This Week at Amtrak; January 5, 2008

A weekly digest of events, opinions, and forecasts from
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739, Electronic Mail info@unitedrail.org
http://www.unitedrail.org



Volume 5, Number 1



Founded over three decades ago in 1976, URPA is a nationally known policy institute that focuses on solutions and plans for passenger rail systems in North America. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, URPA has professional associates in Minnesota, California, Arizona, New Mexico, the District of Columbia, Texas, and New York. For more detailed information, along with a variety of position papers and other documents, visit the URPA web site at http://www.unitedrail.org.


URPA is not a membership organization, and does not accept funding from any outside sources.


1) Great, wonderful, progress! Amtrak has figured out the high value of its timetables in the world of marketing, and has started soliciting paid outside ads. The ads now appear in the Fall and Winter 2007-08 national timetables. Overall, Amtrak prints something close to a million timetables a year (including all of the individual route timetables and wallet corridor timetables), and has been doing so almost solely at its own expense for years.


One bright spot over the last decade has been the constant upgrading of the timetables, with each new one bringing a fresher look than the one before. Now, with both the national timetable upgraded (lots more color and an impressive presentation) and the route timetables pleasantly redesigned, Amtrak seems to be taking the relatively inexpensive initiative to sell advertising space in these timetables and let someone else pay for part of the printing and distribution cost.


Capitalism is abounding, and is wonderful. For every dollar Amtrak earns in timetable or other collateral material advertising revenue, it is one dollar less it needs in free federal money. What a concept.



2) Revisit some real, factual history and look at why Amtrak was founded at the end of the 1960s.


One of the primary reasons Amtrak was created was to clean up the mess created by the PennCentral merger and bankruptcy earlier in the 1960s, and the resulting bankruptcies of most of the other railroads providing freight and commuter/regional passenger service in the Northeast.


Several hard facts must be considered. Railroading in the 1960s wasn’t much different than railroading in the 1930s, except for diesel engines and radio-equipped locomotives. Harsh and unbending union rules, which almost exclusively were based on steam railroading and the days when railroads were printing their own money desperately needed to be updated. Rules such as steam locomotive firemen still be required in diesel locomotives just to preserve jobs were costing the railroads hundreds of millions of dollars a year.


And, too, the railroads were far too heavily regulated and falsely treated as public utilities because the railroad robber barons of the 19th Century and early 20th Century had been so naughty. The naughtiness spawned the beginning of the Interstate Commerce Commission, a federal agency that probably did more to harm railroads and shippers than any other single government entity in the history of the Republic. The ICC was a political agency and it had life and death power over the railroads. Desperate railroads may petition the ICC for relief from some immediate problem, but the ICC always responded in its own time and way of doing things, which was never for the convenience of the public or the private companies it regulated. If not for the Staggers Act that deregulated railroads at the end of the 20th Century, the ICC would most likely have presided over the end of the railroad industry in this country, and then wondered what it did wrong.


It never occurred to anyone in time the advent of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System and the Boeing 707 jet airliner drastically changed the landscape for the railroads in both the freight and passenger realms, which called for a whole new set of operating, union, management, and marketing standards.


Everyone was at fault. Railroad senior executives were for the most part inflexible, and had begun their railroad careers sometime after World War I, when the rails were king. They never adapted to the changing landscape of the 1950s and 60s. Wall Street, always accustomed to reaping huge profits from blue chip railroad stocks before the Interstate Highway System, still demanded those same profit levels, without taking into account the changing landscape. Local and state governments regarded the alleged deep pockets of the railroads as an extraordinary tax base, where every foot of rail, every station or depot building, every signal tower, and every spike plunged into a tie were heavily taxed at premium rates. Railroads shouldered the burden for many local taxpayers, keeping other taxes for locals low because the alleged mighty railroads with unlimited revenues could pay the taxes, instead.


