Amtrak

As of this year, 2011, Amtrak is 40 years old.
It began operation May 1, 1971 at 12:01 a.m., taking over most of the railroads’ passenger-train operations — those that joined.
Some railroads didn’t, for example Southern and Denver & Rio Grande Western, which continued to operate passenger-trains on their own.
If anything, I would say a common misconception has arisen that railroading is passenger-trains.
Especially in the media. Railroading is always depicted as passenger-trains, once the main mode of passenger transport. Rarely do you see freight-trains, where all the action is.
Only when freight-trains smash up, causing massive conflagrations and toxic releases.
Another misconception is that railroads, like highways, are publicly owned, as is Amtrak.
They aren’t. They’re private for-profit enterprises, regulated by the public sector, but private. Amtrak is a public entity operating mostly on the private railroads. It only owns a couple railroads, e.g. the Northeast Corridor.
Public highways aren’t privately owned. Railroads are; they have stockholders.
(Highways weren’t always publicly owned. Go back far enough, and some highways were privately owned; private toll roads to speed wagon commerce. The paving might be wooden planks.
When I was a child, the rickety wooden bridges to south Jersey seashore points were privately owned. They were so rickety they prompted public investment, ownership and maintenance.
Public ownership put private highways out of business.)
The Summer 2011 issue of my Classic Trains Magazine dedicates almost its entire issue to Amtrak’s 40th anniversary.

Don Phillips.

Of interest to me is a giant article by Don Phillips on Amtrak’s gestation.
It has all the gory details; the intrigue, the compromises, the politics involved.
Phillips is a columnist for Trains Magazine, and is also the transportation-reporter for the Washington Post.
I’ve subscribed to Classic Trains for some time.
It’s an offshoot of Trains Magazine.
I’ve subscribed to Trains for eons, since college, the ‘60s.
I’m a railfan, and have been since age-2. I’m currently age-67.
Classic Trains treats primarily railroading from the classic era, about 1920 through the late ‘70s, when I was coming of age.
I’m late ‘40s on.
Massive changes were taking place in railroading at that time, primarily the replacement of steam locomotion with diesel.
That’s about mid-‘30s on.
I was lucky enough to witness steam locomotion.
It’s what made a railfan out of me.
I was scared to death of thunderstorms, but could stand right next to a gigantic throbbing, panting steam locomotive.
Diesels were attractive, just not as much.
The chuffing of a steam locomotive told you the rate at which it was working.
Exhaust pulses increased with speed.
Go fast enough, and it becomes a roar.
Diesels too had massive size.
And then there was the incredible efficiency of railroading.
That the freightcars (“trailers”) are following a fixed guideway, the railroad.
That allows the locomotive (“truck,” “tractor”) to tow 100 freightcars or more. A highway is not a fixed guideway.
—A highway truck can tow at most two trailers; usually it’s only one.
And a railroad’s right-of-way is puny compared to a highway, perhaps 20-50 feet wide for single track (maybe 60-100 for double), as opposed to as much as 300 feet or more for a four-lane expressway. A football-field is 300 feet long.
About the only restriction on railroading is gradient. Exceed one percent (one foot up per 100 feet forward), and you’re asking for trouble.
Even at one percent ya may need helper-locomotives to keep a heavy train climbing.
And braking — preventing runaways — is also challenging.
Four percent is nearly impossible. About the steepest ya see is 2.5 percent.
Highway grades often exceed six percent.
Gobs of horsepower can climb a six percent grade with a heavy load.
The tire-patch on pavement can maintain adhesion on a steep grade.
Railroading is steel wheel on steel railhead. Little rolling resistance, but a grade can break adhesion. —That contact-patch is tiny.
Make the grade steep enough, and the load heavy enough, and the train stalls as the driving-wheels slip.
Locomotives apply sand between the drivers and the railhead to maintain adhesion. There also is computer slip-control. A locomotive can pull harder if its drivers slip slightly.
The idea of nationalizing railroad passenger service was first broached by Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island in 1962 in his famous “Megalopolis” speech, the idea that a giant megalopolis of urbanization was arising on the east coast between Washington D.C. and Boston.
And that it would need railroad passenger service.
(Perhaps it should be noted rail passenger service was at first privately offered. Amtrak has been around so long, people might think rail passenger service was always public.)
