomotives
creates Amtrak-caused delays, cancellations and many enroute customer
service shortcomings.

7. Since the inception of Amtrak over 35 years ago, passenger railroading
has been treated as a political football by many parochial interests,
with scant regard for maintaining a true national passenger railroad
service. Furthermore, the host freight railroads view Amtrak as an
interloper on their properties and, in some cases, a general nuisance.
Most host freight railroads do not consider the dispatching and hosting
of Amtrak trains on their systems as a profitable activity, but an
unwanted obligation agreed to by retired and/or dead senior managers who
were anxious to get rid of private passenger service at the end of the
1960s at almost any price when railroads in general were on a downward
spiral.

8. In the fastest-growing regions in the country, burgeoning freight
traffic and decades of scant investment by private freight railroads in
track and facilities has led to growing pains and severe congestion on
some Amtrak routes that Amtrak has had to contend with, while having very
little chance of resolution of a problem not of Amtrak's own making.

Fixes (addressing the above, in order)

1. Expand the network where it makes sense, add second daily "flip"
frequencies (at roughly 10 to 12 hours behind the other daily train) on
some existing routes. At a bare minimum, expand consists to full strength
where they were only a decade ago. Many Amtrak trains that are nine cars
or less today used to run as many as 18 cars on a daily basis.

2. Offer a federal program of partial tax abatement for
passenger-carrying freight lines and full tax abatement for those
passenger-only facilities still in private hands. Better yet, localities
should own and maintain the stations, just like they own the airports.
Amtrak should be a tenant, not a landlord.

3. An expanding Amtrak won't be so obsessed with "headcount" and other
hobgoblins, like "featherbedding." With more trains, low productivity
will be largely a self-correcting problem. Raise productivity with more
work being done because more trains are running, not by constantly
trimming the workforce down to skeletal and unproductive levels.

4. Work with the freight railroads to "fleet" passenger trains with their
existing intermodal freight trains. Fast intermodal trains and passenger
trains run at roughly the same average speeds.

5. Bring back scheduling. The freight customers will love it and it will
allow freight train crews to have a more normal life. This will attract
more workers to the railroads at time they're having problems with
recruitment, retention and crew fatigue. Changes could be made to the
Hours of Service law to encourage the railroads to move in this
direction. Example: the current 12 hours on and 12 off would apply to
scheduled movements, but non-scheduled movements would be subject to 8
on, 16 off.

6. First off, a no-brainer, devote more of Amtrak's budget to maintaining
long-haul rolling stock, the company's primary physical asset outside the
Northeast Corridor. The long-haul rolling stock is arguably Amtrak's most
productive asset. To handle enroute problems, bring back an old, reliable
solution by assigning mechanical forces to stops with longer layovers,
using contractors if necessary in locations that need only part-time
workers. In addition, reform work rules to soften craft lines and refocus
on providing the best experience for the customer, irrespective of one's
specific "job." Example: Assistant conductors or onboard service
employees could be cross-trained to perform simple repairs enroute,
enhancing time-keeping, reliability and passenger comfort.

7a. Stop using Amtrak's budget as a backdoor Railroad Retirement subsidy
for the freight railroads. Eliminate the Railroad Retirement "excess"
payments by Amtrak. Also eliminate RRB participation for Amtrak new hires
and move new hires to Social Security, with a 401(k) defined contribution
plan with hefty company match mandated by law. Allow all passenger rail
operators in on the same deal. (This may lure the freights into the game
by opening passenger-operation subsidiaries. See also Item 7d.)

7b. Relieve Amtrak of infrastructure ownership. The United States
government would assume direct ownership of NEC and all NEC-related debt.
The government would then lease the NEC to a regional authority for $1 a
year, with regional authority operating it and providing maintenance.
(Servicing the debt would be well worth the cost of getting the albatross
off Amtrak's books.) Turn Amtrak-owned lines (in upstate New York and
Michigan) over to the Federal Railroad Administration for use as
semi-high-speed test beds.

7c. Change Amtrak governance to eliminate, or at least balance out, the
political influence on the board. The US Department of Transportation has
been a source of unending frustration, and a font of much nonsense with
regards to Amtrak. That being the case, eliminate the DOT secretary seat
on the Board and replace the current board with an arrangement similar to
the Amtrak Reform Council. Board seats are to be appointed by majority
and minority leaderships in each house of Congress, plus the executive
branch, subject to an up-or-down vote on entire slate by the Senate. The
legislation would prohibit the Senate from "cherry-picking" appointees.
This will ensure buy-in and investment from both parties in the success
of Amtrak. Retain the current Amtrak Reform and Accountability Act
language mandating transportation and business expertise for board
members. Include one dedicated seat each for rail labor and host
railroads (perhaps chosen by the Association of American Railroads) on
the Board.

7d. Maintain Amtrak's current statutory access to freight lines and the
current liability caps, but explicitly prohibit franchising out routes,
with one key exception. The track owners would be eligible to obtain
either exclusive (new routes) or competing franchises (existing routes)
on their own lines. This eliminates the fear of passenger rail being the
"camel's nose" for open access. FRA would establish minimum service
standards for franchisees and develop formulas for operating subsidies
payable to franchisees.

