Amtrak Mail & Express to End.

[conrailman]

It's official Amtrak Employees have been notified Today, Aug. 27 that Amtrak Mail and Express is to be ending. All M&E activities are to be ended by early October 2004.[^]

[conrailman]

How many Cars does Amtrak have to sale around 300 to 600 Cars. I much money it amtrak get from the sale of these Cars?

[Anonymous]

If this is true, it is truly sad. I heard the rumor (which is what I'm calling it until I see it on the news wire or Amtrak page) about roadrailers being ended, but haven't heard of the MHC's leaving us. Hopefully this is just a misunderstanding of the story. Though I'm happy I got some good shots of the three rivers going through altoona with a long line of MHC's and Roadrailers in tow, before they are gone.
Andrew

[Anonymous]

Just a rumor.

[Anonymous]

About the time Mr. Gunn was being named to head Amtrak, Trains Magazine had an article about him. He indicated at that time, he intended to get rid of all head end business and concentrate on passengers. I believe his position was that head end loses money. This was in an issue of Trains about 9 months ago I think. But having just moved, I can't locate the issue.

[conrailman]

It is the Newswire Today Aug.30 about amtrak to end Mail and Express in October.[:)]

[Anonymous]

Mr. Claytor must be turning in his grave

[Anonymous]

Simple, Who would dare to think that less revenue is a bad thing

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by piouslion

Simple, Who would dare to think that less revenue is a bad thing

Hmm, I never thought of Graham Claytor as wanting to run Amtrak as less than a profitable enterprise...

I guess I'm missing something...

LC

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by piouslion

Simple, Who would dare to think that less revenue is a bad thing

Oh do pardon me ladies and gentlemen, I do believe that I have used the wrong word when less should be more. [banghead]It must be Monday

[conrailman]

I hope Amtrak buy more Viewliner sleepers, dining cars, and Lounge cars all in Viewliner. I hope amtrak doesn't waste this extra money from the sales of these cars. How many cars does amtrak have about 300 to 600?

[Anonymous]

disclaimer- This post contains no facts! it is merely opinion!
with amtrak leaving the mail and express haulinig businss (ok so lied earlier, but this is the only fact from here on out) Would amtrak consider terminating the three rivers at pittsburg instead of chicago. Here's my train of thought. Most riders get off before pitt., The three rivers is haabitually late. The closest to being on time I've seen is justt under an hour late. There are stations that service the lake shore limited an hour away of each stop of the three rivers. Ie. Three Rivers stops in Akron Ohio, Lake shore stops in cleveland 1 hour drivinig time at most. So couldn't Amtrak save money by getting rid of this duplicate route? A route that in my opinion only stayed becaus of the MHC's and Roadrailers
Andrew

[Anonymous]

I recall from several years ago of being held on the EB Texas Eagle in Dallas for about 30". The time was to add or subtract M&E equipment.
No M&E was added.

Did M&E turn a profit? Never saw anything either way.

Did this discourage passengers? This was only Dallas,but had to happen elsewhere.

[TH&B]

It is a shame for Amtrak to pull out of M&E. The passenger train should carry anything it can carry. This is just adding to the forever downward spiral of the American mainline passenger train :-(
It just makes Amtrak a bit smaller so it is easier to kill. Realy sad and stupid.

[jeaton]

According to the 2005-2009 Plan the count on express cars would drop from 462 to 200. I don't know if the 200 were to remain to complete contracts or as some sort of hedge or other uses. The 2004-2008 Plan list 665 Road Railers with dispostion plans not noted. I'd assume Amtrak now has a plan for disposal.

[conrailman]

How much money will amtrak make by the sale of them 665 Roadrailers and 462 Boxcars say 100 to 130 Million Dollars??[?]

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by M.W. Hemphill

M&E lost money. Period. Unless you gave it all of its expenses as a gift.

Whereas the passenger operation is just raking in the dough?! If Amtrak follows the same logic for its passenger operations as it did for the M & E, what will they do for fun next?

What ever happened to the axiom that freight makes money, passenger operations lose money?

[daveklepper]

I thought Amtrak should be in the Express and Mail business years before they did and wrote so, including a letter to Mr Hemphill at TRAINS (which was not published) . But if Mr. Gunn says it is a money looser and interferes with good passenger service, I believe him. He is a professional. He has a hard job. Hopefully the freight railroads in some cases where there is capacity on existing trains or to add new fast ones, will move in on this business. The Road Railer seems a natural and I would be very surprised in Triple Crown (NS trucking subsidiary) is not looking at the business opportunities.

