Amtrk Senate Debate

[MichaelSol]

You didn't answer the original question of whether the maintenance costs were actually compared in the Statistics of Railways of the United States, or if you did the comparison.

12/11/2007:

I looked at the Statistics of Railways of the United States, looked to three separate years 5 years apart, compared the cost of diesel-electric locomotive maintenance to the cost of passenger car maintenance ...

[oltmannd]

Tom,

 

Your statement of 12/11 that "pre Amtrak railroads did not have completely separate facilities for maintaining passenger and freight cars" is not accurate.  In all the cases that I am aware those facilities were separate.  Think of Sunnyside Yard for example, all passenger.

 

I worked in the 'Coach Yard" in Seattle just before ATK took it over.  It was originally a joint GN/NP facility.  Did work only on passenger equipment.  Freight car repairs were done at Balmer Yard, 5 miles away.  This arrangement was typical.  Skills and supplies were very different as between freight and passenger and mechanical facilites for each were typically separate.

 

Mac McCulloch

Thank you Mac, just the kind of experienced opinion I was fishing for. The main point is your very last sentence.

Why were you fishing for it?  Nobody was ever disputing frt and passenger are different. 

Page 2 of this thread, the 6th post.

You're referring to "...the number or locomotives and cars Amtrak has is less than the number of locomotives NS has....."?

[TomDiehl]

Tom,

 

Your statement of 12/11 that "pre Amtrak railroads did not have completely separate facilities for maintaining passenger and freight cars" is not accurate.  In all the cases that I am aware those facilities were separate.  Think of Sunnyside Yard for example, all passenger.

 

I worked in the 'Coach Yard" in Seattle just before ATK took it over.  It was originally a joint GN/NP facility.  Did work only on passenger equipment.  Freight car repairs were done at Balmer Yard, 5 miles away.  This arrangement was typical.  Skills and supplies were very different as between freight and passenger and mechanical facilites for each were typically separate.

 

Mac McCulloch

Thank you Mac, just the kind of experienced opinion I was fishing for. The main point is your very last sentence.

Why were you fishing for it?  Nobody was ever disputing frt and passenger are different. 

Page 2 of this thread, the 6th post.

[TomDiehl]

But we do agree on the point that we really have nothing with which to compare Amtrak in the current enviornment. Any comparison may be an interesting exercise in statistical methodology, but the accuracy of such numbers is easily called into question.

Unless railroad passenger car technology has changed dramatically, it can still be compared with its companion technology, the diesel-electric locomotive for which an established statistical relationship exists in terms of maintenance costs, and from which one can be used to assess the probable and reasonable costs of the other. In this case, we can plainly see that Amtrak is way overstaffed on mechanical forces by historical standards.

To argue otherwise, without any statistical evidence at all, is what is "easily called into question."

 

You didn't answer the original question of whether the maintenance costs were actually compared in the Statistics of Railways of the United States, or if you did the comparison.

The point called into question is how do you define the maintenance costs of a diesel-electric locomotive to the maintenance costs of a passenger car as "companion technology" in any era?

If you're going to take that view, then we should be able to compare the maintenance costs of a passenger car with the cost of growing grapes. I'm sure there's statistical data somewhere on that.

[oltmannd]

Tom,

 

Your statement of 12/11 that "pre Amtrak railroads did not have completely separate facilities for maintaining passenger and freight cars" is not accurate.  In all the cases that I am aware those facilities were separate.  Think of Sunnyside Yard for example, all passenger.

 

I worked in the 'Coach Yard" in Seattle just before ATK took it over.  It was originally a joint GN/NP facility.  Did work only on passenger equipment.  Freight car repairs were done at Balmer Yard, 5 miles away.  This arrangement was typical.  Skills and supplies were very different as between freight and passenger and mechanical facilites for each were typically separate.

 

Mac McCulloch

Thank you Mac, just the kind of experienced opinion I was fishing for. The main point is your very last sentence.

Why were you fishing for it?  Nobody was ever disputing frt and passenger are different. 

[MichaelSol]

But we do agree on the point that we really have nothing with which to compare Amtrak in the current enviornment. Any comparison may be an interesting exercise in statistical methodology, but the accuracy of such numbers is easily called into question.

Unless railroad passenger car technology has changed dramatically, it can still be compared with its companion technology, the diesel-electric locomotive for which an established statistical relationship exists in terms of maintenance costs, and from which one can be used to assess the probable and reasonable costs of the other. In this case, we can plainly see that Amtrak is way overstaffed on mechanical forces by historical standards.

To argue otherwise, without any statistical evidence at all, is what is "easily called into question."

 

[TomDiehl]

Tom,

 

Your statement of 12/11 that "pre Amtrak railroads did not have completely separate facilities for maintaining passenger and freight cars" is not accurate.  In all the cases that I am aware those facilities were separate.  Think of Sunnyside Yard for example, all passenger.

