Derailed

ONE
Riding Amtrak: An Adventure
"Twenty-five years after I set out to save the American passenger train, I feel personally embarrassed over what I helped to create."
--Anthony Haswell, founder, National Association of Railroad Passengers










Train travel can be an enjoyable experience. On some days riding Amtrak can be great; on other days, a disaster. One constant through Amtrak's history is its widely uneven level of service. The result is that people who like trains either love Amtrak or hate it. Why is this?
Before looking forward, let's look back.
Anyone who has wondered what inspired Washington to create Amtrak, or who wants to hear well-considered views of what we should do about Amtrak today, should meet Anthony Haswell. In his sixties, he is as lean as a track star, courteous in demeanor, and shy about his genius. When he speaks, his sincerity shines in such a way that eventhose who disagree with him respect him. Logic is his strong suit, perhaps because of his legal training, and his knowledge about railroads is encyclopedic.
In the days before Amtrak, he was known as the railroad industry's Ralph Nader--an allusion he probably liked--because he argued eloquently for better passenger train service to serve a neglected public. He knew his way around railroad offices in Chicago, having worked for the Illinois Central and the now-defunct Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad and learned the ins and outs of Washington, D.C.
He earned the moniker Father of Amtrak, which he is uneasy about today, as the founder of the National Association of Railroad Passengers. There, working out of a Capitol Hill office in 1970, he was the key proponent in persuading Congress to pass the Railpax ("railroad passenger") law that created Amtrak. Now he has the mettle to declare that his work was wasted. "Back then, if I could have seen what Amtrak would become, I would have sought some other way to save and improve our passenger trains."
Haswell would like to undo what he created. His is one of a growing number of voices who would replace Amtrak with new organizations in all parts of the United States. Meanwhile, others who've never met Haswell believe that some Amtrak trains could be operated profitably by new enterprises--provided the government makes policy changes. This claim of profitability is made because of a basic fact: the market for rail passenger service is much wider than Amtrak has ever been able to tap into.
Simply put, there are many reasons why customers are motivated to travel by train. A psychological factor is that trains are part of our human fabric. Children still ask for trains for Christmas (when has a child ever asked for a model bus?), and many of us are just older children. People of all ages anticipate with pleasure a long-distance train trip. In a few of our largest cities, some business travelers arrange meetings around train schedules whenever possible.
The lure of train travel can be understood by leafing through Amtrak's multicolor tour brochure, in which flowery prose can whet a traveler's appetite:
It rolls through majestic farmlands. Cuts through mountains so high they take your breath away. Just around the bend is something new--a mist-shrouded forest, an endless beach. And just out the window, America and her people thrive, raising a hand in greeting as the train hurtles by. It's the sound of the distant whistle. The rush of the wheels and the rhythmic sway. It's relaxing. Stimulating ... . So close your eyes and clear your mind. Or spend hours looking at the scenery outside. Pick up a book. Or pick up a conversation with that fellow across the aisle. Watch your children watch for bears, deer and eagles. Lean back. Way back. And enjoy the entertainment of our great land.
That makes telephones rings down at the local travel agent's office, but so do other marketing efforts. Amtrak has earned some good marks by implementing a Smart Pass for frequent riders, upgrading equipment, developing new train-bus routes in conjunction with Greyhound Lines, and urging its employees to be friendlier. Its marketing efforts include an Internet site that describes routes and promotional packages.
Once aboard a train, travelers find an atmosphere unlike the strapped-in confines of an airplane cabin. Trains--particularly long-distance ones--offer room to stretch and places where it's easy to meet people. Sometimes, an employee with a sunny disposition creates a fun, relaxed atmosphere, which helps break the ice among passengers. Although unprovable, I suspect more friendships have started aboard passenger trains than on any other form of transportation except cruise ships.
Amtrak sometimes offers wine tastings on Sightseer lounge cars in America's West, where views of snowcapped mountains, sparkling rivers, and endless prairies captivate travelers. Dining cars offer sit-down dinners with fresh food prepared by chefs trained at the Culinary Institute. By boosting the quality of its meals, Amtrak is trying to please the aging part of the travel market who are fussy about lunch and dinner.
First class still exists on Amtrak. The opulence of Pullman service may be gone, but Amtrak's sleeping cars--with snug beds, individualtemperature controls, linens, and private bathrooms--still provide the single most comfortable way to travel overnight.
An example of Amtrak's effort to target specific markets is found in several states where cycling enthusiasts can bring fully assembled bicycles aboard the train. This is an improvement over a time-consuming requirement that bicycles had to be disassembled and boxed for shipment as baggage.
There's some style left to train travel, a hint of which shows in train names. The Capitol Limited connects Washington, D.C., with the Midwest, terminating in Chicago. The California Zephyr starts in Chicago and links many communities with San Francisco. The Coast Starlight trundles along on a busy Seattle--Los Angeles route and has become Amtrak's "most respected train," according to Sylvia and Ted Blishak, who own a travel agency in Klamath Falls, Oregon, and are rail travel specialists.
