In 1970/1971, why was Amtrak created instead of subsidizing private railroads?

I see your point, but I wouldn't call it a subsidy -- the USPS (or was it still the Post Office Department?) got full value for what it paid the railroads until the trucks and airlines took their place. It's fair to say that the mail was what made it possible for intercity passenger trains to "make money" as long as they did.

Makes you wonder why Amtrak (or Congress) couldn't figure out a deal to get all the mail back at cost vs. paying trucks and airlines to carry it for a profit... Yeah, I know they carried some, but one government corporation paying another government owned corporation to do essential work should have been a no-brainer.

conductorchris wrote: ↑Sat Nov 26, 2022 5:08 pm Things I have read have suggested that there was a sentiment that freight railroads had screwed passenger trains up and were not to be trusted with the job.

True. The general feeling was that nobody from the railroads knew how to run a railroad -- get airline people in there who really understand the passenger business. It seems that attitude hasn't entirely died out ...

ExCon90 wrote: ↑Mon Nov 28, 2022 11:04 pm

conductorchris wrote: ↑Sat Nov 26, 2022 5:08 pm Things I have read have suggested that there was a sentiment that freight railroads had screwed passenger trains up and were not to be trusted with the job.

True. The general feeling was that nobody from the railroads knew how to run a railroad -- get airline people in there who really understand the passenger business. It seems that attitude hasn't entirely died out ...

I withhold comment due to the fact I may incriminate myself on the current state of upper management currently "flying" this railroad.

electricron wrote: ↑Mon Nov 28, 2022 8:58 pm The largest source for Federal subsidies to the railroads during the 1950s and early 1960s came from USPS contracts shipping mail everywhere. When those postal contracts ended, so did the passenger trains along those routes.

When a major organization of the Federal government realizes passenger trains were not capable of providing an appropriate fast mail service, they found something else to full fill it needs.

WRONG O on multiple levels.

It was the Post Office DEPARTMENT until July 1971.

As the nascent USPS was moving forward, President Johnson horse traded with the postal officials: If they gave up on the Railway Mail Service, he’d reallocate the dollars to provide sorting centers.

Believe it or not, the Class Ones knew the value of those RPO contracts. Trains with mail ran on time.

electricron wrote: ↑Mon Nov 28, 2022 8:58 pm The largest source for Federal subsidies to the railroads during the 1950s and early 1960s came from USPS contracts shipping mail everywhere. When those postal contracts ended, so did the passenger trains along those routes.

It wasn't USPS; it was the Post Office Department, the predecessor of USPS. USPS was created in 1971 -- the same year as Amtrak -- to replace the Post Office Department, which had been a cabinet-level agency.

Railroads were competing against subsidized modes of transportation for both freight and passenger business. The smart thing to do should have been to lobby for their own subsidies, or at least for relief from things like property taxes on their tracks. But as far as I know, none of them ever did. I remember reading through some Erie-Lackawanna employee magazines a few years ago, and found company ads in them denouncing subsidies to truckers and airlines as socialism or some such. These people had their heads up their asses.

One thing that we need to remember is that the railroads own piggyback freight service took over what mail continued to be carried by rail.

For what it is worth, it's interesting that the passenger rail business took the road to nationalization in 1971, while the freight railroads, at the same time Amtrak was being formed, were vehemently trying to avoid nationalization. Even the bankruptcy trustees of the Penn Central and other northeast railroads wanted "healthy competition" for what became known as Conrail.......

It was both the last best chance fort passenger rail, and everyone forgot the politics of budgeting. Once an organization comes to life, it’s incredibly tough to kill it.

I've read that Johnson killed the railroad mail contracts due to campaign support from the airlines. I believe the specifics are in Jim McClellon's book if I remember right.

It's true that many railroads, as mentioned before, still knew how to run a quality operation. What I meant was more about the feeling in Washington DC among decision-makers about the freight railroads' ability to do so - especially the marketing and commercial end of things.

Railroads had a national perception problem in those years on many levels.

Christopher

eolesen wrote: ↑Sun Nov 27, 2022 4:33 pm First of all, SABRE was still owned by American Airlines in 1971, and the airlines hadn't been deregulated for another ten years. Thus, they had little to no incentive to allow Amtrak to be listed along with airline flights.

SABRE was based upon SAGE.
ACP was based upon SABRE, as well as Deltamatic and PANAMAC.
TPF was based upon ACP.
ARROW runs atop TPF.

TPF is still very much heavily used throughout major businesses. Use a VISA card? Yup, it's processed over TPF. While SABRE was developed and for many years owned by American Airlines, the core of it was developed by IBM and still sold to other entities to this day.

What's amazing about that initial experiment with SAGE and SABRE is that every major Legacy Airline was still using either ACP or ALCS up until around 2005. It still the predominant core reservations platform used today. Newer open source platforms have been tried but simply can't handle 10,000+ transactions per second with zero downtime. Even the best clustered databases need downtime for patching and failover...

Sent from my SM-G981U using Tapatalk

There was a shame for Amtrak reservation computers. EAL had a system that was much more capable than SABRE. Handled all reservations, operations and paperwork EAL even sold time to other airlines. It was called if memrory servers "System one ". Was told by an EAL IT person that it would work well for Amtrak. It had capabilities for any number of fligh's tmulti stops and could add change flight times and connections quickly. However, did not follow up as interest in Amtrak was minimal due my various schedules.

However, when Continental took over EAL for some obscure reason System one was junked and the contract airlines that used it had to scramble to Sabre. Do not remember what Continental was using for reservations and operations..

SYS 1 did have a complete back up computer that took over for one to have downtime.

We're diving off-topic, but System One wasn't junked. Big parts of it still survive today.

SystemOne was initially moved off EAL's books and over to Texas Air's along with some aircraft in 1988, and then a year or so later Texas Air sold 50% ownership of it to Ross Perot's EDS for around $250M (a very fair price for the times) in 1989 or 1990. Continental and EDS then sold off the travel agency platform (SOTA) to Amadeus in 1995, and as recently as 2011, Amadeus was still housed in the old SystemOne offices in Doral, FL and I know several dozen originally-SOTA employees who eventually retired from Amadeus during the last 10 years.

The airline specific functions (PNR, inventory control, ticketing, advance seating, departure control) were retained and repackaged as SHARES, still with joint ownership by EDS and Continental. That continues to today -- United has dedicated functionality in a subset of TPF processors called SHARES-A and HP (who absorbed EDS) sells SHARES-B to smaller airlines.

Functionally... SystemOne really wasn't any better than Sabre, Apollo, Deltamatic or PARS for use with rail or hotels.

That's because at the core, they were all the same system, with code packages having been traded/bartered/sold between UA (Apollo), AA (Sabre), EA (SystemOne), and TW/NW (the original owners of PARS) and DL (DATAS II) because they were all on TPF and it was easy to migrate between instances.

I'll have to dumpster dive for specifics, but I know DB and SNCF were working with Sabre at one point early in the 90's. That was about the time that Amtrak was also listed for availability and ticketing in Sabre.

eolesen: Thanks for the info. Lost track of may of the almost illegal take over of EAL by Texas air. Better known as Trans Texas (TT air ) or Tree Top air. TT took National and then Continental and then EAL. Continental was considered the lincoln of the passenger amenities. Some how the "Dock" employee protections were not followed.