Why take Amtrak?

[Brandon]

In the US here, because of our extensive road network, people are more spread out.  So when people complain that we don't have decent transit options here, it's often times due to their own making.  They live a mile back in their large development, and wonder why they can't get their local mass transit agency to give them a bus stop a half-mile away.

No, it's not due to our large road network.  We were spread out well before that, and well before the Model T.  People lived, at one time, on 160 acres out in the middle of nowhere with the nearest town being 10, 20, 30 miles away.  We've always been far more spread out than Europe, and even today, the demographics speak to this.  You can go for miles upon miles through the middle of the country, even in an eastern state like Illinois and have small towns spread out away from anything else.

[Scott5114]

Some of these long distance routes are needed to make Amtrak have any semblance of usefulness at all outside the Northeast.

Only one route serves Oklahoma City: the Heartland Flyer, OKC to Fort Worth. That's it. To go anywhere else requires the Texas Eagle. That being said, system deficiencies still make getting anywhere from OKC pointlessly roundabout–Kansas City via Fort Worth and St Louis, Omaha via Fort Worth, St Louis, and Chicago, and so on.

I'd like to see routes from OKC to Tulsa and Kansas City. True, OKC-Tulsa is only 90 minutes by car, but it would be nice to be able to visit the city without driving. Unfortunately, transit in OKC is terrible (don't know about Tulsa, but I can't see it being any different) so once you get to your destination that might make things dicey as to actually doing anything useful on your trip.

[The Nature Boy]

Some of these long distance routes are needed to make Amtrak have any semblance of usefulness at all outside the Northeast.

Only one route serves Oklahoma City: the Heartland Flyer, OKC to Fort Worth. That's it. To go anywhere else requires the Texas Eagle. That being said, system deficiencies still make getting anywhere from OKC pointlessly roundabout–Kansas City via Fort Worth and St Louis, Omaha via Fort Worth, St Louis, and Chicago, and so on.

I'd like to see routes from OKC to Tulsa and Kansas City. True, OKC-Tulsa is only 90 minutes by car, but it would be nice to be able to visit the city without driving. Unfortunately, transit in OKC is terrible (don't know about Tulsa, but I can't see it being any different) so once you get to your destination that might make things dicey as to actually doing anything useful on your trip.

Amtrak doesn't seem to be very good at building NEW tracks. Their Northeast tracks were all essentially inherited from now defunct railroad companies.

[Pete from Boston]

Amtrak doesn't seem to be very good at building NEW tracks. All their tracks were all essentially inherited from now defunct railroad companies.

FTFY

[Brandon]

Amtrak doesn't seem to be very good at building NEW tracks. All their tracks were all essentially inherited from now defunct railroad companies.

FTFY

Amtrak only owns track in the Northeast.  All other track is on rails owned by active (not defunct) railroad companies.

[Pete from Boston]

Amtrak doesn't seem to be very good at building NEW tracks. All their tracks were all essentially inherited from now defunct railroad companies.

FTFY

Amtrak only owns track in the Northeast.  All other track is on rails owned by active (not defunct) railroad companies.

Yes, that's true, but the entire system runs on track meant to serve the needs of the 1940s and before, mostly laid by defunct railroads. (I'm assuming not too much new track was laid down between the Second World War and the birth of Amtrak.)  Amtrak doesn't build new track because there is no vision for a future beyond the placeholder company it is today. 

[US81]

I rode once, because coach was so much cheaper than renting a car. Seat was comfortable and very wide, so there was a comfortable distance between me and my "seatmate," enough that I didn't feel like he was "in my personal space." Seat reclined to several positions without breaking the next passenger's computer or knees. Each seat has an electrical outlet, individual light & a/c vent. Amtrak staff were courteous and helpful; no TSA "security theater" hassle. Travel time for 200-ish miles was equivalent to the freeway at that time due to freeway construction delays at the time; otherwise it would have been a little longer but not that much; there are sometimes delays on the rail related to freight rail on the same tracks but I did not experience it. I brought lots of stuff to pass the time but I don't think I got out a single book. The windows are wide so easy to look at scenery even from an aisle seat; there are cars designed for viewing with panoramic windows.

It had not occurred to me how much road-geeking was possible from the train but I had so much fun finding the many old alignments, old bridges and odd & unexpected road/rail crossings that I hope to take more train trips with road-geeking and scenery-watching as my primary objective.

