Passenger service ca. 1944 and Amtrak’s self-destructiveness

If my title seems like a hodgepodge, you’re absolutely right. After deciding to write about how Amtrak, given the chance to step up and improve the rail travel experience for its customers, usually doesn’t take it, I discovered an article in a 1944 issue of Trains. (A Railroad Plans For Tomorrow by J. V. Gilmore, Trains, Vol. 4, No. 11, September 1944, p. 8.)

The article is fiction: a hypothetical speech from a railroad planner in 1944 talking about what must be done to keep the traveling public riding the trains after the end of World War II. The fiction contains nuggets of fact and reality-based thinking, something I think is sorely lacking at Amtrak.

It’s noteworthy that, even in 1944, the growth of air travel and the degradation of the air travel experience to a one-size-fits-all seat in single-class accommodations was anticipated. In the area of roads and automobile travel, the writer also had it right, anticipating if not actually predicting what the Interstate Highway System would do to both rail travel and road use by heavy trucks. Even in 1944, the railroads were vigorously fighting for regulations on truckers just as stringent as those on the railroads, and noting that, for tax purposes, nobody was paying for the railroads’ rights of way with public funds. It was clear they also recognized that taxes on those very rights of way were paying for the roads and airports for their competition.

The fictional railroad planner clearly recognizes that there must be a train ready to go when and where the traveler wants to begin his or her trip, and ready to go where that traveler wants the trip to end. Five passenger trains per day, and two to three at night, are recommended to cover this kind of service.

Now, this is probably laughable given Amtrak’s schedules. Not even in California does the state-supported Amtrak service achieve this level of service. When Amtrak took over the Northeast, it wisely kept the density of scheduling already put in place by the participating railroads. Nowhere else did Amtrak use this wisdom.

Today, Amtrak has forgotten that you have to spend money to make money, and moved to the political theory that you have to beg Congress for money to make less money than you need to break even. It’s not even imagined that Amtrak could actually turn a profit if it had multiple trains per day on multiple routes. Then there is routing.

The closest things to a hub and spoke system that Amtrak has are Chicago and New York City. Even the latter is only half a wheel. Let’s face it, once the railroads had gutted the passenger rail map with train offs, Amtrak did the rest by selectively choosing routes that were never going to get passengers “anywhere” by train.

Finally, the fictional planner recognized that the volume would come from the masses. This is a backhanded way of saying that they’d only fill the new trains if the price was right, and competitive with other modes. Forgetting that government subsidy skews any competitiveness, because you don’t really factor in what you have already paid in taxes toward transportation when you buy a ticket, the fictional planner wanted to price rail coach seats below all other modes. Again, this may seem laughable with the always-full Amtrak schedules, but shouldn’t this really be the case. Why are we paying near first-class airline fares for seats on a full train? The airline pricing strategy makes sense—for airlines. If you want to fill up your planes, sell low early out, and sell high to get people in at the last minute.

Okay, I fudged a bit. Amtrak’s pricing only makes sense for Amtrak, not for the traveling public. Amtrak has a limited amount of space and they want to monetize it at the highest possible rate; but they don’t want to risk not filling it up. It’s the flip side of the same coin.

Amtrak can do one of two things to increase revenue under the current conditions: It can either gouge the public, which it is coming dangerously close to doing now, or establish excess capacity, under which it can use a full-up pricing strategy and gross a lot more money than they ever could with the current status quo.

Alas, we’re back to getting Congress, which has never liked Amtrak and thought it would die a natural death within its first decade, to fork over enough funds to create that excess capacity and to tell the freight railroads to carry it or go to hell. Or we’re back to Amtrak to creatively market a funding program with private and local partners. Don’t hold your breath for either; you’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of drowning by one or the other.

Looks like I’ve overstayed my word count, so let’s just table Amtrak’s cute little self-destructive tendencies until next time.

©2018 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com

(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Charles is a political conservative but believes in public funding of passenger rail as a part of the federal government’s constitutionally conservative obligation to provide for defense and public infrastructure so that private enterprise may flourish.)