Amtrak has so many empty seats on its trains that it is creating a writers-in-residence program offering free long-distance train rides to writers provided that they tweet their journeys. Despite my skepticism for government subsidies to trains, I love trains and have always dreamed of living on one. So I’m ready to take up my residency.
For Amtrak, the rationale for this program might be that the marginal cost of carrying someone a train that is already going somewhere with empty seats is not a whole lot more than zero. (It’s much more than zero if they ride in a sleeping car, but presumably all Amtrak is offering is coach.) The potential downside is if the train is significantly late or has other problems, which are all-too-frequent on certain Amtrak routes, the negative publicity would outweigh the positive.
On the other hand, where does this end? Should Amtrak offer residencies to photographers? Painters? Model railroaders? On average, Amtrak trains only fill half their seats, so there is plenty of room for this program’s expansion.
The truth is that this idea isn’t entirely crazy or even new. As I document elsewhere, back in 1924 the Great Northern Railway gave Grace Flandrau–then a well-known fiction writer–an unlimited pass to ride its trains as a part of its commission for her to write a series of historical papers about the Northwest. The Santa Fe Railway gave painters free rides from Chicago and the West Coast to New Mexico where they could paint scenery and Indians. Many western railroads outfitted entire passenger cars with darkrooms and other facilities to help photographers like William Henry Jackson roam around and photograph their lines.
Kamagra Soft Tabs and Kamagra Jelly work exactly like order cheap levitra unica-web.com their branded counter part.9. But cialis tadalafil generic it is tough to say whether Multiple Sclerosis causes the blockages of veins or not. This device is controlled by a computer and it delivers HIFU energy at the prostate through a rectal buy generic cialis https://www.unica-web.com/franzrienesl_passed_away.htm probe that removes all the cancer-infected tissue from the region. One of the most recommended and preferred treatment for ED is see now cheapest generic tadalafil Caverta 100 mg tablets. While Amtrak isn’t the biggest waste of money in the federal government, it is hard to justify when planes, buses, and cars are all far less expensive and, to varying degrees, faster and more convenient. Nor is it true, contrary to what Amtrak would like you to believe that taking the train will help save the planet. For short-distance travel, intercity buses are far more environmentally friendly, while for long-distance travel planes are superior. (Since planes use most energy taking off, the energy and emissions per passenger mile is far lower on longer trips than the average.) Still, I can’t fault Amtrak for using social media to promote its trains any more than I could complain about it taking out an ad in the Washington Post.
Unfortunately, Amtrak is not likely to offer me a residency. Not only am I skeptical of Amtrak in the first place, I have a better idea than most young writers today what a train ride should be like. They’ll compare Amtrak’s leg-rest seats with those found on an airplane and find them favorable even compared to first-class seats on a domestic flight. They’ll compare Amtrak food and see that, though far from excellent, the food on the long-distance trains is better than airlines offer in coach and can be as good as airline first class.
On the other hand, I remember what the trains were like before Amtrak as well as in Amtrak’s early days when it was still using older railcars. The seats on trains such as Santa Fe’s hi-level El Capitan were based on decades of ergonomic research aimed at finding the most comfortable long-distance seat that would fit a wide range of people. Passenger train seating took a huge step backwards when Amtrak replaced those cars with Amfleet and Superliners, whose seats appear to be based on plastic lawn furniture.
I also remember real dining-car food. The railroads almost always lost money on their dining service, but used it as a loss-leader to attract patronage. So I can’t fault Amtrak for losing money on its food services. But I can fault it for serving largely inedible junk.
So don’t expect to see me on an Amtrak train any time soon. If I’m going from Washington to New York, I’ll take Megabus or another bus. If I’m going across the country, I’ll fly. If I want a really enjoyable train ride, I’ll go to Switzerland and ride some of their private, for-profit trains.
“If I want a really enjoyable train ride, I’ll go to Switzerland and ride some of their private, for-profit trains.”
It varies, but the train stock on the private lines is not necessarily very plush. The Bernina Express that Rhaetian runs is actually a bit shappy — although the setting is indeed lovely.
I have to disagree with the Antiplanner. Doesn’t comparing Amtrak to today’s airlines make a lot more sense than comparing today’s Amtrak to some memories of days gone by? Airline travel had deteriorated so much and Amtrak should at least get some credit for not being as bad.
Cato should spring for a rail pass for the Antiplanner when he next travels to DC.
“Cato should spring for a rail pass for the Antiplanner when he next travels to DC.”
The cost of a coach ticket from PDX to DC on March 3 is only about $350. That seems like a bargain, until you consider that the trip is 96 hours—assuming no delays. That doesn’t include food. Or the inconvenience of sleeping semi-upright with no privacy. Or spending hours in train stations during layovers.
Non-stop flight time is five hours and costs $550 on March 3.
Assuming the Antiplanner values his time, the train is many magnitudes more expensive; even a room a roomette at $1200 to $1400 is far less expensive than the time cost, which at $50 an hour is about $4500, assuming no delay.