[ET21]

Well if someone has a plane phobia, train would be better. I've been meaning to do a train ride to like Milwaukee, Grand Rapids, or even out to Denver

[thenetwork]

The problem with many of the Amtrak's longer daily routes is that for some towns, the train arrives & departs at a not-so-decent time.  The train times are in the dead of night.   You can't work a train around every city's daytime schedule.  So while Chicagoans have the the prime times for trains arriving and departing, other good-sized cities like Cleveland or Salt Lake City get stuck with red-eye schedules where there are limited services before or after you catch a train in those cities.

My town is fortunate -- the eastbound train comes through around 10 AM, while the westbound train passes through around 4 PM.

[MikeTheActuary]

I regularly ride Amtrak for trips to New York, Washington, and points in between.  The highway traffic is nasty; the trip is short enough that the train is competitive with flying, it's cheap, and I can usually get some work done while on board.

Before I got access to TSA Pre-Check, Amtrak was theoretically on my preferred mode of travel for long distance trips IF driving wasn't a viable option, and if scheduling permitted; I object to the virtual-strip-searches enough that I would only agree to fly only if driving or taking the train was prohibitively impractical.  (And if TSA Pre-Check quits working pretty well at keeping me out of the milimeter wave machines, I'll return to that stance.)

On a couple of trips to California, I had the opportunity to fly into Sacramento, visit family, and then take Amtrak into the Bay Area, and that worked out well.   I imagine that scattered around the country, there are other examples of Amtrak providing decent regional service.

In college, I used to ride the City of New Orleans overnight between Memphis and Champaign, IL, to get to/from school.   I was a poor college student, mostly didn't have a car...so it made sense.  I road coach, and boy did you meet an interesting slice of life.

I think the long-distance overnight trains are interesting as "experiences", and I don't doubt there are some people in relatively unique circumstance for whom such trains are  the most logical manner of transport... but for most other people, I would imagine that Amtrak is mostly an anachronism when it comes to mode of long-distance travel.

[Duke87]

With regards to the long distance routes.... they are a means of traveling for low-income individuals who cannot afford to buy a plane ticket, and whose car might not be in good enough shape to put a lot of miles on it. Alternatively, for the smalltown stations, they are a means of traveling for people who maybe could afford a plane ticket but don't live near a major airport.

If I lived in Minot, North Dakota, and wanted to go to see family in Minneapolis, but I didn't trust my car to reliably make the trip, Amtrak would be a way of making it happen when it might not otherwise be practical.

The problem is that because these towns are small, the number of people described is small, and thus the route can't be profitable.

[SP Cook]

Poor folk:  I would be interested to see the figures on that.  Personally, I think poor people travel inter-regionally on Greyhound.  It is less expensive than Amtrak, and has a far more extensive route map, and is designed for that market segment.  Overlay the route maps and teh bus is just far superior, and the prices are far less.  I would think that Amtrak's economic statistics skew towards middle class recreational travelers, mostly old folk.

Tracks:  Outside of a small part of the northeast, Amtrak has nothing to do with the ROW.  They are a guest of the freight railroads.  That was the deal when if was founded.  The RRs got to get out of the passenger business, and Amtrak got to use their tracks.  The freight RRs spend billions on upgrading their ROW every year and it is of world class quality.

[The Nature Boy]

Poor folk:  I would be interested to see the figures on that.  Personally, I think poor people travel inter-regionally on Greyhound.  It is less expensive than Amtrak, and has a far more extensive route map, and is designed for that market segment.  Overlay the route maps and teh bus is just far superior, and the prices are far less.  I would think that Amtrak's economic statistics skew towards middle class recreational travelers, mostly old folk.

Tracks:  Outside of a small part of the northeast, Amtrak has nothing to do with the ROW.  They are a guest of the freight railroads.  That was the deal when if was founded.  The RRs got to get out of the passenger business, and Amtrak got to use their tracks.  The freight RRs spend billions on upgrading their ROW every year and it is of world class quality.

Whenever I've taken Amtrak, I noticed that most of the "poor" people that I encountered seemed to only get on for a couple of stops and were off. The richer people were the ones who were taking it for any appreciable distance.

And Megabus is starting to under price Greyhound. I saw a bus ticket from Fayetteville, NC to Atlanta, GA for $5 last week.

