Amtrak Train Runs Out Of Fuel, Perhaps a Wake-Up Call For America?
by Andrew Posner, Rhode Island, USA on 12. 2.07
Despite the green merits and stress-free nature of train travel relative to flying or driving, Americans have been slow to abandon their “homes on wheels,” and seem content to tolerate an increasingly unpleasant air travel experience. Not that we should have any illusions about the magnificence of Amtrak’s underfunded service, which is slow, rickety and prone to delays compared to trains in Europe or Japan. Still, Amtrak has its fans, and this writer is certainly of the opinion that increased ridership would mean better cities, cleaner air and, if the laws of economics hold true, increased funding. Supporters of this scenario would agree that the best way to increase ridership isn’t for a train to run out of fuel eight miles from a station, which is precisely what happened last week to a Pacific Surfliner train going from San Diego to Santa Barbara.
What’s worse, passengers had to spend two hours on the train before they were finally told that they could get off, provided that someone could pick them up! The rest of the passengers were forced to wait for a freight train that would push the Surfliner train to a point where it could be re-fueled.
Then, five days after this incident, 100 people were injured, 5 of them seriously, in a crash in Chicago between an Amtrak train and a freight train. Fortunately, the train was only traveling at 15 to 20 m.p.h., or else the results would most certainly have been catastrophic.
We all know that America is in desperate need of an efficient, safe and reliable transportation system. Clearly, Amtrak needs to play an important role in providing mobility both within and between cities. With imagination and funding, we can achieve that goal. These incidents shouldn’t turn us off to train travel (after all, 40,000 people in the U.S. die every year from car crashes alone, and flights are often delayed or canceled altogether). Rather, we should be outraged that we haven’t prioritized our rail system and made it into one of the world’s best. In many ways, trains are symbols of the Industrial Revolution. What we need now is to push for a system of trains in the U.S. that can become symbols of a resurgent America, one that takes the lead in green cities, technologies and jobs, and becomes part of the solution to, rather than the cause of, global climate change.
Via ::LA Times, ::Blogs.Courant.Com
See Also: ::Sustainable and Sound Infrastructure Now, ::Railroads for Sustainability, What Can We Do?, ::Trains Are Fun? Sexy, Even? and ::How to Green Your Public Transportation
Note that electric trains do not have this problem.
Fund the California High Speed Rail Initiative.
In the Northeast, we have highly reliable, safe, FAST, and clean trains.
Anyone who has ever traveled by Amtrak knows the problem. They are incompetent!
The worst run train line in Europe would run them out of business if they were in a competitive market.
I totally agree with JC. We use tax dollars to give billions of dollars a year to amtrak. Imagine if we slashed funding and let competion reign. Isn't that what america's about? You don't even need to ride amtrak to know how incompetent they are, just use their website to book travel.
I am having a little problem here... how precisely do you run out of Diesel on a train? The only answer to that is total incompetence of management and drivers. Even a train must have a fuel gauge, or doesn't it...
HELP!!!
Veshengro
I'd love to travel more often by train. I took an Amtrak from Sacramento to Baltimore about four years ago and had a pretty decent time. No unscheduled stops, no fuel shortages, and no need to buy an expensive bed ticket, because many of the passenger cars were empty going across the great plains.
But now I live in Montana. There are no passenger trails going through Billings, despite the fact that Billings was originally designed as a major passenger stop on the Northern Pacific. I'd have to go to the Canadian border or down to Denver to hitch a ride. Instead, we have an airport in town, and that's why I pick it.
I ride the St. Louis - Chicago route about once a month and I have rarely had any problem with them. The train is always on time and the staff are friendly. The trains could be faster, but that is more of a problem with the Union Pacific rails then Amtrak itself. We need a nationwide high speed rail initiative.
Quoting JC- "Anyone who has ever traveled by Amtrak knows the problem. They are incompetent!"
As someone who rides the NEC about once a month, and goes long-distance a few times a year, I completely disagree with you. The majority of their problems come from freight railroad interference and inability to honor their legal and contractual obligations.
In places that Amtrak owns the right-of-way, the on time proformance is much, much higher than those where they are owned by CXS, UP, NS, etc...
Mind you, running out of fuel is pathetic. But, considering that you can wait on the tarmac for 10 hours on an airplane, its not out of line with the rest of the transportation industry.
Amtrak is the most wasteful, overfunded disaster in the history of public works projects in this nation's history. the sooner it dies, the better.
'Amtrak is the most wasteful, overfunded disaster in the history of public works projects in this nation's history. the sooner it dies, the better.'
that is a stupid and untrue thing to say
what about cars?
how is amtrak wasteful?
do you know anything about it?
I'd love to take Amtrak from Blacksburg, VA to Baltimore, MD regularly to see my girlfriend. But, the closest Amtrak station is about 90 minutes away on the Interstate, and the train leaves at 10:00am on Friday and arrives at 10:00pm. But, since I have a full-time job, I must leave after 5:00pm and, if I drive, I'm still there by 11:00pm.
So, I drive. Bummer.
