OK, who is a good photochopper and can stick Hillarys pic on this one? 
Posted on 02/27/2007 1:08:35 PM PST by libertarianPA
WASHINGTON - The Capitol Limited, an Amtrak train from Chicago, is scheduled to arrive in Washington every day at 1:30 p.m. But frequent rider Edda Ramos knows better than to make plans for the afternoon or evening.
She knows a late arrival — sometimes by an hour or two, sometimes by seven or eight — "is the one thing you can count on."
The 764-mile route is among Amtrak's most dismal performers, with just 11 percent of trains arriving within 30 minutes of their scheduled time last year. But the problem exists to one degree or another on the majority of Amtrak routes.
The main reason: In most of the country, the national passenger railroad operates on tracks owned by freight railroads, and the tracks are badly congested.
With freight traffic soaring in recent years, Amtrak's never-stellar on-time performance declined to an average of 68 percent last year, its worst showing since the 1970s. When the routes where Amtrak owns the tracks are excluded, the on-time performance last year fell to 61 percent.
Even the lawmakers who vote on Amtrak's subsidies of more than $1 billion annually have gotten caught in the holdups. Earlier this month, House Democrats traveling to a retreat in Williamsburg, Va., arrived two hours late after getting stuck behind a CSX freight train with engine trouble.
Alex Kummant, who took over as Amtrak's president in September, has made improving on-time performance a priority. A former executive at Union Pacific Corp. — a freight railroad long considered hostile to Amtrak — he says the relationship between Amtrak and the freight railroads is inherently complicated.
"It is an intersection of a subsidized structure with a truly private-sector structure, so how do you coexist?" he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
Kummant doesn't blame the freight railroads for most delays, saying they need government help to make the capital investments necessary to cope with soaring volumes.
But passenger advocates and others accuse the freight railroads of failing to live up to their end of a bargain struck in 1970, when Congress agreed to let the railroads unload the passenger service they said was dragging them down. In exchange, the railroads were required to give priority on their tracks to trains run by a new national passenger railroad. Amtrak pays modest fees for use of the tracks.
Amtrak performs far better on the Northeast corridor, where it owns the tracks. Last year, 85 percent of its high-speed Acela Express trains between Boston and Washington arrived within 10 minutes of their scheduled time.
But where Amtrak depends on the freight railroads, the picture is far gloomier, and the Capitol Limited is not even the worst case. The Coast Starlight, which runs between Seattle and Los Angeles, had an on-time performance of 4 percent in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30. For the California Zephyr, connecting Chicago and San Francisco, the figure was 7 percent. In the current fiscal year, the California Zephyr has not once arrived on time.
"The resulting damage to Amtrak's brand, reputation and repeat business is potentially devastating," Amtrak's former acting president, David Hughes, wrote in a letter last summer to the federal Surface Transportation Board.
The freight railroads say they do the best they can and are investing heavily in capacity improvements. In its own letter to the board, CSX Corp. said Amtrak should add more time to its schedules to reflect reality.
There is little incentive for the railroads to help Amtrak arrive on time, because the fees that Amtrak pays to use the tracks are paltry in relation to the billions of dollars the freight lines take in. Nor are there any real consequences for failing to accommodate Amtrak. A bill in the Senate calls for establishing penalties.
In the last fiscal year, Amtrak paid all of its host railroads $90 million — including about $15.5 million in rewards for on-time performance. If Amtrak had performed better, the railroads could have earned an additional $74.5 million in incentives.
Kummant said he believes the freight railroads are making a good-faith effort. But he said track capacity has become maxed out as freight traffic has soared in recent years, thanks to increased demand for coal and a growing reliance on rail.
That, in turn, has worn out the tracks, forcing Amtrak trains that normally travel 79 mph to slow to as little as 20 mph. Much of the rail network is single-tracked, meaning trains going in one direction have to pull over onto sidings to let trains coming the other way pass.
But Kummant said the situation has shown some improvement in recent months. And in what he called a sign of better relations, he has been given a sneak peak at the railroads' capital plans, and "they're nothing short of stunning."
To further speed up improvements, the freight industry is lobbying for federal tax credits for investments in track and other infrastructure to expand capacity.
One late arrival of the Capitol Limited last week showed how complicated the issue is. The train lost several hours because of "freight interference" on Norfolk Southern Corp.'s tracks between Chicago and Toledo, Ohio. But its problems actually started when it left Chicago an hour and a half late because of mechanical problems, thus missing its time slot. It arrived at Washington's Union Station 3 1/2 hours late.
The late arrival was frustrating for Ramos, 44, who started riding the Capitol Limited last year to visit relatives in Chicago. The Washington resident takes the train to avoid airport security hassles, but said she wouldn't risk it for business travel.
"I would be fired!" she said.