 

I worked in the 'Coach Yard" in Seattle just before ATK took it over.  It was originally a joint GN/NP facility.  Did work only on passenger equipment.  Freight car repairs were done at Balmer Yard, 5 miles away.  This arrangement was typical.  Skills and supplies were very different as between freight and passenger and mechanical facilites for each were typically separate.

 

Mac McCulloch

Thank you Mac, just the kind of experienced opinion I was fishing for. The main point is your very last sentence.

[TomDiehl]

BTW, did the "Statistics of Railways of the United States" actually compare the costs?

ICC Accounting required the reporting of cost of maintaining all passenger equipment as a separate accounting category as well as reporting the numbers of such passenger equipment. In a similar fashion, the cost of maintaining and repairing diesel-electric locomotives is reported as a separate accounting category, as is the number of units being maintained/repaired.

As of 1950, these were mature technologies and improvements in costs of maintenance and repair since that time were incremental, not transformational, and represented the same kind of productivity improvements over time that all mature technologies enjoy as small improvements occur in service and technology: better gasket materials, improved metallurgy, improvements in bearing design, improved electrical controls, etc. Experience suggests that mature technologies enjoy these productivity improvements at about the same rate.

In this fashion, similar technologies become "linked" insofar as statistical relationships that can be used to examine the known cost of one technology, and derive the unknown cost of another technology. The validity of this analysis is established by linear regression analysis and identification of a correlation which identifies the reliability of the relationship.

In this conversation, I did not, in fact, have any idea what the relative costs were. So, since it is an interesting thought, I looked at the Statistics of Railways of the United States, looked to three separate years 5 years apart, compared the cost of diesel-electric locomotive maintenance to the cost of passenger car maintenance, and saw that Don's figures were very conservative, no doubt intentionally so for the purpose of discussion, and that the consistent ratio looks to be about 3:1. I did this using MILW Road's figures which looked to be a useful representative of Amtrak in terms of combinations of heavy commuter traffic, night trains, and long distance trains.

This process is called "substitution" and uses a "surrogate" to identify the probable measure of an entity that we don't have a direct measure of. We use "surrogates" all the time. For instance, the definition of a second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom, referring to a cesium atom in its ground state at a temperature of 0 degrees Kelvin. Next time someone asks for the time, defer until you can get the results from your particle accelerator at absolute zero.

Obviously, we use motors, gears, and ratchets to create a surrogate measure of "seconds" because of the obvious difficulty of performing, or even understanding, the direct measurement, which in turn allows us to fairly accurately estimate minutes, hours, and days. The surrogate is acceptable, and in fact preferable, to attempting the direct measure.

Industries routinely use "industry average" surrogates, through publications such as Dunn & Bradstreet, to assess the effectiveness of their relative performance. Amtrak is a toughy, since there isn't anything like it. However, we do have millions of miles of similar performance, using similar equipment, on identical territory, over a number of years. We have a current class of equipment which is related in technology terms to the Amtrak class. We have a surrogate: the diesel-electric locomotive.

And that is what I measured. Don simply added a generous measure of doubt in favor of the railroad passenger car -- he said as much -- thinking that it would reasonably provide an unchallengeable measure of the problems with Amtrak's equipment maintenance and repair costs.

Well .... I think it did.

 

 

First, the easiest one. Since I've worked with Cesium (and Rubidium) oscillator clocks, these are used as a high accuracy and stability frequency reference.  Time, being the inverse of frequency, is easily derived from the output of these oscillators. To call the simpler digital or mechanical clocks a surrogate for the atomic clocks would imply the atomic ones are the older ones. It's actually the other way around. The earliest "clocks" were simple hour glasses. The decision to use one rather than the other is based on the level of accuracy required and the cost. Obviously an atomic clock costs more than a digital Timex. How this relates to statistics is a real stretch. Unless you're trying to say using a surrogate yields a much lower accuracy.

In your second and third paragraphs above, you seem to be running in circles. First you say that both passenger car and diesel locomotives are "mature technology" with incremental improvements based on past improvements. Then you talk about linking similar technologies as far as statistical relationships to derive the cost of an unknown technology. What suddenly became "unknown?"

But we do agree on the point that we really have nothing with which to compare Amtrak in the current enviornment. Any comparison may be an interesting exercise in statistical methodology, but the accuracy of such numbers is easily called into question.

[oltmannd]

I wish that the GAO would do some serious, detailed benchmarking, or better yet, Amtrak should do it.  It would take some real time and effort.  The GAO's  "get rid of the diners and sleepers" study took the simple approach that the way to cut costs was to cut services.  A good benchmarking study would help find ways to keep and exand services while cutting costs.

As a long time and reasonably frequent user of Amtrak who happens to think their food services are dismal, I have always thought that their food service should go the other way and they could make some money; develop a reputation, offer some "named" meals, and make these things real diners instead of the cookbook recipe and cattle car "community" seating used so they can minimize the hours of operation of the diner. As it is, I notice on the Empire Builder that few take advantage of the diner. The seating is frequently backed up, the community seating is purely for the convenience of the staff not the customers, and they always seem like they are in a rush to get people out. The food is merely "OK", and not worth too much effort. A first class facility with a third class attitude.