It always amuses me when people compare transcontinental air travel to travel by long distance trains. Contrary to such musings, the obvious needs to be pointed out: long distance trains do not compete with transcontinental air travel. Usually less than 10% of all long distance train passengers are traveling between the end of the lines, e.g., such as Chicago-Seattle on the Empire Builder. Most travel is to/from the intermediate points, which should be obvious when average trip lengths are considered. This is less than 1,000 miles for the Empire Builder, for example. And most points served do not have affordable or frequent air service, let alone intercity bus service (which is increasingly is limited to point-to-point services between major metro areas from the likes of Megabus, and are mostly useless to anyone not living near a large urban downtown).
The economics of long distance trains could be improved. But like the forgotten stepchild Amtrak lavishes its limited resources on its pampered Northeast Corridor, shifting many of its fixed expenses onto its poor relation (or overcharging states for trains less than 750 miles.) It is interesting that reports of long distance train subsidies almost never identify the fixed costs that would still mostly exists if they were all discontinued.
Every so often some unidentified denizen of Amtrak points out there would be almost no savings if all long distance trains were cut, thanks to “labor protection” and the large proportion of fixed, e.g., mostly Northeast Corridor, expenses. A recent Trains article points out that Amtrak plus Connecticut could spend well over $10 billion just on replacing Northeast Corridor bridges–which could go a very long way in the rest of the U.S. There is also plenty of discussion and analysis of passenger rail economics at the outspoken rail advocacy site run by URPA (http://www.unitedrail.org/. As these folks point out, Amtrak’s accounting system has NEVER been particularly transparent, or structured in a way clearly identifying the actual costs incurred on a particular route.
There are few empty Amtrak seats in the Northeast. My wife recently took a train to VA that left at 12:30 AM. We thought she would have a leisurely ride and get some sleep. The train was packed and she got jammed into a 4 seat section where two people face two other people with their legs all intertwined. She did not feel pampered. They could fill a lot more trains if available.
Trains work there because of demographics, geography and the historical development of cities in the Northeast. That can’t be replicated in most other parts of the country and it is a waste of money to build “not so high speed trains” to try to create demand. A small portion of the high speed rail $ would do wonders for regular speed trains on Amtrak.
Sandy, I’m not sure how Amtrak isn’t as bad. The “deterioration” in airline service since Carter eliminated the CAB is arguably a huge improvement. Sure, it’s not romantic. But things that the masses do rarely are romantic.
Before the elimination of CAB, airlines couldn’t compete on price. So they competed on things like who served better prime rib and how sexy their flight attendants were. I can see how lacking steak and airlines firing stewardesses for being too old is no longer romantic, but that doesn’t make being able to fly for 1/2 of what it used to cost me bad.
As for Amtrak, I can’t speak for other routes but the Empire builder is a mess compared to flying. It’s frequently far from being on time. Even when it is, it’s just as expensive as the cheapest flights on Southwest Airlines but takes 3- 5 times longer for total travel time and has 1 single choice versus Southwest’s 6 – 8 per day.
Another example of how messed up Amtrak is in the little things. It’s 2014 and their main form for routes doesn’t recognize “Minneapolis” as a station. They’re just too cheap to pay for some programming / data management and map commonly entered cities + what official station names they map to.
http://screencast.com/t/tVbAnbu33
msetty, I’m not sure what you mean in your evaluation of the Empire Builder. All destinations are part of the highway system. They all have access to airports. Often times that airport has air service that the Federal government is subsidizing.
For example, look at the state of North Dakota in 2013. They had a total of 154,,800 on/offs. Ther top 4 stations all have airports within 5-10 miles of the Amtrak station. The top 4 accounted for all but 20190 – 1/8th – of the on-offs.
Of the last 1/8th, nearly half is accounted for by Stanely, ND. It’s less than 60 miles from Minot’s airport and people in that area are accustomed to driving into Minot to do most of their shopping. They don’t “need” Amtrak service.
The other 2 stops in North Dakota are Devils Lake and Rugby. Like the top 4, Devil Lake’s Amtrak station is within a 2 handful of miles of the Devils Lake airport. The Federal government already subsidizes flights to DVL.
Like Stanley, Rugby – the geographical center of North America – is only @60 miles from air service. People in it’s area are used to driving into Minot or Devils Lake every day for shopping and even work.
All Empire Builder stations in North Dakota are served by Jefferson Lines. Most are served by Greyhound. Some cities have service by a few other bus lines.
The number of on/off’s in NOrth Dakota means that each day, the state on average for all 7 of it’s stations handles @400 / day. A town like Stanley average 25 people / day. Rugby has even less.
I’m not seeing essential service. What I”m seeing is highly subsidized, SUPERNUMERARY service.
And this all ignores the paradigm of rail. It’s highly capital intensive and requires high volumes to offset it’s high capital costs. A thinly used service like the Empire builder is the exact opposite of that.