[J N Winkler]

I last rode Amtrak (Southwest Chief, Newton to Garden City) in 1984.  That is the same year I also last rode a local bus in Wichita.  I have never ridden an intercity bus with an origin or destination in Wichita, although I have ridden long-distance trains, commuter trains, local buses, and intercity buses in other places.  The one time I took a sleeper service was between Lisbon and Cáceres on the Lisbon-Madrid overnight train in June 2010.

In general, I feel trains work better in western Europe and Japan than in North America because the former regions have more world cities in close proximity.  However, North America does have regions where large city pairs are geographically close together and interurban rail could work much better than it does now, not just in the Northeast and along the California coast, but also in places like the Texas Triangle (Dallas-Houston-Austin-San Antonio) for which a "Texas TGV" has been proposed, Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Tampa-Orlando, Toronto-Ottawa-Montréal, etc.

A crucial obstacle to such developments, especially in the US, is the balkanization of local transit, which impedes the provision of suitable interfaces between local networks and interurban systems.  San Francisco is a classic example:  Muni, AC Transit, BART, and Golden Gate Transit don't really interoperate with each other, and Jack London Square doesn't afford anywhere near the same ease of transfer from Caltrain to a local transit system that, say, a London terminus station offers between the railway and either the Underground or London local buses.  Even the Philadelphia to New York segment of the DC-Boston megalopolis is another example--in that area you are dealing with SEPTA, NJ Transit, NYC MTA, and umpteen local bus systems, although transfer between interurban and shorter-distance services at union stations is significantly more streamlined than in urban California.

[Pete from Boston]

Plus there is the same obstacle as there is to roads (maybe worse): new ROW is not easy to put together.

[Duke87]

Airlines are also an obstacle to high speed rail. The "Texas TGV" plan fizzled in part because it was pushed as being potentially profitable, and then Southwest Airlines threatened to undercut it and turn it into a money pit.

The same thing has basically already happened in Europe: you can take a high speed rail train for intercity travel if you want, but plane tickets are usually cheaper than train tickets for any trip that the trains can conveniently serve. The airlines want people to prefer to fly when they travel, and thus they don't want intercity trains to be too successful. And they are willing to operate some routes at a loss in order to achieve this goal.


So, if you want a high speed rail line to really be successful, you also need a regulatory leash on the airline industry that prevents them from skewing their pricing against it.

[hbelkins]

So, if you want a high speed rail line to really be successful, you also need a regulatory leash on the airline industry that prevents them from skewing their pricing against it.

If the consumer benefits in the long run (from cheaper travel from Point A to Point B) then leave well enough alone.

[PurdueBill]

I was looking up different ways to get to different places by comparing airlines, and then when I decided to look up Amtrak as an option I was shocked. For example, Amtrak from Lafayette to Seattle costs $319 and takes two days. While by air from Indy to Seattle costs $242 and takes one day. So why would anyone take the train when it is cheaper and faster to go by air?

Once upon a time, Amtrak ran through the streets of downtown Lafayette and United Express and Northwest Airlink served the Purdue Airport (that time being ca. 1995), and the IND airport was a little shorter trip from Lafayette than it is now, out I-70 a couple miles from 465.  How times have changed.   

I've used the Northeast Corridor Amtrak for trips like Boston-Wilmington Del. for which it made a lot of sense, but my experience pricing trips from Lafayette on Amtrak to desired destinations never worked out.  Either uneconomical or took way too long.  For the right destinations, it would have been OK but not for where I was trying to go.

[KEVIN_224]

I live in New Britain, CT, about 9 miles southwest of Hartford. We get limited service with Greyhound and Peter Pan innercity busses. I'm not sure how this will change once the New Britain to Hartford Busway opens next year. That roadway won't be used by these busses. The downtown New Britain terminus will be about 2 blocks northeast of where Greyhound and Peter Pan stop now. I just wish they could move G/PP into the new Busway lot instead. Oh well!

Amtrak serves New Britain...sort of. The closest station is in the Kensington section of Berlin. We get service from the shuttle trains between New Haven and Springfield, MA. They're supposed to upgrade and dual track this stretch soon. Work with fiber optic cables, etc. was installed on the bridge in Berlin over Farmington Avenue (CT Route 372) this past spring.