And here's a benchmark: I doubt that even as much as 20% of the passengers take advantage of breakfast or dinner on the Empire Builder because of the wait times, the short dining hours, and the awkward seating policy.

Amazingly, I have never seen a survey ...

You have a point.  There is nothing very special about the diner.

I've rarely seen many coach passengers make it past the lounge car for meals.  I think they all want to save a buck or two on meals.  Or, maybe they just snack their way along all day.  I know that's what I did on some of my all day treks from Philly to London Ont. in the past  (there was no other option!)

I know they're trying out an open all day/all day menu version of the diner on a couple of trains (Cardinal and City of New Orleans?)

I've always wondered if they wouldn't be better off just bidding it out to a national chain restaurant.  The one that you have to pay the least to take the bid wins - and then they can try to make as much profit as they can.  Logistics and cooking belong to the vendor.  Whether you have a grill chef or not no longer is an issue of national politics!

[MichaelSol]

I wish that the GAO would do some serious, detailed benchmarking, or better yet, Amtrak should do it.  It would take some real time and effort.  The GAO's  "get rid of the diners and sleepers" study took the simple approach that the way to cut costs was to cut services.  A good benchmarking study would help find ways to keep and exand services while cutting costs.

As a long time and reasonably frequent user of Amtrak who happens to think their food services are dismal, I have always thought that their food service should go the other way and they could make some money; develop a reputation, offer some "named" meals, and make these things real diners instead of the cookbook recipe and cattle car "community" seating used so they can minimize the hours of operation of the diner. As it is, I notice on the Empire Builder that few take advantage of the diner. The seating is frequently backed up, the community seating is purely for the convenience of the staff not the customers, and they always seem like they are in a rush to get people out. The food is merely "OK", and not worth too much effort. A first class facility with a third class attitude.

And here's a benchmark: I doubt that even as much as 20% of the passengers take advantage of breakfast or dinner on the Empire Builder because of the wait times, the short dining hours, and the awkward seating policy.

Amazingly, I have never seen a survey ...

 

 

[CSSHEGEWISCH]

An example in the other direction was in the mid to late 1960's when IC closed the 27th Street facility and serviced and maintained the passenger power at Homewood.

[oltmannd]

Tom,

 

Your statement of 12/11 that "pre Amtrak railroads did not have completely separate facilities for maintaining passenger and freight cars" is not accurate.  In all the cases that I am aware those facilities were separate.  Think of Sunnyside Yard for example, all passenger.

 

I worked in the 'Coach Yard" in Seattle just before ATK took it over.  It was originally a joint GN/NP facility.  Did work only on passenger equipment.  Freight car repairs were done at Balmer Yard, 5 miles away.  This arrangement was typical.  Skills and supplies were very different as between freight and passenger and mechanical facilites for each were typically separate.

 

Mac McCulloch

 If more examples are needed, there's Ivy City - all passenger.  And Harrisburg diesel terminal (all passenger) vs. Enola diesel terminal (all frt).  On the backshop side, passenger cars usually enjoyed their own shop and staffing, although cabooses were sometimes included with the passenger cars.

[oltmannd]

Any critique of Amtrak from any quarter gets some of us in the passenger-train advocacy community to circle the wagons as it were.

There was a time when the whole lot -- corridors, commuter, LD passenger -- were taken care of privately, though there too was subsidy in the form of the railroad companies carrying passengers at a loss and cross-subsidized by the freight side of the business either out of legal responsibility under ICC regs or to maintain the corporate image as in Sante Fe maintaining high standards for their Western trains.

At one time C&NW was running those Chicago commuter trains without any public subsidy and these days Metra has something like a 200 percent operating ratio, and the financing of rolling stock is off the books because they regard the provision of cars and locomotives as "gifts" provided to them by whoever funds the grant.  And I don't see evidence of "featherbedding" because as far as I can tell Metra is running longer trains with fewer crew than in the C&NW days.  But something has changed about the economics of all of that.

No one is accusing any Amtrak employee of slacking as I am sure they are dedicated and hard working and if there are issues with productivity, it is a question about how the business is run rather than the responsibility of workers low down on the chain of command.

In seeking out interesting things to do, I have been reading through stacks of old Trains from the 50's and 60's at the Wisconsin State Historical Society, which has an excellent railroads collection of books and other periodicals.  It seems that all of these same argument were made some 50 years ago when the railroads made one last generational update in locomotives (Diesel -- private railroad passenger power really only made it through first-generation Diesels, with a smattering of 2nd gen power in the SDP35-40-45's, the FP45s, U28-30CGs) and passenger cars ("lightweight" 4-axle streamliners -- the Amtrak Heritage fleet with much of it that is still running now in Canada).

Here we are 50 years later, and Amtrak is creaking along, at the brink of collapse in some people's estimation, and we are going through all of the same arguments -- what is the role for passenger trains in light of cars, buses, and airplanes, what public purpose is served by subsidy for trains, what is a reasonable rate of subsidy.  We are kind of in the 2nd Generation of the Passenger Train Crisis.

