An excellent, well thought out presentation.  I wonder if anyone from Amtrak has read Mr. Garnet's treatise?  I look forward to my first trip on the Ocean this coming Fall from Montreal to Halifax and return.

I am proud to be a regular supplier of communications materials to VIA Rail Canada, so far be it from me to tamper with the corporation's image.  However, I must take away one claim to fame by its Ocean Limited.  It is the second oldest name train in North America.  Amtrak's Sunset Limited is the longest, continuously-operated name train on this continent.  But 106 years for the Ocean is nothing to sneer at.

The Sunset's was the Southern Pacific's before it was Amtrak's.

Great Train. Listen to the song "Home in Nova Scotia" by either Hank Snow or George Hamilton IV that makes reference to this wonderful train. A Northbound connection to the Adirondack would be a revenue producer for both trains.

A piece of useless rail trivia: Sunset magazine, which now is a free-standing entity, began life as promotional material for the SP.  I guess the sun never sets on Sunset.

The market for passenger service lies in the area of travel time reduction. There are so many examples, I would need more space than i'd care to think of to set 'em down, but trying to get people to travel for the experience of being treated nicely on a comfortable conveyance is only a worthwhile effort if your conveyance is the MOST comfortable and your people the NICEST.  The California Zephyr (which did NOT die for lack of patronage) is a great case in point.  If the train had gone twice as fast, the the costs should have (and ultimately would have) been half as much for everything but fuel. But a lot of people who were going where the train was going, would have ridden because they could do it in maybe an extra day or half day.

 Given the dreadful condition of airline service today if you could be within four hours of scheduled air time between any two points, you could fill a train between those point and no one would choose to fly! You might also fill the track with more trains! (a he-- of a lot of assumptions in the above, but you get the idea). The ocean is just as romantic as was the Newfie Bullet, and equally as doomed.  But with Bombardier's true high speed technologies, and Canada's cheap electricity from James Bay, a real high speed line could be built relatively cheaply, and Oceans of people would be interested in it.  Another thing is that since the whole route is through the boonies, building a separate electrified line would not be the undertaking that it would be in NY NJ or PA. What might be fun for a real entrepreneur would be designing a simple single stack high speed container train to run on the same line and at the same 230 MPH or so speed. It could pay the bills.  and the passenger trains would get to share the infrastructure costs. Maybe instead of a 283KIP gross rail load we could do more work in less time and with less track displacement with a LOWER axle load (and a well thought out simple suspension).

  I think it might be time to think about something other than running a landborne barge line, but maybe not.

  I sure wish A. E. Perlman was around to comment on this.

  Tom Engle

Tom:  You still have the problem that the airline not only does not pay the full cost of the airports it uses, it is effectively subsidized by various taxpayers who do pay for the airports -- and then they give their customers lousy service.  One example is the CEO of Delta's comment on the new tarmac delay rules in which he threatened his customers with more flight cancellations and even worse service.  What this guy knows about customer service might fill a thimble.  The railroad, passenger and freight, still must pay the full cost of owning and maintaining its infrastructure.  Everything else in your comment is valid.

Larry:  You are right about the subsidies, but we have to think about a couple of things.  In North America in general, the passenger train was obsoleted by an airline subsidy system based on the cold war need for airplanes, people who knew how to fly 'em and factories and engineers who knew how to make 'em in great quantity and quickly. A new industrial segment was needed and the Railroads had to give up competing with that need.  They had heroes like Rickenbacher, Curtis LeMay, Jimmy Stewart, and the list goes on. We had a worn out infrastructure, capitalistic ideals, the economics of transportation, and not much more.

 In more recent times though, the direct aircraft subsidies have been reduced (which is WHY the service us so lousy and likely to get worse). For the service I'm thinking about, though, we have a Canadian perspective on subsidies which includes passenger trains (sometimes) and an incentive to use the home product (Bombardier) which already is in the High Speed Rail business (TGV if i remember, is a Bombardier product) and has a government ear that no one in the USA has.  I know it's not very pure, but I'm an engineer, not a philosopher.

Tom Engle

Tom: One of my favorite aphorisms is: "You can always tell an engineer -- but not very much."  You may not be a philosopher, but you have an excellent understanding of history and economics, I think.