The thought processes of unions during the period was best demonstrated through the New York City newspaper strikes of the day, where most of New York’s daily newspapers were forced to go out of business because they tried to modernize with new typesetting and printing methods, but the unions demanded all jobs be retained, even if there was nothing for the workers to do. The attitude of the unions was they were rather see the newspapers go out of business than benefit from new work rules which favored management and owners. The attitude of the railroad unions was identical. Everyone thought the railroads were untouchable by strife because they were so necessary. It never occurred to these people the railroads may actually disappear until the PennCentral crisis.


World War II wore out the railroads. They had already gone through a tough time during the Great Depression in the 1930s, and the physical plant was not a good as it could have been. When wartime demands were placed on the railroads, like every patriotic citizen, the railroads rose to meet the demand, and performed magnificently. But, by VJ Day, the railroads were in ragtag shape because of the heavy demands of use, and no replacement equipment or infrastructure materials had been available during the war.

After the war, the railroads placed new orders for all types of equipment, including passenger equipment. The day of the heavyweight passenger car was gone, and lightweight streamliners were the order of the day, trailing behind thrifty diesel locomotives.

Many American servicemen had gone to war by riding a troop train, mostly equipped with older cars that had seen better days. Short-trip day coaches were pressed into service on transcontinental trains, and, for many soldiers who envisioned the grand service offered by the passenger railroads, the nightmares of troop trains stayed with them for a very long time.

In the first part of the 20th Century, most of the rail based transit systems in America were privately run. They, too, became victim of the bus and the automobile, and private systems disappeared as cities and municipalities suddenly found themselves in the transit business because the automobile had stolen the heart of the ridership away from the streetcars and trolleys. Americans, too, suddenly rejuvenated by winning a world war, were tired of standing on a street corner in all of the weather elements waiting for what was now ragged and sad-faced public transportation. Americans had liberated the world, and they wanted the freedom to move about unimpeded in their own automobiles at will.

Postwar Detroit stopped making drab and boxy sedans, and starting turning out eye-catching chrome plated automobiles that were the product of professional stylists, not automobile engineers. Gas was cheap, highways were being built everywhere, and the suburbs beckoned with new styles of homes complete with modern kitchens, supermarkets, and shopping centers.

And, then, Boeing and Douglas got into the passenger jet business. The former glamour of highly civilized rail travel in Pullman Sleepers and parlor cars was replaced by the fascination of jet travel, with full hot meals being served at the seat of each passenger by young and attractive stewardesses, and alcohol flowing like a river. New and shiny airports replaced dreary and ominous train stations. People became jet setters, and a new lifestyle was born and glamorized by Hollywood and the media.

Everything but the railroads had changed.

Railroads still had coaches, diners, lounges, and Pullman sleeping cars, all manned by all-male Black American crews, harking back to the undesirable era of segregation. It was tough to compare well-trained, white-jacketed porters and dining car waiters to young, elegantly suited and perfectly coiffed smiling stewardesses. Train speeds stayed the same, or, in many cases, slowed down. Stations and terminals started losing their luster as trains became passee, and maintenance began to slide.

In short, every factor imaginable was against the railroads in the late 1950s and 1960s, and it’s only through a miracle the industry survived.

The railroads with the biggest problems were the railroads which handled short hauls of both freight and passengers, such as the New England railroads, PennCentral, the Southern Pacific, Chicago and Northwestern, Milwaukee Road, and others in a similar situation. Railroads which were in less danger of surviving were ones with little or no commuter business and little short haul business, such as the Seaboard Coast Line, Southern, Norfolk & Western, Chesapeake and Ohio, Union Pacific, Great Northern, Burlington, Santa Fe, and Northern Pacific. While everyone of these railroads ended up with at least one merger partner, they did so to maintain positions of strength, not because they were teetering on bankruptcy. Also, these railroads all operated heavily regulated passenger trains, but the nature of the long hauls of the passenger trains made them much more financially feasible than the other railroads burdened with the high cost and low revenue commuter services.

