RIDEWITHMEHENRY is the name for our almost monthly day of riding trains and transit in either the NYCity or Philadelphia areas including all commuter lines, Amtrak, subways, light rail and trolleys, bus and ferries when warranted. No fees, just let us know you want to join the ride and pay your fares. Ask to be on our email list or find us on FB as RIDEWITHMEHENRY (all caps) to get descriptions of each outing.
daveklepper That is the ongoing burden the railroads agreed to assume to avoid running the passenger trains themselves. You are asking them to reneg on their agreement. Apparently, they still consider this tremendous subsidy to be far less than the losses they would face if they were running a decent skelatal long distance passenger network themselves.
That is the ongoing burden the railroads agreed to assume to avoid running the passenger trains themselves. You are asking them to reneg on their agreement. Apparently, they still consider this tremendous subsidy to be far less than the losses they would face if they were running a decent skelatal long distance passenger network themselves.
I think in advocating for passenger trains we need to move forward from the mode of thinking about this.
Back in the day when railroads had their own "Railroads" Dow Jones Stock Average, maybe, just maybe, it was reasonable to regard railroads as money-spinning monopolies and require of them to fulfil social duties.
But even in the 60's during the ICC Train-off Hearings where folks who like passenger trains spoke of the obligation to run passenger trains, there was the view that the railroads "made all their money on freight" and were treating "passengers as an inconvenience." David P Morgan's Trains Magazine was trying to correct that perception inasmuch as the railroad enterprise was tenuous even in freight carriage.
I have asked this question, but it was another Forum participant offering the proposition that maybe, just maybe, there may be more social benefit, especially on long-distance lines, of letting the freight railroads be freight railroads by maximizing the diversion of truck traffic from the highways (no offense to our OTR Forum participants, but given demand, I think there will always be jobs for drivers). Of course the folks 'round here would have none of this because of all of the inherent goodness provided by passenger trains, especially long-distance passenger trains.
We can invoke how the freight railroads were "discharged of their obligation to run passenger trains" by accepting Amtrak on their lines and why the freight railroads should continue to run Amtrak at what might be argued is below their cost. We had that argument in the days of NARP fighting the ICC Train Off petitions pre-Amtrak -- full allocated vs avoidable cost, railroad as a public concession (paying a whole lot of property taxes, too) having a social responsibility and so on.
But if we are to move forward, if we are to expand behind the skeletal Amtrak network, do you suppose we should get an inkling of what the railroads face in hosting in Amtrak and what it would take to get their cooperation if more trains are needed?
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
Sam1 Amtrak's payment to the freight railroads to host its trains declined from $136.5 million in 2010 to $110 million in 2012. Or from approximately 5.06 cents per train mile to 4.04 cents per train mile! I have not pulled the 2013 numbers. Some of the reduction may have been due to withheld performance incentives. Negotiating with the federal government can be a tough nut to crack. If the freight carrier does not like the terms of the agreement, i.e. Amtrak pays the full cost of hosting its trains, etc., it cannot just tell Amtrak to shove it.
Amtrak's payment to the freight railroads to host its trains declined from $136.5 million in 2010 to $110 million in 2012. Or from approximately 5.06 cents per train mile to 4.04 cents per train mile! I have not pulled the 2013 numbers. Some of the reduction may have been due to withheld performance incentives.
Negotiating with the federal government can be a tough nut to crack. If the freight carrier does not like the terms of the agreement, i.e. Amtrak pays the full cost of hosting its trains, etc., it cannot just tell Amtrak to shove it.
Thank you Sam. On the "Grow America Act" thread I demonstrated that it costs BNSF $36.84 per train mile on a system average basis to provide and maintain the fixed plant. These figures indicate that the US Govt is paying the rails not more than 2% of the costs they are incurring to support ATK. On the $110 million ATK does pay and 2% the railroads and their freight customers, are subsidizing ATK to the tune of $5.5 billion per year.
This is what the NITL should be up in arms about, rather than penny-anty fuel surcharges.