For those who travel along the Eastern seaboard, Amtrak's Auto Train can transport them and their automobiles overnight between Lorton, Virginia (near Washington, D.C.), and Sanford, Florida, convenient to a host of tourist destinations. The train's biggest virtue is that passengers avoid driving a grueling nine hundred miles, parts of which offer highway congestion and speed traps. Also, passengers may pack as much baggage as their cars can hold, a benefit for those planning an extended stay.
In many cases, Amtrak passengers are riding in fairly new equipment, paid for by taxpayers, including double-decker Superliner cars (on long-distance trains) and single-level Viewliner cars (on Eastern routes). A significant number of Amfleet cars have been extensively rebuilt.
Train trips start at terminals, and Amtrak has done a decent job upgrading many of them. A stench-filled, decrepit station in Rochester, New York, has long been replaced by an attractive facility. Through painstaking restoration, Washington Union Station, once a boarded-up embarrassment, again reflects its classic splendor. Oakland, California, has a new station, required after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake nearly destroyed the old one. And in a unique arrangement,Bellingham, Washington, converted an old salmon cannery into an intermodal facility that serves Amtrak, intercity buses, airport shuttles, and taxicabs.
Disappointing Rides
Unfortunately, Amtrak can be schizophrenic. While passengers may have delightful experiences, they also run the risk of enduring miserable rides. As Kevin P. Keefe, editor of Trains magazine, cogently put it: "You can still ride the Northeast Corridor at 125 mph, then endure 40-mph average speeds on the Chicago--St. Louis run. You can still board various short-haul trains that feature food service, and others that don't. These simple but maddening lapses of consistency prevent Amtrak from attaining anything close to world-class status."
Sad but true, many Amtrak passengers experience terrible trips. Amtrak's efforts are overshadowed by its unpredictability. Its on-time performance is uneven--a few trains generally run on time, such as the Metroliner between New York and Washington, while others are late, dirty, and worse. On some trains passenger cars run without heat in the winter or air-conditioning in the summer, windows are filthy, and garbage piles up in coaches. Even Amtrak president Tom Downs admits that many first-time Amtrak customers say, "Never again!"
In 1994 Amtrak received more complaint letters than ever before. After a subsequent decline, however, the letters are coming in again. Consider what happened during Thanksgiving week in 1996, when the Associated Press ran a story about Amtrak's "train from hell." The report chronicled numerous problems aboard Amtrak's Empire Builder and noted that the train arrived in Seattle twelve hours late. It quoted Tim O'Donoghue, a passenger from Reston, Virginia, as saying, "I was wondering if the stagecoach would be faster." Moreover, the food ran out, "forcing a stop to take on some Kentucky Fried Chicken in Spokane, Washington."
Even Amtrak's special trains filled with VIPs run poorly.
In 1996 the first run of Amtrak's Gulf Coast Limited between New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama, ran so slowly that it was calledthe "slow boat to China." It didn't help that it also ran late, keeping crowds at train stations sweltering in the summer heat.
Amtrak had not learned from a terrible inauguration several years earlier, when its Sunset Limited from Miami arrived in Los Angeles four hours behind schedule. According to Craig Wilson, a reporter for USA Today, "The toilets didn't always work. The shower was sometimes cold. The dishwasher broke down before New Orleans and the toasters were left behind in Miami. To make matters worse, the bar car ran out of vodka outside of Sanderson, Texas--just when you need a drink most."
Again and again, this is Amtrak's experience.
One episode in particular sticks in my mind as a way of illustrating Amtrak's problems. I was a public relations representative for Amtrak and at one point was in charge of promoting sparkling new equipment that was being put in service on a long-distance train. Our publicity about the new train offered hope to travelers: "Passengers riding the new Amfleet cars can expect to find the ride smooth because of an advanced suspension system and quiet due to extensive soundproofing. The cars are equipped with all the luxuries of modern travel--pastel colors, indirect lighting, roomy seats, automatic sliding doors, pulldown seat trays, and air-conditioning."
In addition to carrying paying customers, the train was filled with journalists, elected officials, and travel agents. Under the circumstances, it was reasonable to expect that the train would run on time. After all, the equipment was fresh from the factory; most of the guests were VIPs; the weather was perfect. The day was important enough for Amtrak to serve champagne. But all was not well. One media story after another reported that the westbound inaugural train pulled in to Kansas City nearly four hours late, while its eastbound counterpart limped into New York five hours behind schedule. This attempt at positive publicity resulted in widespread negative coverage, which of course turned off an untold number of potential customers.
That late-running train was the National Limited. This particular story happened in 1978, but it cries out for repetition because nothing has changed--the disappointing service offered back then is similar todisappointments today. It's also an important story to consider because the train was discontinued, having failed to pick up a decent share of the market in its service area.
On-Time Performance
If Amtrak can't run trains filled with governors and mayors and the news media on time, when can it? Certainly its record with regularly scheduled trains will win no awards. The "late train story" has repeated itself often throughout Amtrak's history, causing great customer dissatisfaction. One result is that trains almost seem to compete for negative attention. AMTRAK RUN HAS "WORST TIME" RECORD was the title of a Champaign Courier (Illinois) story back when its local train, the Illini, was meeting its scheduled time of arrival "only once in 20 trips." Or, BROADWAY LIMITED's ON-TIME RECORDED: 1 IN 60 headlined the Chicago Sun-Times, which reported that Amtrak blamed Conrail for the poor performance.