I also think the U.S. passenger train was done in more by the private automobile and the travel flexibility it afforded people than by the airlines.  Air travel was not all that great or even reliable into the 60s and 70s when the passenger trains were rapidly passing from the scene.  Add in loss of the mail traffic, including the stranding of capital as railroads built new facilities for mail handling and then lost the business, and you really have a story of government nonfeasance.

Tom: Please consider the number of baby boomers, affluent and with time to spare, who would enjoy a rail experience in the US that would be comparable to the wonderful "Canadian"!  (We're retired and have taken the "Canadian" several times  -- just for the experience of it.  Friends we've told about it have also  ridden it with enthusiastic responses.)  Over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays we've seen trains filled to capacity with families and retirees, many of the latter denied those money-making sleeping car accommodations because Amtrak hadn't adequate equipment!

What Amtrak needs to acknowledge is that there IS a large ridership out there who are not interested in speed, but in gracious accommodations, good food and a reliable schedule -- and who are willing and able to pay for it.  Amtrak "just" needs to provide those, and then do some advertising.  

Angelfire: With all due respect, you are not describing the need for decent rail passenger service in the United States so much as you are describing the desireability of an excursion system.  When Amtrak first was being developed, the original idea at DOT was to operate some reasonably high-speed, relatively short corridors and supplement it with a number of excursion trains of the sort you advocate.  The former never was properly funded by the government - necessary because rail passenger service doesn't pay its way anywhere in the world, and the latter probably isn't justified from a government subsidy standpoint.

Question: Why must 21st century passenger transportation always be equated with bad-tasting medicine (i.e., not meant to be enjoyable, only existing to serve a purpose)?!

Tom has already stated how today's commercial airline service is "dreadful," "lousy" and "likely to get worse." [Worse than _dreadful_!] So, why do we believe it would be impossible for conventional passenger trains to compete for business?!

The MAIN REASON has NOTHING to do with our product's _potential_; rather, it revolves around a shopworn and indefensible idea which has already been mentioned more than once:

Tom: "The market for passenger service lies in the area of travel time reduction."

Larry: "When Amtrak first was being developed, the original idea at DOT was to operate some reasonably high-speed, relatively short corridors and supplement it with a number of excursion trains..."

These two comments (among others) sum up the primary reason why Amtrak has existed almost two score years now, yet has failed to accomplish anything substantive - save for keeping the passenger train on life support. Certainly, one could argue that Amtrak has been consistently shortchanged any time the feds have come 'round, doling out cash...but what would they have done _with_ the money, presuming it had been available? Just what Larry accurately pointed out the U.S. D.O.T. had in mind for them to do all along: create "some reasonably high-speed, relatively short corridors"!

Our friend garnetm is absolutely right. "Time effectiveness is more important than trip duration"! After all, if elapsed travel time was the only - or even the _primary_ - factor in these matters, why would automobiles still retain the lion's share of passenger traffic between any two major metropolitan areas of less than approximately 1,000 distance (per the B.T.S.)? [In certain rural and western climes, that figure can approach 1,400 miles!] Are we so sure of the conventional passenger train's failure that we're willing to cede whatever business we might capture to the affirmed "dreadful" and "lousy"?!

Are we really _listening_ to garnetm? Cutting an hour here or there, using improved corridor lines when applicable, improving performance (especially where timekeeping is concerned), proper marketing...would these things truly be to no avail? Is it honestly not possible to sell the concept of working or eating or sleeping while traveling to a "modern" audience?

We already have equipment designs which can be safely and efficiently operated upon existing infrastructure. We already possess a "conveyance [which] is the MOST comfortable" (as Tom might say). We already enjoy a potential market which has been dramatically increased in size since the beginning of transport deregulation. We even know this same market (by and large) has no _idea_ what the phrase "grand manner" means, so their preconceived notions of "first class" will be far more forgiving (and far less expensive to maintain) than in the days of yore.

I'm sorry; I just don't get it.

