Just off the top of my head, X-Train's negotiated slot price was ~30x Amtrak's average pay per train mile and there's several studies showing that significantly more double track is required when passenger trains are running on a line due to the speed differential.
Sure. I'm looking at a fully double tracked line from New York to Chicago, a fully double tracked line from Philadelphia to Cleveland, a triple-tracked line from Chicago to Aurora, double-tracked some distance past Galesburg, double track from DC to somewhere past Richmond with stretches of triple track. There's also a mostly double-tracked line from Chicago to Los Angeles (double tracked for needs of freight), a soon-to-be double-tracked line from Minneapolis to western Montana (double tracked for needs of freight).
And some of that was paid for by government, including extra tracks from DC to Richmond and the money put into Conrail.
While the speed differential argument is accurate in theory, it's overblown in current practice. On most of these routes, I'm looking at a speed differential between 50 mph nonstop *at the slowest* and 79 mph with stops, which ends up being the same speed. The intermodals do go faster than this sometimes and should arguably be sped up; I don't think there's anything magic economically about 50 mph. Look at the routes Amtrak runs on: nearly all of them are primarily fast intermodal traffic routes.
CSX has much more to complain about on the Cardinal route (which is mostly slow coal trains and trains of empties) than any of the other Class Is have to complain about. And maybe the Class Is had more reasonable complaints when they were running mostly coal.
And perhaps this is what's actually happening: we're seeing a holdover attitude. With the speed differential from coal drags, the opportunity costs and incremental capital & maintenance costs of running passenger trains on a bulk-aggregates-focused network probably was really high, and I guess that meant that probably Amtrak was underpaying back in the 1980s. But now we have an intermodal-focused network, and the Amtrak trains are nearly all on the fast-intermodal-focused lines, with the notable exception of the Cardinal. So the speed differential has become less of an issue due to business changes.
I understand the complaints about running passenger trains at 110 mph without adding a third (state-owned) track, since this would bring back the speed differential. But this isn't happening.
This does make me realize that CSX may, justifiably, ask for a hell of a lot to run the Cardinal daily. The traffic mix on that line -- slow all of it -- makes the relatively fast Cardinal much more troublesome than running extra passenger trains on either of BNSF's Transcons, UP's Sunset Route, the Water Level Route, the Broadway Limited Route, the Florida routes, the Crescent route, etc., all of which are full of fast trains to start with.
Opportunity costs of being able to run fewer freight trains are a thing which deserve compensation.
What, the one train a day they can't run? If they're running that close to capacity, they need to invest in more capital.
If a line is under capacity, adding one passenger train per day is not going to be a big deal. If it's over capacity, the Class I needs to invest for its own account.
Running a *lot* of passenger trains per day *is* displacing a significant number of freight trains and should cost a lot more. I am under the impression that it does cost a lot more. And is quite uncommon. There's several reasons the Capitol Limited and Lake Shore Limited run back to back across Indiana, and I'd expect the cost of an 8-hour-off run to be much higher.
Operational cost isn't all that much different most likely. Capital cost is going to be a different thing however and it must be remembered that much of Amtrak's OTP issues are of their own making.
Much? A small percentage. It's a lot on the Empire Corridor (sigh, sigh), but really not much in most of the other corridors. It's quite easy to go through the details to figure out what the causes are on each route -- the two largest causes by *far* are bad dispatching (mostly by host railroads) and poor track maintenance on host railroads,
Need I point out that the most often cited "irrationally biased" Class I also hosts the corridor with the most daily trains and the best OTP in the entire Amtrak system, better even than Amtrak's trains on their own tracks?
UP seems to have changed its culture with the last change in CEO (which is quite a while ago now). They've been doing great. No argument there.
Anything run by E Hunter Harrison, on the other hand...
The hostility to passenger trains seems to come as part of a package, which includes a slipshod attitude towards maintenance and necessary upgrades, and terrorizing employees. This attitude seems to come from the top, or not, depending on the mentality in the executive office. It's obvious that the move of Hunter Harrison from CN to CP has given CP a worse attitude; I'm hoping that it will give CN a better attitude, but I've seen no evidence yet.
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The question for me is whether Amtrak could have realistically recovered more of the overpayments or was this the best the legal and finance team could get due to poor documentation records on Amtrak's part?
Unfortunately, it was probably the best they could do.
I totally expect that the documentation was poor.
Perhaps Amtrak should put some of the funds they did recover into hiring better accountants and financial staff.
Should go back and read the IG audit report.
Link to Amtrak OIG Audit reports list. I see there is a recently posted on on Acela parts contract costs, which from a very quick skim, is not a good one for Amtrak. Boardman may get some heat for not fixing all the problems in contract and project management.
Yeah, there are definitely still major problems in that area. I suspect Amtrak inherited the accounting and procurement disasters of the 1960s railroads (*all* of which were complete nightmares), and hasn't managed to fix all of it.