8. Float federal- and state-issued bonds on an 80%/20% federal-state
split for critical new lines and improvements to existing lines,
terminals and other bottlenecks, with states and regional authorities
assuming title to the improved property. Track usage fees (per gross ton,
per train movement, etc.) would service the bond debt and ongoing
maintenance. FRA to develop formulas based on Return On Investment
criteria to make sure the funds flow equitably to all regions and ensure
sufficient revenue flows to service debt. ROI criteria and the need for
sufficient revenues assume they will be mixed-use freight/passenger
shared facilities. And lastly, provide regulatory relief from
environmental reviews for railroad construction on existing rights of
way.

[End quote]


If you are reading someone else's copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can
receive your own free copy each week by sending your e-mail address to

freetwa@unitedrail.org

You MUST include your name, preferred e-mail address, and city and state
where you live. If you have filters or firewalls placed on your Internet
connection, set your e-mail to receive incoming mail from
brucerichardson@unitedrail.org; we are unable to go through any
individual approvals processes for individuals. This mailing list is kept
strictly confidential and is not shared or used for any purposes other
than the distribution of This Week at Amtrak or related URPA materials.

All other correspondence, including requests to unsubscribe, should be
addressed to brucerichardson@unitedrail.org

J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-6760
brucerichardson@unitedrail.org
http://www.unitedrail.org


SPECIAL NOTE:

TWA (for those who are direct subscribers; not recipients through a list)
is now sent through a new system, and has a Sender address of

twa@unitedrail.org

If you have e-mail filters on your system, you may wish to adjust your
filters inorder to continue to receive This Week at Amtrak. If you do
miss any issues, every issue is archived at www.unitedrail.org
_______________________________________________
TWA mailing list
TWA@unitedrail.org
http://lists.unitedr...an/listinfo/twa

[MrFSS]

This Week at Amtrak; March 29, 2007

A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-6760, Electronic Mail info@unitedrail.org
http://www.unitedrail.org


Volume 4, Number 12

Founded over three decades ago in 1976 by Austin M. Coates, Jr., URPA is
a nationally known policy institute that focuses on solutions and plans
for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in
Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota,
California, Arizona, the District of Columbia, Texas, New York, and
Tennessee. For more detailed information, along with a variety of
position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at
http://www.unitedrail.org.

URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from
any outside sources.

1) This Week at Amtrak is always pleased to feature the writings and
thoughts of Gilbert E. Carmichael, one of America's foremost experts on
transportation. Mr. Carmichael, from 1989 to 1993, was the Administrator
of the United States Federal Railroad Administration, and is currently
Senior Chairman of the Intermodal Transportation Institute of the
University of Denver. Mr. Carmichael was also chairman of the Amtrak
Reform Council.

Mr. Carmichael spoke at the National Press Club's Transportation Table
last week in Washington on March 23rd. The following is a transcript of
Mr. Carmichael's speech.

[Begin quote]

Intermodalism: A New Science of Transportation

On most occasions when I speak about intermodal transportation, I devote
an extensive portion of my remarks to simply providing a basic
orientation. This audience does not require such coddling. You all grasp
the fundamentals. Many of you are experts.

You understand that freight transportation has undergone a revolution
during the past quarter-century and that intermodal is now the global
standard for moving freight. You also understand how it succeeds -
interconnections . containerization . speed . safety . reliable
scheduling . economic and fuel efficiency . and marshaling the strengths
of each individual mode, while avoiding modal weaknesses. We are looking
at a new science of transportation.

Yes, this intermodal system works. It continues to grow. Its future
success will hinge partly upon our ability to further improve the routes
and terminals that enable it to function in the manner desired. However,
although a revolution in freight transportation has taken place, the
general public is unaware of it. Most public officials and opinion
leaders do not even know the intermodal system exists! It may be
unreasonable to think that the average citizen will get excited about
such matters, but ignorance on the part of our public officials and
opinion leaders has consequences! Ignorance about transportation in
general - and intermodal in particular - has placed government at all
levels "well behind the curve" in thinking and acting on a wide range of
transportation issues. During our intermodal revolution they sat on the
sidelines for 25 years.

By tradition, government agencies concentrate on each mode's
infrastructure. Highway agencies build and maintain roads. Airport
authorities build and maintain airports. Government provides grants to
these and other systems - urban transit and Amtrak, for example - to
offset operating deficits, meet capital needs, and help upgrade the
infrastructure they use. Several things are wrong with this historical
arrangement.

For one thing, it leads to one-dimensional thinking. Federal and state
governments concentrate on infrastructure, but do not pay much attention
to how it is actually used - or where the most promising opportunities
exist. Freight's intermodal network, on the other hand, has succeeded
because it is customer-driven. Our "infrastructure mentality" also causes
government to view the modes in isolation, yet the intermodal system
prospers by efficiently unifying them horizontally.

Among public officials at all levels of government - including many
people in transportation agencies - the ignorance of freight
transportation is almost universal. Some regional planning agencies have
written transportation plans that devote more attention to bicycle paths
than to freight transportation. We must remember that for every passenger
moving on America's transportation system, a ton of freight is moving.

Ignorance about freight leads to bad decisions and missed opportunities.
Nearly all recent progress and innovation in US transportation has come
in the freight area. Nearly all of those gains are attributable to action
and investment by the private sector - not government. I believe that
freight will continue to be the category in which we achieve the most
impressive gains. The ship, train, and truck have found each other!

Unfortunately, government is heavily involved in passenger policy.
Government has resisted reform and modernization. We desperately need an
intermodal systems approach to passenger service. In this regard, we are
20 years behind the freight industry. The plane, train, and intercity bus
must find each other!