Garl

Garl:  Air service is lousy in large part because the airline business model doesn't work in the current environment and the people who run the ailrines have nothing but contempt for their customers most of the time.  Rail passenger service does not pay its way.  Before Penn Central went bust and Congress became frightened that it might have to nationalize the entire rail industry, the ICC very cavalierly required the railroad companies to cross-subsidize their passenger losses with freight profits.  PC made it obvious that freight profits would not be sufficient to do the job.  Amtrak was a government solution to a problem.  No one ever has said it was the right solution.  Amtrak has had managements of varying quality over the last 40 years.  It rarely has had funding that allowed either for acquisition of new equipment in large numbers or to fund expansion of its system. Keeping the passenger train on life support is the best we have been able to getg out of Congress and the Republican Administrations (Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II). If one were to believe their rhetoric and budget requests, Amtrak would have been removed from life support years ago.  I am not opposed to rail passenger service.  I do not believe that land cruises roaming around the National Parks and other tgourism centers is a justifiable use of taxpayer money, just as taxpayers do not support the ocean cruise industry.  I would support an expansion of coverage of the U.S. by point-to-point rail passenger service.  But, it always will be up to Congress to decide how much money it wishes to make available and then to do so.  By the way, you may remember Grande Luxe, the company that operated the American Orient Express, a luxury train operation for those of means who wanted to roam the country in comfort and style.  It went bankrupt.  Now, Xanterra, the company that operates lodging and concession in a number of national parks and which is owned by Phil Anschutz, the Denver billionaire who once owned the Southern Pacific, is trying to set up a new luxury train operation using the former American Orient Express equipment.  I can assure you, Anschutz will not go into business where he might take a loss.  He doesn't do business that way.

Larry,

Please understand that I'm not advocating taxpayer subsidy for land cruises. In fact, VIA's Ocean should never be dismissed as nothing more than a luxury excursion train, but recognised as a viable part of our continental passenger transportation network.

The biggest problem with Amtrak isn't an over reliance upon an "outdated business model" (or any number of other ignorant, misguided insults we so often hear). Instead, Amtrak's Achilles' heel is a system that is far too small and frequencies which are far too limited. In 39 years, Amtrak's network has never once approached critical mass!

Amtrak doesn't understand or believe in its own long haul product. In fact, they seem to buy into the "luxury cruise" mindset, themselves! [Personally, I pity those innocents who purchase fares with that expectation in mind.]

I'm absolutely convinced garnetm "gets it." He mentions how the "time spent on a full-service long-distance train is also available for other purposes, including overnight sleep, meals, work, meetings, socializing or simply the enjoyment of scenery." He sees how trains serve "a transportation function," but also offer an experience totally unique to railroad travel. He points out how "hotel costs can be avoided by using overnight train service" and the way a "business travel market for rail between small to mid-sized centres separated by an overnight trip" exists even today. Furthermore, a long distance train's "basic transportation market" includes a "potential...role in small town revitalization and ecotourism."

Right now, the primary stumbling block we'll encounter when attempting to recreate a true continental network isn't a lack of money. It's a lack of faith - and the U.S. entity which should be busy preaching it wallows amongst the biggest doubters.

VIA - and Canada - needs men like garnetm! Perhaps our northern brethren can teach us a thing or two.

Garl

  Just a couple more brief comments.  The Need for Speed.  The suggestion that elapsed time required for transport is the basic determinant of customer choice of travel mode, and is thus critical for bringing back passenger service, is based on my recollection of how, in my youth, trains were much faster than automobiles and a lot of my relatives used them for both business and pleasure. With the coming of the Interstate highway system, that advantage died and so did a lot of trains.  The airlines, however took the M&E and with heavy subsidies also took the business travel market. It seems pretty logical then, that if you get the time advantage back in the railway's favor, you could expect to get the business back.

  Second, I wanted to point out that the technology is available today, off the shelf, to do that very thing. China's new Shanghai to Beijing High speed line - opening next year, is scheduled for 800 miles (not KM) in under four hours!

 The other points; comfort, use of time in travel, cost and pleasure are all relatively side issues. Not trivial, but not definitive.

 When Larry correctly points out the relative importance of automotive travel improvement, I agree but do not believe that it is either an inherent condition or a permanent one.

 Regarding AMTRAK: How many of us could do a good creative job that required not only a lot of technical savvy, but a lot of individual effort in the face of our owners principal spokesman telling the world from his bully pulpit, with every political campaign, how useless our efforts were?  It's gotta be tough, and you have to respect all the Captain Queegs, who stood up and took it as required.  

  Hopefully this is a new day. The first meaningful high speed route will probably be chosen in a political sausage making process, but hopefully AMTRAK has a couple of good market planners someplace.   I bet they do! I bet they even know who they are!  I hope their boss does too, and that they can have at least a sensible impact on that sausage making.

