Amenities Being Eliminated from Long Distance Routes

[Blackwolf]

Very. SOLID. Post. Thank you very much, Sir!

 

[Meat Puppet]

I could be wrong but I thought the wine and cheese are on trade accounts. Free/heavily discounted wine and cheese in return Amtrak puts the brand names in the route guides online and in print.

 

[Bob Dylan]

Too bad you dont run one of the Giant Corporations that are Obscenly Profiting on the backs of their Workers Lion! Wonder what all these Over Compensated CEOs would do if they Were suddenly Shown the Door without their Golden Golden Parachutes? Milking Pension Plans and so called 401 K Plans are a Couple of the Biggest Swindles in the History of the World! :angry: (more Money than Bernie Madoff Stole!)

"Greed is Good!" - Gordon Geko/"Wall Street"

 

[Nathanael]

I could be wrong but I thought the wine and cheese are on trade accounts. Free/heavily discounted wine and cheese in return Amtrak puts the brand names in the route guides online and in print.

You are correct. I don't drink wine, but the cheeses were definitely promotions on the part of the cheesemakers who offered them -- and promotions which worked, as I ordered some of the cheeses after I got off the train. Blessed are the cheesemakers.

 

[Jackson Whole]

Old data (some four years old), seems to indicate the average annual pay for Amtrak employees is $61K:http://www.careerbliss.com/amtrak/salaries/

It appears the "grunts", service attendants riding the trains are paid a wage far above what similar workers in the hospitality industry typically earn.

That's an average. That includes top brass. You really can't use that to extrapolate how much an attendant makes.

As has been discussed, ad nauseam, sleeper car attendants make approximately $38,000 per year.

This $90,000 b.s. is how rumors get started. People need to do research before believing some random, anonymous guest (not you, the original Chicken Little who posted that nonsense about $90,000/year). That's why my original post on the subject said "citation needed".

According to this report from 2009, Amtrak's total employee wages and benefits were $1.7 billion and the number of employees was 18,600. 1.7B/18600 = $91K. True, that is an average, but the number is also four years old, does anyone seriously think their average payroll has declined? Amtrak has made themselves a target for criticism - show me an airline, a hotel, or a restaurant where the service staff earn a base pay of $35k+ a year. (http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/sites/downsizinggovernment.org/files/pdf/transportation-amtrak-subsidies.pdf)

The report also cites an average loss per passenger on the LD routes of ~$40. Again, that was four years ago and the losses may be higher today given the QE-driven price inflation we've seen in most consumer goods and energy prices. If nixing the amenities can shave costs by ~$50 per passenger (the stuff + labor + overhead), then it makes sense financially to get rid of them.

 

[VentureForth]

There's nothing solid about it. GML is talking about the management of one. And he is Lee Iacocca? Or Joe Boardman? So you get bad managers. That's the beauty of tree 401k. You get to manage your own investments within the risk parameters set forth by your employer. A good employer will match your contribution to a degree.

No one here is talking take home pay and the starting wage after training for an LSA is well over $30k before OT. I'm sure the average is being that. Unless we get a currently paid LSA with 30 years seniority to cough up their W2, we'll never know the top end.

Alan, we've talked about this before, and I know the RR retirement is separate from the SS system. But I was under the impression that the Amtrak pension plan was additional. Like I'm going to get ss from the feds, plus my 401k. If Amtrak is truly paying a higher percentage than their peers and receiving less, there should be a congressional hearing.

GML, it really is good to see you back even if you want to call BS on me.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S3 using the Android Amtrak Forums mobile app

 

[VentureForth]

Too bad you dont run one of the Giant Corporations that are Obscenly Profiting on the backs of their Workers Lion! Wonder what all these Over Compensated CEOs would do if they Were suddenly Shown the Door without their Golden Golden Parachutes? Milking Pension Plans and so called 401 K Plans are a Couple of the Biggest Swindles in the History of the World! :angry: (more Money than Bernie Madoff Stole!)

