More Hope Than Plan at This Point

News outlets in Ohio over the past few of days have reported stories about Amtrak service expansion plans in the state.

The intercity passenger carrier has been reported to be planning five new corridor services including Cleveland-Cincinnati via Columbus and Dayton; Chicago-Cincinnati via Indianapolis; Cleveland-Detroit (Pontiac) via Toledo; Cleveland-New York via Buffalo, New York; and Cleveland-New York via Pittsburgh.

Most of these routes would have multiple daily frequencies including four daily roundtrips on the Chicago-Cincinnati route.

The 3C corridor service would be three daily roundtrips while the Cleveland-New York service would be two daily roundtrips via Buffalo and one roundtrip via Pittsburgh.

Amtrak would fund these services through a program for which it is seeking $300 million from Congress.

For its part, Amtrak has been issuing a written statement to reporters seeking information that is far less detailed.

After stating that corridor services of 500 miles are the fastest growing segment of its network, the passenger carrier has said, “We have developed a visionary plan to expand rail service across the nation, providing service to large metropolitan areas that have little or no Amtrak service.

“We are working with our state partners, local officials and other stakeholders to understand their interests in new and improved Amtrak service and will be releasing that plan soon. We will call on Congress to authorize and fund Amtrak’s expansion in such corridors by allowing us to cover most of the initial capital and operating costs of new or expanded routes”

And that’s it. The statement did not provide any details about specific routes and service levels.

The specific information came from All Aboard Ohio, an advocacy group that has long sought without success to push for creation of a network of passenger trains in the Buckeye state.

But is this proposal the “game changer” that some on social media are calling it?

It could be but keep in mind it is simply a proposal. There is no guarantee Congress will approve funding for the corridor development program and no guarantee that any of the proposed Ohio trains will ever turn a wheel.

AAO public affairs director Kenneth Prendergast acknowledged in an interview with Trains magazine that the five corridors that his group has identified are “more of an outline or goal than a plan.”

Amtrak officials have been meeting with local officials throughout Ohio to discuss the corridor program proposal. Similar meetings have been held in other states, including Tennessee and Kansas.

Based on what Amtrak government affairs officials said during state legislative hearings in those states, Amtrak would front the costs of route development and pay operating expenses on a sliding scale for up to five years.

State and local governments would have to begin underwriting the service starting in the second year and assume all funding after the fifth year.

If you read the Amtrak statement carefully, it says the passenger carrier would pay for most of the initial capital and operating costs.

That is not necessarily the 100 percent federal funding factoid that AAO described in a post on its website and it officers have been talking up in news media interviews.

In fairness, though, the AAO post later said that Amtrak might pay up to 100 percent of the initial capital costs and up to 100 percent of the operating costs for the first two years.

Given that Amtrak has yet to release details about the corridor development program and has yet to formally ask Congress to fund it, there is much that remains unknown.

And given that the Amtrak statement falls short of saying it will pay all costs of getting a route up and running it is reasonable to conclude that state and local governments would need to pay something, although we don’t know yet what that would be.

One guess is local and state money would need to help fund station development.

Not even AAO expects the proposed services to come to fruition anytime soon.

Writing on Twitter, AAO said it can take three to six years to get a route started depending on its complexity.

In the meantime, AAO has said it will seek a “small appropriation” in the next biennial budget to pay for state-level planning of the five proposed corridors.

It is not clear whether Gov. Mike DeWine and Ohio legislative leaders would be receptive to that.

AAO argues that DeWine is more inclined to be supportive of passenger rail than was his predecessor, John Kasich.

As a gubernatorial candidate in 2010, Kasich adamantly opposed using a $400 million federal stimulus grant the state had received to start 3C service.

Upon being elected, Kasich returned that money to the U.S. Department of Transportation although not before making an unsuccessful pitch that the state be allowed to redirect the grant toward highway development.

AAO contends that DeWine has asked the Ohio Department of Transportation to put passenger rail “back on the radar.” But the scope of DeWine’s support for passenger rail has yet to be publicly articulated.

It is all but certain that once concrete proposals are introduced in the legislature authorizing spending state money on rail passenger service development that opposition will arise from opponents decrying wasting public money.

Another unknown is what demands the host railroads would make to agree to allow these trains to use their tracks.

We know that in the past host railroads have submitted lists of millions of dollars of infrastructure improvements as the price of acceptance.