Mac
Negotiating with the federal government can be a tough nut to crack. If the freight carrier does not like the terms of the agreement, i.e. Amtrak will not pay the full cost of hosting its trains, etc., it cannot just tell Amtrak to shove it.
henry6If you open a pizza parlor you have to make pizza the customer will buy so you have to devote yourself to being good at what you do and provide great pizza and service and not just good pizza and service. IF a railroad lays down track and says they are open for business as a common carrier and solicit business. Any customer who you agree to do business with expects you to live up to the agreement no matter what the price is. So, if you agree to run a passenger train on such and such a schedule for $XXX then you run that schedule. Period. IF you don't want to hold to the contract, then say so and stop charging for service you are not delivering. OR renegotiate the contract. And if you are the buyer and the railroad refuses to provide the contracted services at the contracted price, hold back paying the bill until you are getting what you're paying for or stop using the service. IF the public raises hell, tell them that the railroad could not provide the needed services and schedules. If the pizza is not what you want to pay for, don't buy the pizza. No, it's not that simple but you gotta start thinking strongly about your product and your customers.
C&NW, CA&E, MILW, CGW and IC fan
According to Amtrak, a train is considered "late" if it arrives at its end-point terminal more than 10 minutes after its scheduled arrival time for trips up to 250 miles; 15 minutes for trips 251-350 miles; 20 minutes for trips 351-450 miles; 25 minutes for trips 451-550 miles; and 30 minutes for trips of 551 or more miles. These tolerances are based on former ICC rules. The exception is that all Acela trips, regardless of run length, are considered late if they arrive at their end-point terminal more than 10 minutes after their scheduled arrival time.
The statistics presented above would really be dismal, especially for the long distance trains, if the metrics did not have these additional wiggle rooms built into them.
At least Amtrak is doing a good job of notifying passengers that their train is running late. On my last five trips, Amtrak has sent me a text message telling me that the train is late, as well as when it is expected to arrive at my departure station.
SAM brings up some important points that can be obscured. The class 1s are being overwhelmed in many locations with too much traffic for their present infrastructure. The all stations stats have concerned me as well. There are many station to station segments that appear to delay a train almost constantly.
These delays may be the death of LD trains as the intermediate station passengers cannot depend on a train being close to on time. IMHO present congestion is not going to get better. Other routes may actually get worse on presently fluid segments ?
What many persons have not noted is the federal report anticipating almost double traffic from 2010 to 2040. Cannot find report for link but some one should be able to find the report.
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Beginning with Amtrak’s FY13 Monthly Performance Reports (MPR), which includes FY12 comparative data, an all-stations on-time performance report has been included together with the end-point performance report. Now we can see how well the trains do on average at stations between the end-points. The all-stations report appears to be the mean of an array of averages, which is not a very precise statistic, but it is interesting.
In FY13 the end point on-time performance for the system was 82.3 per cent whilst the all-stations figure was 79.6 per cent. In FY12 the comparative numbers were 83 and 80.1.
For the Acela the median end-point on-time percentage for FY12 and FY13 was 87.5, and the all-stations number was 90.6. The numbers for the Northeast regional trains were 85.4 and 84. The results may suggest that the Acela had trouble with the last lap or two.
The short distance trains had a median end-point percentage of 82.0 and an all-stations percentage of 84.2. The best performing short distance trains were the Capitols, with a median end-point on-time performance record of 94.6 per cent and an all-stations on-time performance record of 95.7 per cent. The worst performing train in this category was the Pere Marquette, which had a median end-point on-time performance percentage of 50.6 per cent and an all-stations median of 54.0 per cent.
The long distance trains underperformed the system. The median end-point on-time performance for them was 71.3 per cent, whilst the median all-stations on-time performance record was 54.7 per cent. This suggests that the long distance trains improve their performance during the last several laps of their run, thanks in part to heavily padded schedules. This is certainly the case for Number 21, which gets 3 hours and 25 minutes to run from Austin to San Antonio vs. 2.5 hours for its counterpart, Number 22, to get from San Antonio to Austin.
At 88 per cent the City of New Orleans had the best median end-point on-time performance record, whilst the Crescent and Palmetto had the best all-stations records at 72.6 per cent. The Cardinal was the worst performing long distance train, with a median end-point on-time performance record of 49.6 per cent and a median all-stations on-time performance records of 44.6 per cent.
I excluded the Auto-Train from the analysis, inasmuch as it does not serve any intermediate stations, and is a different animal from the other long distance trains. Also, there were several trains in the short distance and long distance categories that came within a hair of the best and worst performers.
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