A feisty publication, the Rail Travel News, reported in early 1972 that the Coast Starlight had an abysmal on-time record over the just-ended Christmas holiday period, having an on-time record at Los Angeles of only 29 percent. Again, some things don't change--even after nineteen years. As reported by Michael Wright in Condé Nast Traveler, the on-time rate of Amtrak's Coast Starlight "dropped from a not-great 40 percent in September 1991 to an abysmal 8.3 percent one year later." This train was so tardy during 1995 that Amtrak employees began referring to is as the "Starlate." Riders aboard Amtrak's Chicago--New York Lake Shore Limited have been heard to call it the "Late Shore Limited." Newspaper headlines from the 1970s and 1990s about late trains are virtually interchangeable.
At times, Amtrak management has explained poor performance by pointing out that its routes are so long that many opportunities exist for things to go wrong. What, then, explains the problems on short-distance lines? The Train Riders Association of California reported that Amtrak service between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles was "extremely unreliable," as Amtrak trains were sidetracked for other trains. "Insome instances passengers had to endure waits as long as an hour in the sidings," reported the group. It concluded, "This chaotic operation seems to be a standard feature of the route."
In its twenty-five-year history, four presidents preceded Tom Downs at Amtrak. The first was Roger Lewis, followed by Paul H. Reistrup, Alan S. Boyd, and W. Graham Claytor, Jr. All shared an inability to make the trains run on time.
Professors Tony M. Ridley and Francis R. Terry of the Centre for Transport Studies at the University of London report that European railways "exceed by a substantial margin the punctuality standards which Amtrak sees as the norm (70-80 percent on-time arrival)." The French railway system reported that after a decade of operating the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse, or "train of great speed"), it has experienced a delay of ten minutes or longer only once per year per trainset, or every 248,500 miles. Further, a survey by Railway Gazette International revealed that nine European rail systems did better than Amtrak when tolerance differences were taken into account.
Amtrak's on-time performance has never been, nor will it ever be, at the point where passengers could expect European-like dependability. Amtrak owns tracks only in parts of the Northeast and a small stretch in Michigan, but virtually everywhere else its trains move over tracks owned and dispatched by America's freight railroads. The result is that Amtrak's on-time performance from 1983 to 1993 ranged from a low of 72 percent to a high of 82 percent. It has fallen again, with Amtrak's 1996 record of 70.9 percent lower than the previous year's 76.4 percent. For short-distance business passengers, that meant arriving late for meetings. For long-distance travelers, there were missed connections with other trains and countless personal inconveniences.
"I can personally testify that the Southwest Chief does not have a good reputation for on-time performance," said Haswell. "Twice in recent years I have inquired about renting a car at Flagstaff; both times the rental agency said they could not meet me at the train because it ran late so often. A cab driver in Albuquerque referred to the train's schedule as an 'estimated time of arrival.' On-time performance is particularlyunimpressive when one keeps in mind that the Southwest Chief averages 55 mph."
John Reed, the president in the 1970s of the Santa Fe Railway, over whose tracks this train operates, was so disenchanted with Amtrak's stewardship that he ordered Amtrak to cease using the name Super Chief, which for years had been the name of Santa Fe's premier passenger train. Amtrak was forced for many years to rename the train, which it called the Southwest Limited.
Federal law gives Amtrak passenger trains priority over freight trains, but operating conditions often mean it's impossible for the freight railroads over which Amtrak operates to comply. For example, when a long freight train and a short Amtrak train run on a single-track line, and the passing siding is short, the Amtrak train often must take the sidetrack and wait for the freight train to pass. This is an operational fact that Washington policy makers who demand that "passengers come before freight" prefer to ignore.
An Amtrak analysis showed that 36 percent of the delays suffered by Amtrak were attributable to factors that are wholly controlled by the freight carriers. But Amtrak itself is responsible for many delays due to improper servicing of equipment, malfunctions at stations that it owns, trains being held for late-running connections, and other causes.
Amtrak in Chicago
What is surprising about Amtrak's having so much trouble arriving at the appointed hour is it liberally pads its schedules with extra time. This is most noticeable in the stretches at the end of a train's run. Henry Kisor explains this well in his book Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America, in which he urges readers to check the elapsed time between a train's point of origin and its first stop. Now do the reverse--compare the time between the same stations for a train going in the opposite direction. He gives as an example the 28 miles from Chicago to Naperville, which takes "thirty-five honest minutes," but Naperville to Chicago takes more than twice as long.
This bizarre scheduling results in Amtrak trains' entering Chicago at speeds equal to some of the worst found on creaky railroads in Third World countries. Table 1.1 shows that Amtrak's New York--Chicago Three Rivers plods into Chicago from Hammond, Indiana, at an average speed of 12.8 mph, slower than trains in Peru. Other Amtrak schedules are also tedious: the California Zephyr at 20 mph mimics a timetable found in Algeria; the Lake Cities on Amtrak's "emerging high-speed corridor" from Detroit, creeping along at 22.3 mph, would lose a race to a train in Nigeria. Other trains in Chile, Angola, and Ethiopia are equal to or faster than Amtrak trains running toward Chicago Union Station.