"Greed is Good!" - Gordon Geko/"Wall Street"

Yes, I am bummed that I don't have the wherewithal to employ tens of thousands of workers to be productive and rewarded.
How does anyone actually pillage a 401(k)?

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S3 using the Android Amtrak Forums mobile app

 

[Bob Dylan]

Too bad you dont run one of the Giant Corporations that are Obscenly Profiting on the backs of their Workers Lion! Wonder what all these Over Compensated CEOs would do if they Were suddenly Shown the Door without their Golden Golden Parachutes? Milking Pension Plans and so called 401 K Plans are a Couple of the Biggest Swindles in the History of the World! :angry: (more Money than Bernie Madoff Stole!)

"Greed is Good!" - Gordon Geko/"Wall Street"

Yes, I am bummed that I don't have the wherewithal to employ tens of thousands of workers to be productive and rewarded.
How does anyone actually pillage a 401(k)?

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S3 using the Android Amtrak Forums mobile app

Excellent Point about Inequities in Railroad Retirement! And as for Social Security, the last three Republican Presidents all talked about letting Workers put their Social Secuirty Money into Investments and the Stock market, this was DOA even in a Republican Congress! Bet the tens of Millions of Americans living on Social Security and Medicare/Medicad are Happy their Money wasnt in the Stock Market during the Big Melt- Down of 2008! YMMV

They don't pillage employees 401K, they just don't do the Promised "Matches' and of course 401Ks don't have the Amount of Money end up in that Defined Pension Plans have to go along with a Guaranteed Fixed Amount Monthly Pension! 401Ks are Subject to the Whims of the Stock Market and Money Market Wizards, and just like in the last Great Crisis in 20008, lots of Hard Working/Long Time Employees will see their Retirement Disappear while the Execs @ th Top Reap Millions! True Story,you can look it up! And Why do those not Rich want to Carry Water for Billionaires and Bash other Workers that Actually Do the Work and Earn their Pensions! I know I'm not an Economist or a Money Wizard, Guess I'm just a Hopeless Socialist or Something like that!

 

[TraneMan]

I'm on the Empire Builder and there is champaign and cranberry juice. There's no shower bag, no vase/flower in the dinning car.

-Sent from my iPad using Amtrak Forum App.

 

[haolerider]

Many, if not all of these amenities were introduced as a part of the Product Management group, which was headed by Brian Rosenwald. They were meant to enhance the rail experience on the long distance trains. The department seems to not exist anymore and the removal of he amenities are probably the last of the improvements. The overall inability of Operations to keep the consistency of implementation of the amenities seems to highlight the differences in focus of Operations versus attempts to improve the onboard experience.......or said simply......Operations has generally said the main focus of Amtrak is to run trains and other departments have no clue, since they are not " real railroders"! "Those damn passengers just get in the way"!

 

[Trogdor]

Many, if not all of these amenities were introduced as a part of the Product Management group, which was headed by Brian Rosenwald. They were meant to enhance the rail experience on the long distance trains. The department seems to not exist anymore and the removal of he amenities are probably the last of the improvements. The overall inability of Operations to keep the consistency of implementation of the amenities seems to highlight the differences in focus of Operations versus attempts to improve the onboard experience.......or said simply......Operations has generally said the main focus of Amtrak is to run trains and other departments have no clue, since they are not " real railroders"! "Those damn passengers just get in the way"!

This is probably the closest assessment of the truth I've seen in a while.

The Product Development (their most recent name, anyway) group/department/division/whatever was responsible for conducting the PRIIA studies on the long distance trains. However, before they even got to the FY12 trains (Builder, Starlight, Chief, etc.), their department had basically been put on notice that their jobs were going away in a restructuring (which was announced in September, 2011, and only just recently got completed; but that's a rant for another day).

I noted to someone else offline that the lack of ability to maintain a group of people together long enough to put together a plan and see it through to implementation (and giving them the power to ensure the implementation runs properly) has really prevented Amtrak from revamping long-distance train service, instead falling back on doing things the way they've been done since forever, give or take a flower or two.