3) At the end of the 1960s PennCentral was a financial basket case. It took a long time for PennCentral’s management (which was pretty awful to begin with) to convince official Washington and the public it was in danger of having to be liquidated. PennCentral was the Enron of its day on steroids, and nobody knew what was going on until it was too late.

Finally, some action came from the Nixon and Ford Administrations to tackle the PennCentral mess and create Conrail. One way initially PennCentral and then Conrail was helped was the creation of Amtrak as a child of government.

In a nutshell, someone realized there was still viability in passenger trains, but not fully at the moment with the competition of the Interstate highways and jet travel and the way passenger trains had previously been heavily regulated. But, someone realized if Amtrak relieved PennCentral of its regulated obligations to run passenger trains, the railroad could concentrate all of its efforts on its freight business, and not have to worry about the costs of commuter and regional passenger trains, stations, and other passenger related capital needs and infrastructure.

Once you do something for one child, you have to do it for every child. So, Amtrak became a national, optional program, which the private railroads could join if they chose to do so.

Again, look at the history. By the end of the 1960s, it was time for the railroad corporate planners to start thinking about ordering new passenger diesels and cars. Most of the equipment was nearing 20 years old, and all of the rolling stock mechanical systems were based on pre- and post-war technology, not anything new.

Few new stations and terminal had been built since the first half of the century, and almost all of the passenger depots and stations were built and operated on prewar traffic loads, not current traffic loads. Major terminals such as Cincinnati, Jacksonville, New Orleans, Richmond, Atlanta, and elsewhere were giant, expensive-to-maintain monuments to railroad egos of a time long gone. The stifling regulatory atmosphere of the day didn’t allow for much change in infrastructure or necessary downsizing.

The computer age was dawning, and the railroads embraced it, on the freight side of the house. Passenger reservations were still made on paper manifests, and stations still communicated with each other by decades-old teletypes. Conductors and engineers were still working under the 100 mile rule, which was geared towards steam engine travel, not diesel travel.

Really, when the government came to the railroads and said “do we have a deal for you,” it was tough to turn down joining Amtrak. So many problems and capital intensive costs simply went away, and trains that used to be the responsibility of the railroads became the responsibility of the government. The railroads were paid to run the trains (although a small sum, not a fair market price), and suddenly a lot of employees and their pension obligations went away, too, transferring to Amtrak.

Still, though, two railroads held out, the Southern, and the Denver & Rio Grand Western. Some railroads, like Seaboard Coast Line, which was proudly operating still in high style its passenger trains, hesitated, but took the Amtrak plunge, anyway.

Already, the Pullman Company, which was jointly owned by the operating railroads, had already gone away before 1970, and the individual railroads took over the operation of the sleeping cars. The demise of the Pullman Company is a whole other story, but it occurred at a time when the day of the Pullman Company was simply over, and its functions could more efficiently be handled by the individual railroads. Most of the cream of the Pullman Company business, the overnight business traveler, had already moved to jet airplane travel. The Pullman Company was left with mostly leisure travelers, who at the time were more interested in new and novel roadside Holiday Inns and private automobiles than upper and lower bunks in a Pullman sleeping car.

4) It’s May 1, 1971, and Amtrak rolls into existence. About half of the nation’s passenger rail system disappeared overnight. Lots of promises were made, some which would be kept, and others that would be quickly broken. Amtrak had many huge flaws, including sloppy legal language which created it in Congress. Amtrak was not a public national priority in the Space Age, and it was pretty well left to define itself with lots of questionable flexibility which would come back to haunt it in coming years.

Looking at the history of the private railroads, and the beginning of Amtrak, the company started with extraordinary benefits.

– Amtrak had congressionally mandated operating rights over every stretch of main line rail and every two streaks of rust in the country.