This thread was started in response to Senate debate and then passage of Lautenberg-Lott by a thumping 70-30 vote.  Senator John Sununu was castigated on this thread for "playing politics" with Amtrak for opening up the issue of the high rates of per passenger subsidy attributed to Western LD trains, but I guess his point of view didn't carry the day.  The House has to yet vote, and the President needs to sign, and while the President has a general anti-Amtrak stance, the final outcome will probably depend on whether votes are strong enough to sustain veto overrides along with how the legislation is bundled and the general horse-trading that is politics.

Given the balance of loyalties in Washington and given the high price of oil and everything, we are probably as close to getting Lautenberg-Lott as we have been in a long while and getting a not-enormous but significant capital infusion (which the advocacy community endorses) along with some formulaic oversight and "accountability" (which the advocacy community looks upon with a jaundiced eye).  If this money goes through, this may prove Amtrak's swan song as it were. 

This is it people -- the 18 billion over 6 years or whatever amount of money it is or gets whittled down to.  The combination of the high oil prices with the political votes with the much-needed capital spending is what Amtrak is going to get to do its stuff and make an impression on people.  The train advocacy community deeply believes in the inherent goodness of trains but the average person out there needs convincing by real-life experience.  If Amtrak doesn't achieve enough "bang-for-the-buck", after 6 years, I don't think there will be third and fourth chances.

I guess it is the nature of the politics that NARP and others wind up being apologists for Amtrak and totally eschew the watchdog role.  That's too bad.  I think there is room for them to be both. 

I think that you may be right that this big chunk of change coming Amtrak's way might be their best, last chance to "get it right".

I did notice in the language of the bill that it is recommended that Amtrak put some sort of performance bonus plan in place.  I think that could help a lot.  Over it's history, Amtrak seems to make significant changes only when their back is too the wall.  Once the scare is over, they go back to busness as usual.  The latest round of threats have seen them cut employment from 22,000 or so down to 17,000.  While they have done this, they have grown their business modestly.  My, "back of the envelope" benchmarking makes me think they still have a ways to go.  A bonus plan that rewards all for overall efficiency improvements would help Amtrak keep moving in the right direction with positive "heat" applied within instead of the occasional outside threat.  No doubt there are many within Amtrak with good and honorable intentions, but it's not reasonable to think that many will go out of their way to "gore their own ox" or make their life more difficult w/o some pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

I wish that the GAO would do some serious, detailed benchmarking, or better yet, Amtrak should do it.  It would take some real time and effort.  The GAO's  "get rid of the diners and sleepers" study took the simple approach that the way to cut costs was to cut services.  A good benchmarking study would help find ways to keep and exand services while cutting costs.

..one can hope.

[PNWRMNM]

Tom,

 

Your statement of 12/11 that "pre Amtrak railroads did not have completely separate facilities for maintaining passenger and freight cars" is not accurate.  In all the cases that I am aware those facilities were separate.  Think of Sunnyside Yard for example, all passenger.

 

I worked in the 'Coach Yard" in Seattle just before ATK took it over.  It was originally a joint GN/NP facility.  Did work only on passenger equipment.  Freight car repairs were done at Balmer Yard, 5 miles away.  This arrangement was typical.  Skills and supplies were very different as between freight and passenger and mechanical facilites for each were typically separate.

 

Mac McCulloch

[MichaelSol]

BTW, did the "Statistics of Railways of the United States" actually compare the costs?

ICC Accounting required the reporting of cost of maintaining all passenger equipment as a separate accounting category as well as reporting the numbers of such passenger equipment. In a similar fashion, the cost of maintaining and repairing diesel-electric locomotives is reported as a separate accounting category, as is the number of units being maintained/repaired.

As of 1950, these were mature technologies and improvements in costs of maintenance and repair since that time were incremental, not transformational, and represented the same kind of productivity improvements over time that all mature technologies enjoy as small improvements occur in service and technology: better gasket materials, improved metallurgy, improvements in bearing design, improved electrical controls, etc. Experience suggests that mature technologies enjoy these productivity improvements at about the same rate.

In this fashion, similar technologies become "linked" insofar as statistical relationships that can be used to examine the known cost of one technology, and derive the unknown cost of another technology. The validity of this analysis is established by linear regression analysis and identification of a correlation which identifies the reliability of the relationship.

In this conversation, I did not, in fact, have any idea what the relative costs were. So, since it is an interesting thought, I looked at the Statistics of Railways of the United States, looked to three separate years 5 years apart, compared the cost of diesel-electric locomotive maintenance to the cost of passenger car maintenance, and saw that Don's figures were very conservative, no doubt intentionally so for the purpose of discussion, and that the consistent ratio looks to be about 3:1. I did this using MILW Road's figures which looked to be a useful representative of Amtrak in terms of combinations of heavy commuter traffic, night trains, and long distance trains.