[TH&B]

I realy have a problem with Amtrak not able to make money with M&E. In fact I even the fancy European passenger trains don't have a kind of M&E. Airlines carry cargos to help the bottum line, so does Greyhound and other intercity busses. Trains have more capacity then these other modes, but for some reason passengers train must only carry passengers ?!?!?!? The "excuse" is that it doesnt make money.

[CSSHEGEWISCH]

In the good old days prior to May 1, 1971, mail and express was usually relegated to secondary trains or dedicated mail and express-only schedules without passengers. Most of the first-line trains carried little to no mail (one RPO at most) and no express.

Express traffic was handled by REA, who had their own infrastructure to handle pickup and delivery, sorting and all of the other related functions. Thr operating railroads just had to move the cars. Amtrak, on the other hand, had to do everything itself, which drives up costs. Amrtrak also has a pretty skeletal route structure to be operating an express service, anyway.

[jeaton]

CSSH... Is exactly on point. When railroads were the primary mode of intercity public transportation, the Railway Expres Agency was their busines arm handling express, and the service was available almost anywhere. When the rail passenger service network started to shrink, first general commodity less-than-truckload carriers moved in with hard competition and when airplanes could start to handle some tonnages near today's levels, they and the air freight forwards also got into the business big time. Then folks like UPS, FedEx, DHL and even good old USPS got into the act. Does that sound like enough competition?

Those are just the big guys in the business. There are many little operators who have found a appearantly profitable niche. My on-line purchases from Staples often come by an off the wall courier service I never heard of. Probably a small firm that has a contract to run their business from stores in say the southeast part of this state.

Now you have Amtrak trying to get business and make money with a network that only hits 550 points in a world where the buyers want someone that goes every where. Dave Gunn may well have more smarts on the business and finance end of railroading than the collective knowledge of all the members of this forum. If there was any way the the M&E business could have been made to actually contribute to the financial goals of Amtrak, he probably would have moved in that direction. (In case you missed it, my previous comment about M&E blocking his view from the Beech Grove was a joke).

By the way, is there anybody out there that actually used the service to move a package?

[fuzzybroken]

Hmm, too bad. Guess I'll have to catch a few #7s and #8s at Waterford Avenue before the M&E are all gone.

This kind of got me thinking, though. UPS intermodal trains are usually the top-priority trains after Amtrak, right? Could UPS trains combine with some Amtrak trains to (1) expedite both, and (2) run only one train for both services, thereby saving money? This would, of course, have to be a three-party agreement, with Amtrak, UPS, and the host railroad all agreeing to the service. That alone would probably kill the whole idea.

Anybody else got insight or ideas?

-Mark
http://www.geocities.com/fuzzybroken

[jeaton]

Mark-Interesting thought. I sure don't know if that was considered. On the downside, it cuts the revenue stream three ways, and as noted earlier, the freight railroads were not happy about Amtrak getting into the business at all.

Obviously if one has no business relationship with a competitor, a decision to go with something can be unilateral. However, if the potential competitor is also the provider of an absolutly essential piece of one's business-be very, very careful.

[morseman]

I understand Amtrak used to run a special mail only train from Boston on the NE corridor. What were it's intermediat stops? Where did it terminate? Is it still running? If it's still running will Gunn be getting rid of it also???????????????

[conrailman]

Will amtrak cut some trains because of this Mail and Express in Nov. Timetable. Will amtrak keep train 40 and 41 from New York to Chicago. Amtrak should put 40 and 41 on the Capitol Limited from Pittsburgh to Chicago get it way from CSX .[^]

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by M.W. Hemphill

... and shedding little aluminum feathers as they went.

and not a little glass and plastic

[fuzzybroken]

QUOTE: Originally posted by M.W. Hemphill

If you look at the morass these questions lead you into, it points right directly to some of the fatal flaws in the Amtrak M&E scheme. There were a lot more flaws than just this, though. The only time you can successfully mix two different businesses on the same platform is when one business can tolerate having lower priority. Trying to do two things at once to 100% performance levels -- which is the nature of both passenger and small-package express -- will accomplish neither.

Now you're going to tell me that the airlines do this every day. Yes, but, they also have an enormous army of people and mountains of equipment to pull it off. A dinky little airline like Frontier with 45 jets and all of 45 destinations has 4,500 employees! The railroads pulled it off to, 50 years ago. They also had armies of employees and mountains of equipment. They,and the airlines today, also give 100% priority to the passenger schedule. If you're UPS, why would you want to give up any control when you already have enough market power to run your own trains and one of the world's largest airlines?