Nobody at Amtrak really "owns" the PRIIA studies anymore, and it's becoming less and less likely that many of them will ever see the light of day.

Another example, from a few years ago, was the diner-lounge conversion. The concept, on paper, was actually pretty good (have a one-stop-shop where you can get anything from a cup of coffee to a candy bar to tasty appetizers to a full cooked meal, any time from 6 am to 11 pm). The implementation (outside of a couple of pilot runs with customer service personnel on board on the Capitol Limited back in 2005) sucked, and it turned into "replace the dining car with a worse-configured dining car but still pretend to provide the same old dining car service." If they had stuck with the original plan, it would have made sense to convert a dozen and a half cars into the new configuration. If they were just going to provide the same dining car service, with fewer people, then it absolutely made no sense to spend the money on reconfiguring the cars when a simple freshening up would have done. Instead, you had the plans made up, and the shops went full speed on car conversions, but nobody was interested in the follow-through of making sure the service got changed.

So, it's really just the same sad cycles over and over again. Maybe some day in a few years someone will have the idea to offer wine tasting on trains as a way to attract people to the sleepers.

 

[jis]

And sadly outfits like NARP seem to be so beholden to Amtrak that they will never raise a finger about any of this and continue singing rah rahs no matter what. Sad.

 

[Ryan]

If only there were something we could do about that!

 

[Anderson]

GML,

First and foremost, welcome back.

As to the meat of your post, being on the business end of some pension issues, I can say that there's one major aspect you're forgetting, namely the train wreck that low interest rates have been for pension plans...especially in the last five years, with rates near zero. The effects of this aren't a matter of "mismanagement" insofar as interest rates going to zero and staying there was unforeseeable. Even going back to the 50s, when rates were lower, you still usually had the fed rate in the 1-3% range. Prior to 2008, I think I can find one month in 2003, three months in 1958, and three months in 1954 with the Fed funds rate <1%. Since December 2008, it hasn't broken .25% a single time.

This has had two effects. The first is that companies have seen lower returns on their pensions than expected on a grand scale. The more dramatic effect has been that the discount rate has been acting like these conditions will remain static. Unfortunately, by design the discount rate always behaves like this...so companies made a bunch of pension promises when their actuaries were feeding them numbers based on 10% interest rates until the end of time, and now they're having to make payments based on 0% interest rates until the end of time.

I suspect you can see where this goes very, very wrong: Pension plans which were fully funded, or even overfunded, as of 5-10 years ago are now showing up as being horridly underfunded and companies are having to shovel money in based on exceedingly brutal assumptions. A fair bit of blame should be put on the shoulders of the Fed for this...but the fact is that nobody, and I mean nobody, of significance was projecting five plus years of near-zero interest rates back in 2005. You can't blame companies for mismanaging a situation when the situation was utterly unforeseen and completely without precedent.

Does a company bear the obligations you mentioned? I'll grant that, but among other things those promises came with broad, unstated caveats about what those obligations were going to cost the company. Even those who operated with prudent assumptions of interest rates at historical levels such as we saw in the 50s and 60s, or in the late 90s and 2000s, have been totally whipsawed by this. They didn't make poor management decisions...they got run over by a course of government action aimed at fixing one problem that's made another one so much worse.

 

[CoachSlumber]

Too bad you dont run one of the Giant Corporations that are Obscenly Profiting on the backs of their Workers Lion! Wonder what all these Over Compensated CEOs would do if they Were suddenly Shown the Door without their Golden Golden Parachutes? Milking Pension Plans and so called 401 K Plans are a Couple of the Biggest Swindles in the History of the World! :angry: (more Money than Bernie Madoff Stole!)

"Greed is Good!" - Gordon Geko/"Wall Street"

Yes, I am bummed that I don't have the wherewithal to employ tens of thousands of workers to be productive and rewarded.
How does anyone actually pillage a 401(k)?