This process is called "substitution" and uses a "surrogate" to identify the probable measure of an entity that we don't have a direct measure of. We use "surrogates" all the time. For instance, the definition of a second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom, referring to a cesium atom in its ground state at a temperature of 0 degrees Kelvin. Next time someone asks for the time, defer until you can get the results from your particle accelerator at absolute zero.

Obviously, we use motors, gears, and ratchets to create a surrogate measure of "seconds" because of the obvious difficulty of performing, or even understanding, the direct measurement, which in turn allows us to fairly accurately estimate minutes, hours, and days. The surrogate is acceptable, and in fact preferable, to attempting the direct measure.

Industries routinely use "industry average" surrogates, through publications such as Dunn & Bradstreet, to assess the effectiveness of their relative performance. Amtrak is a toughy, since there isn't anything like it. However, we do have millions of miles of similar performance, using similar equipment, on identical territory, over a number of years. We have a current class of equipment which is related in technology terms to the Amtrak class. We have a surrogate: the diesel-electric locomotive.

And that is what I measured. Don simply added a generous measure of doubt in favor of the railroad passenger car -- he said as much -- thinking that it would reasonably provide an unchallengeable measure of the problems with Amtrak's equipment maintenance and repair costs.

Well .... I think it did.

 

 

[TomDiehl]

So my figure of 27 to 1 is just a valid as your figure of 3 to 1 because we both pulled them out of our butts.

Whoa. Don took a careful, conservative approach, equating the maintenance costs of a diesel-electric locomotive with that of a railroad passenger car. He knows its better than that, but for the sake of argument, it has to be hard to say that a railroad passenger costs more than an operating power unit for all sorts of practical reasons, and so he went with 1:1.

I derived the 3-1 ratio, and I derived it from the Statistics of Railway of the United States. These are large bound volumes of data generated by the ICC, using ICC accounting, based on annual ICC reports of the railroads of the United States. Due to their size, I cannot fit the Statistics of Railways of the United States anywhere but on the bookshelf and so they were "pulled" from no other location.

 

Don's original statement (comparing the raw figures of cars vs. number of maintenance personnel) was anything but "careful" or "conservative." It was simply meant to belittle the job Amtrak is doing. His outlandish comparison made it easy to call him on that one. Then changing it to locomotives vs. passenger cars was just as bad. Funny, if you read the post above yours, He seems to be taking credit for the 3 to 1 figure.

Comparing historical data has several flaws of its own, making separation of figures difficult, especially for the reporting railroads:

1. Pre-Amtrak, the railroads didn't have completely separate facilities for maintaining freight and passenger cars.

2. Due to their similarity, the locomotives were definately maintained in the same facilities.

But comparing the cost of maintaining a locomotive to that of a passenger car is so far out in left field it's laughable. The similarity ends at the flanged wheels and couplers.

BTW, did the "Statistics of Railways of the United States" actually compare the costs?

[MichaelSol]

So my figure of 27 to 1 is just a valid as your figure of 3 to 1 because we both pulled them out of our butts.

Whoa. Don took a careful, conservative approach, equating the maintenance costs of a diesel-electric locomotive with that of a railroad passenger car. He knows its better than that, but for the sake of argument, it has to be hard to say that a railroad passenger car unit costs more than an operating power unit for all sorts of practical reasons, and so he went with 1:1.

I derived the 3-1 ratio, and I derived it from the Statistics of Railway of the United States. These are large bound volumes of data generated by the ICC, using ICC accounting, based on annual ICC reports of the railroads of the United States. Due to their size, I cannot fit the Statistics of Railways of the United States anywhere but on the bookshelf and so they were "pulled" from no other location.

 

[TomDiehl]

And, so, I made a comparison between Amtrak and NS's Mechanical Dept staffing and Michael made one with BN's, which we believe to be valid.

You disagree with the comparison, but offer no opinion one way or the other on the conclusion.

cest la vie.

No, obviously you're reading what you want to see.

To repeat:

I guess you're trying to tell us that the work and personnel required to maintain a freight car is the same as required to maintain a passenger car.

After I pointed out this part of the discussion, Michael didn't dispute it.

My whole point was based on a comparison between a locomotive and passenger car.  Michaels's numbers put the equivalent at 3 passenger cars = 1 locomotive, so my comparsion was more than valid (if that can be).  That NS had any workers left over to do any frt car work was "gravy", or "whipped cream and an cherry" or whatever you'd like add to the top.

A freight car is not like a passenger car.  You can quote me.  Happy now?  I am.

 

You're right, your comparison isn't valid. Nice to see you have your doubts.

And comparing the maintenance on locomotives to passenger cars? Since we're pulling numbers out of our butts, how about 27:1?

No doubts.  Real sources.  Real experience.  Real education.

But not based on science or statistical methodology.

Oh, yes it is.

And what would that be?

All the above!

So my figure of 27 to 1 is just a valid as your figure of 3 to 1 because we both pulled them out of our butts.

