Amtrak Joe, Hometowns, and what Amtrak’s Past Can Teach Us About its Future

The news over the last week about VA and CSX, along with the Jobs Plan pushed me to write down some ideas that have been swirling around in my mind for a while about the future and past of passenger trains in the United States. Please read: "Amtrak Joe, Hometowns, and what Amtrak’s Past Can Teach Us About its Future," on Medium:

https://link.medium.com/4VC6Rak66eb

I know I'm not very active on this forum, but I'd appreciate reading your thoughts and feedback.

There isn't anything attached, so here is the link for the essay.

How frequent would you say service needs to be to
1. justify building and maintaining a separate passenger line
2. give enough freedom that a big chunk of the population will come to think of the train as being a reasonable, or even the obvious, way to make a certain trip ("frequency is freedom" is a great line; so many kinds of trips are easier with frequent public transp than they are by car, even some kinds of hiking trips)
3. make rail travel seem important in its own right to ordinary people, rather than having it always appear as some kind of sop to poor people, people with certain disabilities, environmentalists, and railfans?

The flatland parts of the western routes have plenty of space to add parallel tracks along much of their routes, Frontrunner style, which is just as good as rebuilding a separate parallel route, or even better, because the cost of things like grade crossing signals, drainage, etc., can be shared. In the mtns, not so much.

Very smart to point out that the key places to speed up train speeds is where they are currently very slow, not necessarily where one could get to the highest top speed.

Pensyfan19 wrote: ↑Fri Apr 02, 2021 2:39 pm There isn't anything attached, so here is the link for the essay.

Thanks. I didn't realize the link didn't parse right. I fixed it.

An interesting read.
Good points about fixing slow points . Changing to 10 mph track to 20mph track saves as much time as changing 79 mph track to 158 mph track , mile for mile .
Do you have a map of the Lackawanna cutoff ?

Arborwayfan wrote:How frequent would you say service needs to be to
1. justify building and maintaining a separate passenger line

Construction costs average $1M per mile to build at grade, considerably more for bridges and crossovers ($1-3M each) and then $30K per mile at a minimum for maintenance.

Depending on the length of the line and the other costs like fuel and labor, frequency isn't the question but how many pax per year you can attract and how much you're willing to commit in order to subsidize the losses...



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Interesting blog. It concentrates on what went right in Michigan, and what could happen likewise in the rest of America. It even includes what went wrong with the Michigan services in Indiana and Illinois.
Higher speed train services in Michigan with the trains averaging 70 mph connects Chicago with Detroit in about 4.5 hours. While not the 3 hour sweet spot to compete with planes, these trains are not charging HSR fares either. But will higher speed train services averaging 70 mph ever achieved majority market share in the Chicago to Detroit service? Towns and cities with stations along the way will have positive economic impacts with this service. What did it take to achieve 70 mph average speeds? Tracks owned and dispatched by Amtrak or the respective states, that a freight railroad had abandoned via bankruptcy. What went wrong, the approaches into Chicago is still on freight owned railroad corridor. Freight trains are always in the way slowing the passenger trains down.
That is not going to be as easy to do on an active freight line still owned by the freight railroad companies. The Frontline services mentioned in the blog in Utah is where the UP sold half the right-of-way to Utah which was not the UP mainline but a branch line off it. UTA runs half hour commuter train headways during the morning and evening rush hours and hourly services the rest of the day, easily 24 or more trains a day. Few intercity trains in most of the USA will ever need that frequency of train services. Provo to Ogden is just 81 miles. A commuter train averaging 45 mph can reach either end in around 2 hours or less.
North Carolina and Virginia intercity train services are extensions of Amtrak’s NEC regional services. Virginia is following a half and half model, Michigan and Utah, while North Carolina is following the Michigan model exclusively. In both cases along the rail corridors being developed, the passenger trains will run on state owned corridors hopefully dispatched by them as well.

But this does not hold true on most of Amtrak’s expansion of service plan. They still think using freight owned and dispatched tracks is the way to go. Why? There is a significant different and reach of trains averaging 45 mph, 70 mph, and 100 mph.