– Amtrak inherited a national fleet of equipment at no cost, even though much of it was nearing the end of its useful life. Henry Christie’s famous “A” and “B” lists of equipment would determine which cars would be converted from steam heat to head end power and live to roll another million miles down the track.

– Amtrak was exempt from all local and state taxes of every type (except diesel fuel taxes) and all federal taxes except payroll related taxes.

– Amtrak had no competition in the rail marketplace, and it could carve out its own useful niche in the transportation world of jet airplanes and automobile travel.

– Amtrak had no federal or state regulation, and it could manipulate its route system nearly at will, but with certain union restrictions for job protection and severance packages.

– Amtrak shed many of the huge and expensive passenger railroad terminals in major cities in favor of small, efficient stations that required fewer employees and had lower operating costs.

– When Amtrak needed money, it went to the federal government for handouts, often with no strings attached. The private railroads had to be accountable to stockholders, entities buying commercial paper, banks for loans, and everyone else in the world of commerce. Amtrak simply was written a check by the government with no mandate to pay back the amount or scrutiny as to how it was used. Amtrak had an unending source of funds that was renewed on an annual basis.

– In the early 1970s, Amtrak tried a bold experiment by today’s standards. It advertised itself to the traveling public, offering all of the myriad of advantages of passenger rail travel. The public responded in droves, and Amtrak could not handle the public demand. Instead of finding a way to meet the demand, Amtrak retreated into becoming America’s best kept secret, and a constant financial ward of government.

5) All of this put together should have made Amtrak a resounding success. Oops! It wasn’t, and still isn’t. What went wrong?

– In the early days, too many people tried to remake passenger rail travel into the image of airline travel, or, even worse, bus travel. Nobody was content to let Amtrak be Amtrak, and play to the strengths of passenger rail travel, and not try to imitate another form of travel.

– Many of the original officers of Amtrak came from the few failing private railroads, especially the PennCentral and its predecessor the Pennsylvania Railroad, which at one time had advertised itself as the Standard Railroad of the World. The boys from the Pennsylvania and later PennCentral pretty well started this whole mess with their failures (along, of course, with way too much government regulation and a host of other problems) that created the need for Amtrak. The people who failed previously were brought in to fail again, whether consciously or not by the federal government and Amtrak’s creators.

– When the Ford Administration, groping for a way to make Conrail viable, shunted off the Northeast Corridor onto Amtrak to keep it off of Conrail’s books, someone should have just turned out the lights at that point and told everyone to go home. Expensive, high-cost and low revenue regional rail, especially Mid-Atlantic and New England regional passenger rail, were huge contributors to the failure of the private railroads. By passing the infrastructure and operations along to Amtrak without a better business plan to operate the regional system, the same problems of 50 years ago still exist today, and are continuing to drag Amtrak down.

– The addition of the black hole of the NEC to Amtrak completely changed the mission of the company and its business plan. Amtrak’s original business plan was based on operating long distance passenger trains as the primary function of the company, not glorified commuter trains which were hopeless money losers and more public utilities than a modern business. The mistake Amtrak made was concentrating too much of its resources on rescuing the NEC, and not enough of its resources on building a strong, healthy, national long distance system which the public wants.

Here’s something that can keep people awake at night wondering: If Amtrak would have stuck to its original business plan (flawed as it was) of running a long distance passenger system, and the Ford Administration had found another place to put the NEC instead of Amtrak (such as the FRA or USRA), it’s highly likely Amtrak today, in 2008, would either be profitable or very close to breaking even. Without the distraction of the Northeast Corridor, the Capitol Corridor, the Pacific Surfliners, and other local services, it’s highly likely there would be a daily Sunset Limited over the full route between Los Angeles and Orlando, there would be a daily Cardinal between Washington and Chicago, the Pioneer and Desert Wind would still be in operation, there would be a Broadway Limited, a National Limited, a Floridian, a Champion, and a North Coast Hiawatha, along with a few other discontinued trains from the early days of Amtrak. If Amtrak had remained an operating company, as based on the successful model of the Pullman Company (pre-jet travel), and not an infrastructure owner and operator, today’s national system would most likely be a healthy railroad taking full advantage of the resurgent interest in passenger rail travel in America. Instead, the company is foolishly bogged down in running short distance, high-expense, low revenue trains which contribute little to the national commonweal.