Overall Amtrak ridership by station
http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/17600/amtrak-stations-mapped-by-ridership/
We are at an interesting point in the people transportation business. many changes, very quickly. I expect that some service like Uber will soon appear fro long distance travel.
As the Instapundit says, disintermediation is the wave of the future, and the idea that private cars are not public transportation services will die.
Why would I ride a train or a bus from A to B when a few clicks on my smart phone will find me a guy who is going from A to B anyway, and would happily pick me up at my house for a contribution to his expenses?
The mathematical nature of 1 dimensional main frame processing versus the 2 dimensional distributed processing of road nets becomes more apparent with time and internet communication. Except to the auto haters. Whose ideas seems mostly to be based on hatred of the idea of freedom for us plebs.
pk166:
msetty, I’m not sure what you mean in your evaluation of the Empire Builder. All destinations are part of the highway system. They all have access to airports. Often times that airport has air service that the Federal government is subsidizing.
Virtually every town has “access to airports.” That doesn’t mean they have access to affordable flights or more than 1-2 flights per day. I suspect Williston, ND air fares are pretty high thanks to the Bakken oil boom, with fares meant for the business market. And short-distance markets such as within an hour’s drive of Devils Lake aren’t the market served by once per day trains, long distance or otherwise. Trains can be competitive with driving over a few hundred up to 1,000 miles, particularly when such drives can be quite tedious and tiring, and expensive when motel bills are added for overnight trips.
I also don’t think there is an intellectually valid reason to have to defend the subsidies shelled out for Amtrak and other rail service, other than answering unthoughtful ideological arguments. This is particularly true at the national level, where “user fees” currently barely cover 50% of federal and many state highway costs because the politicians are too chicken-sh– to have raised gasoline taxes to keep up with inflation. Amtrak subsidies are actually a drop in the bucket. Ten times that amount spent on intercity passenger service would return a lot more than 10 times the transportation, thanks to the network effect and literally thousands of additional connections that would be possible. But that goes against the biases of The Antiplanner and others here.
But in “exceptional America” (sic), such heretical thoughts are tantamount to “socialism.” Never mind the Stalinist-type legacy of how our road system was planned and developed, naively kickstarted by the Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower Administrations. And don’t forget how dubious cost accounting for passenger trains never created a real understanding of their economics by the railroad industry from the 1910’s onward (as documented by Greg Thompson in his book, The Passenger Train In The Motor Age https://ohiostatepress.org/Books/Book%20Pages/Thompson%20Passenger.htm. And of course, Amtrak has continued the hoary railroad tradition of not really understanding how passenger train economics and markets works, say, unlike the Germans or Swiss (among other things, “density” is an important factor but far from the dominant one).
Chapter 8 is the central discussion in Thompson’s book of how the understanding of passenger train economics was screwed up in the 1930’s and 1940’s, particularly pages 144 through 148. And unfortunately the tradition continues with Amtrak, and Superliner trains with often 5+ tons of tare weight per passenger based on average loads.
Typo! Correct chapter is Chapter 6, What Went Wrong.
1. Just to provide further amusement to msetty 🙂 , I still think the Antiplanner’s work as a Writer in Transit for Cato should focus more on comparing Amtrak to airlines rather than to historic train travel. The time difference is obvious to everyone, but the experience difference is not. Does anybody know what portion of the US has ever traveled on inter-city rail?
2. My complaints about the deterioration of airlines is mostly about security delays (need to arrive 1 hour early just to be half-safe) and utter humiliation that I am still amazed that Americans put up with. The biggest problem with deregulation is that now flights are completely full and flying is so much nicer with an empty middle seat. Of course the deregulation has lowered costs so much that “anyone” can fly 🙂
3. Not every can fly because of health/fear/lists. Not everyone is in a huge hurry to travel. Some people want to enjoy the travel and not just get it over with fast. Some people carry luggage that can’t go on airlines. A coast to coast trip is rather extreme, but trips of several hundred miles are very comparable between flying and trains.
One advantage that trains have is that they keep going in the same direction, while planes fly to hubs and then redistribute passengers. If you are travelling from one minor city past a major city to another minor city, then flights are never direct, but trains will travel through a major city and keep going in the same direction.
If train and plane passengers paid the fair cost of their transportation, than this would be a public policy issue.
The biggest problem with deregulation is that now flights are completely full and flying is so much nicer with an empty middle seat. Of course the deregulation has lowered costs so much that “anyone” can fly
Increasing load factors are a problem? They are primarily responsible for 1) lower fares, as carriers optimize their networks, and 2) consistently increasing fuel economy — energy consumption per passenger-mile has fallen by well over 50% in the past 40 years. This would not have happened without the incentives set in place by deregulation.
Italy has private sector HSR. http://www.italotreno.it/en/Pages/default.aspx
I have no problem if you want to travel by automobile or intercity bus, but O’Toole as you have said before roads are there regardless of economic conditions. That’s an ? subsidy, thanks to your government friends.