Finally, this obsolete focus on individual modes and individual modal
infrastructure, coupled with a lack of knowledge about customers and
markets, causes important issues to fall through the cracks because they
do not have a governmental "home." The most striking example is the
intercity bus industry. We are losing it. Most people do not care. They
should. It frankly amazes me that a mayor will loudly protest the
threatened loss of airline services or a single Amtrak train to his or
her community. Yet, the disappearance of intercity bus service - which
may have generated more local ridership - is allowed to take place
without comment or complaint. Greyhound is almost invisible today.

As commercial air service continues its retreat from urban areas with a
population of less than 100,000, people will still have to get to major
airports, only the terminals will be farther away. The choice is simple -
bus or private car. The bus is flexible. Routes can be adjusted as
markets change. Service frequency can be increased or decreased,
depending upon demand, and at modest cost. Despite these advantages, the
intercity bus industry is in trouble. Government at every level simply
does not care.

Capital Investment Strategies

There are two issues currently up for consideration that relate to the
intermodal theme. One is the proposed 25 percent tax credit for freight
railroad capital investment. Intermodal's biggest challenge is simply
that of capacity expansion. I believe that the freight railroads have
done a good job funding improvements that add capacity and enhance
intermodal service. Capital investments that directly influence these two
priorities currently are running in the $5-8 billion annual range.
Meeting even predictable near-term business growth will require a much
higher commitment.

A tax credit will unleash substantial additional amounts on an ongoing
basis. I urge support for it. The huge North American rail system has
been single-tracked in the last 30 years. This right-of-way is probably
carrying only 25 percent of its capacity. If we go back to
double-or-triple-tracking, grade separation, and GPS, it would equal
three times more capacity - and this right-of-way already is in place and
paid for! If we build this Interstate II, it will be far more significant
than Interstate I was.

Senators Trent Lott (Mississippi) and Frank Lautenberg (New Jersey) are
working on a multi-billion-dollar Amtrak reauthorization proposal, which
includes incentives for states to provide matching funds. I believe that
we will have to involve the states more deeply in issues associated with
intercity rail passenger service. There is overlap with the states' other
transportation functions, and there is an overlap with freight's
intermodal system. How public officials deal with specific passenger
projects can help create a better intermodal system - or damage the
existing one. States might wisely partner with the railroads to add a
third track. This may be the real public-private partnership we keep
talking about.

In considering Amtrak, I am aware of the deferred capital needs of the
Northeast Corridor: $20 billion in 2002 and rolling stock system-wide.
However, I would urge that in considering any new routes or services,
only one priority should be applied. That is to upgrade the most
promising existing city-pair corridors by first increasing train
frequencies and improving schedule times within the framework of
conventional intercity service. In time, I believe we will need to expand
high-speed routes. But in nearly all cases, we will need to develop and
build a customer base with more frequencies before making the leap to a
true high-speed operation. The 13 federally designated corridors are a
good place to start for the city pairs.

State and Federal Government Roles

Perhaps the most important next step in advancing intermodal
transportation, both freight and passenger, is to take a fresh look at
the structure and priorities of government agencies. I have noted that
since 1980 freight intermodal has flourished because the private sector
was in charge. Some would claim that government involvement easily could
have retarded its growth. But, I do believe that government has a role in
freight, if for no reason other than the linkages among the surface modes
and connections at public ports, terminals, and the new evolving
"logistics centers." I do not believe that meaningful progress can be
achieved in passenger intermodalism unless state transportation
departments are the catalyst for it!

Why the states? Who else will do it? Theoretically, the airlines might be
promoters of improved surface connections to deliver passengers to their
gates - but they operate at airports they do not own! Today those airport
managers have shown little interest in anything but "parking lot" and
"car rental" revenues. Nearly all efforts by intercity bus companies to
provide direct service or to be allowed to maintain facilities on airport
terminal grounds have been summarily rebuffed. The bus companies cannot
do it. Name me one major airport with a Greyhound station.

Amtrak is not in a leadership position to be a broker or coordinator, and
its management lacks the skill, vision, and entrepreneurial spirit
required to bring it off. It seems so logical that the airplane should
meet the bus and train - by design. Just as it does at Hong Kong, Charles
de Gaulle, and Narita, Japan.

To prepare public agencies for a belated arrival into the intermodal era,
I propose that the chief executive of each state transportation
department should have two principal deputies - one to oversee policies
and programs associated with freight transportation and the other to
carry out an identical role in passenger transportation. Each could be
meaningful players in coordination and intermodal project design and
approval. They would soon learn that they have to listen to the
customers.

Senior executives of these agencies should have a working knowledge of
the new principles of intermodal transportation, because a majority of
policy decisions and projects need to be carried out with priority given
to intermodal needs - for both freight and passenger improvements. Senior
DOT executives either should have gained this intermodal knowledge
through professional experience in the transportation industry or they
should receive formal academic training. That is what the Intermodal
Transportation Institute at the University of Denver is doing through its
Executive Master's Program, which awards a Master of Science in
Intermodal Transportation Management from the University of Denver.

Dividing the executive functions - policy, planning, programs, and grants
- into the freight and passenger categories makes practical sense. It
also would make a powerful statement that we, in fact, do understand that
the world has changed.