A study of schedules shows that at least thirty less-than-advanced nations run trains twice as fast as Amtrak does in Chicago.1 Amtrak trains are painfully slow, which, combined with lengthy layovers between trains, means passengers passing through Chicago have to stay in Chicago much longer than if they had driven, taken the bus, or flown.
To add another disconcerting element, Amtrak's system of record-keeping tolerances makes Amtrak's on-time performance look better than it is. Trains traveling more than 550 miles are still considered to be on time even if they arrive thirty minutes late. Thus, on a day the eastbound California Zephyr is on time at Naperville, combining that allowance with the schedule of one hour and fifteen minutes means that the train can take one hour and forty-four minutes to travel 28 miles to Chicago and still be considered on time. That's an average speed of 16.2 mph, or slower than the Dar es Salaam--Mwanza train in Tanzania.
It was not always like this at Chicago. In 1952, for example, the Santa Fe's westbound Grand Canyon took fifty-four minutes between Chicago and Joliet, but eastbound took only four minutes longer. Today, in Europe and Japan, railroad managers schedule trains as expeditiously on final segments of routes as they do on originating legs.
Even more shocking, Amtrak's slowness isn't isolated to Chicago. Its trains are the slowest American trains in more than half a century. That finding came from research by Haswell, who went back to 1936, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to his second term as President and Hitler's troops were occupying the Rhineland. It doesn't seem possible that trains running so long ago were faster than trains today, but they were. Haswell cites startling examples: Amtrak takes five hours and thirty minutes to connect Chicago with St. Louis, but that trip was forty-five minutes faster in the thirties. Amtrak's fastest train today between Chicago and Detroit covers the distance in five hours and twenty-four minutes, but that trip was thirty-nine minutes faster then. Similar comparisons could be made for other periods: a San Francisco-Los Angeles trip on Amtrak's Coast Starlight today takes eleven hours and twenty minutes, barely faster than the twelve-hour schedule launched in 1923 by the Southern Pacific Railroad.
It is logical to compare Amtrak today with schedules in 1952, when railroads had replaced steam engines with diesel locomotives similar to what Amtrak operates. Also that year the Interstate Commerce Commission implemented a rule that the top speed for passenger trains unequipped with special signal lights on engineers' control panels was to be 79 mph; other rules limited passenger train speeds to 60 mph. Amtrak has to observe the same regulations today.
The results shown in Table 1.2 are devastating to Amtrak. On many corridors--the routes most promising for passenger trains--Amtrak schedules are embarrassingly slow. For example, travel on Amtrak between Chicago and Cincinnati takes nearly eight and a half hours, almost three hours longer. Even very short routes aren't spared. The 86-mile Chicago--Milwaukee line sees a schedule more than a quarter hour slower than it was in 1952. Los Angeles--San Diego, where the state of California has spent millions of dollars to upgrade track, is ten minutes slower.
This is truly remarkable. In no other area of transportation can such a marked deterioration be found, as a comparison of 1952 and 1997 air and bus schedules or driving time charts would easily show.
It may be immaterial that schedules for long-distance trains have been lengthened because it is believed leisure travelers won't mind. That may be, but today's slower trains are failing to deliver their passengers to their destinations with the same degree of punctuality as their faster predecessors did.
A disturbing factor about lengthy schedules is their significance for the future. The New York Central Railroad offered a twenty-hour schedule between New York and Chicago in 1893 with the Exposition Flyer. If the best that Amtrak can offer on the same route more than a century later is a schedule only about an hour and a half faster, then Amtrak has reached its technological pinnacle for long-distance trains. Thus, fundamental changes must be made to the nature of the services offered aboard the trains and the markets to which they are targeted.
Some Amtrak trains are faster than their 1952 ancestors, as shown in Table 1.3. There are a few reasons for this. First, on the New York-- Washington, Boston--Washington, New York--Buffalo, and Seattle-Portland routes, federal and state funds have gone into upgrading the lines in order to shorten travel times. Second, the Sunset Limited is faster because a reroute means it no longer directly serves Phoenix, Arizona. Finally, some 1952 schedules required time to switch cars in and out of trains at junctions. When the westbound George Washington, for example, stopped in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad added sleeping cars that arrived in another train from Richmond and Tidewater-area points. Dining cars and coaches were also switched in and out of the train. Later, upon the train's arrival in Ashland, Kentucky, where routes diverged, time was needed to split the train into sections--one to Cincinnati, Ohio, and the other to Louisville, Kentucky. Amtrak avoids all that by running an intact train, but it is only fifteen minutes faster.
Meanwhile, travel has become faster on one system that competes with Amtrak--highways. In 1995 Washington repealed the nation's 55-mph speed limit that had been imposed to save energy during the mid-1970s Arab oil embargo. Most states have since increased their speed limits to between 65 and 75 mph, with highway patrols often ignoring drivers going faster than posted speeds.
Flying will become faster in upcoming years. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will phase in new rules and technology to permit "free flight," meaning that pilots will be allowed to pick their routes, altitudes, and speeds, with controllers intervening only if flight plans conflict. This will eliminate many zigzag flight patterns and, in addition to saving money for airlines by easing delays, will save time for passengers.
Don't expect faster Amtrak trains in most of the country.
