x-press said:
I will go to my grave thinking that labor costs could be saved to make sleepers more financially viable, maybe even self-sufficient above-the-rails. I still am not remotely convinced of the need for 1 attendant per viewliner, and other solutions, such as basing attendants in major terminals to come aboard and help with the "busy" times at the end of a run, never seem to be mentioned around here.
I’m not trying to be flip here, so please don’t take this the wrong way, but do you know where to hire workers who want to work odd hours? Hours that change everyday based upon the delays encountered by the trains along the way? Most workers that I know of want a fixed schedule and they want to be able to count on the same amount of hours each week. The only way for Amtrak to do what you propose, unless you know where to find that type of worker, would be to pay people to be on duty 24/7 in three rotating 8 hour shifts. And half the time, they’ll just be sitting around doing nothing but waiting for the next train due in.
I suspect that will cost far more in the long run. Even worse would be the fact that too many late arriving trains could then end up overwhelming the crews at the station, since you don’t want to hire too many people to just sit around for half the day. That would mean that beds might not get made, linens changed, and so on.
As it is now, Chicago often finds the cleaning crews getting overwhelmed if too many trains arrive late. The cleaning crews only have to vacuum, take out the trash, and clean the restrooms and showers. Yet trains are often late out of Chicago because too many late arriving trains overwhelmed the staff’s ability to get those things done. These are things that can only be done at the end of the run.
But I don’t believe that adding more tasks that can be done onboard to these crews will save much more than the cost of 1 attendant per car. On a two car train, you’ll still need at least one attendant. So you save the salary of one attendant, penalize the passengers, and eat up most of the savings by needing to hire at least 4 people at each terminating station to make up the beds. You’ll need 4 for sure, since you’ll have to have at least 2 per shift during the typical hours that trains could arrive.
What Amtrak needs to be taking a long and hard look at OBS already mentioned management. It is a well known fact that Amtrak has too many managers. Many of us had high hopes that David Gunn was going to fix that, and initially it looked like he was going to. There was some headway made, but sadly not enough. And now it has just gotten worse since his departure.
Let’s just analyze Amtrak’s recent cost cutting initiative, SDS. Does food service loose money? Yes. It always has, even the history books will tell you that in their heyday, the Freight RR’s lost money on food service. Yet thanks to Congress’ mandate, here comes Amtrak to figure out how to cut loses on food service. Yet I just have to shake my head when I look at their grand plan.
With SDS, we have cut two workers per dining car, the assistant chef and one waiter/waitress. To do this Amtrak needed to do the following:
Eliminate glassware.
Eliminate a few more of the cooked to order foods. (Most food served was already cooked off the train, before SDS. Steaks, cooked to order eggs, French toast were a few of the things that were still cooked on board that are now gone.)
Seat passengers in groups of 8, every 15 minutes.
So let’s take a look at how well this works. First of course, we’ve now pissed off a few people who liked having those few cooked onboard foods, as well as those who liked having glassware.
Next, if we consider a Superliner Diner, it has a capacity of 72 people. I’m going to eliminate 8 from that number, since the crew usually keeps 1 or 2 tables to use as prep areas and for crew meals. That means under the old system on a busy train, a dining car could seat 64 people at once. With 3 potential seatings for dinner, that’s 192 meals that could be served.
Under the new plan, if they start seating for dinner at 5:00 PM and stop at 8:00 PM, that’s 13 seatings of 8 for a total of 104 meals served. If we assume a low average of say $15 per meal that means that the dining car now rings up $1,560 per night. Under the old system they rang up $2,880 per night, a difference of $1,320 per night.
Just taking quick random numbers, which may or may not be wholly accurate, Amtrak just shot itself in the foot. If we assume that Amtrak would have paid those two workers now laid off for 18 hours of work in one day, and if we assume that the assn’t cook got paid 40 bucks an hour and the waiter $30 an hour, their combined salaries were $1,260 for that day. If Amtrak actually has to pay those two workers for a full 24 hour day, then Amtrak has managed to save money, a whopping $360.
But remember my numbers only involve the income from dinner. That dining car still served breakfast and lunch in the 24 hour period, which would make up any short fall if indeed Amtrak must pay those two workers for the full day. And if my recent trip on the Empire Builder is any indication, that diner was full for each and every meal. The revenue that would be lost from taking that car to SDS would be huge!
Yes, there may be trains (City of NOL, perhaps) where SDS might make sense since the amount of people using the dining car I understand is less. Perhaps there are even routes where SDS should be used during the slow months, with a return to normalcy during the busy months. But there are trains where it doesn’t belong, like the SW Chief, the Coast Starlight, the Capitol Limited, the Lake Shore Limited, and the Silver Service.
Now I will grant you that as I alluded to above, that not every dining car manages three dinner seatings year round, so that would help to change the numbers some. But I’d bet that the lean times would come close to being cancelled out by the boom times during peak periods. When it doesn’t, then there’s a candidate for SDS at least part time.
Finally, in Amtrak’s infinite wisdom, what did they do to make sure that SDS works properly? They hired new managers to make sure that the crew that’s now left in the dining car works harder. Something tells me that those new managers are making a nice salary, one that is probably at least equal, if not surpassing the salary of the now laid off assn’t chef.
Yes, I will grant you that his salary doesn’t get charged to the dining car, so in that respect salary costs for that car have gone down. But at what cost? Amtrak is
not saving any money overall by cutting those two positions, since the bottom line now includes the salaries of these new managers. And of course as I just proved, they are now taking in less revenue from the dining car.
IMHO all Amtrak has managed to do is juggle some costs, **** off its workers even more, inconvenience the passenger more (remember pissed off passengers mean less revenue), loose still more money, and therefore increase the subsidies that it will need in the coming years.
All that said I do believe that there are some work rule changes that Amtrak does need to get from its workers. But Amtrak cannot cut its front line workers to reduce the subsidies that it currently requires; it needs to look elsewhere to find those cuts, not on the front lines. But when was the last time a manager recommended firing himself?
Finally one of the most often overlooked things with Amtrak is that the bulk of the money that Congress gives it each year
is not going towards operating costs, and hence the pockets of Amtrak’s front line employees. Three fourths of the annual appropriation is going towards capital costs, not operating costs.
No matter what Amtrak does, it will never be able to cover its capital costs. No passenger RR in the world does that. But with proper, regular capital investment, Amtrak just might be able to cover all of its operating expenses a few years down the road. But I hope that I just proved that we aren’t going to get there by cutting front line employees. Especially if Amtrak continues to do things like it did with SDS.