– The creation of Conrail and the transfer of the NEC to Amtrak also created financial havoc when Amtrak did not write new contracts with commuter railroads it hosted on the NEC. As far back as before the creation of Amtrak, the Long Island Rail Road, which was a commuter road that hauled some local freight as an afterthought, was spun off into a government agency in New York State. Forty years ago, railroaders knew hauling commuter trains was a losing proposition. When Amtrak took the NEC (under protest), it never imposed fair operating contracts on its commuter systems it hosted. Sweetheart deals which benefitted local politicians and local government at the expense of Amtrak abounded.

Taxpayers in Arizona were paying dearly for commuters in New Jersey to have commuter rail access into New York City. Instead of locals paying for local costs, suddenly federal taxpayers were subsidizing local commuters. This bore no relationship to the federal highway building projects, where federal, state, and local governments shared the one time costs of building new roads. Instead, it turned into an annual gift of solely precious federal resources that deprived entire cities and towns of even one train a day for basic long distance travel so NEC commuters could have an easy ride to and from work.

Despite the false information constantly provided by Amtrak and its many sycophant rail fan support organizations, closing the NEC to Amtrak commuter trains would not grind the national to a screeching halt. The relatively few daily Amtrak riders of the NEC, measured by the total counts of all North-South travelers in the region, would simply switch to private automobile, bus, or air travel if there were no more Amtrak short distance NEC trains. The local commuter agencies would continue without the largess of Amtrak’s annual capital improvement budget for the NEC, and there would be little difference in life in the Northeast.

A reality no one, especially Amtrak and those same sycophant organizations and the greens want to admit, is that Amtrak is not – and never will be – a solution to transportation problems, either in urban areas or in regions. What Amtrak has the potential to be is a good alternative, for whatever reasons you may choose, and it does bring balance to our domestic transportation network. Keep in mind Amtrak’s national share of the transportation marketplace is about the same as motorcycles. Amtrak can be more relevant by growing its system, but the relevance must be measured in real transportation output, not commuter and regional trains which operate with annual load factors of less than 50% or even as disastrously low as 35%. Amtrak has always done very well serving the many small, intermediate stops in its national system. These smaller station stops often generate the highest revenue tickets at the lowest cost. To small town America, Amtrak is an essential service. This is where Amtrak shines the best, fulfilling its original mission to provide a viable, national passenger rail system.

– Because it has been a government overseen monopoly, Amtrak has never acted like a real company focused on passenger service. It has become lazy and complacent, knowing another year’s pot full of free federal money was just months or weeks away.

– Like the blunders of so many railroads, Amtrak has let itself be dictated to by the operating department, and brushed aside the needs of the marketing department. Amtrak has often run trains on schedules which were convenient for crew changes, meshing with commuter operations, or the needs of terminals, instead of the desires of passengers. Just as the freight railroads learned the hard way and finally got rid of the mentality of “if we run a train, we don’t care if you put a box car on it or not,” Amtrak has never learned that lesson, and still lets the operating department make too many passenger services decisions.

– Amtrak continues to have a complex about offering anything other than Spartan services. Because it is a child of government, many believe Amtrak should not offer high-dollar, high-profit services, but, rather, should be a bus on rails with minimal creature comforts. Not only does this provide a glaring example of why Amtrak should not be a government entity, it also avidly demonstrates how thinking in terms of government provided services versus privately provided services warps concepts and can hide true potential. Amtrak, as a part of government, has a duty and obligation to provide the best level of service available that generates the highest income at the lowest cost. That is being a good steward of taxpayer subsidies. Instead, Amtrak aims for mediocre service levels at often inconvenient times that will always require free federal or state monies because its business plan is not geared toward productivity on any level.