Infrastructure was already in place, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s New York-to-Washington D.C. electrified line, and New Haven’s line from Boston to New York, which was partly electrified (New Haven to New York City).
And there had already been extensive government involvement.
It could be said the Pennsylvania Railroad’s electrification into Washington D.C. was essentially a New Deal project.
The government was later heavily involved in the Metroliner project, self-propelled cars that could boom-and-zoom New York to Washington over the Pennsylvania Railroad’s electrified line.
Railroad passenger-service was dragging railroads down.
People weren’t using railroad passenger-service, so it cost way more to operate than any revenue it generated.
Other factors were dragging down railroading at that time, primarily -1) it was so heavily regulated. Railroading couldn’t initiate a rate-change without government oversight. They couldn’t price service to meet the market, or price for heavy users.
This was a reflection the technology of railroading was revolutionary when first promulgated. It was much faster than horse-and-wagon; plus they could run all year, unlike canals which froze in winter.
Railroads were often the only means of shipping product to faraway markets, so they could charge a fortune.
And -2) since railroads were private enterprise, they could be heavily taxed.
Railroads have lots of land right-of-way, so are heavily taxed.
Beyond that competing modes of transport were being subsidized by the government.
Highways were public, and the government built the Interstate Highway System, subsidizing trucking.
Terminals for airplane transit were usually built by government entities.
A railroad built its own terminals.
Railroad stations were usually built privately, although a Union-Station might be built with participation of the railroads using it. (A union-station was proposed for New York City, but never built. To do so meant crossing the Hudson River, always a barrier.)
An airport was usually a government effort to attract airlines. After that the airport charged usage fees.
But it wasn’t the airlines building that terminal.
Later on David P. Morgan, the editor of Trains Magazine at that time, dedicated an entire issue to “Who shot the passenger-train.”
It was a watershed article. His premise was the passenger-train had not atrophied from disuse, it had been It shot dead.
Well, HEX-KYOOZE me, but to me this is poppycock! Much as I like David P. Morgan — he was the reason I subscribed to Trains — this was romanticism, revering the ideal of passenger-train travel.
I’ve ridden passenger-trains myself, and -A) they can’t compete with the speed of a jet over long distances, and -B) they’re not point-to-point, like an automobile.
With a train, like an airplane, someone has to pick you up, or you rent a car at the terminal.
Plus a jet can get me to Florida in about three hours. A train takes almost all day (plus all night).
Yet passenger-service, and its losing expense, was dragging railroading toward nationalization.
What really precipitated the nationalization of railroad passenger-service was the collapse of Penn-Central Railroad, the largest corporate bankruptcy at that time.
No one seemed aware of what sad shape the two major east-coast railroads were in, New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad.
The merger of Pennsy with Central was more-or-less forced. Other railroads across the nation were merging to rationalize, yet Pennsy and Central had nowhere else to turn.
Previous attempts to do better mergers, e.g. New York Central with Chesapeake & Ohio, and Pennsy with Norfolk & Western, had been stymied.
Even Penn-Central failed. Merger didn’t really occur. Penn-Central divided into two camps, the red-team (Pennsy) and the green-team (Central), forever at war with each other.
Penn-Central was hemorrhaging money, first $250,000 per day, then $500,000, then a million dollars per day come 1970.
Finally Wall Street caught on, Penn-Central stock tanked, its officers were fired, and bankruptcy-papers were filed June 21, 1970, just 873 days after Penn-Central was formed.
Amtrak legislation passed largely because there was fear other railroads would follow Penn-Central, and that passenger-service was the reason railroads were hurting.
And it was called “Railpax” at first; “Amtrak” came later — American travel over tracks.
Meanwhile Metroliner service had done quite well, despite Pennsy hurting.
The success of Metroliner service was a plus for Amtrak, and that’s despite all the things wrong with it; train-failures, etc.
Amtrak has come quite a ways since 1971.
No longer is “the pointless arrow,” pictured above, its logo.
It’s been replaced by the one pictured at left.
And when it began, Amtrak found itself using equipment from participating railroads.
Soon Amtrak purchased its own equipment, e.g. first the EMD F40PH pictured below, and now the GE P42.

