Duke said:
NickD said:
In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :
When Illinois Terminal was jointly purchased by 9 different Class 1s in '56, they didn't want to deal with the money-losing interurban passenger service or the upgrading and maintaining the electric infrastructure, so they dumped passenger service and yanked down the catenary.
So, yeah, medium-distance passenger service in the US has been losing money for almost 70 years and still people think that multi-billion-dollar passenger rail projects will save the world. California, I'm looking at you.
Illinois Terminal is a bit of a unique case, in the fact that it went everywhere already existing railroads went, so it really didn't bring anything to the table in terms of interurban service that anybody else wasn't serving.
I honestly think that short- and medium-distance passenger service is where they have the most chance of success these days. Long-distance, in my mind, is a losing proposition. Part of that is how US passenger service is configured, Amtrak is the unwelcome house guest of the Class Is. They don't want to run passenger service, so they allow Amtrak to run over their rails, but that doesn't mean they have to make Amtrak train a priority. I remember reading where a guy rode the Southwest Chief and they were something like 30 hours behind schedule because BNSF kept them in a siding pretty much for an entire day to let their trains by. This is made worse thanks to Precision Scheduled Railroading, which has encouraged Class Is to cut down on additional track capacity, knocking 4-track lines down to 2 and 2-track lines down to singles with a bunch of passing sidings. But let's say you were able to scrounge up the trillions to construct an entirely separate electrified high-speed passenger line for long-haul service from New York to Miami. Even if your trains ran direct service at 250mph, they're still going to get their ass kicked by that direct flight 747 doing twice the speed, and your ticket prices are going to be way higher to offset construction costs, unless subsidized by governments.
But your shorter trips have the time advantage over long-haul. Look at the North East Corridor. The actual travel time of the plane between say Philly and Washington is faster than the train, but then you add in the 1-2 hours ahead of time that you have to show up for the plane and going through security and boarding and taxiing and unloading, and the train has the advantage. You show up at the station 10-15 minutes before arrival, hop on board and get seated immediately and then hop off at your station. And the closer those cities get, the more that time advantage improves. And if you are connecting major cities, like Los Angeles or San Francisco, you can skip all that nasty gridlock where it takes 2.5 hours to go 11 miles despite 6- and 8-lane highways.
The thing that Joe Boardman (former head of Amtrak), and myself, think your Amtrak service is doing wrong is trying to beat planes on price, rather than accommodations. It's tough to beat them on time on longer trips, but what is the big gripe about airplanes? They're cramped, they're uncomfortable, the food is garbage. So people are willing to deal with a little longer travel time if the accommodations are a little nicer and you get a good cooked meal and a place to sleep. And that was Joe Boardman's big push. He had the dining car menu extensively reworked to provide good meals like lobster mac'n'cheese and roast beef that were cooked in the dining car. And Amtrak saw record growth in ridership under him. And then he left and the new guy dumped the dining kitchens for microwaved TV dinners because he tried to get ticket prices down instead. Well, now you have a service that has the same accommodations as an airplane but a fair bit slower. Boardman was pretty vocal about his displeasure at the new hands on the reins after he left and thought he was sending Amtrak down a dangerous path.
A few other points: there have been promising light-rail short- and medium-range passenger rail projects that could have been successful but they have been undermined by politicians, who inflate the price tag through graft. The one in North Carolina comes to mind, where they spent years and years doing all these studies through different favored groups and kept cranking the price tag up to an absurd level and then it withered on the vine when at the eleventh hour one of the participants backed out protesting a concern that they had to have had the whole time but curiously never mentioned. Or how the Lackawanna Cutoff, arguably the finest section of rail built in the US, has sat dormant for 40 years while they have run study after study on reactivating it. Also, I think the future of commuter rail might have taken a blow with the pandemic, now that a lot of jobs have gone to work from home. Again bringing up the reactivation of the Lackawanna Cutoff, there is now a lot of doubt that it's purpose of easing commutes from Scranton to NYC might be lost now that a lot of those people have permanently gone to working from home.
