What else, indeed?

Let's say we take my advice from the previous blog and dump Amtrak altogether. What can replace it?

I guess I'm not worried about the corridor services. Those provide enough high-density traffic that the states will probably gobble them up or find operators for them. The blue states will probably continue to subsidize them, as well. The red states should, too, as it's going to take a high learning curve for operators to understand how to make passenger trains make money again.

The long-distance trains are different. A single long-distance Amtrak train has two purposes, as I see it. The most important of these is to provide service between intermediate city/town pairs that are not well served by other the only other two forms of public transportation, air and bus. Current Amtrak trains accomplish this by manipulating prices as seats over any particular segment of a route get scarce. A seat between two intermediate points may become somewhat more expensive, but for that same seat to be available for a customer traveling from end to end may become hugely expensive and discourage that end-to-end customer from booking it, thereby leaving it open for the intermediate passenger.

Yes, that makes it possible that a seat will not be occupied between those intermediate points, but Amtrak doesn't care because it has already taken in the money equivalent to selling that seat by manipulating the prices.

An the post-Amtrak world, the intermediate travel demand should be satisfied by short-distance trains running on the same route but never the whole route. Take the Southwest Chief, for example. At the west end, the first set of local trains should serve nothing further east than the Arizona border. The next set could probably serve Arizona and New Mexico up to Las Vegas, NM, and still be day trains.

Think about the other possibilities on the other routes until my next blog.

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