What about the federal government? Congress still operates as if this
were the 1950s. Members talk intermodal but vote for traditional highway
projects. I hold out little hope for leadership from Capitol Hill. What
about the US DOT? Fifteen years ago they created an intermodal office. It
had no authority. It was purely cosmetic. Eventually it was done away
with. A senior official of the department told me several weeks ago that
steps now have been taken to bring a serious intermodal flavor to its
policies and actions, by concentrating on freight. I am not hung up on
that point, because I realize that formal changes affect such things as
congressional committee relationships. Even the chairs of the most
insignificant subcommittees rebel if even half a smidgen of their turf is
threatened. I recognize the difficulty of a formal reorganization of
Congress, but a committee on intermodal freight and one on intermodal
passengers make sense.

But, if my friends at DOT are serious about this, I ask them to show us
tangible evidence. They will not have credibility until they do. A chart
with dotted lines showing coordination arrangements will not convince us.
Even having an intermodal "enforcer" who can mandate coordination will
not suffice. We in the intermodal community will believe you only when we
see solid evidence that your FAA, FRA, Highway, and UMTA leaders are
energetic intermodal advocates - without pressure from above. Further, I
propose that DOT informally gather the best minds of the intermodal
community to examine what they are up to. That could help persuade us. It
also could help DOT avoid going in the wrong direction in the process of
trying to do something right. Congestion is reaching critical mass - the
huge untapped capacity of North American railroad right-of-way may be the
solution! We must change directions.

Intermodalism and Energy

I have reached the closing portion of my remarks without mentioning the
subject of energy. I happen to believe that high fuel prices are with us
for the long term and that they will go even higher! But it does not
matter what I think, when the subject is intermodal. Why? Intermodal made
sense when fuel cost one-half of today's prices. Intermodal makes even
more sense today. If prices drop, the container will still be the
low-cost service. It made Wal-Mart. If energy costs double in the years
ahead, intermodal will simply gain more market share and help keep
inflation under control.

There is a lesson here for politicians who are jumping on the energy
bandwagon. Investment in intermodal is a no-brainer if you want to
conserve fuel and keep the cost of goods and services in line, even if we
radically re-price fuel, as we have. And it has a built-in hedging
mechanism, because intermodal investments will pay off even if prices
decline. If fuel cells work, I expect both truck and rail to adopt the
technology. The intermodal marketplace will not be skewed because energy
costs are only one component of the intermodal advantage.

However, I would observe that railroads do have a trump card. Unlike
their partners in trucking and aviation, if at some point in the future
permanent oil shortages are a serious threat, rail can convert to
electricity generated from an alternate source. The rail mode already
carries its freight and passengers nine times farther per gallon of fuel
than do the highway modes.

Thank you.

[End quote]

Mr. Carmichael may be reached by e-mail at gilcarmichael@bellsouth.net

2) News item, from The Ticket, an independent electronic newsletter for
frequent business travelers:

[Begin quote]

AIRLINE STATS OF NOTE. This one slipped underneath our radar . but
according the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Delta is no longer
the nation's third largest carrier after #1 American and #2 United. Based
on year end results, Southwest Airlines is now #3, based on total revenue
passenger miles in 2006. The five busiest routes in the U.S.:

New York - Chicago

Ft Lauderdale - New York

Los Angeles - Chicago

Atlanta - New York

Washington, DC - Chicago

[End quote]

Despite the poor use of abbreviations for real words in this article,
what is significant about airline statistics in space usually devoted to
passenger rail? Note that the rankings are based solely on revenue
passenger miles, not meaningless numbers like boardings or passengers
carried. Revenue passenger miles are the gold standard which EVERY OTHER
FORM OF COMMON CARRIER, OTHER THAN AMTRAK, USES.

Until Amtrak adopts this common standard, all of its numbers will be
meaningless in the real world of transportation.

3) Usually, Union Pacific Railroad is considered the bad guy of
railroading to many who are familiar with railroads in the United States.
UP, once a shining beacon of efficiency in the world of railroading, and
a pioneering company which tied North America together by rail, lately
has had a number of corporate problems which have led to meltdowns in
customer service and disgruntled freight shippers. Additionally, UP has,
in recent history, consistently been Amtrak's most frustrating host
railroad, with consistently abysmal on time performance when hosting
Amtrak trains.

Just recently, in Sacramento, California, the UP suffered a huge loss
when a long UP railroad bridge caught on fire and burned. Freight traffic
was detoured at great expense, and Amtrak trains temporarily lost an
important part of a route. However, this week, a medium sized miracle
happened.

[Begin quote]

They did it!

After the March 15 fire that destroyed Union Pacific's approach trestle
to the American River Bridge east of Sacramento, the railroad set to work
immediately to build a new, concrete/steel trestle.

Many expressed amazement at how fast UP was working, and at their
projected date for one open track of April 1st. The second track was to
be completed by May 1st.

UP proved that their old slogan "We Can Handle It" can still apply. At
1:30 A.M. on Tuesday, March 27th, Track One on the approach trestle was
completed and opened for traffic. UP now anticipates that Track Two will
be completed and open for traffic on April 3rd.

As a result, the short-turn of Amtrak's California Zephyr was to end
immediately, with Train 5(25) going to Emeryville. The Zephyr arrived in
Sacramento for the first time since the fire. ...