In the vast majority of the United States, Amtrak has no effective program to address causes of slow and undependable trains, including but not limited to poor track, inadequate signaling and grade-crossing protection, arbitrarily low municipal speed limits, freight congestion in yard and terminal areas, delays for passing freight and commuter trains, and insufficient operating supervision.
Late and slow trains aren't Amtrak's only problem.
The FDA's Permanent Injunction
Amtrak's service problems are numerous, but it's useful to examine a notorious case in which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cited Amtrak for unsanitary conditions. It's a little-known fact that the FDA regularly inspects food service of commercial airlines. During a typical year, the agency issues about nine warning letters to airlines. Southwest Airlines was cited for a lack of hand-washing sinks at a California facility, Aloha Airlines for mold in an ice machine, and Continental Airlines for storing meat and eggs at improper temperatures aboard a New York--Houston flight. In Washington, FDA spokeswoman Judith Foulke said, "There's a possibility of public health problems, or we wouldn't have issued warnings. But the airlines are very good about correcting problems immediately."
As FDA records show, Amtrak had problems that were far more severe--problems that festered for years.
In the 1970s and again in the 1980s, the FDA had issued warnings to Amtrak regarding unsanitary conditions and rodent problems in its commissaries. The warnings were issued locally, and no national coordination or investigation was evident. Amtrak responded by taking sporadic corrective action, which was only temporarily effective. Often, food-service personnel were confused by conflicting directives. For example, Amtrak--which has long been unable to keep refrigeration equipment in working order--encouraged its employees to use dry ice to keep food cold. The FDA opposes such a practice because dry ice has an uneven effect on food, which produces health hazards. Receiving conflicting directives from supposedly knowledgeable officials led Amtrak workers to be contemptuous of both the edicts and the officials.
In 1992 the FDA initiated a sweeping investigation of Amtrak because of reports about unclean conditions, mice-infested dining cars and commissaries, inoperative public toilets, and related conditions. The complaints were coming not only from passengers but from another public agency--the U.S. Customs Service reported that rodents were in evidence on the Montrealer. The FDA took action that was more severe than anything ever taken against an airline. The agency filed a complaint in federal court, which issued a permanent injunction against Amtrak that required a long-term "sanitation and food service program" to be implemented with the FDA's and the court's approval. Amtrak, which signed a consent decree, must for all time take the agreement seriously because the FDA has the authority to take strong measures when Amtrak falters.
For the first time, Amtrak began giving employees serious sanitation training: part of the effort included the banishment of dry ice. The organization also began a long-delayed cleanup campaign.
The immediate impact was to create havoc on Amtrak's operations. Within a month Amtrak fumigated more than six hundred cars outside the normal maintenance schedule, temporarily sidetracked a large segment of its food-service cars, rushed sixty-four cars with inoperative public toilets or sinks into the repair shops, and delayed sixty-eight trains for rodent problems. Another result was noticeable to passengers as infested equipment was shunted around--more and more trains were late. Very late.
Some railroad enthusiasts were unhappy that the FDA had opened fire on Amtrak with such force. But speaking a year later, Dennis F. Sullivan, then Amtrak's executive vice president and chief operating officer, conceded that "the FDA didn't do that to Amtrak; Amtrak did that to Amtrak ... . It was a tough thing to go through, but I'm glad it's behind us."
It wasn't.
Two years later Amtrak had to close part of train number 477 in Springfield, Massachusetts, because of mice. After the mice were discovered, Amtrak planned to remove the coach at New Haven. However, no advance notice was given to employees there, and considerable discussion ensured about what to do. One worker speaking over a radio suggested allowing the car to continue to Philadelphia, where the mice might be happier. Another employee said that wasn't permissible because the mice didn't have tickets. When the joking ended, the train was evacuated and all passengers transferred to a later train.
Accidents and Their Aftermath
More serious than the mice are the mishaps and derailments.
Amtrak trains derail too often, even while loping along at slow speeds. Meanwhile, high-speed trains overseas operate with astonishingly superb safety records. France's TGV, Germany's ICE Train (InterCity Express), and Japan's famed Bullet Trains have carried more than 3.5 billion passengers without a single passenger fatality. In rare instances when foreign high-speed trains are in an accident, the injuries have never been as extensive as on Amtrak.
A stunning high-speed accident was described by Mike Knutton, editor of the International Railway Journal: "What images spring to mind if you consider the possibility of a TGV train leaving the tracks at 183 mph? Mass destruction of life and equipment? Fortunately the reality is different, as was demonstrated when a derailment actually happened in northern France on December 21, 1993, when four cars of the early morning train from Valenciennes to Paris left the track ... . The cars remained upright and attached to each other and the rest of the train, and only one of the 170 passengers on board was slightly injured--a remarkable testimony to the TGV's articulated design." The cause of the derailment was a collapse of underground trenches made during World War I, which had not been identified from official records during construction planning.
"One wouldn't wish it on anyone," wrote Knutton, "but this accident provided some sound evidence of the extremely high safety levels of the TGV and, perhaps perversely, it could actually enhance the safety image of the TGV system--the French press treated the incident as a triumph for the train."
An Amtrak train could never survive a similar right-of-way defect at even half the speed, because the design of its infrastructure and trains are inferior when compared with the TGV.