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S3 using the Android Amtrak Forums mobile app

Excellent Point about Inequities in Railroad Retirement! And as for Social Security, the last three Republican Presidents all talked about letting Workers put their Social Secuirty Money into Investments and the Stock market, this was DOA even in a Republican Congress! Bet the tens of Millions of Americans living on Social Security and Medicare/Medicad are Happy their Money wasnt in the Stock Market during the Big Melt- Down of 2008! YMMV

They don't pillage employees 401K, they just don't do the Promised "Matches' and of course 401Ks don't have the Amount of Money end up in that Defined Pension Plans have to go along with a Guaranteed Fixed Amount Monthly Pension! 401Ks are Subject to the Whims of the Stock Market and Money Market Wizards, and just like in the last Great Crisis in 20008, lots of Hard Working/Long Time Employees will see their Retirement Disappear while the Execs @ th Top Reap Millions! True Story,you can look it up! And Why do those not Rich want to Carry Water for Billionaires and Bash other Workers that Actually Do the Work and Earn their Pensions! I know I'm not an Economist or a Money Wizard, Guess I'm just a Hopeless Socialist or Something like that!

Depends on your age. Most of my 401k money was in the stock market at the meltdown. I left it in, and the total has grown. Those SS plans were for younger workers. As you get older you transfer more into bonds.

 

[afigg]

Nobody at Amtrak really "owns" the PRIIA studies anymore, and it's becoming less and less likely that many of them will ever see the light of day.

Another example, from a few years ago, was the diner-lounge conversion. The concept, on paper, was actually pretty good (have a one-stop-shop where you can get anything from a cup of coffee to a candy bar to tasty appetizers to a full cooked meal, any time from 6 am to 11 pm). The implementation (outside of a couple of pilot runs with customer service personnel on board on the Capitol Limited back in 2005) sucked, and it turned into "replace the dining car with a worse-configured dining car but still pretend to provide the same old dining car service." If they had stuck with the original plan, it would have made sense to convert a dozen and a half cars into the new configuration. If they were just going to provide the same dining car service, with fewer people, then it absolutely made no sense to spend the money on reconfiguring the cars when a simple freshening up would have done. Instead, you had the plans made up, and the shops went full speed on car conversions, but nobody was interested in the follow-through of making sure the service got changed.

So, it's really just the same sad cycles over and over again. Maybe some day in a few years someone will have the idea to offer wine tasting on trains as a way to attract people to the sleepers.

There is now a General Manager for LD services, so if the PIPs recommendations are to be implemented. it would be his responsibility. To be fair on the PIPs recommendations, many of them were waiting on the arrival of the Viewliner IIs which has been delayed or recommendations for schedule changes that are directly or indirectly dependent on track work projects that have also been taking a very looooong time to get started on construction.

The opening of the diner car to a cashless club-diner service on the LSL as an experiment was dependent on deploying an electronic Point Of Sale system. Once the LSL and the other eastern LD trains get the new diner cars, which I assume will come with a modern POS system, then we will see if the club-diner concept is still in the plans as an experiment. Or if it has been deep sixed because the OBSs did not like the idea.

BTW, in the Jan 2014 Amtrak Ink interview with Mark Murphy, the new GM for LD services, I'm surprised no one picked up on this part of his statement on looking at changes for the LD trains: "We will be looking at the dining car model, service delivery model, employee empowerment, sales and revenue incentives, possible new routes just to name a few". Talk is cheap and it probably means nothing, but he did state that for the record.

 

[VentureForth]

And sadly outfits like NARP seem to be so beholden to Amtrak that they will never raise a finger about any of this and continue singing rah rahs no matter what. Sad.

If only there were something we could do about that!

Has NARP not weighed in at all on this?

 

[jis]

We have not heard Boo from NARP regarding the PIPs, unfortunately.

Speaking of amenities, I just chanced upon the full OIG Report on F&B and found it very interesting reading. I can see that it will be immensely upsetting to some. But in case you are interested you can find the PDF document at:

http://www.amtrakoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/oig-a-2014-001_0.pdf

It does address the issue of labor cost and addresses the cost and revenue per train.