We plan do to arrange our lives so that this commute won't be necessary, but it may be a year or so before grad schools, jobs, and the real-estate market all line up to make this possible... A train system with nearby stations and a usable schedule would make this more efficient in every sense, since I could work or sleep on the train -- but, alas, that's not an option.
I agree with Kip. Cars are by far more wastful than trains, per person. If more people used trains there would be more funding. Then there would be better service and faster trains. I think if more people used trains more people would meet other interesting people, something not possible with auto travel as well.
Hey Anonymous #1 -
I live in the Northeast. I ride the NJ Transit on the NEC 5 days a week. I can tell you from experience, that electric trains DO run out of fuel - they lose "power", however that happens.
That said - Its still a million times better than driving!
By personal experience, AmTrak has a horrible on-time rating on its long routes that involve giving way to the freight companies. AmTrak is in a no-win situation.
Long distance passenger rail is in the shape it's in in this country precisely as a result of the "let the private sector do it" mentality. Free marketeers in Congress routinely do all they can to keep AmTrak from being a viable alternative to their donors in the highly subsidized airline industry.
On a fairly recent trip to Chicago, I observed abandoned rights-of-way all along the trip. One of the smartest things we could do would be to obtain those rights-of-way by eminent domain and build a modernized national passenger rail system.
Run on either electricity or biodiesel, the trips would be delightful, prompt and genial. The staff aboard the trains are already doing a tolerable job under intilerable conditions.
Nationwide, accessible, viable long-distance passenger rail isn't a reality only because we haven't demanded it.
Are there any passenger trains like Amtrak or any company that goes by Houston?
I'm not even sure if we have a passenger train station here. So does anyone know?
And I'm not talking about the MetroRail here.
"Amtrak is the most wasteful, overfunded disaster in the history of public works projects in this nation's history. the sooner it dies, the better."
Peter
In February of 2005, the Bush Administration proposed cutting Amtrak's national budget investment (called a "subsidy" by the Administration) from $1.2 billion to $0.9 billion. For comparison, when the 1.5 mile Cypress Viaduct of Interstate 880, an elevated section of the freeway, collapsed in the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, it was rebuilt for $1.2 billion. That's right, 1.5 miles of freeway got as much money as the entire passenger rail system of the richest country in the world.
From 'Ecocities' by Richard Register
So who's overfunded again?
Writing as a foreigner (I'm Swedish) I would be as bold as to say that the problem with trains in the US is not Amtrak, but General Motors, Ford, Goodyear, the oil companies, the motel chains, the fast food industry, and every American business that makes a living and a profit from individual use of the internal combustion engine, i.e. cars in every shape or form.
The USA we know was built on individual use of the gasoline engine, and it worked because the US for a long time has had the strongest economy in the world and also the most efficient distribution of wealth, thus allowing a large middle class that has been the cornerstone of the world's largest consumption society.
This could have gone on forever, but for the shortage of the stuff that made it all possible; cheap oil. Now that oil is no longer abundant, or cheap, America's economy could grind to a stop since everything, trains included, run on petroleum. And such a grinding halt would affect the entire world economy.
I'm not saying that Swedes are in any way smarter, but since we have always been poorer than the US, we have had to use transports and travel that were to a large extent collective rather than individual, because this was more efficient, using electricity rather than fossil fuels because electrical power was cheap while oil was expensive. We have also had governments that for a hundred years have spent tax money to build infrastructures that would never have been profitable for private business. As a lucky result, we are now in better shape to face the end of the fossil fuel era.
Luckily for America, the learning curve should be rather short, since knowledge in using less fossil fuel is readily available. One hard part would be convincing the American people that the automotive way of life they have grown accustomed to during the past 80 years cannot be sustained. Another will be building a new infrastructure based on steel wheels and electrical power rather than rubber tyres and fossil fuel.
Zack
I have to agree a bit with Kevin above about removing the billions in subsidies for Amtrak to make it competitive. And while we're at it, remove the even more billions we give to the oil companies for R&D - because they already have the money. And get rid of the billions we give to agricultre, because Delmonte and Cargill already have it as well. And how many other large industries do we subsidize? Just imagine what we could do with all that money to improve our infrastructure - maybe we could rebuild some of the railroads we've been taking apart lately.
Quikboy,
Yup, you can get Amtrak in Houston. The line that goes from LA to Florida (?) passes through. There's an Amtrak shuttle connection that goes all the way to Longview, too, which runs to Chicago. I took a train from Boston to Houston once in 2002, and I haven't flown since:)
Amtrak only owns a tiny percentage of its own track. The rest is owned by the freight companies. They pay taxes on the land their rails cross over, so their is little incentive to "improve" their land and thus raise their taxes. Better to make the tracks just good enough to keep the freight rolling. Naturally the minimum rail quality for a boxcar isn't optimum for high speed passenger cars, so the Amtrak trains can't run as fast as the track layout otherwise would allow.
The trucking companies pay taxes for their fuel, but so do the railroads, and the fuel taxes don't cover repairs and maintenance on the roads.
And what would the airline industry be without federal air traffic control and federal subsidies for airports and jet fuel? Few if any airlines would be in business without federal subsidies.