Attached photo: the first train across the new trestle, from UP's
Sacramento Bridge Update page.
http://www.uprr.com/...to_bridge.shtml

[End quote]

Many will remember the wreckage to the railroad infrastructure in and
around the Gulf Coast during the hurricane season of 2005 when Hurricane
Katrina slammed into Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. In a time frame
measured in days, Norfolk Southern had its main line from Atlanta to New
Orleans up and open, even after a very long bridge over Lake
Pontchartrain fell into the murky lake waters. The CSX main line from
Pensacola, Florida to New Orleans was completely destroyed, yet parts of
it were up and running in just a few weeks, and the line was completely
reopened in less than six months.

Some in the railroad industry lobby for the nationalization of all
railroad infrastructure in this country, so the rail would be considered
the same way highways are considered.

Highway US 90 on the Gulf Coast is still not completely reopened after
Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and it's 2007. Considering the miraculous job
the private railroads do to rebuild their infrastructure when someone
goes wrong, do we really want to lose this capability and turn over these
critical tasks to government?

Important note: While the private railroads are back to operating at full
capacity throughout the Gulf Coast, Amtrak still has not restored the
Sunset Limited east of New Orleans, using a plethora of excuses ranging
from the dog at their homework to unusable station facilities (even
though all of the passenger platforms are in place, and the only truly
questionable location is Mobile, Alabama because the station building has
been sold for redevelopment). All of the private companies got their
collective acts together and rebuilt and rejuvenated. Amtrak, a child of
government, is still stalling.

4) A former Amtrak manager commented on last week's story about URPA Vice
President Andrew Selden's speech in California at the RailPac meeting.
Mr. Selden's speech may be viewed on YouTube at
http://www.youtube.c...h?v=7HFfbb-VTmM

[Begin quote]

Andy's numbers demonstrate passenger rail has economic utility with the
bare bones structure that has been in place for the life of Amtrak, and
economic ruin (waste) has been primarily on the soft asset side (people).
You can park cars and engines, and will not cost a plug nickel, but
Amtrak has not been able to park people (employees) that cost money and
add zip to the utility of Amtrak. Andy is no stranger to the word
"growth," and will be treated like a leper because he advocates change.

The highway people are your allies, and the new young generation no
longer thinks passenger trains are old-fashioned or old hat. Many in the
new generation think most people over 30 are pretty stupid for dumping
trains and leaving everyone with slow, crowded and expensive roads, along
with no choice but air intercity transportation that is not an
all-weather route anyone can claim.

The utility of passenger trains does not require brain surgeons by the
masses. As the saying goes, "you always want what you can't have."

[End quote]


If you are reading someone else's copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can
receive your own free copy each week by sending your e-mail address to

freetwa@unitedrail.org

You MUST include your name, preferred e-mail address, and city and state
where you live. If you have filters or firewalls placed on your Internet
connection, set your e-mail to receive incoming mail from
twa@unitedrail.org; we are unable to go through any individual approvals
processes for individuals. This mailing list is kept strictly
confidential and is not shared or used for any purposes other than the
distribution of This Week at Amtrak or related URPA materials.

All other correspondence, including requests to unsubscribe, should be
addressed to brucerichardson@unitedrail.org

J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-6760
brucerichardson@unitedrail.org
http://www.unitedrail.org
_______________________________________________
TWA mailing list
TWA@unitedrail.org
http://lists.unitedr...an/listinfo/twa

[WICT106]

This Week at Amtrak; April 5, 2007:

1) Last week, TWA was fortunate to share a speech by former Federal
Railroad Administration Administrator and former Chairman of the Amtrak
Reform Council Gilbert E. Carmichael on the new science of intermodalism.

March 23rd, the same day Mr. Carmichael was delivering his speech in
Washington, the current Chairman of Corridor Capital LLC in Chicago and
the former Vice Chairman of the Amtrak Reform Council, James E. Coston
delivered a fascinating speech in Chicago about the future of passenger
rail and the importance of long distance trains. Mr. Coston’s remarks
follow.

[Begin quote]

The Dirty Little Secret The Government Doesn't Want You To Know:
Americans Love Passenger Trains

By James E. Coston, Chairman, Corridor Capital LLC

Delivered at the National Passenger Rail Leadership Summit, Union League
Club, Chicago

[M]y speech is about a Dirty Little Secret. I want to talk to you today
about some things that passenger-train advocates are not supposed to know
— and that members of the media and the general public – and especially
public policy makers and legislators – are not supposed to know about
passenger trains.

I bring this Dirty Little Secret up today – not because I want to
discourage you, or demoralize you – but because I want to arm you with
essential material you will need as you take the fight for a modern
passenger-rail service to the next level. We mustn't let the next 35
years look like the last 35 years.

Before somebody accuses me of opening on an excessively grim note,
however, let me just observe that these are very exciting days that
furnish us with excellent grounds for hope.

We just proved it here in Illinois. As many of you know, last year the
Illinois General Assembly voted to double its spending for
state-supported Amtrak trains, and to get four new daily round trips
added to the timetable on about five months’ notice.

During that extraordinarily short lead time, Amtrak had to negotiate
slots for each train with the railroads, identify and prepare suitable
rolling stock, and hire and train new crew members.

It wasn't easy. There were glitches — both before and after the new
trains were introduced.

But it was all worth it. Just in case you've been on Mars and haven't
seen the actual numbers, here’s what happened.

