All Eyes on Amtrak

I have to agree with Vranich that says the government should not subsidize the trains but open it up to private companies. Here is my horror story with Amtrak. In June of this year, I needed to get to Chicago from Arkansas. My husband and I absolutely hate the drive between the two. So, I started looking at airline prices...not an option. I then checked into Amtrak. Decent prices...about what would have been spent on gas anyway, but without having to do the driving. And, I was shocked to see that it would only take about two hours longer than we usually take in the car anyway. It usually takes us about 12 hours to make the drive (we stop everywhere!) and it took the train almost 14.
So, Amtrak is was. We were both excited about our first train ride. Right from the start, we had a 3 hour delay even getting on the train because it was stuck behind a stalled freight train somewhere in Texas. I was mad. Then I realized that there were people on that train. They're having to wait those 3 hours to get moving again. We went to Wal-mart. Poor folks. My first instinct was to just start the car and head on to Chicago. Needless to say, that's not what happened. After additional delays of around 6 HOURS, that put us in Chicago 9 HOURS LATE!!!!! The only way to get off the train while it was stopped was to be thrown off and have a report filed. I was seriously contemplating this move. The train ran out of everything except bad attitudes from the staff. Instead of boarding for the return trip home, we rented a car and drove ourselves back to Arkansas. Know what the difference was in a one-way fare refund from Amtrak and the rental car & gas to get home? Ten bucks.
So, for me, is Amtrak a consideration on which way to travel? NOPE. If, in say, twenty years, when a private company may take it over and have their own tracks to travel on, I may change my tune a bit. 'Til then, I will never...even if it means never leaving my state...step foot on another Amtrak train as long as I live.

Yesterday I checked ticket prices from VA to FL on Amtrak and compared them to the airlines. Needless to say, I was totally shocked that the price of an Amtrak ticket (even with my AAA discount) was MORE than the price of a plane ticket; $325 vs $280 respectively.

Given the claim by the Association of American Railroads as to the effeciency of diesel locomotives, HOW can Amtrak justify the fact that they cost most than the airlines? This cost comparison does not even take into consideration that it would take 16 hours on a train vs. 5 hours by plane to complete my travel in one direction. Had the Amtrak price been more realistic I happily would have purchased their ticket over the airlines. Amtrak does have one thing the airlines are severly lacking, customer service!! Nothing worse than paying lots of money for the opportunity to receive mediocre customer service. However, given that Amtrak is more expensive AND takes longer, makes it hard to justify a train trip!!

If Amtrak really wants to increase ridership, especially during these times of $4 a gallon fuel, then they MUST REDUCE their prices!! By decreasing each individual ticket price, they will not make more one each one, however, they will make more in the long run (by virtue of increasing the number ticket purchases AS A RESULT of lowerindividual ticket prices!!!). Is it better to sell 100 tickets at $100 each for $10,000 or 150 tickets at $80 each for $12,000; the results are obvious, as long as you look at the BIG PICTURE.

AmTrak PLEASE revisit your prices!!!!!!!!

For such a advanced country,America is way way behind Europe as far as fast ,affordable and enviromentalyy friendly transportation...A disgrace ...For all our weatlh and tecnology,we are still in the dark ages when it comes to moving the masses around....There is no rail transportation to any of our beautifull National Parks,shamefull !!! It has taken the huge rise in gas prices to get our attention,Perhaps that is why Europe has invested in a awsome rail system years ago...They have been paying huge prices for oil for several years

I will try to speak from my experiences of Amtrak both as a passenger and structural employee.

Like the article says, Amtrak only owns a fraction of the rail that has been laid out throughout the country, mostly in the northeast between Boston and Washington DC. This has been the only profitable part of Amtrak's business over it's lifetime. Amtrak has spent $10's of billions on improvements. For example, Amtrak has replaced nearly 6,000 bridges, the rails, and thousands of signals along this route to improve their service. This has allowed Amtrak to introduce a high speed rail service to cut down on trip time. It is so popular that it helped Amtrak turn a profit for the first time in it's history 2 years ago.

Unfortunately, the private freight companies that own the rest of the rail lines in the United States have not updated their systems since the civil war (really!). Most of the bridges, especially in the southeast are still one way, which means if an Amtrak train and a freight train meet at nearly the same time at a bridge, the Amtrak train must yield. It can take a 3 mile long freight train doing nearly 20 minutes to clear the bridge. In the summer, the freight lines impose a speed limit because the heat from the summer sun can bend the track potentially derailing a speeding train. This has a profound effect on the arrival time of the long distance services.