Incidentally I was somewhat surprised to learn that the Palmetto travels a greater distance than the Capitol Limited and almost as much of a distance as the Auto Train. I should have noticed before.

F&B losses have primarily to do with labor cost, and now I am really curious to see how Mr. Boardman plans to deliver on his promise to eliminate all F&B losses, without eliminating at least some aspects of the F&B service while he is at it.

 

[D.P. Roberts]

[

BTW, in the Jan 2014 Amtrak Ink interview with Mark Murphy, the new GM for LD services, I'm surprised no one picked up on this part of his statement on looking at changes for the LD trains: "We will be looking at the dining car model, service delivery model, employee empowerment, sales and revenue incentives, possible new routes just to name a few". Talk is cheap and it probably means nothing, but he did state that for the record.

I'm curious about possible new routes, but a new LD dining car model too? What in the world is that?

 

[Anderson]

[

BTW, in the Jan 2014 Amtrak Ink interview with Mark Murphy, the new GM for LD services, I'm surprised no one picked up on this part of his statement on looking at changes for the LD trains: "We will be looking at the dining car model, service delivery model, employee empowerment, sales and revenue incentives, possible new routes just to name a few". Talk is cheap and it probably means nothing, but he did state that for the record.

I'm curious about possible new routes, but a new LD dining car model too? What in the world is that?

Check the OIG report linked above. There's a number of proposed changes to the dining service models.

 

[Green Maned Lion]

There's nothing solid about it. GML is talking about the management of one. And he is Lee Iacocca? Or Joe Boardman? So you get bad managers. That's the beauty of tree 401k. You get to manage your own investments within the risk parameters set forth by your employer. A good employer will match your contribution to a degree.

p

Listen, it might not be nice to say, but the almost all blue collar workers, and most lower tier white collar workers do not have the intelligence, knowledge, or time to manage their investments effectively. And please don't give me exceptions that prove the rule. They just don't. Competent management of money is a gift certain people have. The point of a pension department is to provide the employees with the advantages of having one.

GML,

First and foremost, welcome back.

As to the meat of your post, being on the business end of some pension issues, I can say that there's one major aspect you're forgetting, namely the train wreck that low interest rates have been for pension plans...especially in the last five years, with rates near zero. The effects of this aren't a matter of "mismanagement" insofar as interest rates going to zero and staying there was unforeseeable. Even going back to the 50s, when rates were lower, you still usually had the fed rate in the 1-3% range. Prior to 2008, I think I can find one month in 2003, three months in 1958, and three months in 1954 with the Fed funds rate <1%. Since December 2008, it hasn't broken .25% a single time.

This has had two effects. The first is that companies have seen lower returns on their pensions than expected on a grand scale. The more dramatic effect has been that the discount rate has been acting like these conditions will remain static. Unfortunately, by design the discount rate always behaves like this...so companies made a bunch of pension promises when their actuaries were feeding them numbers based on 10% interest rates until the end of time, and now they're having to make payments based on 0% interest rates until the end of time.

I suspect you can see where this goes very, very wrong: Pension plans which were fully funded, or even overfunded, as of 5-10 years ago are now showing up as being horridly underfunded and companies are having to shovel money in based on exceedingly brutal assumptions. A fair bit of blame should be put on the shoulders of the Fed for this...but the fact is that nobody, and I mean nobody, of significance was projecting five plus years of near-zero interest rates back in 2005. You can't blame companies for mismanaging a situation when the situation was utterly unforeseen and completely without precedent.

Does a company bear the obligations you mentioned? I'll grant that, but among other things those promises came with broad, unstated caveats about what those obligations were going to cost the company. Even those who operated with prudent assumptions of interest rates at historical levels such as we saw in the 50s and 60s, or in the late 90s and 2000s, have been totally whipsawed by this. They didn't make poor management decisions...they got run over by a course of government action aimed at fixing one problem that's made another one so much worse.

