jis
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Isn't Amtrak part of the railroad retirement plan?
Why does the Empire Builder lose so much money?
- Thread starter norfolkwesternhenry
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If the truth be known; the only way to get costs under control is like everyone else is doing it. You must use cheap labor. More for us and less for you! Isn't that the way all businesses are run these days?
WoodyinNYC
Conductor
Good info, Philly. Thanks for bringing it to our attention. And thanks to Neroden for ranking them.
I'm looking bottom up.
The Hoosier State. What a mess. Indiana paid for a study that concluded that $250 million in upgrades Indy-CHI would cut 29 minutes from the trip time. That and a 2nd frequency would double (or was it triple?) ridership. Then $20 million a year in subsidy to cover the usual losses. The report was by consultants who work for the IN Dept of Highways. It did not calculate how Cardinal ridership would fare with two daily frequencies of the Hoosier State, to allow earlier morning arrivals in CHI and earlier evening arrivals (now 10 minutes before midnight) in Indianapolis. (It would be plus+plus for Amtark, of course, but the Indiana study didn't give a hoot.) Anyway, until the next Stimulus, nobody plans to upgrade this corridor, so it's likely to remain at the bottom of the losers list.
The Raleigh-Charlottsville Corridor is currently served by the Carolinian and two Piedmonts. With half a Billion in upgrades underway, soon the route will have four Piedmonts, including a very early departure to allow same-day, go-and-return trains to appeal to business travelers. Two years from now the Piedmonts will not be close to the bottom at all.
The Capitol Corridor surprises me. By all other reports it's a very successful route, often adding frequencies, and usually reporting increasing ridership. So I think this is a statistical fluke somehow.
The Heartland Flyer. Take the long view? Or say, put money in or get out? One day it should connect to Wichita-Kansas City. But Tulsa-Joplin-Kansas City might have to serve in view of the economic experiments being conducted in the state of Kansas. And in either case, track upgrades are needed Ft Worth-Oklahoma City.
The Downeaster, I don't pay it attention. It seems to get the required attention from the State of Maine. And it will do better soon enuff.
St Louis-Kansas City will benefit from the Billion in upgrades CHI-St Louis that kick in next year. It will benefit again when Nippon Sharyo gets its Humpty Dumpty Model #2 faster, better cars on the line. Not enuff to move it up much in 2016, but 2017 and 2018 should show much better results.
The Quincy trains, I dunno. The Quad Cities trains will share about a third of the trackage, so another frequency there, which could help ridership and costs. But due to Gov Rauner's delays, there will be a delay.
New Haven-Hartford-Springfield is being rebuilt from New Haven to Hartford. (More money needed to get to Springfield.) So lately it's been a mess of delays, cancelled trains, and bustitutions. When the first round of upgrades are finished next year, this route should do much much better.
Not sure why the Maple Leaf runs so far behind the Adirondack and the Empire Service trains to Buffalo-Niagara Falls. Things could get better when the Albany area choke points are fixed next year, to improve the on time performance. Maybe smoother Customs and Border processing at the new Niagara Falls station will help too.
The Pere Marquette (Grand Rapids) will be transformed when the South of the Lake upgrades take almost an hour out of its run time. Long before then it will at least get new bi-level equipment.
The CHI-Champaign-Carbondale trains will cut their losses when one can be extended to Memphis and those newfound passengers are added to the current Illinois-only numbers.
The Cardinal couldn't be simpler. The PRIIA study concluded that taking it daily would double ridership. Add in the benefits from upgrading the Hoosier State portion of the route and the Cardinal won't need any more help from Sen Harry Byrd.
Last month the San Joaquins added a 7th frequency, featuring an earlier arrival in the Bay Area. An 8th run will be added just as soon as equipment becomes available.
Cascades -- what can you get for $800 million in Stimulus funding? On time performance up from 70ish to a promised 88%, about 10 minutes cut from the run time, and 2 more Talgo Cascades, making 6 plus the Coast Starlight.
The showpiece of the Stimulus-funded investments is supposed to the the Lincoln Service (CHI-St Louis). Starting about this time next year, most of the upgrades to the route will be finished, and about an hour will come off the schedules (now 5:30 end to end, will be 4:30 or so). Even with 1 or 2 or 3 more frequencies, the Horizon trains may be crowded until the new bi-levels with 30% more capacity arrive from Nippon Sharyo. Ridership could be hitting a million in 3 or 4 years.
Empire Service will benefit from better on time performance when the double-tracking, new signaling, and the revamped Albany station are done. Rochester will also get a new station. Whether that's gonna be enuff to improve the results here, well, we hope so.
The Sunset Ltd will be another one simple to improve (not cheap or easy, but simple) take it daily. Ridership will double, but costs will not, due to the terrible inefficiency of 3-day-a-week schedules.
The Vermonter is ready to show even better results when the previously mentioned construction mess New Haven-Springfield is mostly finished.
It's actually pretty optimistic for Amtrak to look at its outlook from bottom up.