I will agree that Amtrak's management is pathetic since most of the board members are tied to members of Congress. However, most people who oppose Amtrak do not understand how vital Amtrak is to the northeast. Amtrak wants to expand service to places like Chicago to Detroit, Chicago to St. Louis, Dallas to San Antonio to Houston, and LA to San Diego, but tons of red tape still plague the railroad; most of it due to the private rail companies and Congress.The government spends 10 times as much money subsidizing the airlines than it does the railroads. I believe a regional rail service will not work .Imagine getting on the train and having to change trains every 200 miles because you have reached to limit of one company's service with layovers at each stop.

Remember when the airlines were paralyzed by 9/11. How many people used Amtrak to get home. Amtrak MUST be an alternative.

Train travel is probably the worst way to travel. I took a train from San Antonio to Phoenix thinking it was going to be glamorous like the movies and it was the opposite. The train was 5 hours late just because it's a train so it's not reliable like say a plane (I ended spending 24-25 hours on the train), your packed into a cabin like sardines, it was just the worse thing I've ever experienced. Nothing like the movies.

Maybe in Europe trains are a little more comfrotable because it's normal to take the EuroRail but here it's not.

Funny thing: USDOT has proposals for high speed rail corridors that conveniently do not connect:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/High-Speed_Rail_Corridor_Designations.png&imgrefurl=http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:High-Speed_Rail_Corridor_Designations.png&h=862&w=1440&sz=109&hl=en&start=3&tbnid=QUmvGq3TB6lFKM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=150&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dus%2Bhigh%2Bspeed%2Brail%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den

It would be all too simple to extend these lines at critical points to create a ntaional high speed network: cleveland-pittsburgh, st. louis and louisville-nashville-atlanta, kansas city-tulsa, little rock-st louis, little rock-meridian, houston-san antonio, sacramento-portland, mobile-tallahassee-jacksonville, jacksonville-orlando.

Getting across the rockies is tough, but it can be done as well: oklahoma city-amarillo-albuquerque-phoenix-las vegas-los angeles, with a spur from albuquerque to denver. Presto! high-speed national network. But somehow USDOT didn't do that. Perhaps they are under pressure to do this, by the same parties that press the 'inefficiency' of rail travel in general.

Yes I am cynical (and a little but conspiratorial); I see too much propaganda against rail transit by those who turn a blind eye to road and air travel inequities. Amtrak is by no means perfect: any rail advocate will acknowledge that, but there is a big difference between imperfect and infeasible.

Great article what are americans and transit going to do now and for the future. Amtrak information will be added on this site in the summer of 2008
http://www.transitguru.com/

First, improving the infrastructure would cost 10's of billions, NOT hundreds! This is real money, make no mistake, but the nay-sayers like to give 'sky-is-falling' estimates of how much things would cost to update Amtrak, conveniently ignoring reality. Instead of whole new lines, in most cases it would only be necessary to build several miles of pass-through track on existing railroad right-of-way.

And I love the passive-aggressive commentary: 'a handful of commuter lines'; There are just under 30 transit systems in this country, including two new ones being built in Phoenix and Seattle. That's more than a handful, but there's still a mindset among some people that trains are 'inefficient' and only a 'novelty'. A novelty: that must be why LA is building a subway network to replace their streetcars.

Couple of other points:
--If rail transit is so inefficient, why are the automakers and the airlines doing so well? Can you imagine GM's profitability if they had to operate the roads as well as build cars?
--Rail has a bad rap in part because they overbuilt in the late 1800's, and by the time they realized how bad it was the auto industry was in full form (1920's) and was lobbying congress heavily to shut them down.
--Ask anyone who opposes rail if they have any investment in oil/cars/air travel. Their answers might surprise you.

--A few weeks ago American Airlines cancelled 3,000+ flights for maintenance, while at the same time gas prices went up over 20 cents a gallon. Yet in that same week there was NO news from Amtrak; the trains ran, and yes there were some delays but everything operated as normal. Think about that.

I'm sixty years old and the first train I ever road was the Bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto in 1981. What a shame. I travel several weeks a month now and would gladly give up on the headache of air travel for a nice modern train ride. Wake up American and smell the clean air!

I don't see why people insist that Amtrak "pay its own way." The highways don't; they rely on tax dollars.