Can we PLEASE privatize this thing NOW???
they still have JetBlue beat
High cost repairs means an ever-shrinking number of high-volume rail corridors...
Imagine trying to shove a huge volume of water through an ever-shrinking opening.
This year, yet another high-volume East-West Corridor (Cincinnatti-St. Louis) was closed because of it needed High-Dollar bridge repairs.
Until we get SERIOUS about restoring our collapsing infrastructure, and SPENDING THE BUCKS TO DO IT, we face problems on our Rails, Airports, Highways, Electric lines, and all the jobs they attach to....
Most of that $15.5 million went to the Burlington Northern Santa Fe. The BNSF treats Amtrak as a profit center and is proud of its dispatchers, who keep Amtrak running on time on BNSF tracks.
Last year the Coast Starlight, which runs on Union Pacific tracks and is perenially late, was diverted to the BNSF in California due to a track blitz on the UP's Coast Division. The Starlight, running on the BNSF, arrived at Los Angeles Union Station 4 1/2 hours early. (At rail meetings and cocktail receptions, the VP Passenger Operations of the BNSF loves to twist the tail of his counterpart at UP.)
Every day, the VP Passenger Operations comes to his office in Fort Worth and checks how well the BNSF is servicing Amtrak. He does this because the daily report tells him how well his network is flowing. Within the world of BNSF, Amtrak functions as the canary in the mine.
Its best on-time performance is on the one route where it owns and operates the line itself.
Late trains?
Is there a TEPT (Train Early Pregnancy Test) to confirm their fears?
Privatization isn't the answer, unfortunately. You can't expect to privatize the railroads as long as you subsidize the airlines, with government owned airports, traffic controllers, etc.
And you can't privatize the railroads unless you privatize the roads. As long as governments pay for road maintenance, it distorts the economic balance.
Why should government pay for road bridges but not railroad bridges?
There's no easy answer, but I'm inclined to agree that we need to repair the infrastructure. Railroads are much more efficient for transporting heavy goods, if you equal out the cost of taking care of the rails and the roadways. And they are, or should be, much more efficient at transporting passengers between cities less than a couple of hundred miles apart, since they go from city center to city center and save those trips out to the airport at both ends.
But Amtrak is certainly in miserable shape. And it appears that the money is not being well spent.
Comrade Mussolini? Please pick up the white Courtesy Phone in the train depot. Thank you! *SMIRK*
Waiting for Hillary's promise to make the trains run on time.
Most major railroads are expanding into a lot of non-transportation related businesses and then crying for taxpayer subsidies to do what their freight rates are supposed to support.
It is sort of like big city mayors closing down swimming pools and police stations and crying that there isn't enough tax revenues while the big shots and their union cronies continue to live high on the hog. I've heard, for instance, that Pittsburgh Port Authority Bus Drives clear around $80K per year while the city fathers are cutting routes, raising fares and crying for more subsidies.
The railroads are raping the public they are supposed to serve not much differently than they were doing 150 years or so ago because of too much government involvement, not because of too much privatization.
Almost all modes of transportation are subsidized, and most of the subsidies are hidden. Read TANSTAAFL: A Semi-Satirical Look at a World Without Transportation Subsidies for a funny look at what would happen if you applied libertarian principles strictly.
Yeah, more tax money for trains, that's it. Where's Willie Green when you need him?
Don't get me wrong, I'm a HUGE Proponent of privatization.
But at some point, the states and the government have to step in to REBUILD the very same infrastructure they helped build, 100 years ago....
China can build a 4-track high-speed rail corridor to it's central highlands, resulting in HUGE growth, but WE cannot find the funds to repair a 450-ft railbridge in the American Midwest?
You are absolutely correct about that!
Makes you wonder what we did with the umpteen billions (between taxes,fees and bonds) that were supposed to go to restore infrastructure.
Isn't it the case that airlines pay lots of money in user fees for each plane that lands?
Concerning "subsidized" roads, that is a laugh.
Fuel taxes and other road taxes (each and every 18-wheeler you see on the road pays a yearly $1800 truck tax, just to be on the road) are a slush fund for politicians.
Here in PA, the state Kleptocrats (the only political party in PA) took $40 million from fuel taxes that were supposed to be for the roads and *gave* it to the rail companies to upgrade all the underpasses so that containers could be double-stacked.
Infrastructure means JOBS....
It's the one area that Government SHOULD be helping private industry...
So whose fault is it? Hmmmm?
"Isn't it the case that airlines pay lots of money in user fees for each plane that lands?"
In many large Democrat-Run cities, the fees the Airports collect are used to subsidize the huge salaries of the Local bus services, or lost in politicly-connected graft, with little left over for actual "improvements"...
OK, who is a good photochopper and can stick Hillarys pic on this one?
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