   Tom Engle

Regarding VIA's Ocean, Canadian, and their sister long-distance trains in the Amtrak system: These are not just cruise trains, though they do attract some leisure riders out to see North America at ground level. Rather, they have several functions. This was brought home to me on a Twin Cities-Portland Empire Builder trip. The train 1) had been the Chicago-Milwaukee-Twin Cities day service; it became 2) the Twin Cities-North Dakota-Montana lifeline intercity service, as well as 3) a link to/from Glacier Park from both east and west and, finally, 4) overnight service from Spokane to Portland and Seattle. Quite a lot for one train, with clusters of a few to a couple of dozen passengers on/off at every stop, and well over 500 souls (not counting CHI-MLW-MSP) carried on this single run of a train with maybe 428 passenger spaces (+/-296 coach & 132 sleeper). There was a one well-patronized diner and 1 sightseer lounge. On a $/passenger-mile basis, the economics of such trains are not too bad. As an earlier poster noted, this could be improved if the trains also were allowed to carry some mail and express. Critically, the long-distance trains are the links between corridors that make Amtrak a national system, and not just a bunch of regional services. Even if your opinion is that we are "stuck" with them, and that probably is the case, should we not make them as good as they can be, as M Garnet opined in the opening post?

The comments around this exceptional piece of work seem to be getting at the heart wood of the rail passenger conundrum in this country. My positions come from being 70 years of age, nurtured by an old school conservative view of individual responsibility, educated in business and economics and experienced in national agendas.  From my years in Washington, DC, I know that there is an association for every human body part and human activity, all having lobbyists and manipulating all manner of metrics to justify  their existence and point of view.  It would be helpful to avoid the use of such knee jerk labels as “subsidy” when trying to explore ways of making our country’s transportation system more effective & efficient in solving the human need of physically getting around a rather large nation.  Every group in this country gets a subsidy in one form or another: call it job stimulus, tax exemption, protective tariff, price support, development credit, harbor dredging, improved trade access, etc.!  

When Amtrak was started, I was only interested in getting the Montrealer re-instated so I could avoid driving from my new home in Vermont to family in Connecticut.  It is easy to look back and say Amtrak should have been done differently: it has performed the task of “place holder” for passenger rail but that is about it.  Those were dark days for railroads but we are now in a very different world: then I paid 16 cents a gallon for fuel oil to heat my drafty Vermont farm house!  Today, we have 75 million boomers aging out, they control about 75% of the nations wealth, they love to travel, they are fit but getting more prone to medical situations, they have “done it all” and want to continue to have adventures, they enjoy creature comforts and are enjoying being grandparents.  This is not a market block to be ignored, it is not solely a market for “luxury train travel;” it is a major component of the traveling public which does not opt for speed alone but which prefers reasonable mode frequency, reasonable adherence to published schedules, reasonable and clean accommodations, reasonable food, accessible and accommodating  equipment and a minimum of hassle.  

I enjoy traveling across Canada on VIA and each trip I meet more reasons beside my own for using the train to get from Toronto to Vancouver.  Business people I have met even take personal time so they can arrive in Edmonton for instance, well prepared for an important meeting, fed and rested and right near city center while those who fly in are jet lagged, sleepy, irritable, confused and ill prepared. Guess who gets their way at the meeting?  The government auditor for oil revenues who had a heart attack on a plane flight, was taken to hospital for surgery, released after several days and could only travel by train from Winnipeg to Edmonton because of his new health condition, and on and on.  We all have different reasons for being on the train and collectively make up a very appreciable market but, it does require, as Garth stated, a critical mass being recognized as such and then a vision developed to meet this, be it a government/private partnership or some form of federal capital bank to invest in the track structure making its operation compatible with freight traffic.  

My friend, the late Paul Weyrich, had all the conservative credentials a person could have and he was a strong voice for passenger rail & trolley/light rail as well as integration of inter and intra urban service: this problem/opportunity at this time must be addressed without falling back on old reasons not to and, like my example of the varied reasons for different persons being on a train, come together with fresh ideas on how to really run the railroad.

oamundson:  Boy, am I glad to see your comment.  I was beginning to worry that I was the only one who saw the issues as I do.  You also are right in citing the late Paul Weyerich.  There were few as conservative as he, yet he was a strong advocate of rail passenger service.  He also was a supporter of mass transit, having helped shepherd through the UMTA, now FTA, budget request when he worked as an aid to to a Senator from Colorado.

Bill Buckley, also not exactly a man of the Left, wrote a couple pieces on why passenger rail might need public support, and, what's more, actually used to ride it himself.