Often, watching Amtrak crews at terminals or station platforms, one can draw a conclusion there is never a sense of urgency, or desire to make up time if a train is running late. There appears to be a complacency among many of Amtrak’s crews that when the train gets there, it will get there, and there will be no extra compensation for the crews, or any penalty for the crews for being late. While tardiness is often the cause of host railroads, and often Amtrak itself causes tardiness by lack of equipment maintenance or lack of adequate staffing, it is rare to see an Amtrak train crew pushing to get a train into a terminal or the next station in any particular hurry. These front line soldiers of Amtrak in most cases have the personal motivation to get a job done well, but the system they work in does not provide the exhortation necessary to prompt improvement.

– Amtrak’s skeletal national system is expensive to operate and does not provide its potential return on investment. Even though it is easy to demonstrate the Empire Builder route performs financial circles around any corridor route, and throws off a positive cash flow (that reads profits for all of those unfamiliar with the concept) from operations, the route has the easy potential to double its contribution to Amtrak’s bottom line. This can rationally be accomplished by expanding the length of the train (the easiest fix), promoting the train heavier (even though it has one of the best load factors in the system), or negotiate with BNSF for a second frequency over the line.

Daily passenger trains require stations and personnel on the ground to run them, including crew bases and maintenance shops. The least efficient way to use these assets is to have one train a day (or, even worse, tri-weekly service) in each direction. That’s a lot of infrastructure for one visit a day by passengers in each direction. When route frequencies increase, the infrastructure costs remain virtually the same (although, occasionally, some station hours must be lengthened to accommodate other frequencies), but the revenue potential more than doubles because more passengers respond to more travel times choices. This is the same all over the Amtrak system.

Even though the host freight railroads want to moan about track capacity restrictions (which is often a very real scenario), somehow, when the price is right and conditions are favorable, space is always found for another train. Not every piece of rail in every part of the country is totally congested. There are many opportunities for Amtrak to expand its system, but someone has to want to do that first, and that doesn’t seem the case with Amtrak.

6) Where does all of this leave us? In a terrible place, with a crippled passenger rail system with a grossly flawed business plan, a nationwide demand for passenger service which is not being met, and a glaring hole in our domestic transportation network.

– Amtrak needs to take more responsibility for itself, and take a serious inventory of its assets and potential. It needs to realistically look at the potential of its system, and expand the system where the most revenues will be generated by spending the least amount of money. Passengers in the form of high numbers of warm bodies are not the answer. Passengers in the form of people who generate the most transportation output for the lowest cost are the answer. Amtrak is not a public utility, and should never be considered as a public utility. Amtrak is – startling so to some – a very real business with an obligation to operate efficiently and effectively.

If Amtrak became financially stronger on its own accord, the annual charade over free federal money would simply go away. Why do ill-bred and ill-informed people want the future of Amtrak to always be dependent on the largess of irresponsible politicians?

Why do some of these same people – and, others, which are wiser and have more realistic life experiences – always look with envy of what is happening in Europe and wonder why we can’t have the same type of transportation system, here? Don’t they understand how so many of the dynamics are completely different, and comparing our national needs to those of Europe are comparing apples to oranges?

– Amtrak needs to become more creative. President and CEO Alex Kummant is presiding over some much needed changes at Amtrak (see item one of this column), and he has in place good executive like Richard Phelps, Mike Chandler, Brian Rosenwald, Tommy McDonald, and Butch Williams. These wise and personable professional railroaders understand operating Amtrak is more than just running trains, but it’s also all about passenger service and proper marketing.