Admittedly, some Amtrak accidents are minor and cause no injuries. In one instance, Amtrak's Coast Starlight moving at 50 mph sideswiped a derailed Burlington Northern freight train in Winlock, Washington. Passengers were unharmed, although their fear turned to anger as delays set them nine hours behind schedule. In Memphis, the City of New Orleans derailed on the Illinois Central Railroad. The Federal Railroad Administration found that poor crossties had caused the rails to spread, but riders--who experienced the derailment while moving at only 18 mph--had to wonder about the quality of the tracks over the entire route.
To be fair, many accidents are not Amtrak's fault--particularly those at railroad-highway grade crossings. Nevertheless, there's much to be said for completely separating railroad tracks from streets and highways, especially when planning for high-speed trains.
Some Amtrak accidents are quite serious.
Amtrak's worst tragedy came at 2:50 A.M. on September 22, 1993, when the Sunset Limited's locomotives and four cars plunged into the swamps and bayous near Mobile, Alabama. Forty-seven passengers and crew members lost their lives, most by drowning, and more people would have died except that passengers formed human chains to rescue nonswimmers. Another 103 were injured. Thick fog, smoke from a fire, and the murky waters of the Big Bayou Canot added to the chaos of the scene. Rescue workers had difficulty finding the remote site, an area with no lights and no nearby highways.
Some passengers were rescued by a towboat, M/V Mauvilla. It wasn't long, however, before National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators found that a barge had broken loose from that towboat and struck the bridge, knocking it out of alignment and causing the train to wreck. The NTSB did not fault Amtrak in the accident, although it recommended that Amtrak provide safety briefings to its passengers, much like airlines do, as well as install portable onboard lighting.
Some accidents bring with them lasting legal and contractual entanglements. On the first Sunday of 1987, a clear and dry day with heavy holiday traffic, Amtrak's Colonial was traveling at 120 mph when it slammed into three Conrail freight locomotives occupying the wrong track in Chase, Maryland. The impact caused one of the Conrail locomotives to explode, the passenger cars to derail in a zigzag pattern, and one car to screech along the ground on its side. Fifteen passengers and the Amtrak engineer died, and 175 passengers were injured.
A court found the Conrail engineer responsible for the accident because, by failing to comply with a stop signal, he had blocked the rightful path of the Amtrak train. It also was determined that he and the brakeman had been smoking marijuana on the trip. Investigators uncovered contributing factors: safety features on Conrail's locomotives were absent, malfunctioning, or purposely disabled. This accident, because of its lawsuits and financial losses by Conrail, caused longlasting friction between Amtrak and Conrail. Further, it sparked demands throughout the freight railroad industry that passenger train operators carry more liability insurance.
Over the years, Amtrak has been at fault for accidents attributed to human error, poor maintenance, or acceptance of new equipment that had design flaws, but it was not responsible for the accidents discussed above. Amtrak has, however, gone too far to plead its innocence. After a rash of accidents, Amtrak issued a statement in September 1995 claiming that most of its reports to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) "concern minor accidents causing no injury and involving only slight inconvenience to passengers. On average, only .00007 percent of the annual FRA-reportable accidents result in injury to passengers."
The problem is, for a long time Amtrak has issued figures that cannot be trusted. Washingtonian magazine writer Steven D. Kaye reported in 1987 that the number of injuries found in FRA reports, which were compiled from Amtrak data, was lower than information compiled in NTSB reports. "We discovered a pattern of sharply lower FRA injury figures going back at least to 1975, when a collision in Illinois injured 41 people--according to the NTSB--but only 4 people according to the FRA," wrote Kaye. "A derailment in Montana injured 115 people or 31; a sleeping-car fire in California injured 61 people or 6; a New York City collision in 1984 injured 140 people or 23, depending on whose report we read."
Kaye's remarkable findings show that in twenty-five accidents, the FRA reported forty-four injuries while the NTSB found 1,388 injured. Amtrak later admitted that it counts as injured only those passengers admitted to a hospital, not those who are treated and released. The FRA acknowledged that its Amtrak-originated statistics were misleading, but it's unclear whether corrective action was taken; contradictory statistics again appeared after a 1995 derailment in Arizona.
Amtrak issued "safety comparisons" in its 1994 annual report that were misleading. It stated that the average annual fatalities in the 1978-92 time period mean that automobiles were the most dangerous way to travel, followed by commercial air, bus, then Amtrak trains. In other words, Amtrak is safer than everybody else.
That is misleading. The Amtrak comparison was for a contrived fourteen-year period, which included years when Amtrak's fatalities were lower. A better standard to use comes from the National Safety Council, which annually issues statistics for the preceding decade. More important, any useful comparison should be based on passenger-miles--the total of all miles traveled by all passengers. After all, the probability of being involved in an accident is based not on the number of people using a particular mode of transportation but on the exposure level as determined by miles of travel. When figures from the National Safety Council for 1983-93 are examined, and when weighted per 100 million passenger-miles, all passenger trains were the safest form of transportation in only one year (1985). Amtrak usually ranked second or third, switching places with buses, while automobile travel was always the least safe and commercial aviation usually the safest.
Even within the railroad community, Amtrak does not always stack up well. The National Safety Council reported that "in 1993, Amtrak accounted for about 46 percent of the railroad passenger miles and 42 of the 58 railroad passenger fatalities." While that was an unusual year, the bottom line is that Amtrak is not the most dangerous way to travel, but it isn't the safest, either, despite Amtrak's claims.