[oltmannd]

And, so, I made a comparison between Amtrak and NS's Mechanical Dept staffing and Michael made one with BN's, which we believe to be valid.

You disagree with the comparison, but offer no opinion one way or the other on the conclusion.

cest la vie.

No, obviously you're reading what you want to see.

To repeat:

I guess you're trying to tell us that the work and personnel required to maintain a freight car is the same as required to maintain a passenger car.

After I pointed out this part of the discussion, Michael didn't dispute it.

My whole point was based on a comparison between a locomotive and passenger car.  Michaels's numbers put the equivalent at 3 passenger cars = 1 locomotive, so my comparsion was more than valid (if that can be).  That NS had any workers left over to do any frt car work was "gravy", or "whipped cream and an cherry" or whatever you'd like add to the top.

A freight car is not like a passenger car.  You can quote me.  Happy now?  I am.

 

You're right, your comparison isn't valid. Nice to see you have your doubts.

And comparing the maintenance on locomotives to passenger cars? Since we're pulling numbers out of our butts, how about 27:1?

No doubts.  Real sources.  Real experience.  Real education.

But not based on science or statistical methodology.

Oh, yes it is.

And what would that be?

All the above!

[TomDiehl]

And, so, I made a comparison between Amtrak and NS's Mechanical Dept staffing and Michael made one with BN's, which we believe to be valid.

You disagree with the comparison, but offer no opinion one way or the other on the conclusion.

cest la vie.

No, obviously you're reading what you want to see.

To repeat:

I guess you're trying to tell us that the work and personnel required to maintain a freight car is the same as required to maintain a passenger car.

After I pointed out this part of the discussion, Michael didn't dispute it.

My whole point was based on a comparison between a locomotive and passenger car.  Michaels's numbers put the equivalent at 3 passenger cars = 1 locomotive, so my comparsion was more than valid (if that can be).  That NS had any workers left over to do any frt car work was "gravy", or "whipped cream and an cherry" or whatever you'd like add to the top.

A freight car is not like a passenger car.  You can quote me.  Happy now?  I am.

 

You're right, your comparison isn't valid. Nice to see you have your doubts.

And comparing the maintenance on locomotives to passenger cars? Since we're pulling numbers out of our butts, how about 27:1?

No doubts.  Real sources.  Real experience.  Real education.

But not based on science or statistical methodology.

Oh, yes it is.

And what would that be?

[oltmannd]

And, so, I made a comparison between Amtrak and NS's Mechanical Dept staffing and Michael made one with BN's, which we believe to be valid.

You disagree with the comparison, but offer no opinion one way or the other on the conclusion.

cest la vie.

No, obviously you're reading what you want to see.

To repeat:

I guess you're trying to tell us that the work and personnel required to maintain a freight car is the same as required to maintain a passenger car.

After I pointed out this part of the discussion, Michael didn't dispute it.

My whole point was based on a comparison between a locomotive and passenger car.  Michaels's numbers put the equivalent at 3 passenger cars = 1 locomotive, so my comparsion was more than valid (if that can be).  That NS had any workers left over to do any frt car work was "gravy", or "whipped cream and an cherry" or whatever you'd like add to the top.

A freight car is not like a passenger car.  You can quote me.  Happy now?  I am.

 

You're right, your comparison isn't valid. Nice to see you have your doubts.

And comparing the maintenance on locomotives to passenger cars? Since we're pulling numbers out of our butts, how about 27:1?

No doubts.  Real sources.  Real experience.  Real education.

But not based on science or statistical methodology.

Oh, yes it is.

[TomDiehl]

And, so, I made a comparison between Amtrak and NS's Mechanical Dept staffing and Michael made one with BN's, which we believe to be valid.

You disagree with the comparison, but offer no opinion one way or the other on the conclusion.

cest la vie.

No, obviously you're reading what you want to see.

To repeat:

I guess you're trying to tell us that the work and personnel required to maintain a freight car is the same as required to maintain a passenger car.

After I pointed out this part of the discussion, Michael didn't dispute it.

My whole point was based on a comparison between a locomotive and passenger car.  Michaels's numbers put the equivalent at 3 passenger cars = 1 locomotive, so my comparsion was more than valid (if that can be).  That NS had any workers left over to do any frt car work was "gravy", or "whipped cream and an cherry" or whatever you'd like add to the top.

A freight car is not like a passenger car.  You can quote me.  Happy now?  I am.

 

You're right, your comparison isn't valid. Nice to see you have your doubts.

And comparing the maintenance on locomotives to passenger cars? Since we're pulling numbers out of our butts, how about 27:1?

No doubts.  Real sources.  Real experience.  Real education.

But not based on science or statistical methodology.

[Paul Milenkovic]

Any critique of Amtrak from any quarter gets some of us in the passenger-train advocacy community to circle the wagons as it were.

There was a time when the whole lot -- corridors, commuter, LD passenger -- were taken care of privately, though there too was subsidy in the form of the railroad companies carrying passengers at a loss and cross-subsidized by the freight side of the business either out of legal responsibility under ICC regs or to maintain the corporate image as in Sante Fe maintaining high standards for their Western trains.

