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New high-speed trains for Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor

By Channtal Fleischfresser | December 14, 2012, 3:05 AM PST

Chinese high-speed trains can move at an average speed of 217 miles per hour. The fastest American train today - Amtrak’s Acela Express - averages only 86 miles per hour.

But Amtrak, which has struggled to stay out of the red in recent years, has plans to replace its 20 Acela Express trains with new, high-speed models.

“Moving directly to new high-speed train sets is the best option to create more seating capacity, permit higher speeds, and maximize customer comfort all while improving equipment reliability and reducing operating costs,” Amtrak CEO Joe Boardman said in a statement.

The company’s existing fleet has been in operation since between 1999 and 2000. The new trains would begin service within five to seven years.

All this is part of Amtrak’s ambitious plan to improve its high-speed rail service over the next 30 years. The plan is estimated to cost as much as $117 billion, making it the country’s most expensive engineering project since the Interstate Highway project.

While simply replacing the trains themselves won’t entirely revolutionize the system - a complete overhaul would involve replacing tracks, tunnels, and stations, as well as trains - the new trains could run from New York City to Washington, D.C. in 96 minutes, according to CNN.

And with rail ridership on the rise - a record 31.2 million people took the train around the country in the year to September 30, and 11.4 million of those were along the Northeast Corridor - Amtrak’s move could be a step towards bringing American rail travel into the 21st century.

Photo: Flickr/John Mueller

via [CNN]

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About Channtal Fleischfresser

Channtal Fleischfresser is a contributing editor for SmartPlanet.

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Does little for the normal Commuter

As with airlines, this does little to help the bulk of normal commuters that are no-where near Airport or High Speed Rail Termini - High Speed rail needs to have few stops to keep speed up.

What would help normal commuting and traffic congestion would be a move to get freight out of interstate trucks and onto rail away from interfering with passenger services - a dedicated low-speed rail-freight network with regional hubs and local container grab loaders to pull straight off the train and onto a Truck.

However low speed rail freight is boring and is not a sexy project, so no-one is interested in just making things 'just work better'.

Edited by neil.postlethwaite@...

Updated - 14th Dec

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In

Rail maintenance.

I am not sure about system wide, but I know track repairs in the Northeast have been delayed several times because of Amtrak/MBTA/state refusing to pay the agreed upon lease payments required to use private track. They are often months behind in track lease payments.

You see the federal government inherited thousands of miles of track when Amtrak was created. For some reason, only the bureaucrats at the time can explain it, the federal government decided to rip up thousands of miles of track in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In my home town alone they tore up miles of track. 4 setts of rails went to 2 sets of rails. The 40 plus commuter trains per day to Boston must now share space and rail time with freight trains. The tracks are seeing much more use than they were designed to handle.

Somehow the bean counters in DC and on Beacon Hill in Boston decided it was more cost effective to lease space on freight lines instead of maintaining their own track. When they are short on cash they neglect track lease payments.

That short sightedness is why the current NY to Chicago Amtrak train takes almost twice as long as the 1930s era steam engines that used to run on dedicated express rails. Similar slowdowns are found on every major run. Boston to Portland ME, Boston to NYC, NYC to DC, NYC to Chicago, even Chicago to Denver. Regularly failing to pay track lease payments leads to poorly maintained track. While adequate for freight trains running at 20 mph, it is not good enough for commuter rail running at 40+ mph.

Overall the decision to become dependent on private freight rails has dramatically hurt rail service from a reliability position. The commuter trains cannot run on a fixed schedule because of poor track or conflicts with freight trains.

When you cannot provide reliable service, customers will stay away unless forced to by other situations. As we have seen.

Edited by Hates Idiots

Updated - 21st Dec

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Does little for the normal Commuter

Posted by neil.postlethwaite@...

Updated - 14th Dec

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Understatement of the year.

"Amtrak, which has struggled to stay out of the red in recent years, "

Lets be honest on this matter for the sake of the taxpayers out there.

Amtrak has been in the red since day 1.

Amtrak has never made a profit or just broken even.

Amtrak has been a black hole for taxpayers money for decades. With increasing ridership its operating loss was still $500,000 million in fiscal year 2011. Up from $400 million in 2010 and projected to be over $600 million in 2012. The situation is getting worse, not better.

http://news.consumerreports.org/money/2011/06/despite-growing-ridership-amtrak-says-revenue-is-down.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704281504576329641360701866.html

After this 2008/2009 report below came out it was discovered some accounting tricks made the billion dollar Acella look like it was making $41 a passenger while the conventional Northeast Regional looked like it lost $5 per passenger. In most cases they were writting off ALL operations costs to the Northeast Regional when in fact the costs supported both trains.

When the cost are accuratly divided between the trains the reality is almost the opposite. With the heavily used Northeast Regional making the Northeast Corridor profitable.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/27/amtrak-loss-comes-to-32-p_n_335020.html

Posted by Hates Idiots

Updated - 14th Dec

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It's hard to get excited about a government operation...