Bradley International Airport (BDL) is in Windsor Locks, CT, roughly 20 miles to my north. When I made flights in 2009 and 2010, I took the CT Transit #41 bus [Might have been "P" back then] to Central Row in downtown Hartford, then walked half a block north to Main and Asylum Streets to catch the connecting Bradley Flyer bus. The problem with this set-up is obvious: The #41 bus does not run on Sundays. In those cases, I would've had to deal with Union Station (Amtrak/Greyhound/Peter Pan) several blocks to the west on Asylum Street. The new Busway wouldn't exactly fix the problem, since it's Hartford terminus would also be Union Station.

As for Amtrak, the farthest I've ever been in one direction is Washington DC's Union Station (yet only to Springfield, MA heading northbound). The farthest I've been with flight one way (by mileage) would be Tampa in 2009. I've only flown to the Central Time Zone twice (Chicago and Nashville).

[Duke87]

So, if you want a high speed rail line to really be successful, you also need a regulatory leash on the airline industry that prevents them from skewing their pricing against it.

If the consumer benefits in the long run (from cheaper travel from Point A to Point B) then leave well enough alone.

The consumer doesn't benefit when threats from an airline (read: lobbying) prevent infrastructure from being built.

And if said infrastructure is built anyway, the consumer doesn't really benefit from lower airline ticket prices since the resulting lack of patronage on the rail line would cause more and more of that consumer's tax dollars to have to be pumped into subsidizing it.


The point is that you have an industry which is quite comfy with having a monopoly on speedy intercity travel, and they are going to do everything they can to obstruct the possibility of an alternative coming into existence that would give them more competition. And might force them to treat their customers better if they want to stay in business. Indeed, the need to compete with high speed rail probably helps explain why Asian and European carriers offer a better customer experience than North American carriers do.

[Dr Frankenstein]

Re: TSA Security Theatre: I have actually been subjected to it at the Albany-Rensselaer station. They had actually set up a temporary checkpoint and were going through passengers' luggage (thankfully, mine was already on the train; I had only gotten off to get a snack).

[DandyDan]

I only knew 3 people who ever took Amtrak:
1) When I still lived in Illinois, my old Minnesota friend took Amtrak down for the weekend, essentially just to say he took the train once.
2) When my uncle Jerry was still alive, he would take Amtrak from suburban Chicago to here in Omaha (and he would take it to my aunt's house in Colorado as well).  I couldn't see him ever flying or driving that trip.  Flying would cost too much and driving would be too much work.
3) One of my coworkers took the train from Omaha to Burlington, Iowa for some family event.  Of course, that doesn't work if the train between Omaha and Chicago doesn't go through Burlington.

Of course, to ever take Amtrak, you have to have the route align itself with your route perfectly.  Frankly, I'd rather fly.

[cjk374]

As a senior in high school in November, 1991, I went to Washington, DC to participate in the National Young Leaders Conference in Chevy Chase, MD.  I had to catch Amtrak's Crescent in Meridian, MS.  When I got to Washington Union Sta., I had to call the organizers of the conference to see who was gonna come pick me up.  Come to find out, they didn't have any plans made to pick up participants from the train station....they didn't figure anyone would arrive by train.  In fact, out of 360 participants, I WAS the only person who came in on the train.  Due to the train's schedule, I was the 1st person to show up, and I was the very last to leave.

About 5 years later, one of my classmates youngest brothers was wanting to go to the same program, and asked me to come talk to him about my experiences at the conference.  I read through his literature and the very 1st thing that I noticed was that they now had accommodations to pick students up from WSU.

It can be cool to be a trendsetter.   

[triplemultiplex]

The Hiawatha Line is the only reason I ever visited Chicago while living in Milwaukee.  No construction, no finding parking, no maniacs to deal with on the Tri-State.  Plus you can BYOB.  My only criticism is that Union Station is a few blocks from the nearest EL stop and one time I got stuck taking that walk in the rain.

[SSOWorld]

The Hiawatha Line is the only reason I ever visited Chicago while living in Milwaukee.  No construction, no finding parking, no maniacs to deal with on the Tri-State.  Plus you can BYOB.  My only criticism is that Union Station is a few blocks from the nearest EL stop and one time I got stuck taking that walk in the rain.

ALL of the commuter rail stations are blocks away from L stations in Chicago.  Either wait for a bus or hot-foot it to get to them.  Amazingly Los Angeles has a subway stop at Union Station but Chicago? nope.  Grab your umbrella or just suck it up.