At one time C&NW was running those Chicago commuter trains without any public subsidy and these days Metra has something like a 200 percent operating ratio, and the financing of rolling stock is off the books because they regard the provision of cars and locomotives as "gifts" provided to them by whoever funds the grant.  And I don't see evidence of "featherbedding" because as far as I can tell Metra is running longer trains with fewer crew than in the C&NW days.  But something has changed about the economics of all of that.

No one is accusing any Amtrak employee of slacking as I am sure they are dedicated and hard working and if there are issues with productivity, it is a question about how the business is run rather than the responsibility of workers low down on the chain of command.

In seeking out interesting things to do, I have been reading through stacks of old Trains from the 50's and 60's at the Wisconsin State Historical Society, which has an excellent railroads collection of books and other periodicals.  It seems that all of these same argument were made some 50 years ago when the railroads made one last generational update in locomotives (Diesel -- private railroad passenger power really only made it through first-generation Diesels, with a smattering of 2nd gen power in the SDP35-40-45's, the FP45s, U28-30CGs) and passenger cars ("lightweight" 4-axle streamliners -- the Amtrak Heritage fleet with much of it that is still running now in Canada).

Here we are 50 years later, and Amtrak is creaking along, at the brink of collapse in some people's estimation, and we are going through all of the same arguments -- what is the role for passenger trains in light of cars, buses, and airplanes, what public purpose is served by subsidy for trains, what is a reasonable rate of subsidy.  We are kind of in the 2nd Generation of the Passenger Train Crisis.

This thread was started in response to Senate debate and then passage of Lautenberg-Lott by a thumping 70-30 vote.  Senator John Sununu was castigated on this thread for "playing politics" with Amtrak for opening up the issue of the high rates of per passenger subsidy attributed to Western LD trains, but I guess his point of view didn't carry the day.  The House has to yet vote, and the President needs to sign, and while the President has a general anti-Amtrak stance, the final outcome will probably depend on whether votes are strong enough to sustain veto overrides along with how the legislation is bundled and the general horse-trading that is politics.

Given the balance of loyalties in Washington and given the high price of oil and everything, we are probably as close to getting Lautenberg-Lott as we have been in a long while and getting a not-enormous but significant capital infusion (which the advocacy community endorses) along with some formulaic oversight and "accountability" (which the advocacy community looks upon with a jaundiced eye).  If this money goes through, this may prove Amtrak's swan song as it were. 

This is it people -- the 18 billion over 6 years or whatever amount of money it is or gets whittled down to.  The combination of the high oil prices with the political votes with the much-needed capital spending is what Amtrak is going to get to do its stuff and make an impression on people.  The train advocacy community deeply believes in the inherent goodness of trains but the average person out there needs convincing by real-life experience.  If Amtrak doesn't achieve enough "bang-for-the-buck", after 6 years, I don't think there will be third and fourth chances.

[oltmannd]

And, so, I made a comparison between Amtrak and NS's Mechanical Dept staffing and Michael made one with BN's, which we believe to be valid.

You disagree with the comparison, but offer no opinion one way or the other on the conclusion.

cest la vie.

No, obviously you're reading what you want to see.

To repeat:

I guess you're trying to tell us that the work and personnel required to maintain a freight car is the same as required to maintain a passenger car.

After I pointed out this part of the discussion, Michael didn't dispute it.

My whole point was based on a comparison between a locomotive and passenger car.  Michaels's numbers put the equivalent at 3 passenger cars = 1 locomotive, so my comparsion was more than valid (if that can be).  That NS had any workers left over to do any frt car work was "gravy", or "whipped cream and an cherry" or whatever you'd like add to the top.

A freight car is not like a passenger car.  You can quote me.  Happy now?  I am.

 

You're right, your comparison isn't valid. Nice to see you have your doubts.

And comparing the maintenance on locomotives to passenger cars? Since we're pulling numbers out of our butts, how about 27:1?

No doubts.  Real sources.  Real experience.  Real education.

[TomDiehl]

And, so, I made a comparison between Amtrak and NS's Mechanical Dept staffing and Michael made one with BN's, which we believe to be valid.

You disagree with the comparison, but offer no opinion one way or the other on the conclusion.

cest la vie.

No, obviously you're reading what you want to see.

To repeat:

I guess you're trying to tell us that the work and personnel required to maintain a freight car is the same as required to maintain a passenger car.

After I pointed out this part of the discussion, Michael didn't dispute it.

My whole point was based on a comparison between a locomotive and passenger car.  Michaels's numbers put the equivalent at 3 passenger cars = 1 locomotive, so my comparsion was more than valid (if that can be).  That NS had any workers left over to do any frt car work was "gravy", or "whipped cream and an cherry" or whatever you'd like add to the top.

A freight car is not like a passenger car.  You can quote me.  Happy now?  I am.

 

You're right, your comparison isn't valid. Nice to see you have your doubts.