...that still manages to lose money selling soda and sandwiches in an monopoly environment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/03/us/politics/amtrak-lost-834-million-on-food-in-last-decade-audit-finds.html?_r=2&

If they can't master even the simplest things, why would any sane individual expect that they can efficiently run the larger things?

Like with most government operations, what Amtrak needs more than new equipment is a total culture flush. They need to replace people from the top down with those who understand that people will not get excited about their operation until they run it cleanly and efficiently. As it is now, they operate exactly like you'd expect and operation to be run when it's mostly funded by OPM (other people's money) and there is little threat of that changing.

Posted by JohnMcGrew@...

Updated - 14th Dec

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NYT Article

The article link you posted states that the loss is due mostly to waste and employee theft. But, having actually read the article, it seems to me that the article was written to highlight the information given at a congressional hearing where republicans were trying to show inefficiencies in Amtrak food service in order to move the food service into private corporate hands instead of having government oversight. Though some in the Federal Government are not very trustworthy, I'll trust the Federal Government any day over profit mongering corporations. The first year they didn't make a profit, they'd shut the whole thing down. Meanwhile, lets talk about the billions of dollars every year we give to oil corporations, who, by the way, are the most profitable in the world and yet they get billions from taxpayers. It's way past time we take some of those subsidies back and put them into something useful like maintaining the national transportation infrastructure. I'd rather see the money going into something like Amtrak instead of pissing it away to oil corporations.

Posted by victortweed

Updated - 14th Dec

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Clearly, you miss the point. Wait, you didn't miss it...

...it just didn't matter to you because you see this reality as a threat to your ideology. Why else would you deflect away from a clearly mismanaged government agency to instead bring up the overused talking points on America's supposedly most hated industry, oil?

(It's also ironic that Amtrak benefits form oil subsidies as well. After all, most of its trains operate on diesel. Higher oil prices won't do anything to help Amtrak's bottom line. If you even care, I don't think any industry should be subsidies over another. Not oil. Not nuclear. Not solar...)

But back to the real point that you clearly don't want to face: If Amtrak is so poorly managed that its employees are robbing it blind, why would any rational person expect that they can manage the bigger problems?

Can you answer that? Or do you want to talk more about oil on a thread about Amtrak?

Posted by JohnMcGrew@...

Updated - 14th Dec

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The truth is interesting. If you care.

"Despite public perception, the industry has a relatively low profit margin and pays a much larger share of its revenues in taxes than most other industries. "

http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2011/05/26/fact_and_fiction_in_anti-oil-industry_demagoguery_99042.html

What concerns me is that GE made billions of profits in 2011 in the US and paid $0.00 US income taxes because of wind and solar tax credit subsidies. At least the oil companies paid taxes.

Oddly you never hear that being mentioned. You do not care. Just as you do not care that Amtrak has been bleeding taxpayer dollars for decades.

I can tell you one huge reason why Amtrak is not profitable. The US Post Office.

When the US Post Office used mostly trains to move mail between cities (prior to 1965), and not the trucks they migrated to in the 1960s and 1970s or the planes they started using in the 1990s, the profits from that reliable, every day cargo service, subsidized passenger service on trains.

That was a fact of train service almost from year 1 of large scale train use in the US.

Did you ever notice the sudden collapse of private train service prior to the creation of Amtrak mirrors the rise of intra city truck use by the USPS? Or that the increased truck use by the USPS coincided with the expansion of the federal highway system. Not an accidental cause an effect, but unintended in their rush to justify more highways. USPS traffic was being specificly mentioned in proposals for new highways.

If Amtrak could sign a contract with the USPS or FedEx or UPS to handle long haul shipping you would see their profits change within months of the change. It would make passenger train service profitable again and could pull millions of long haul trucks a year off the highways of the US. The timing of such a change is perfect with the trucking industry predicting a 240,000 driver shortage by 2022.

http://www.sbwire.com/press-releases/need-for-truck-drivers-rising-in-united-states-reports-advanced-heavy-vehicles-186795.htm

The tough part of this idea is that Amtrak, as a company/government agency, is too incompetent to run on the timely schedule the shippers require.

To fix that problem is another issue entirely.

Posted by Hates Idiots

Updated - 14th Dec

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Amtrack (US Postal Service....)

Does Amtrack really look forward to actual support from the neocon US government? Remeber the Fed is going Postal, as in, cutting off financial support and regulating important functions like rail and mail out of existance.
Let's go privitization!!!!
The future? Note the horibble upkeep of rail tracks and bridges in the US by private forprofit companies. The Feds have been regulated (neocon congress) out of inspecting bridges - so typical of the profit hungry.

Posted by affordablecomputerguy@...

14th Dec

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Rail maintenance.

Posted by Hates Idiots

Updated - 21st Dec

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