Amtrak statements about the safety of its future high-speed trains are deceptive. Amtrak said its new fleet of high-speed trainsets are "designed to be among the safest trains in the world." Significant differences exist, however, between the Amtrak design and those of the Japanese Bullet Trains and French TGVs. Also, Amtrak's signaling systems are less sophisticated and its track structure less advanced. Further, there is no evidence that Amtrak's tracks will receive the superior maintenance that is standard practice overseas. Thus, if a new Amtrak train were in a derailment such as the one the TGV experienced, it is likely that the human cost would far exceed the one injury suffered by the French.
Train-wreck pictures in newspapers cause a sensation. Cable News Network's video footage of an Amtrak accident, sometimes aired for days, can rivet the public's attention with highly negative consequences. Amtrak spent $109 million for advertising and sales in 1996, which was offset by the media's focus on Amtrak accidents. Tom Downs said Amtrak was perceived as trying to sell a product that it couldn't deliver.
Late-night television hosts in their opening monologues have targeted Amtrak. On The Tonight Show, Jay Leno said, "They don't post arrivals anymore. They post the odds." Another Leno line was that Amtrak planned to get rid of about six hundred workers--by putting them on one of its trains. On CBS, David Letterman joined in: "Earlier today Amtrak announced its new name--Am--Not--On--Track." Another night, listed among Letterman's "Top Ten Signs You're Not Getting a Year-End Bonus" was the item "You're the Director of Safety for Amtrak."
Amtrak officials became so furious with Leno that they pulled advertising worth about $2 million a year from NBC. After forcing a promise from Leno that he would go easier, Amtrak told the network to begin airing its commercials again. In reality, this was a form of censorship, pure and simple. Why Leno and NBC caved in, and why those who strive to guarantee constitutional freedom of expression failed to censure Amtrak, was puzzling.
Amtrak safety became an issue again when a train derailed in November 1996 after crossing a bridge in Newark, New Jersey, forcing part of the train down an embankment. Investigators learned that Amtrak employees had been aware of track defects on the bridge for eleven months but had failed to take appropriate action.
Amtrak Train Discontinuances
Amtrak has problems that have nothing to do with accidents. The public has often been irritated with Amtrak service, and the result has been insufficient traffic. One example is telling.
On a Sunday evening several years ago, I was waiting in Chicago Union Station for an Amtrak train. Over a two-hour period the only arrivals and departures were the local trains operated by the regional Metra commuter system. It struck me that Chicago's O'Hare Airport was operating at full capacity, as it does on many Sunday evenings, and Midway Airport was busy, too. Yet, the train station was oddly quiet--sad testimony to Amtrak's dismal reach into the marketplace.
It could be argued that Chicago Union Station should be full--especially at that hour--because Amtrak has launched many new marketing efforts. Amtrak became the first nonairline member of the Airline Reporting Corporation, increasing the number of approved Amtrak travel agents from four thousand to more than forty thousand; when the airlines reduced the commissions paid to travel agents, Amtrak decided to pay travel agents more; and as Amtrak gained more experience with airline-style yield management, it tweaked its computers to sell a greater number of seats aboard trains.
Amtrak also started a promotion aimed at college students by offering the Student Advantage Card, which for a low price gives users discounts on various products. Amtrak airs glitzy television commercials, which could win awards in the advertising community. Planners helped specific routes, such as by offering miles in Midwest Express Airlines' frequent-traveler program to Chicago--Milwaukee train riders.
Unfortunately, such efforts are offset by Amtrak's shortcomings. Even when serious problems have afflicted Amtrak's air and highway competition, travelers fail to shift to trains in big numbers. Amtrak suffers from an inability to effectively penetrate the travel market on most routes.
When ridership dries up, trains are discontinued. The late-running National Limited made its last run in the late 1970s, as did the Chicago--Houston Lone Star, the Chicago--Miami Floridian, and the North Coast Limited, a Chicago--Seattle train that ran on the historic Northern Pacific Railroad route through Billings, Montana.
As airlines added flight schedules to meet the mid-1990s travel demand--the strongest in America's history--Amtrak, to stop its financial hemorrhaging, cut back. In 1995 the mice-infested train number 477 disappeared from the timetable. The Chicago-Indianapolis Hoosier State, the Montreal--Washington, D.C., Montrealer, and the Houston section of the Texas Eagle--all slow trains--were discontinued. Also deleted from the schedules were Amtrak's Philadelphia-Atlantic City trains and the New York--Jacksonville Palmetto.
One train's demise was to eclipse all others: the last run of the famed New York--Chicago Broadway Limited was particularly painful for railroad buffs. Here was a train that began running in 1902 under the name Pennsylvania Special; it was renamed a decade later not for the theater district of Manhattan but for Pennsylvania Railroad's four-track main line promoted as the Broad Way of Commerce. "The train had operated day in and day out, year in and year out," said railroad historian Mike Bezilla in an interview with Associated Press reporter Ted Duncombe. "It's been there through the world wars, through the Depression, the Sputnik, the atom bomb, you name it--there's been a Broadway." Dan Cupper, an author and correspondent for Trains magazine, pointed out that the train, long the flagship of the Pennsylvania Railroad, "really was the Concorde of its day." Its passengers included Pearl Bailey, Jack Benny, Charlie Chaplin, President Eisenhower, and others foremost in American arts, politics, and business.