So, if you want competition among the various modes of transport, you can pay for it by subsidizing Amtrak or finding another way to subsidize and encourage passenger rail.
But if you think that private companies can provide passenger rail, you'd be well served to go back and review the history of passenger rail in the US. Few of the companies operating passenger rail service objected when Amtrak was created. Many of them were also freight companies and they were happy to unload their passenger rail service. If we don't subsidize passenger rail, it will disappear.
You get what you pay for.
I've tried to use Amtrak for my commute from Berkeley to Silicon Valley for a year and a half and have finally given up on it just recently. My conclusions are thus:
Amtrak is unreliable. In 1.5 year of riding, I've regularly encountered trains just plain not arriving at all (or being at minimum 20 minutes late which would leave me in the middle of nowhere without shuttle buses on the other end) and a couple of midstream breakdowns where the engine simply turns off and we're screwed in the middle of the salt flats or something. In general, my experience was that the trains were on time (within 2 or 3 minutes of schedule) about 20% of the time. The norm was about 5-10 minutes late.
The trains are just not well protected from the stupidity of the general population. The Amtrak route that I used to ride would travel THROUGH neighborhoods at full speed (almost 80mph!). I remember looking out the window and seeing a small neighborhood street whiz by with apartments right across the street--no wall or fence, just train, street, kids, apartments. There were kids playing right next to the train tracks! On several occasions, kids would put random objects on the train tracks to watch them get plowed by the train. We'd have to stop for at least an hour for each incident. I'm not sure where the parents were in these cases, but generally this meant that the kids were most likely UNSUPERVISED and placing things like old bikes on the tracks. The last incident that was my last straw was a teenager that tried to beat the train across to get to the high school that was next to the tracks. Of course the train turned him into a pancake and it resulted in a 3 or so hour delay for hundreds of people, but I didn't feel bad because I felt that a 16 year old should know better than to try and beat an 80mph train. I guess not. Stupidity: 1. Faith in Humanity: 0.
The last reason that Amtrak sucks is ticketing. They try to make it like riding an airplane. I need to go to the to a staffed station with a photo ID and wait while the attendant takes down my info to be printed on a boarding pass style thing. When I traveled through Europe, you just popped your credit card into machines that were plentiful and punched in what you wanted. Boom ticket. If you want people to ride, stop putting up arbitrary walls. Are terrorist really going to ride Amtrak when the average citizen avoids it like the plague?
Do I want to drive to work? Hell no. But do I have a choice? Not if it involves Amtrak.
My mom remembers my grandmother going to work on the passenger train between two small rural towns in the 50s and 60s. These days, you could only do a commute like that if you lived in a suburb of a big city.
Zack - Great post! I couldn't agree with it more!
We have a love affair with our cars, myself included, although I will say that if a better public transit system was available, I'd happily take it rather than drive in traffic every day. It would translate into fuel savings, maintenance savings, and overall sanity savings on a daily basis. However, currently my options are A) Sit in traffic that makes my 15-20 minute commute 2-3 times as long as it ought to be or B) Go to the Park n Ride and have it take me over 2 hours with 2 transfers to get from my home to work. Logically, even though it still sucks, the driving is the better option of the two.
The basic infastructure exists for railways in the US, but it sorely needs to be updated and expanded upon to be feasible. An interesting article showed up in Popular Mechanics that I stumbled across this week: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/transportation/4232548.html
Maybe I'm saying this only for myself, but I would love to see funds go into building an actual solid, practical, and efficient mode of transportation via some form of railway both interstate as well as intercity.
Money talks. Everyone knows General Motors, Oil companies, Tire companies banded together and shut down the nation's train systems in the 1950s.
It's not that people don't want a train system, but we are collectively not as strong as rich corporations. Corporations have the money, and thus political power, to organize our society in a way that benefits them.
Nobody in their right mind, having experienced both a train-centric society, and the American car-centric one, would choose to keep driving, except for lack of options and being stuck in America.
America is truly the land of fright when it comes to public transit -- 90% of the public outside of NYC/DC are afraid of public transport.
It's for "poor people"
It's for homeless/bums
You die alone on the trian (movie: Collateral, Tom Cruise, Jaime Foxx)
Trains are scary
Yeah... i don't see America getting trains until the last drop of oil runs out, and Exxon/GM/Southwest Airlines can't profit from oil-based ICE transport any longer....
Then they might belatedly switch to public transit business models...
Amtrak, as much as it does take a lot of time to go from place to place than it would driving, has help my relationship A LOT! I go from San Diego to San Luis (evidence that trains do service small towns) about every other weekend for the past two years. Driving it nice because it cuts travel time by a couple of hours, but after driving so many weekends you want to kill yourself. I found out soon after that Amtrak offers really good student discount and is WAY cheaper than spending money on gas. Not only did I not have to drive, but I was also able to get homework and reading done. Being on time was a problem a good half of the time, but this was the Union Pacific's fault almost every single one of those times. Oh, and if you ride the train a lot, then you can earn "rewards points" which you can redeem for free one way train tickets. This again helps me save a lot more money than if I was driving my car.