Obama and Amtrak

[bds1960to]

I've seen this topic written about in other threads. My 2-cents are that I think Amtrak has a better chance at a healthy life.

I think Obama has an Amtrak supporter in his VP. Biden rides the rails every weekend.

I think, too, that the times are right for a rail advocate in the White House. Particularly for short haul trips. I can imagine a rail-boosting campaign consisting of two parts. First, a significant increase in Amtrak's capital budget and a raise in its operating budget allowing fares to decrease. Coupled with a marketing campaign: "Leave the car at home. Take the train." Such a campaign would be job-creating and good for the environment, two things most needed now.

Similarly, rail supporters in Canada have been, for 30 years, crying out for infrastructure investment to create a high speed from in the Windsor-Toronto-Montreal corridor. Maybe now conditions are right. Maybe.

 

[PetalumaLoco]

Similarly, rail supporters in Canada have been, for 30 years, crying out for infrastructure investment to create a high speed from in the Windsor-Toronto-Montreal corridor. Maybe now conditions are right. Maybe.

I dunno, last time we invaded Canada it didn't work out too good. :huh:

 

[Hanno]

I've seen this topic written about in other threads. My 2-cents are that I think Amtrak has a better chance at a healthy life.
I think Obama has an Amtrak supporter in his VP. Biden rides the rails every weekend.

I think, too, that the times are right for a rail advocate in the White House. Particularly for short haul trips. I can imagine a rail-boosting campaign consisting of two parts. First, a significant increase in Amtrak's capital budget and a raise in its operating budget allowing fares to decrease. Coupled with a marketing campaign: "Leave the car at home. Take the train." Such a campaign would be job-creating and good for the environment, two things most needed now.

Similarly, rail supporters in Canada have been, for 30 years, crying out for infrastructure investment to create a high speed from in the Windsor-Toronto-Montreal corridor. Maybe now conditions are right. Maybe.

I agree with you in that the time is right to take a different approach to our transportation needs. If Obama really wants to make this country energy independent in ten years we have to have an improved Amtrak IMHO!

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

I think, too, that the times are right for a rail advocate in the White House. Particularly for short haul trips. I can imagine a rail-boosting campaign consisting of two parts. First, a significant increase in Amtrak's capital budget and a raise in its operating budget allowing fares to decrease. Coupled with a marketing campaign: "Leave the car at home. Take the train." Such a campaign would be job-creating and good for the environment, two things most needed now.

And just how am I supposed to get around the greater Lafayette, IN or Madison, WI area if I end up there without a car and without any family who brought a car? I was recently looking at how to get between my parent's home and the largest shopping mall in their community by bus; the travel time would be about an hour each way. By single occupancy vehicle, Google Maps estimated roughly a quarter of that.

Short haul intercity trips are among those where it is most tempting to simply drive in order to have an automobile available when one reaches their destination. And if you want to argue for Auto Train like services in more parts of the country, short haul trips on conventional speed rail are not going to be time competitive with simply driving by the time you factor in the time needed to load and unload the automobiles.

If you want carless short haul trips to be attractive, a significant investment in better local mass transit is probably needed in addition to that Amtrak investment.

Also consider the potential to create a win-win situation with 220 MPH or faster Auto Train like service on routes such as Chicago to Minneapolis / St Paul: drivers will find that even if they have to spend an hour waiting for the loading process and another hour waiting for the unloading process, the train will be a faster way to get them and their vehicle to their destination, and electrified trains will use domestic fuel to a much greater extent than running a gasoline or diesel engine in the automobile, and provide the opportunity to use clean energy sources.

 

[sky12065]

{truncated} Also consider the potential to create a win-win situation with 220 MPH or faster Auto Train like service on routes such as Chicago to Minneapolis / St Paul: drivers will find that even if they have to spend an hour waiting for the loading process and another hour waiting for the unloading process, the train will be a faster way to get them and their vehicle to their destination, and electrified trains will use domestic fuel to a much greater extent than running a gasoline or diesel engine in the automobile, and provide the opportunity to use clean energy sources.

After reading your post, I couldn't help dream about how nice it would be to have a coast to coast auto train say from Lorton VA where there are already loading facilities to a parallel point on the west coast! I'm not advocating or even thinking feasibility but just dreaming!

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

After reading your post, I couldn't help dream about how nice it would be to have a coast to coast auto train say from Lorton VA where there are already loading facilities to a parallel point on the west coast!