The “experiment” of running the Empire Builder like it was always run prior to the last few years at Amtrak has proven successful, and is being expanded to other trains, such as the Coast Starlight (really, the Coast Starlight is just going back to the way it was when Brian Rosenwald remade it successfully in the 1990s, with a few new twists relevant to today). The California Zephyr and other trains can’t be far behind.

The City of New Orleans has instigated a “revolutionary” new concept, all day dining. This isn’t very new, since highly successful test runs of a 24 hour dining car on the Sunset Limited, under the partial creation and supervision of this writer, were done in 1999 and 2000. At the same time, an analysis was done for the City of New Orleans to also host a 24 hour dining car.

Lots of things have been tried in the past, but were often victim of the “not invented here” syndrome at Amtrak. There are so many creative things which can be done at Amtrak to greatly improve passenger service and revenues, yet the company mimics a glacier when it comes to moving forward on these items.

– Amtrak needs to come to better terms with its employees, particularly the union employees. Fears of a strike at the end of this month loom, and a presidential emergency board is already in place looking at the overall labor picture and trying to find a reasonable middle ground between management and labor. Former Chairman of the Board David Laney deserves much credit for jump starting labor relations and forging new contracts, but the job now needs to be finished with realistic Amtrak contracts that meet the needs of both the company and the employees.

– Amtrak needs a better business plan, instead of one always based on using other people’s money, be it on the federal or state level. If Amtrak needs some help today getting out of the mess it has gotten itself in to, well, okay. But, at some point, Amtrak needs to realistically demonstrate it is serious about running a business, and serious about its own future through a better business plan. There is no one perfect answer. But, there are a host of answers, all better than the one Amtrak is using today.

7) The post-war days of the 1950s and 60s are gone. Americans have rediscovered passenger trains (as much as Amtrak has let them despite dismal marketing), and they are looking to passenger trains as reasonable alternatives to air and private automobile travel.

Just as the passenger jet aircraft killed the cruise ship business, it killed the rail passenger business. But, in a new day with a new emphasis, both businesses have rebounded robustly in the eyes of new generations of passengers. Cruise lines are making more money and profits today than they ever have in their histories. Amtrak has the same potential as the cruise lines, if someone will just allow that to happen.

The things that smothered passenger rail, such as heavy government regulation, and the treatment of passenger trains as God-given public utilities, are gone. Cost everywhere have been slashed, from property taxes to staffing huge station facilities. Bi-level and efficient Superliners have replaced low density single-level coaches, sleepers, and diners. Modern reservations systems have made access to Amtrak available to everyone.

There is no rational reason to say passenger trains in America can never make money. There is no rational reason to say Americans don’t want to ride a train, when demand is so high when properly marketed and reasonable frequencies are available. There is no rational reason why Amtrak can’t be relevant as an integral part of our domestic transportation network, with a transportation market share greater than that of motorcycles. Amtrak only has to have the confidence to meet its true potential, instead of unhappily being a ward of a government that doesn’t truly understand what it has on its hands.

8) Finally, it is important to note the passing of former Amtrak President and CEO George Warrington. After leaving Amtrak, he rejoined his former employer, New Jersey Transit as its head man, and ran the system until earlier in 2007. He abruptly left NJT, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family. What most people didn’t know was he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and it took his life on Christmas Eve at age 55.

As one former Amtrak senior manager said, “I didn’t always agree with everything he did, but he was a force to be reckoned with.” That is perhaps the best way to sum up his service to Amtrak. He was a strong personality, and he believed in his convictions. Right or wrong, he did try to bring change to Amtrak, even if the end result was bad. Everyone who tries to make a difference deserves to be admired.

Our sympathies are extended to his family and friends on their loss of George Warrington, an American who believed in what he did.




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J. Bruce Richardson
President
United Rail Passenger Alliance, Inc.
1526 University Boulevard, West, PMB 203
Jacksonville, Florida 32217-2006 USA
Telephone 904-636-7739
brucerichardson@unitedrail.org
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