We give Amtrak a lot of grief. It’s slow, it’s inefficient, it’s overly costly. To be fair, it’s not all Amtrak’s fault — there is simply no way it could look anything but awful next to China’s wonder-line and Europe’s gorgeous rail service. So as a gesture of peace, we do want to acknowledge that Amtrak is working hard to make noticeable improvements. Like roomier seats, and power outlets at every seat on the Acela, and more quiet cars to minimize disturbances. And, as the Times reports, now Amtrak is announcing a plan to provide free Wifi in all Acela trains by the second quarter of this year.
Still, there’s the $64,000 question: What about faster trains?
Well, as the Times notes, the outlook isn’t so good:
For the Northeast corridor alone, Amtrak estimates that it will need almost $700 million annually for the next 15 years to maintain the system and to tackle a backlog of maintenance projects and upgrades. Reducing travel times between New York and Washington to two-and-a-half hours and times between New York and Boston to three hours — goals that were established in the 1970s — will require straighter track, improvements to bridges and tunnels, increased capacity through Manhattan and newer trains, among other investments.
We’re not sure which is more disheartening: the fact that Amtrak still hasn’t met the speed goals set in the ’70s, or the fact that it’ll take millions of dollars to cut time off a route (D.C. to New York) that, even with improvements, will still be slower than the average bullet train in China.
January 5th, 2010 at 7:41 pm
It doesn’t surprise me that nothing has happened. Amtrak has been on life-support for years now - Republicans wanted to kill it entirely. Many in the public wanted to drive or fly - they viewed rail travel as antiquated.
But times change. People see the nice high-speed trains in Europe, air travel becomes more of an ordeal than an excitement. Road conditions steadily deteriorate and traffic is bad all over the place.
So at the moment, things look better - Congressional support has improved, and more important the public is now much more interested in improving the rail system than before. The problem is that we have decades of neglect to try and undo, and that won’t happen overnight. Tons of deferred maintenance. Tons of projects like improving times in the NEC that never got done. Bottlenecks all over the place.
It isn’t all the fault of Amtrak - the generally degraded state of the freight railroads didn’t help - this contributed to the horrible on-time performance that Amtrak had suffered. But the freight railroads also have a long list of deferred maintenance items that they need to work through.
January 5th, 2010 at 8:32 pm
Living in California, I missed the accessibility of numerous cities via train travel. Now that I live in the Northeast again, I travel via Amtrak. Quiet car, cafe car, beautiful landscapes, and soon to be free Wifi on Acela.
January 5th, 2010 at 11:43 pm
Keep in mind that much of the money Amtrak is proposing for Northeast Corridor improvements has nothing to do with higher speeds or better maintenance. The $11 billion program includes $1.3 billion for Moynihan Station, which adds no transportation value, and $2 billion for quad-tracking a segment of curvy track in Maryland without any concern for easing or bypassing the curves.
More points of Amtrak’s proposal include improving speed on curves, but by much less than what the Acela is capable of, let alone what the next generation trains could do; even the reference to the next generation includes a blurb about FRA rules that leaves me with the uncomfortable feeling that off-the-shelf equipment is going to be ruled illegal once again.
And Amtrak owns the NEC; it has no excuse for its shitty schedule adherence there.
January 6th, 2010 at 12:33 am
It truly is time for Amtrak to be complete re-formulated from the top down - new Board, new Executives, new management and new labor agreements. Get some folks in there with transport experience, with customer service experience, with hotel and restaurant experience, with labor relations experience and most importantly, get folks who believe in growing the system not growing their pensions. Even before the HSR map is drawn, Amtrak should have both a higher speed component and an overnight/long distance component whose timetables are co-ordinated as in Switzerland but on a larger scale because of the distances involved, and the system should be a minimum of about 40,000 route miles.
January 6th, 2010 at 11:48 am
You see “beautiful landscpaes” on the Northeast Corridor? Are you seeing them through a vide ipod? The only thing you can see on the Northeast Corridor are other trains. The trip from NYC to Phili may be somewhat fast, but it is far from pretty.
January 6th, 2010 at 2:51 pm
Mad Park, new labor agreements are illegal: federal law protects existing railroad labor agreements and requires any new railroad taking over an existing Amtrak service to respect them.
The only way this could work is if the unions could be convinced that cutting conductor positions is necessary to help Amtrak grow its ridership; higher ridership means more trains, which means more engineer and customer service positions to redistribute the conductors to.
March 1st, 2010 at 2:39 pm
Most transportation planners as well as the general public do not realize that most passengers in China, Japan, Europe and other nations with high speed (~100 mph) and super (~100+mph) high speed rail still ride the slower trains. The passengers use the slower (much <100 mph) trains primarily because the faster trains do not stop at moderate and small sized cities or towns. This is not dissimilar to Amtrak’s routes (e. g., compare the Acela to the Northeast service.) The other reason most passengers do not use the high speed trains is the cost; once again similar to Amtrak’s fare structure.
Amtrak takes about the same amount of time as driving from Niagara Falls to New York City. And the cost is less! .
The biggest problem with Amtrak is that it does not own many of the tracks on which it operates. If it at least had its own tracks along a right of way owned by another railroad company service would improve.
As with any infrastructure project, the initial capital costs are enormous. However, we do have to remember that the Erie Lackawana Railroad laid all the track from about Binghamton to Lake Erie in less than a week during the 19th century. Mainly using human labor rather than machines. If there is a will, there is a way to substantially improve the passenger railroad infrastructure.