Tag Archives: intercity passenger trains

Amtrak carried almost 87 percent as many passenger-miles in October 2022 as it did in October 2019, according to the monthly performance report released by the state-owned company yesterday. This is a significant increase from the 80.5 percent recorded in September.

This is an update of a chart posted last week. I’ll provide another update when October driving data are available.

This is still short of the 94.5 percent carried by domestic and international airlines. Domestic air travel alone is even higher, but unfortunately those data are somewhat behind — the latest is for September, when domestic air travel was several percent higher than the average of domestic and international travel. Continue reading →

Amtrak still hasn’t published its August performance report. But I noticed a paragraph on its “Reports and Documents” page under “Monthly Performance Reports.”

“Going forward,” the page says, “Amtrak will report Adjusted Operating Earnings as the key financial measure to evaluate results, Net Income/(Loss) will continue to be reported for reference. Adjusted Operating earnings represents Amtrak’s cash funding needs and is a reasonable proxy for Federal Operating Support needed in line with the appropriation.”

This isn’t really new; according to archive.org, it has been there since 2018 but wasn’t on the Reports and Documents page in 2017. What the statement means is that, instead of following generally accepted accounting principles, Amtrak will claim its net income is equal to the amount of operating subsidies it needs from the federal government, not including capital subsidies or state subsidies. Continue reading →

Amtrak carried 83.6 percent as many passenger-miles in June 2022 as it did in June 2019, according to the monthly performance report it posted yesterday. That’s an increase from 78.5 percent in May.

See yesterday’s Antiplanner for sources of transit and airline data.

Relative to its pre-pandemic numbers, Amtrak passenger-miles have been rising at about 5.5 percent per month. In terms of actual passenger-miles, they have been rising at 20 percent per month. However, much of Amtrak ridership is seasonal and it is normal for June ridership to be much higher than February’s. In 2019, for example, June’s passenger-miles were 125 percent greater than February’s compared with only 107 percent in 2022. Continue reading →

Brightline celebrated its third year of operating passenger trains in south Florida this month by killing two people in two days and then a third person a few days later. This makes a total of 63 deaths due to Brightline, which has been rated the most dangerous railroad in the country.

Of course, as shown in the above video, Brightline blames all of the fatalities on the victims. The deaths have nothing to do with Brightline adding fast, frequent passenger trains to a corridor that previously was used only by slow, infrequent freight trains. Continue reading →

At a time when almost everyone in the nation is affected by supply-chain problems but almost no one is riding Amtrak, the Federal Railroad Administration is frantic about how Amtrak trains are being delayed by freight trains. According to the agency’s latest report, Amtrak trains were delayed by a total of 1.3 million minutes (that’s 21,666 hours) in the first quarter of 2022, up 9 percent from the previous quarter.

Who is delaying whom? Photo by Patrick Dirden.

“The largest cause of delays was freight train interference at 299,252 minutes of delay — 22 percent of total delay minutes, an increase of 12 percent from the previous quarter,” says the report. However, the report makes no attempt to estimate the number of minutes of delays to freight trains caused by Amtrak. Passenger train delays, continues the report, caused a minuscule 2 percent of Amtrak riders — about 18,290 — who were connecting with a different train to miss their connections. Continue reading →

Just before the pandemic, Amtrak proudly announced that it lost only $29.5 million operating passenger trains in 2019 and expected to make an operating profit in 2020. Of course, that didn’t happen thanks to the pandemic, and what’s more, it was lying about losing only $29.5 million; its actual losses were closer to $1.4 billion, a mere 46 times more than it claimed.

Amtrak spent $2.5 billion on new trainsets for its high-speed Acela. These were supposed to go into service in 2021 but are now expected to begin service no sooner than 2023. Photo by Fan Railer.

Now that Congress has flooded Amtrak with money in the infrastructure bill, however, the agency no longer even cares about whether its passenger trains come close to covering their costs. Like any good soviet agency, it recently released its five-year plan, and it projects it will lose more than a billion dollars a year for almost every year in the future. Continue reading →

Brightline, the privately operated passenger train in Florida, had five accidents that killed three people last week.

• On February 13, a man was killed when he drove his car around the lowered crossing gates and was hit by a train in Lake Worth Beach.
• On February 15, a pedestrian was killed when he was struck by a Brightline train in Hallandale Beach.

Brightline posted this video taken from the train that struck a car last week to prove that the accident wasn’t its fault. What it shows is that a freight train had gone through the crossing and an impatient motorist drove around the gates unable to see that a passenger train was coming because his view was blocked by the freight. The accident would have been prevented if Brightline had installed full-width crossing gates instead of gates that covered only half the width of the street.

• Also on February 15, a woman and her baby narrowly avoided injury when a Brightline train struck her car in Delray Beach.
• On February 16, a man suffered “incapacitating injuries” when a Brightline train struck his car, also in Lake Worth Beach.
• On February 19, a man walking on the tracks was killed when he was hit by a Brightline train in Delray Beach.

Continue reading →