Still, am I crazy? I'm thinking that New York State could buy two or four sleepers . . . for the costly part of a new service. . . .
. . . The
Adirondack is the worst performing train the in the NY State funded set of trains. . . .
The
Adirondack is the worst? Well, sorry. They say . . . grab the worst house on the block, the burned-out building where they used to sell crack. Fix it up and you transform the whole block . . . Try to fix the worst problem first, where there's the most upside potential.
Real estate is not intercity transit.
Let me try that again for those who didn't get my meaning the first time.
When you look at a range of problems, try to fix the worst problem first. If you make appliances, and your refrigerators, washing machines and dryers, and air conditioners get fairly good marks from Consumer Reports, but your freezers get black marks, you better tackle the freezer manufacturing first. It won't matter if you raise the CR score on the fridges from 82 to 84, your lousy freezers scoring 58 will damage the image of your whole product line. If you are a carmaker, and sales are falling in one division or product line, say, down 50% in your near luxury cars, you don't concentrate on building better pick-ups, or eliminating costs on your economy compacts or risk eroding the whole brand. You try hard to fix what's broken.
So if the Adirondack is the worst performing train in the New York portfolio, I'd have a PRIIA-style study to figure out how to make it better. Maybe the big problems are beyond our control, Immigration delays at the border, do we just give up? Would it help to distribute chocolates before the train stops for Immigration? Probably not.
Would it help to improve food services or add to the choice of beverages? If the Province of Quebec won't help with the subsidy, can we get them to take over advertising and marketing the train, hiding the possibly controversial spending as part of the tourism promotion budget? How about a quiet car? Or offer Wi-Fi from NYC at least up to Glen Falls (where the Ethan Allen goes its own way) if not to Plattsburgh with its SUNY campus? And next time Washington decides to spend again -- its normal historical trend line -- have ready a list of almost-sort-of-shovel-ready improvements, from better tracks and a new bridge over the Hudson to new equipment.
The big downside of doing nothing about lousy freezers or disappointing upmarket sedans or one loser train is that their unhappy customers will tell everyone they know about their bad experience.
Of course, after studying the problem you may decide that fixing it would cost too much. So you stop marketing Oldsmobiles or Mercurys. Drop freezers from the product line. And use your money to grow another product to offset the one you are cutting loose. So yeah, I could see putting all the money into the main Empire line NYC-ALB-BUF.
But damn. Double-tracking Albany-Schenectedy should improve that section. But it's slow all the way. To go 128 miles from Albany to Westport (Lake Placid) in 3 hours, it's not going 45 mph. No wonder Neroden is pissed that the host railroad took the 'free money' track improvements but didn't improve the train's run time. How hard should it be to get that stretch up to the "Amtrak average" of 55 mph?