OK, I'm not totally against the idea, as long as you hire me and my friends to run it. There will be lots of overtime, and the coordination meetings to coordinate the uncoordinatable will be endless. I can sit around and argue all day for the right money.

I like it! I'll volunteer for a position in the venture as well.

Heck, I'm almost surprised UPS hasn't gone ahead and built its own railroad yet. I guess nobody picked up any "ideas" from the promotional train set they offered a few years back... [swg] I guess no railroad has provided substandard enough service for them to do this, but UP sure seemed to be trying...

Of course, why does this have to be UPS or USPS? DHL seemed to at least have the thought of rail service in their minds when they ran that one commercial...

Glad to provide more topic fodder,
-Mark
http://www.geocities.com/fuzzybroken

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by M.W. Hemphill

Aside from all the other problems:

1. Are the schedules between UPS and Amtrak even remotely compatible?

2. Who has priority on connections? Do the pigs wait for an hour while the passenger waits for a connection?

3. Who has priority when one falls down: does UPS miss its sort and its service commitment because a passenger gets sick en route and the train stops to transfer the passenger to EMS? Or does Amtrak hold the train for an hour for a late trailer?

4. Do you move the passenger platform to the pig ramp? Or the pig ramp to the depot? If not, either the pigs or the passengers are going to get a hit on each end. If you're lucky and the tracks line up just right, a straight drop, only 10 minutes. If you're not -- and most places, you are not -- it will be an hour minimum added to someone's schedule.

5. Passengers have to go ahead of the pigs -- HEP, slack, etc. Makes it awfully difficult to drop a coach/cafe-car for a connection.

As for Mark's points above, this could be solved by the use of distributed power: Lead unit + pigs + second unit + passengers. In fact, this use of distributed power could also solve some of the other logistical problems as mentioned in #'s 1 through 5 above:

1. Run the mixed on the UPS schedule (Didn't most of the Class I's old M & E's run it this way in the pre-Amtrak days?)

2. Run on the UPS schedule.

3. If a passenger gets sick and the passenger consist must stop, just separate the passenger section from the freight section, let the freight roll on while the passengers probably disembark via bus (like they do now when Amtrak has an unexpected delay). If a trailer is an hour late, so will the passenger consist.

4. Doesn't matter with distributed power. The passenger consist loads at the station with the main crew and the second unit, then they all roll up to the ramp to connect with the rear of the freight, the crew is shuttled up to the lead unit and off they go

5. With distributed power, the second unit at the rear of the pigs provides the HEP. This way they can add on or drop off a coach or two without breaking up the freight consist. Of course, this only happens if the freight is already scheduled to stop for a crew change or refueling, etc.

As for my comment about passengers losing money so why care if M & E loses money, that was just an observation about Amtrak's seeming charter, ie. It's okay to lose money on passengers since that's an accepted "fact" in the railroading world, but if the freight loses money....! The one way to fix it so the Amtrak M & E makes money is for the Congress to force the Postal Service to use Amtrak for it's ground service (one subsidized government entity helping another). I mean, if we are forced to spend 37 cents for a stamp to subsidize the postal service, why should that money be spent on a private intermodal company when Amtrak will suffice? I for one would be willing to pay twice that much for a good ol' RPO postmark.

[Anonymous]

Mail has historically been a profit center for passenger trains. Unfortunately, it doesn't work well to operate a mail network with slow trains that on many routes pass by only once daily. In areas where there is greater frequency (such as certain corridors including the NEC) or no alternative transportation (Empire Builder route in certain areas) it would seem that mail by rail would make sense. I would expect that in time some of these areas will again see mail service via Amtrak. As to Express, that was an ill conceived idea that could never compete with either the freight roads or the UPS and other package shippers and truckers.

LC

[Overmod]

Regarding RoadRailer passenger:

Completely aside from the FRA impact standards, passenger safety et al. (which are all correct as noted above) there's the issue of suitability.

Railroads tried the bus approach in the '50s, with the Aerotrain and other boners. Has anyone looked at the accelerometer data from the latest generation of RoadRailers to see what the ride quality of one of these trailers, con-verted to passenger service, would be? I, for one, wouldn't want to see the arrangements that would have to be made for low-level passenger access (it's interesting to put a vestibule on a trailer, and bus steps aren't too good an option).

Of course, there WOULD be a substantial market for "passenger" trailers in the RV industry (anybody seen those modified Freightliner tractors already used as RVs?) -- think of 'em as ultra-goosenecks.

How are we to know that many of the existing TOFC moves aren't shackle-equipped prisoner trailers already? (You'd almost have to put shackles on RoadRailer passenger trains to keep the pax on board past the first stop ;-})