On October 30, the Illinois Department of Transportation began sponsoring
two new frequencies between Chicago and St. Louis and one additional
frequency each between Chicago and Carbondale and Chicago and Quincy:

In the first full month in which the new trains operated — November 2006
– ridership on state-supported trains between Chicago and St. Louis shot
up 91 per cent.

When calculated across the full slate of Chicago-St. Louis trains — three
state-supported plus two supported wholly by Amtrak — the ridership
increase was 51 per cent over November 2005

On the Chicago-Carbondale route, which got its first morning departure
from each end of the line in nearly 30 years, ridership was up 61 per
cent in the first month. Last month it was up almost 70 per cent.

On the weakest of the three routes — Chicago-Quincy — ridership was up 35
per cent in the first month. Last month it was up 47 per cent.

The holiday peaks of November and December are long gone now, but the
monthly ridership figures just keep growing.

On February 9, after three full months of operation, IDOT reported that
the St. Louis corridor was 50.6 per cent ahead of a year ago, the Quincy
route was now 44.6 per cent ahead, and the Carbondale route, which serves
two huge state universities, was 68.6 per cent ahead of a year earlier.

It now seems very likely that sometime this summer — that is, less than a
year after the new frequencies were introduced – ridership on Amtrak’s
three Illinois corridors will have doubled.

Nowhere in the United States has passenger-train ridership ever increased
at such a pace.

Which is truly amazing when you learn our Dirty Little Secret: This
wonderful new Illinois train service actually isn't very good.

Put it this way: Illinois is not California.

We never passed a bond-issue package like California did in 1990.

We never raised $245 million for intercity passenger-rail infrastructure
and $382 million for passenger rolling stock.

We never bought our own fleet of 17 locomotives and 88 passenger cars.

We have to live with Amtrak’s Horizon cars, which are not true corridor
equipment but adaptations of commuter-train rolling stock. They look
dirty on the outside, and they're smelly on the inside.

We also must live with the infrastructure limitations of our host
railroads. Illinois has not restored any missing double track, as
California recently did on portions of the former Southern Pacific
Railroad.

Between Amtrak’s rolling stock and the railroads’ capacity constraints,
on-time performance of the Illinois trains is terrible, and the Amtrak
and IDOT people in this room will confirm it:

On the Carbondale corridor the CN/IC delivers the trains to their final
destination on time only about 80 per cent of the time.

But on the other corridors BN and UP get the job done only about 50 per
cent of the time. And the rate is dropping as their freight traffic
continues to build.

Did I mention the stations? Our stations are, for the most part,
pathetically inadequate to handle the numbers now seeking to ride.

Only a handful of Illinois stations, led by the new intermodal
transportation center at Champaign and followed by joint Metra-Amtrak
stations at Glenview and Naperville, meet current standards for passenger
accessibility, capacity, convenience and comfort.

Chicago Union Station is beyond obsolete. It has crowd-control and
user-friendliness problems that are on the brink of becoming
public-safety and public-health problems.

And while our state budget for passenger-rail operating support just
doubled from $12 million to $24 million, it still falls far short of
California’s $75 million, which pays for 40 daily round trips compared
with Illinois’ seven.

Yet all of these inadequacies only emphasize how big our victory in
Illinois really is.

Just imagine: If we can double our train ridership in less than a year
with the inferior trains, tracks and stations we've got now, think how
fast our ridership would grow if these assets could be replaced with
adequate ones.

If I can slip in a little infomercial, that’s the task our company,
Corridor Capital, is working on today: We're trying to bring Amtrak,
state DOTs and investors together to make it easier for operators of
passenger trains to get the modern rolling stock, stations, maintenance
shops — and even infrastructure — they need to handle the coming tsunami
of passenger-train demand.

We feel a lot more confident in offering those services today than we did
a year ago, because the numbers we're getting from these seven daily
Illinois frequencies have taught us a lesson that now needs to be shared
with rail advocates — and with elected officials and public policy makers
all across the country.

What is that lesson?

Simply that the United States has crossed a major watershed: There no
longer is any argument about whether the American people want to ride
trains.

Remember back in 2000 when Amtrak President George Warrington told a
congressional committee that it looked like Amtrak was not really on its
"glide path to profitability" — yeah, remember that? — and that maybe it
was time to hold a "national debate" on whether the country should make a
commitment to a serious passenger-rail service?

I'm here to tell you today that debate is over and the verdict is in: The
people are riding trains.

... In fact, in Illinois our ridership was growing by double digits even
for the three years before the four new trains were added.

Now we're going to double our ridership in one year. We're going to fill
up the new trains without cannibalizing any trade from the old ones.

Even California never did that.

And please remember, there’s another way Illinois is not California:
We're not cultural pioneers here. New trends do not start in Illinois.
They reach Illinois—usually from the West Coast and after a lag of
several years. We're Heartland, not La-La Land.

Well, the train trend has reached the Heartland. If Illinois is ready,
the whole country is ready.

In one sense, this success makes our job as advocates easier.

When we ask our elected officials to fund more passenger trains and more
infrastructure improvements, we don't have to speculate about, "If we run
it will they come?"

We ran it, and they came.

We don't have to hire expensive consultants to do computerized ridership
projections.

The public is buying tickets faster than the computers can project the
trends.

All we have to do is run trains, and the riders show up at the depot.

And those riders, my friends, are only a tiny sliver of the potential
ridership in our state and across the rest of the Heartland.

That’s because most of the people who need these trains still don't
realize the trains exist.

Amtrak and IDOT have close to zero money for promotion.