An Electromotive Division F40PH is on the point.

Photo by Craig Zeni©.

General Electric P42.

Amtrak also purchased its own passenger-cars, replacing worn out post-war equipment inherited from its participating railroads.
They purchased Amfleet cars for Northeast Corridor service, and double-deckers for elsewhere. —Double-deckers are too high for use in tunnels on the Northeast Corridor.
I’ve ridden a few Amtrakers myself, the first so far back it was in so-called “Heritage Equipment,” the cars from participating railroads when Amtrak first began.
My first was the “Silver Meteor” to De Land, FL, to visit my wife’s parents.
It was terrible. We got on the Meteor in Wilmington, DE, on the electrified Northeast Corridor.
Dinner in the diner was served.
Apparently a system within the engine supplied electric power to a trainline, but the plug fell apart.
Utter darkness!
How ya supposed to eat when ya can’t even see the table?
All the way south to Baltimore, where the plug was replugged, but it promptly fell apart again just south of Baltimore.
I resolved next time I rode Amtrak I’d bring a flashlight.
All the way to Washington DC without electricity.
Engine-change in Washington, to diesels because the railroad is no longer electrified.
We had reserved a sleeping-room, twin bunks with cramped bathroom facilities.
But our bunks were across the width of the car, not lengthwise.
And the track was rough (or perhaps it was our car, being old).
I couldn’t sleep at all.
Every switch and grade-crossing heaved me into the ceiling.
I was afraid we’d derail.
Our second Amtrak trip was the Lake Shore Limited to visit my brother-in-Boston.
The Lake Shore starts in Chicago, and splits outside Albany. One section goes to New York City, the other section to Boston.
We got on the Lake Shore in Rochester around 6:15 a.m., and it was pleasant.
Dark and dank, but much more roomy than an airliner.
(We flew back from Boston once.)
We had coach seats, and also were in Heritage-Equipment.
Although some of our cars were Amfleet.
Again the electricity tanked, so approaching Boston through tunnels was utter darkness.
We returned via New York City.
The Northeast Corridor was still not electrified to Boston at that time, as it is now.
Diesel to New Haven, and then electric engines, probably AEM-7.
Then to the old Penn Station — long ago torn down, but the tracks are still there, buried under a new Madison Square Garden.
At that time, railroad service across New York state was out of Grand Central Terminal — no connector yet. —Now there is a connector from Penn Station to the old New York Central line up along the Hudson.
Our intent was to take New York Central’s storied Water-Level Route up along the Hudson River, and then west from Albany.
First we’d have to get from Penn Station up to Grand Central.
Amtrak had bus-service to make the jump, but we coulda walked faster.
The traffic was so bad, I doubt the bus went any faster than three mph.
Our train was Amtrak’s famous Turbo-Train, the “Niagara Rainbow” to Toronto.
The Turbo-Train is a dedicated trainset of perhaps three-or-four cars, with a turbine-powered locomotive at each end.
It’s essentially a French design, although restyled for Amtrak’s use.
The side-windows were lexan plastic, and so dirty and scratched and fogged-over they were useless.
It also was getting dark.
Any scenery up along the Hudson could not be seen.
West of Albany was pitch dark, and our train was doing track-speed, 79 mph.
About all we could see was the red flashing grade-crossing lights.

Photo by BobbaLew.

Auto-Train.

A few years ago we rode Amtrak’s Auto-Train, from near Washington DC to middle Florida.
Auto-Train was originally private, the idea being to take along your car on a train-trip to Florida.
Your car went in an auto-carrier on the same train you rode.
Driving from Rochester to Washington DC took all day. We stayed overnight in a motel and took Auto-Train the next day.
The original private effort failed. By now Auto-Train was Amtrak.
Amtrak’s Auto-Train had originally been Heritage-Equipment, but by the time we rode it it was the new double-deckers. Since the train didn’t go to New York City, they could use double-deckers.
We’d reserved a tiny sleeping-space, what used to be called “SlumberCoach” before Amtrak. —I had chosen this because the bunks were lengthwise, instead of across the car.
The compartment was cramped; you couldn’t stand.
Bathrooms were common and separate, and one deck down. The compartments were on the upper deck.
I’d brought a flashlight, but never needed it.
Dinner was in a dining-car.
We hit a bump, I choked on coffee, and sprayed it all over the complete strangers with whom we sat.
I was so embarrassed we split.
Dinner had been one of three entrée choices. It wasn’t like a restaurant.
The coffee incident was after eating.
Sleeping wasn’t bad. Perhaps the track was smoother, or the new double-deckers rode better.
Our buses were like that. They rode fine until the first chassis overhaul. Then they were lumber-wagons.
Auto-Train was full going down, and empty going up. It was Fall.
Amtrak tried to get us to switch to a full compartment going back up, but I deferred. (I wasn’t giving up that lengthwise bunk.)
Auto-Train was much more pleasant than the Silver Meteor, but it was the newer cars on perhaps better track.
Plus when you arrived, you had your car.
By then my wife’s father was gone. Her mother was still living in their house.
What I remember most was the grayness of her hair when she came to meet us. —Although we had our van.
The greatest sin in the perpetration of Amtrak was that it be “for profit.”
This was to placate the tub-thumping Conservatives always hot to foment Armageddon as long as it doesn’t effect their bloated balance-sheets.
It’s been that way for years.
Obama institutes measures to stave off a Depression greater than the Great Depression, and the Conservatives go ballistic.
They wanted a Depression; “Armageddon, let God decide, as long as it doesn’t effect my balance-sheet.”
In which case the tub-thumpers demand a TARP bailout.
“Save Wall Street; we gotta save our bloated paychecks.
Ice-flow for everyone else — stoke the ovens!”
Amtrak passed — partly to stave off the bankruptcy of all northeast railroading, which seemed to happen anyway.
But at least the railroads were no longer saddled with passenger-service, which was costing them a fortune.
And now it’s beginning to look like private investment wants into railroad passenger-service. —Even to the extent of building a new Northeast Corridor better than the currently contorted turkey.
What matters most about Amtrak, is that the public WANTS railroad passenger-service.
They may not choose it, but they want it.

• RE: “Our buses were like that.......” —For 16&1/2 years (1977-1993) I drove transit bus for Regional Transit Service (RTS) in Rochester, NY, a public employer, the transit-bus operator in Rochester and its environs. My stroke October 26, 1993 ended that.