There is a possibility that certain rail lines follow the freight needed less grade approach. If instead there are sections that take the straight line approach of high grades but fast then the slow sections can be bypassed.
This only has merit on the routes with several now or future number of trains. Off top of my head .
1, Harrisburg - Pittsburgh
2. Wash - Richmond the RF&P is curvy in places and almost make a horseshoe.
3. East out of LAX
4. Springfield - Worcester

Depending on the length of the line and the other costs like fuel and labor, frequency isn't the question but how many pax per year you can attract and how much you're willing to commit in order to subsidize the losses...

I agree that the ultimate thing is the number of passengers (and willingness to subsidize). But frequency is one of the things that determines how many passengers you can attract. As jsmyers says, "frequency is freedom", and makes taking the train more flexible and therefore more attractive to many people. It also effectively speeds up the trip by reducing the time between when you are ready to leave and when the next available train leaves where you are and therefore arrives where you want to be; this is maybe another way of saying it's flexible, but it's still a way that makes the train more attractive to potential passengers. (I'm thinking here of routes that serve fairly substantial markets; obviously 5-a-day between Grand Jct and Glennwood Spgs is not going to attract five times as many people, but six-a-day instead of three-a-day on a reasonably populated corridor would be likely to attract more than twice as many passengers, right?

It would seem to be a good time to relook at the DMU concept for some of these routes. An auto/ quick coupling system would allow a lot more options, to connect more cities. As usual for me, extensive thruway buses would create a useful network.

Arborwayfan wrote: ↑Sun Apr 04, 2021 12:40 pmfrequency is one of the things that determines how many passengers you can attract.

Hmmm... maybe. If you're talking about two major cities, yep. You'll attract more with frequencies.

If you're talking about someplace like Duluth or Moline, not so much.

When I used to do armchair analysis for air service to regional markets, I had an unofficial metric of five Walmarts within a 20 mile radius of the airport as a determining factor for whether or not air service was justified.

Moline only has four... but there's a fifth that is 21 miles away, so that market might be borderline.

Duluth only has three. Scranton has four.

eolesen wrote: ↑Sun Apr 04, 2021 4:14 pm

Arborwayfan wrote: ↑Sun Apr 04, 2021 12:40 pmfrequency is one of the things that determines how many passengers you can attract.

Hmmm... maybe. If you're talking about two major cities, yep. You'll attract more with frequencies.

If you're talking about someplace like Duluth or Moline, not so much.

When I used to do armchair analysis for air service to regional markets, I had an unofficial metric of five Walmarts within a 20 mile radius of the airport as a determining factor for whether or not air service was justified.

Moline only has four... but there's a fifth that is 21 miles away, so that market might be borderline.

Duluth only has three. Scranton has four.

I like it , but wouldn't adding Motels/ hotels account for the tourist market as well. It would be interesting to compare your method to million dollar study results.

I may be too down on one- and two-a-day, because plenty of corridor trains run mostly full at one- or two-a-day. But I don't think most non fans pondering a 150-mile trip are likely to design their trip around one or two train departures when they could drive in the same amount of time and leave exactly when they want. (I would think people would be more likely to build their trip around a couple of airplane departures, because people flying tend to be going far enough that car is a lot slower.) Exactly how that works out numerically I have no idea: railfan will go on Thursday night instead of Wednesday morning just to ride the 2x/week train; committed driver will drive rather than wait at 10 if they want to leave at 8. Where everyone else shakes out, I can't begin to say.

David Benton wrote: ↑Sun Apr 04, 2021 2:32 pm It would seem to be a good time to relook at the DMU concept for some of these routes. An auto/ quick coupling system would allow a lot more options, to connect more cities. As usual for me, extensive thruway buses would create a useful network.

David, in case you’ve not heard, the President’s intent is to move the US from fossil fuels as an energy supply.

I have a way to pay for the Biden Plan.

$10 per pound for each passenger and his baggage flying commercial air, PER BOARDING.

Assume a 150 pound person with 30 pounds of baggage. $1800 for each of a two leg flight.

It’s a pipe dream.