There’s no TV advertising and only a tiny amount of print advertising,
most of it in college media. We still don't understand how all these new
passengers found out about their trains.

So you have to ask yourself not only, "How many people would ride these
trains if they were actually good?" — but also, "How many people would
ride these trains if they knew about them?

And by "know about them" I don't mean just reading a news story
re-written from an IDOT or Amtrak press release.

I mean hearing and seeing first-rate advertising for these trains —
creative, exciting, contemporary messages appearing repeatedly – in the
same forums where people learn about Southwest Airlines and Carnival
Cruises and Hilton Hotels and Harrah’s Casinos and Disney World and
Toyota and all the other travel/hospitality/mobility resources we have to
choose from today.

Have you any idea of the scale of the response that would follow if
trains were promoted as hip and happening?

That’s not a rhetorical question. I can answer that question, because the
answer already is part of the historical record. The Dirty Little Secret
is, we are not entering new territory. We've seen this movie before.

How many of you have read the wonderful book by Rush Loving called The
Men Who Loved Trains?

... The Men Who Loved Trains now in its sixth or seventh printing, and
there’s no mystery why: It’s a very exciting, well written book about
some of the most dramatic episodes and larger-than-life personalities
behind the revival of the Class I railroad industry in the late 20th
century.

Don Phillips raved about it, TRAINS magazine excerpted one of its
chapters, and everybody who’s read it loves it.

But The Men Who Loved Trains doesn't just deal with the freight side of
the railroad industry. Rush Loving devotes three-and-a-half pages to
showing that while the federal government was laboring during the 1970s
to revive much of the nation’s freight railroad industry it had to figure
out what to do with the passenger trains as well.

And if you read those three-and-a-half pages you will probably react with
the same sense of deja vu that I did.

According to Rush, skyrocketing ridership growth on passenger trains is
nothing new in this country. Even the passenger-train advocates may have
forgotten it, but the kind of ridership growth we're seeing today already
happened 35 years ago..

Rush tells this part of the story through the eyes of Jim McClellan who
retired a couple of years ago from Norfolk Southern.

But when Amtrak started up in 1971 Jim McClellan went to work there as a
long-range planner in the marketing department. And McClellan was there
when a very interesting figure named Harold Graham left Pan American
World Airways and joined Amtrak to become vice president of marketing.

I'll tell what happened in Rush’s own words, based on his interviews with
McClellan:

"Amtrak’s marketing vice president was a rotund, highly personable man
with a big white walrus mustache who had come from Pan American World
Airways, and he started promoting trains to the masses like he had pushed
flights to Paris and Puerto Rico. The American public responded and
started sampling the trains again. Ridership was growing at about 15 per
cent a year. McClellan had foreseen this, projecting a growth rate in
this range for Amtrak’s first year or so, a rate the operations
department could easily handle. But he grew concerned that traffic would
surge beyond expectations if such a marketing program continued. Noting
that a similar promotion had doubled business on the Canadian National
Railway and it had not been able to handle the volume, McClellan warned
his superiors in a memo that they were headed for trouble. ‘The results
could be disastrous,’ he warned. ‘It’s hard to get a growth curve and
then turn it off.’ His memo did not endear him to the marketing vice
president or to Roger Lewis, Amtrak’s chairman."

Loving goes on to point out McClellan’s importuning irritated Roger
Lewis, who "shot the messenger" by firing McClellan in 1972.

But, in Loving’s words, "…by 1974 his worst fears had come true. Traffic
surged, and Amtrak was not able to handle it."

I can confirm Jim and Rush’s testimony personally.

At the same time as the events in this account were taking place, I was
earning my college money working for Amtrak as a ticket agent and
station-services representative at Chicago Union Station.

I can confirm to you that every night we were putting out a sold-out
18-car Broadway Limited to Philadelphia and New York, and that every
night I had to tell several dozen travelers who arrived at Union Station
without reservations that we had no space for them.

I can confirm to you that summertime demand for space on the Western
trains was so great that Amtrak ran not only the Southwest Chief but also
temporarily revived the Chief on a "flipped" schedule that allowed a
morning departure from Chicago, an evening arrival in Los Angeles and
convenient daytime departures for intermediate stops that the Southwest
Chief served only in the wee hours.

I can confirm to you that we ran not only the California Zephyr to
Oakland but the Denver Zephyr as well to handle the overflow demand that
didn't need to ride all the way to California.

I can confirm similar market demand existed for what today is called the
Chicago Hub service. On major holidays, and on many weekends, we would
run second sections following the Turbo Trains to St. Louis, Detroit and
Milwaukee.

When I came back to work extra at Thanksgiving and Christmas, I found
Amtrak running 10-car trains to Quincy, even borrowing commuter cars from
the railroads in those pre-Metra days.

We did the same thing on football weekends when there were big games at
Champaign, Carbondale, Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor.

... As Rush Loving points out, this demand had to be contained. The
burgeoning demand for passenger rail service alarmed the railroads. They
were under the impression that ridership would continue to dwindle.

The rail carriers believed that in five or six years the government would
remove the passenger trains from their rails for good and allow them to
downgrade their tracks to the 40-mile-per-hour standards of the coal and
grain trains that were believed to be their sole remaining lines of
business.

Rampant passenger-train demand also had alarmed the auto manufacturers,
the highway builders, the airlines and the petroleum industry.