Where trains weren't discontinued, the level of service dropped from daily to three or four times a week. Amtrak reduced frequency on the Atlanta--New Orleans segment of the Crescent, the Ogden, Utah--Seattle Pioneer, the Salt Lake City--Los Angeles Desert Wind, and the Empire Builder between Minneapolis--St. Paul and Seattle. It also ran less frequently the City of New Orleans that links Chicago with its namesake, and the California Zephyr west of Salt Lake City. The logic Amtrak offered for keeping routes open but reducing the number of trains was that more passenger revenue would be retained by cutting the frequency of trains rather than eliminating routes entirely.
Amtrak can change its logic fast. A mere twenty months later, Amtrak announced a restructuring that would do the opposite. Randolph E. Schmid of the Associated Press reported: "Concluding that less than daily service doesn't work, Amtrak plans to close down four routes and return to daily service on several others in an effort to save money and increase income." The new plan, in response to another cash shortage, would restore daily service to the Empire Builder, California Zephyr, Crescent, and City of New Orleans. Amtrak would also add a Pittsburgh--Chicago train and another New York--Miami train, the Silver Palm. These enhanced services came at a cost, however, as forty-two stations would lose all service as trains like the Pioneer, Desert Wind, and Texas Eagle were to be discontinued. Dallas would become the largest city in the country to lose all intercity rail passenger service, although in fact its Amtrak service is a joke because the train runs only three times a week in each direction.
But that plan also was not to be. Congress, alarmed that trains would be discontinued near election time, voted $22.5 million to freeze the existing pattern for six months.
Despite what the latest schedules may be, the root causes for passenger displeasure remain. Too many Amtrak passengers have been angered for too many reasons on too many trains. An occasional cold car here or bad breakfast there could be understood. But the service deficiencies that existed in 1971 have been repeated with eerie similarity through Amtrak's history. In some cases, service is worse: in 1997 Amtrak was running an unprecedented number of trains without food and beverage service on its New York--Philadelphia--Washington route, the busiest in the nation. On twenty-five trains, customers couldn't purchase even a cup of coffee.
The organization simply cannot achieve a level of service that draws a significant amount of repeat business. This has disheartened Amtrak's biggest supporters--railroad buffs. In what appears to be greater numbers than ever, they are giving up on Amtrak.
This is the case even though some have been supporters throughout Amtrak's lifetime. For example, William S. Lind, an experienced Capitol Hill staffer, was influential in arranging the start-up of Amtrak's New York--Chicago Lake Shore Limited and is associate publisher of the New Electric Railway Journal. Several years ago he blasted Amtrak in a Wall Street Journal column for treating passengers on a stalled train "like convicts in a Soviet labor camp, bullying them, insulting them and ultimately enraging them." A letter about the incident from Amtrak's Graham Claytor was so nonresponsive that Lind denounced it, saying, "It suggests the fatigued helplessness of some Third World subminister explaining again why nothing in the country works."
Disappointment with Amtrak also runs strong outside Washington's famed Beltway. John Wegner of Roeland Park, Kansas, wrote in Passenger Train Journal: "Ask yourself this question: Can I recommend a long-distance Amtrak trip to my friends who are not familiar with Amtrak travel? For me, the answer is no ... . I wonder what it will take to get Amtrak to shape up; a 60 Minutes or 20/20 expose perhaps?"
"We're tired of excuses," said Ken Bird, the president of Illinois Rail, an organization that promotes passenger train service. "Amtrak's history is one of missed marketing opportunities, lackluster operational performance, and poor equipment utilization. When you operate chronically late trains with dirty windows, revenue shortfalls are bound to be the result."
From Grand Rapids, Michigan, James C. Miller wrote to Trains magazine that "Amtrak is probably the worst passenger-train operator this side of eastern Europe," a view echoed by a professional railroader, Eberhard Jaensch of the German Federal Railway's high-speed train division. He told Business Week that Amtrak is "almost as bad" as the system in the former East Germany.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that when traveling on vacation, most Amtrak employees and their families avoid their employer's trains except on a few routes--the Northeast Corridor, New York--Albany, and Los Angeles--San Diego. This is startling because employees can travel on Amtrak for free. In fact, most employees fly or drive at their own expense because of Amtrak's poor scheduling, slow travel times, awkward routings, or unattractive service. My experience has been that spouses of Amtrak employees often gripe about how slow Amtrak trains are. Bottom line: Amtrak has difficulty giving its service away for free to its employees.
Amtrak's efforts to save itself have failed, and its time is running out. Anthony Haswell, along with others, applauds the congressional move to end Amtrak funding by 2002. They know that Amtrak, with few exceptions, simply can't deliver useful passenger trains in the next century. But before we can plan a system to replace Amtrak, we must move beyond an examination of Amtrak's symptoms and take an unprecedented look at Amtrak's underlying structural problems.

DERAILED: WHAT WENT WRONG AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT AMERICA'S PASSENGER TRAINS. Copyright © 1997 by Joseph Vranich. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth