Amtrak doubles down on failure

That’s the most logical conclusion to be drawn from Amtrak’s behavior in the past few weeks.

First, without a public announcement, as if Amtrak wanted to be criticized for the move, it withdrew discounts from its reservation system for students and AAA members. College students and those attending away-from-home military or prep schools have always been a substantial segment of Amtrak’s customer base. There are many colleges and universities in moderate to small municipalities within a day trip of major metropolitan centers where the colleges find many, if not most, of their students.

Take three of the major universities in Illinois, for example: Illinois State in Bloomington, University of Illinois in Champaign, and Southern Illinois in Carbondale. Amtrak offers Bloomington five trains from Chicago and five from St. Louis each day. Amtrak has three trains in each direction Chicago Carbondale that includes the intermediate Champaign. What student wouldn’t patronize these trains to avoid driving or flying the relatively short distances involved? (Chicago-Carbondale is 310 miles and St. Louis Bloomington is 160 miles.) Most students in colleges or universities that close to home tend to do regular weekend and holiday trips back.

While it would appear from this that Amtrak is comfortable that students will continue to use its service without the discounts, I predict significant increases in auto traffic on already glutted Interstates on those sensitive days of the week.

Then there is Amtrak’s decision to truncate its Cardinal in the face of New York City trackwork. For some reason that I can’t explain, Amtrak thinks it only needs one train a day each way between New York and Chicago. That train has long been the Lake Shore Limited, Amtrak’s name for the water level route train that was once the Twentieth Century Limited. The Cardinal, on the other hand, could be said to have once been the great PRR Broadway Limited, though there was actually a Broadway under Amtrak until 1995.

The Cardinal has been a bastard child, in that its routing has changed repeatedly over the years. To be fair, so did the routing of the Broadway. While the water level route across lower New York State and along the shore of Lake Erie, thence from Toledo to Chicago remained viable for the freight railroads, the large-scale rationalization of freight routes through lower Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, and thence to Chicago, dropped big chunks from the original routes, and downgraded the rest. To make time and still serve the major cities, both the Broadway and Cardinal changed their routings through Indiana and especially Ohio. Ultimately, when the only likely result would be two trains a day on the same route, unthinkable for 1995 Amtrak, the Broadway was simply dropped.

However, the Cardinal has been posting good ticket sales and ridership is as good as on any of Amtrak’s non-Northeast Corridor routes. The eastern half of the route, particularly, has continued to perform well. So, of course, when Amtrak realized that trackwork in Penn Station and through New Jersey would make schedule-keeping difficult, Amtrak rose to the challenge by truncating the Cardinal, making it a Chicago-Washington, DC, routing.

One train a day that goes all the way between two of the largest cities in the country is, quite obviously, enough. Perhaps enough to discourage potential passengers from using it.

Then, as of March 20, Amtrak has tightened its refund policy and increased penalties for cancelled reservations. Amtrak’s fare structures are too complicated to list here, but, in this writer’s opinion, are simply leaning more towards the air fare model. Can change fees be far in the future? I think not, since no change fees still give some reserved passengers a way out of the refund penalties by simply changing reservations to a future date, for some, an unlimited number of times.

And next! Place your bets! Community events, special train operators, and private car owners—you’re on your own. Good luck with that request to BNSF.

With the announcement at the end of March 2018 that Amtrak will no longer support special trains or private charters, it seems like the new Amtrak CEO’s mission is to sabotage what is left of Amtrak so that his comrades in the air travel industry will no longer have to contend with pricing intermediate distance flights to compete with Amtrak fares, or carry budget-priced passengers to large events that include, ugh!, trains as their central themes.

©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.)