These industries had been assured that demand for passenger trains did
not exist and that the federal government would invest only in
transportation projects that favored their interests.

The demand also alarmed Congress, which had been assured Amtrak would be
a modest program that would not last long and would not cost a lot of
money.

There simply was no real appetite among policymakers for a passenger-rail
buildup at the time. So the demand had to be squelched.

The U.S. government made a fundamental decision: It would not respond to
the growing demand for passenger trains.

Funding for growth was to be withheld.

Existing rolling stock would be replaced, but only on a one-for-one
basis.

The size and capacity of the fleet would not be expanded.

New routes would not be opened.

Additional frequencies would not be scheduled.

New stations would not be built.

Service levels would not be upgraded to attract more passengers or to
enable Amtrak to enter new markets.

Instead, the government would spend the next 35 years propagating a
series of urban legends suggesting that demand for passenger trains
actually was shrinking rather than growing.

One of these legends claimed that the American people had embraced
highways and airlines as their sole preferences for intercity travel.

This legend continued to be propagated even after USA Today reported in
August of 2001 — a month before 9/11 — that 41 per cent of Americans
contacted in a poll said they will not fly. Whether out of fear, dislike
of the flying experience, or some other factor, nearly half of all
Americans simply shun air travel.

Yet the legend that Americans love to fly persists even today, when no
comedian can open his routine without talking about what happened to him
at the airport or what happened to a planeload of passengers trapped on a
grounded jet for 10 or 12 hours.

It was a masterful and very daring use of the Big Lie technique, and it’s
had a very long run.

Even today, when the demand for passenger-train service has become too
big and too noisy to dismiss, the Big Lie has mutated in order to stay
alive.

In the current version, passenger trains are now O.K. and people seem to
want them, but only if they are of the type known as "corridor trains."

Another species of train known as "a long-distance train" is now being
portrayed as "not O.K.," and travelers are said to be rejecting them.

The only problem is that demand for space on the long-distance trains is
growing too, even though those trains get even less promotion than the
so-called corridor trains.

Why is this new version of the old urban legend succeeding?

One reason is the power of vocabulary. Policy wonks and journalists have
a predisposition to believe that every distinction in language signals a
difference in the real world.

It would not occur to these people that both types of trains are used the
same way: The bulk of the people who ride the so-called long-distance
trains actually them use them as corridor trains: They get on or off at
the intermediate points, not the end points, traveling only for a
fraction of the train’s total itinerary.

I am very grateful to our friend Rick Harnish, who did a study that
pointed out all these facts nearly three years ago. Rick’s study was
written up by Fritz Plous in the August, 2004, issue of the Midwest Rail
Report.

Rick pointed out that only 9 per cent of the Empire Builder’s passenger
traveled the whole distance from Chicago to Seattle or Portland.

The other 91 per cent traveled on 929 other trip permutations averaging
only 845 miles.

That meant that for the price of one long-distance train, Amtrak was
getting the equivalent of five or six corridor trains — a terrific
bargain.

Think how much more it would have cost to base separate crews, rolling
stock, maintenance forces and commissaries at St. Paul, Fargo, Minot and
Spokane. Amtrak avoids all that by running a single daily train from
Chicago to Seattle.

Rick also found out that the Empire Builder was getting two subsidies —
one from Amtrak and one from its own sleeping-car passengers.

The first-class ticket-holders made up only 16 per cent of the
passengers, but they were paying 43 per cent of the train’s costs.

Those first-class fares helped hold down the cost of travel for the coach
passengers. But that big source of revenue wouldn't have been there if
the Builder weren't an overnight long-distance train.

Look behind the curtain and you find the real reason why the federal
government has decided corridor trains are O.K. and long-distance trains
are not O.K.

The word "corridor" is actually a proxy for the term "state-sponsored."
Corridor trains are deemed good because the federal government — and
Amtrak — can get state governments to pay for them.

Long-distance trains are deemed "bad" because it’s impossible to get
states to collaborate on funding trains with a multi-state route
structure.

The corridor trains are an Amtrak commission. The long-distance trains
are not a commission, but a mission — belonging solely to Amtrak and its
tightwad sponsor, the federal government.

Thirty-five years later the campaign to get passenger trains off the
federal budget and into somebody else’s continues.

But this time there’s a difference: The campaign isn't working. Congress
isn't buying it, and the last we heard, the new CEO of Amtrak isn’t
buying it either. At the very least, he’s having doubts about its
utility, if not its appropriateness.

As I said, the debate is over. The American people want to ride trains.

But if the debate is over, the fight isn't. I said I wanted to arm you
with some arguments that would take the debate to the next level.

And the next level is simply this: More trains, on more routes —
expansion of the system.

And not just what we now characterize as "corridor" trains or
"long-distance" trains, but trains that use contemporary business and
trip-generation models to attract and efficiently serve all varieties of
domestic travel.

We've saved our trains enough. Now it’s time to grow them.

And there’s only one way to do that, and that’s to convince the federal
government — not just Congress, but the administration too — that a
passenger-train buildup is a federal responsibility along with highways
and civil aviation — and that it’s needed and wanted.

No more excuses this time.

Especially that feeble and obsolete excuse that "Americans just won't
ride trains."

If you believe that, I've got a state I'd like to show you.

Thank you. ...

[End quote]

If you are reading someone else’s copy of This Week at Amtrak, you can
receive your own free copy each week by sending your e-mail address to

freetwa@unitedrail.org