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CCC1007
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I wonder if the capital corridor might be hampered in this measurement by the short distances between stations and capacity restraints on the actual trains, what is their capacity anyway with five cars?
WoodyinNYC
Conductor
Yes, sumpin' like that. Probably similar to the surprisingly low score for the Acelas. Outperformed by the Adirondack? LOL.
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BCL
Engineer
It's kind of hard to justify this kind of route without frequent service, even if that means empty cars. It's more or less a commuter train, although one with frequent mid-day service.
However, I'm not sure whether or not that matters in terms of justification of funding since California pays for it and not Amtrak.
BCL
Engineer
It's kind of hard to justify this kind of route without frequent service, even if that means empty cars. It's more or less a commuter train, although one with frequent mid-day service.
However, I'm not sure whether or not that matters in terms of justification of funding since California pays for it and not Amtrak.
jis
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How is Raleigh - Charlottesville served by the Piedmonts and the Carolinian as claimed by Woody considering that none of those trains go my where near Charlottesville?
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WoodyinNYC
Conductor
neroden
Engineer
As I explained, this is actually most of the problem. The Railroad Retirement program is like Social Security in that current workers pay for the pension of older retired workers. (As opposed to a true pension fund where the workers pay for their own retirement and the money is invested -- perhaps well, perhaps poorly -- while waiting for them to retire. True pension funds have entirely different issues.) In recent years they have shifted somewhat more to having investments and a "pay ahead" fund, but it's still mostly "pay as you go".
However, Railroad Retirement has a big problem which Social Security does not have. See, in Social Security there are generally at least as many current workers as old retired workers. Yeah, there are slightly more Baby Boomers then there are in the next generation, but it's not significant. There's a balance.
In Railroad Retirement, however, there are far, far, fewer railroad workers now than there were back in the 1960s. (Something which was not anticipated when Railroad Retirement was invented.) So for decades, a fairly small number of workers have been paying for the pensions of a very large number of retirees. This caused Railroad Retirement taxes to be jacked up repeatedly, which makes the "Railroad Retirement costs" of hiring a railroad worker very high, and it doesn't actually benefit the worker who was hired at all, it benefits workers who retired decades ago.
"The number of individuals in RRB-covered employment fell from 640,000 in 1970 to 236,000 in 2007, a shift that presents a sizable demographic obstacle for a pay-as-you-go system."
https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v68n2/v68n2p41.html
This problem is self-correcting as the older retirees die off. This component of the "cost of labor" for Amtrak should actually be going down each year as this happens and the required Railroad Retirement taxes can be reduced.
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neroden
Engineer
It surprised me that the Piedmont was so weak, actually. Maybe it's the schedule? Piedmont's better for trips with home base on the east end and destination on the west end, and I think eastbound is predominant (which would be on the Carolinian).
Short trains, high frequencies... but unidirectional commuter traffic. I suspect some of the individual frequencies are very busy and some of the reverse-commute trains are "ghost trains" used mostly for equipment positioning. This is a common problem with commuter-heavy routes, and it does cause commuter routes to financially underperform compared to routes with a more well-distributed pattern of ridership.
High frequencies, commuter traffic pattern, again.
Might get some benefit from KC's new streetcar (makes it easier to get around town when arriving at KC Union Station).
One-way asymmetric traffic pattern (Quincy to Chicago, not the other way) with a low-population city on the end. Who visits Quincy? I'm actually more than a little surprised that this train survived every round of cuts over the last 3 decades.
They'll do significantly better than the Quincy train, since the Quad Cities *are* a destination, unlike Quincy.
I'd guess it's at least partly the border delays and the abysmal Niagara Falls station. (Both Buffalo stations suck too.) They can't move to the new Niagara Falls station soon enough.
Worth noting, Amtrak often lumps the entire Empire Service north of Albany into the Maple Leaf line. If they're doing that this time, then the recurrent delays on CSX, the reconstruction of the Rochester station, and the fact that one of the frequencies starts in the wee hours are also issues which can reduce ridership. In that case, the new Rochester and Schenectady stations and the ALB-SDY improvements should help too.
...OK, now we're into speculative improvements, so I'll stop. It is good to see that several of the routes with low PM/TM actually have improvements under construction. Most of the others have commuter patterns, which always causes lower PM/TM due to the reverse-directional runs.
BCL
Engineer
What option is there really? It's not really a single-direction commute, as it takes passengers to work destinations in Sacramento, Oakland, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley. Caltrain is like that too. I suppose they could run fewer trains in the middle of the day.
If you want something packed, there's Altamont Corridor Express. They clearly have a commute direction and don't operate a reverse commute. They also operate three trainsets at a time that wait in San Jose until they're ready for the evening commute.
WoodyinNYC
Conductor
Right. What option is there really? And is there a problem really? The Capitol Corridor carried 1,475,000 riders last year, up about 4% from 2014. Passengers seem happy, and California seems happy to pay the bills.
What I think we see from looking at the Capitol Corridor, is that we need to use more than one metric to determine if a given train is a success.
neroden
Engineer
Agreed. My point was that this is a good financial metric but not as good for evaluating the value of commuter routes.
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