And comparing the maintenance on locomotives to passenger cars? Since we're pulling numbers out of our butts, how about 27:1?

[oltmannd]

And, so, I made a comparison between Amtrak and NS's Mechanical Dept staffing and Michael made one with BN's, which we believe to be valid.

You disagree with the comparison, but offer no opinion one way or the other on the conclusion.

cest la vie.

No, obviously you're reading what you want to see.

To repeat:

I guess you're trying to tell us that the work and personnel required to maintain a freight car is the same as required to maintain a passenger car.

After I pointed out this part of the discussion, Michael didn't dispute it.

My whole point was based on a comparison between a locomotive and passenger car.  Michaels's numbers put the equivalent at 3 passenger cars = 1 locomotive, so my comparsion was more than valid (if that can be).  That NS had any workers left over to do any frt car work was "gravy", or "whipped cream and an cherry" or whatever you'd like add to the top.

A freight car is not like a passenger car.  You can quote me.  Happy now?  I am.

 

[TomDiehl]

And, so, I made a comparison between Amtrak and NS's Mechanical Dept staffing and Michael made one with BN's, which we believe to be valid.

You disagree with the comparison, but offer no opinion one way or the other on the conclusion.

cest la vie.

No, obviously you're reading what you want to see.

To repeat:

I guess you're trying to tell us that the work and personnel required to maintain a freight car is the same as required to maintain a passenger car.

After I pointed out this part of the discussion, Michael didn't dispute it.

[oltmannd]

And, so, I made a comparison between Amtrak and NS's Mechanical Dept staffing and Michael made one with BN's, which we believe to be valid.

You disagree with the comparison, but offer no opinion one way or the other on the conclusion.

cest la vie.

[TomDiehl]

As I also said above, no doubt the cost of maintaining passenger equipment is higher than that of freight equipment. Of much less doubt is that a freight diesel-electric locomotive has any significantly different maintenance requirements than a diesel-electric passenger locomotive.

Exactly what I was saying. However, trying to compare the the number of maintenance people that work for a freight railroad to the number that work for a passenger railroad is not valid because the jobs they do and the parts that need to be maintained are too different.

The locomotives for either type railroad are fairly similar, but the numbers Oltmand was quoting did not break down loco and car maintenance personnel numbers.

Then you can project the numbers another step: if the number of trains that either one operated was to double, would the number of maintenance people also double? Is the current numbers because of the different jobs they need to do, the number of locations they need to support with maintenance, or the quantity of cars and locos they have to maintain? His comparison was based strictly on the quantity part of the question.

So, what all those Amtrak Mechanical folk are doing is "not much" but you believe it's all about economy of scale and craft division of labor?

Economy of scale and labor constraints as the cause of horrible productivity are both the responsibility of Amtrak management.  What incentive has Amtrak management had to improve either?  Almost none, so Amtrak remains a mess.  Lousy productivity is lousy productivity regardless of the cause.

You still don't get it.

It's about your flawed comparison of a freight railroad to a passenger railroad and the maintenance requirements of each.

I never said that I thought Amtrak's maintenance Department was properly staffed, over staffed, or understaffed. I simply stated the comparison of the job the two have to do is so different, any comparison of that type is invalid.

OK, if that's what you want to believe. 

I'm sure my use of the English language is a bit different than yours, so I'm sure we can't communicate at all. 

When people use the term "in comparison," the reader is led to believe that they are comparing one thing to another.

[oltmannd]

As I also said above, no doubt the cost of maintaining passenger equipment is higher than that of freight equipment. Of much less doubt is that a freight diesel-electric locomotive has any significantly different maintenance requirements than a diesel-electric passenger locomotive.

Exactly what I was saying. However, trying to compare the the number of maintenance people that work for a freight railroad to the number that work for a passenger railroad is not valid because the jobs they do and the parts that need to be maintained are too different.

The locomotives for either type railroad are fairly similar, but the numbers Oltmand was quoting did not break down loco and car maintenance personnel numbers.

Then you can project the numbers another step: if the number of trains that either one operated was to double, would the number of maintenance people also double? Is the current numbers because of the different jobs they need to do, the number of locations they need to support with maintenance, or the quantity of cars and locos they have to maintain? His comparison was based strictly on the quantity part of the question.

So, what all those Amtrak Mechanical folk are doing is "not much" but you believe it's all about economy of scale and craft division of labor?

Economy of scale and labor constraints as the cause of horrible productivity are both the responsibility of Amtrak management.  What incentive has Amtrak management had to improve either?  Almost none, so Amtrak remains a mess.  Lousy productivity is lousy productivity regardless of the cause.

You still don't get it.

It's about your flawed comparison of a freight railroad to a passenger railroad and the maintenance requirements of each.

I never said that I thought Amtrak's maintenance Department was properly staffed, over staffed, or understaffed. I simply stated the comparison of the job the two have to do is so different, any comparison of that type is invalid.

OK, if that's what you want to believe. 

I'm sure my use of the English language is a bit different than yours, so I'm sure we can't communicate at all.