I suspect if there's ever a serious effort made to do this, the existing Auto Train stations are going to become considered obsolete.

While I haven't studied the details carefully enough, I get the impression that the Chunnel loading/unloading facilities work a little differently than Amtrak's Auto Train, and that this allows the Chunnel to process the automobiles faster. And having to split the Auto Train into about four pieces to get it into the station doesn't help the speed of the service, either.

The existing Auto Train terminals probably also can't process many more trains / automobiles a day than they currently do. And I can't imagine the existing Virigina to Florida service is going to see a decrease in demand, especially if part of the route could be moved to faster tracks at some point.

On the other hand, if we had high speed track between all the major cities that weren't congested with long trains of 140 ton freight trains going about 79 MPH, more frequent, shorter trains may also be viable.

Yet another option might be to ship the automobiles on separate high speed trains from the passengers, with an expectation that the automobile will take a couple hours longer than the passenger trip; then you open up the possibility of spliting and recombining the high speed autoracks in some sort of freight yard next to the high speed tracks, so a train full of automobiles departing Virginia heading west might have the automobiles sorted into autoracks by destination (sort of like how an Empire Builder or Lake Shore Limited departing Chicago has passengers sorted into cars by destination), and split up in perhaps Texas, and then in Texas the cars going to Los Angeles from Virigina could be combined with the cars going to Los Angeles from Florida, etc. Express freight (overnight packages, possibly fresh food) might be able to be a part of the same trains as the automobiles.

Or maybe a hybrid approach makes sense: for city pairs with enough demand, run dedicated passenger plus automobile trains, and then for the less popular city pairs, offer the freight yard switching option.

 

[bds1960to]

This evening, I stumbled on an article in a portion of Saturday's The Toronto Star I hadn't read yet. It sheds light on Obama's plans that I did not know was there before including notation of a couple of public statement the president-elect has made.

The article is on what companies to watch in 2009 and lists Bombardier as one, for its rail division. The salient portion of this long article is here:

"Obama already has called for a rejuvenation of state-owned Amtrak...Obama also seeks new, dedicated commuter lines, especially in his native Midwest and in the congested Northeast.

 

"Unlike Amtrak, these new lines, likely to be funded from a giant Obama economic stimulus package this spring, would not suffer Amtrak's fate of having to piggyback on the freight railroads' corridors.

 

[Guest_Spokker_*]

He didn't mention California but if he helps in pushing through some funding for our high speed rail project I don't care what else he does as president.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

"Obama already has called for a rejuvenation of state-owned Amtrak...Obama also seeks new, dedicated commuter lines, especially in his native Midwest and in the congested Northeast. 

"Unlike Amtrak, these new lines, likely to be funded from a giant Obama economic stimulus package this spring, would not suffer Amtrak's fate of having to piggyback on the freight railroads' corridors.

Most of the greater Boston area commuter rail system's track has been owned by the state of Massachusetts for decades. The current exceptions are the Framingham to Worcester section (CSX, with poor on time performance for the MBTA trains) and the state border to Providence, owned by Amtrak, which seems to have fine on time performance.

There has been talk of upgrading the MBTA's Fitchburg Line for cab signaling and otherwise making some improvements to travel time, and of Fall River / New Bedford commuter rail service (with some amount of NIMBY opposition on each of the three proposed routes).

Adding Fall River / New Beford service would only increase congestion on the tracks near South Station, unless he's also planning to have the federal government pay for Big Dig II to put some tracks under I-93.

Track upgrades on the Framingham / Worcester Line would also be useful, but I think everyone is too busy whining about liability to do anything there.

However, I think a lot of the Chicago area and DC area commuter rail lines do run on freight-owned tracks. Getting dedicated passenger track there would make a lot of sense.

I get the impression that all of the tracks used by SEPTA may be owned by Pennsylvania and Amtrak. Not sure about that, though.

And I think the states and Amtrak own most or all of the track used by commuter rail in the New York City area, though I believe at least part of the NYP to ALB route is on freight-owned track.

 

[MattW]

Or perhaps we could stop focusing so much on areas that already have something and start working on areas that have nothing like Atlanta! (no, MARTA doesn't count) Even a single commuter line from one of our big suburban population areas into the city could bring 1200 cars off the road! That's only three inbound trains with 400 people each! Tiny in comparison to many commuter lines!

It's not like people won't ride, the Xpress bus service already in existence is full to bursting on EVERY BUS!