I dunno. My investment portfolio has grown an average of 16% year for the past ten years versus basis. I know I'm good, but I didn't think I was so good as to beat pension fund managers by such huge numbers.

 

[tonys96]

We have not heard Boo from NARP regarding the PIPs, unfortunately.

Speaking of amenities, I just chanced upon the full OIG Report on F&B and found it very interesting reading. I can see that it will be immensely upsetting to some. But in case you are interested you can find the PDF document at:

http://www.amtrakoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/oig-a-2014-001_0.pdf

It does address the issue of labor cost and addresses the cost and revenue per train.

Incidentally I was somewhat surprised to learn that the Palmetto travels a greater distance than the Capitol Limited and almost as much of a distance as the Auto Train. I should have noticed before.

F&B losses have primarily to do with labor cost, and now I am really curious to see how Mr. Boardman plans to deliver on his promise to eliminate all F&B losses, without eliminating at least some aspects of the F&B service while he is at it.

This says the complimentary champagne, and wine and cheese cost $428,000 annually for the three routes that have it. and there are free meals to employees on PERSONAL travel on just ONE route cost over $260,000!

So the "savings" would be over 50% higher if the free "extras" given to people on personal travel on an employee pass on just this one route were cut also. Let me see.......free "extras" to those riding for free, but none for paying customers. Make sense?

 

[Trogdor]

This says the complimentary champagne, and wine and cheese cost $428,000 annually for the three routes that have it. and there are free meals to employees on PERSONAL travel on just ONE route cost over $260,000!

So the "savings" would be over 50% higher if the free "extras" given to people on personal travel on an employee pass on just this one route were cut also. Let me see.......free "extras" to those riding for free, but none for paying customers. Make sense?

The one route is the Auto Train, where all passenger receive free meals (so your statement about free extras for passriders but not for paying customers is false).

On other routes, if an employee rides in business travel space, they do not get free meals. If they are in revenue space, they do get free meals, but actually have to pay for the sleeper at the employee rate (80% of the public fare).

 

[afigg]

[

BTW, in the Jan 2014 Amtrak Ink interview with Mark Murphy, the new GM for LD services, I'm surprised no one picked up on this part of his statement on looking at changes for the LD trains: "We will be looking at the dining car model, service delivery model, employee empowerment, sales and revenue incentives, possible new routes just to name a few". Talk is cheap and it probably means nothing, but he did state that for the record.

I'm curious about possible new routes, but a new LD dining car model too? What in the world is that?=

He was talking in context of LD services, the service model for how the dining car operates, not a new physical model of a dining car. There is a lot of pressure on Amtrak to reduce or eliminate food service losses or else which Boardman was responding to when he stated the goal of eliminating food and beverage service losses for the entire system in 5 years.

Dropping wine and cheese tastings for 3 trains, flower displays to trim costs is likely to be an early step in that process. Given how long a thread those modest changes has generated, bigger changes such as outsourcing could really heat up the Amtrak forums.

 

[afigg]

We have not heard Boo from NARP regarding the PIPs, unfortunately.

Speaking of amenities, I just chanced upon the full OIG Report on F&B and found it very interesting reading. I can see that it will be immensely upsetting to some. But in case you are interested you can find the PDF document at:

http://www.amtrakoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/oig-a-2014-001_0.pdf

It does address the issue of labor cost and addresses the cost and revenue per train.

Incidentally I was somewhat surprised to learn that the Palmetto travels a greater distance than the Capitol Limited and almost as much of a distance as the Auto Train. I should have noticed before.

F&B losses have primarily to do with labor cost, and now I am really curious to see how Mr. Boardman plans to deliver on his promise to eliminate all F&B losses, without eliminating at least some aspects of the F&B service while he is at it.

The Amtrak OIG report on F&B service is dated October 31, 2013, but somehow I didn't read it before. It is worthy of its own thread for discussion, although, yes, it will get heated. Although how the F&B losses for the LD trains are calculated depend heavily on how the revenue is attributed. Interesting how the Acela First Class ticket revenue is allocated to the F&B costs.