How necessary those improvements were is debatable, but the demands seemed exorbitant enough to discourage the proposed service.

Such pricey demands have thwarted efforts to operate the Chicago-New York Cardinal and the Los Angeles-New Orleans Sunset Limited daily rather than tri-weekly.

Some of the articles and social media posts about the proposed Ohio corridors have noted that President Joseph Biden is an avid supporter of passenger rail and is expected to release an infrastructure proposal later this year.

Passenger rail advocates are hoping to use that as the springboard to shake loose billions of federal dollars for passenger rail development.

It may be a time to be optimistic yet nothing is certain. At best Amtrak’s proposal represents hope. But as we’ve seen in the past, those hopes can be a very fragile thing.

Groups Pushing for Indiana Rail Passenger Commission

Two Indiana-based passenger rail advocacy groups are pushing for the state to established a passenger rail commission.

The Indiana Passenger Rail Alliance and the Northern Indiana Passenger Rail Association said the proposed Indiana Passenger Rail Commission would focus on and coordinate the efforts of state advocacy and regional planning organizations to develop modern passenger-rail systems within Indiana.

The commission would include officials from the Indiana Department of Transportation and the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District.

The Indiana General Assembly would have to include the proposal to create the commission in its summer study sessions, which would allow the IPRA and NIPRA to have draft legislation ready to be introduced during a future General Assembly session.

Toledo-Detroit Passenger Rail Restoration Eyed

The Toledo Metropolitan Area Council of Government is contributing $20,000 toward a feasibility study of reinstating intercity rail passenger service between Toledo and Detroit.

The study is expected to cost $50,000 and the City of Toledo has been asked to provide the remaining funds needed.

The study is expected to examine such questions as which route will work out the best and which railroad is most likely to be cooperative.

Toledo and Detroit are linked by routes of Norfolk Southern, CSX and Canadian National.

It is expected that whichever route is chosen will require capital work to bring it up to passenger standards.

The last intercity service between the cities was discontinued in April 1995 when Amtrak ended the Toledo-Detroit leg of the Chicago-Toledo Lake Cities.

Making Sense of Amtrak’s Anderson

To paraphrase a well-known remark made by Marc Anthony in Act 3, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar, I come not to bury or praise Richard Anderson but to explain him.

Since taking the sole helm of Amtrak last January Anderson has become public enemy No. 1 among some railfans and passenger train advocates.

In short order he triggered intense anger by approving such changes as ending everyday discount fare programs, banning most special and charter movements, restricting operations of private rail passenger cars while sharply raising handling fees, threatening to suspend service on routes that do not meet the federal positive train control installation deadline later this year, and ending full-service dining cars on the Capitol Limited and Lake Shore Limited.

It is a common belief among his critics that Anderson doesn’t understand railroads because he came from the airline industry.

There may be some truth to that. It is probably true that Anderson does not view intercity rail passenger service in the same manner that many railfans and passenger train supporters do.

It also may be true that Anderson is overseeing a movement toward ending long-distance passenger trains that would leave vast swaths of the country without intercity passenger rail.

That doesn’t mean Anderson knows nothing about intercity passenger rail and its role in the nation’s transportation network as some of his critics would have you believe.

He is just not as convinced as many passenger train advocates that America needs 1950s style streamliners with full-service dining cars, sleepers and lounges.

Having spent much of his career in the airline industry, Anderson came to Amtrak with well-formed ideas about transportation that he would have expressed during his interview with the Amtrak board of directors.

During that interview he no doubt was asked to lay out his vision for Amtrak. He would not have been hired had that vision been incompatible with the board’s own views of Amtrak’s purpose and future.

Anderson may, indeed, have an air travel bias, which would not be surprising given his airline industry background.

He knows most long-distance travel in America is by air. Few business executives travel long distance by rail and most Americans who are not rail enthusiasts rarely, if ever, do so either.

If Anderson has a “bias” against long-distance intercity passenger trains, he would not be the first person in the transportation world to have that.

You can go back to the 1960s when Alfred Perlman of the New York Central acted as though long-distance trains were expensive dinosaurs to be removed.

Stuart Saunders of Penn Central infamy also declared that any rail passenger service beyond 500 miles was dead. So did a lot of other railroad CEOs.

Since Amtrak began in 1971 the U.S. Department of Transportation has ranged from outright hostile to benign indifference to Amtrak’s national route network.

What Amtrak appears poised to do under Anderson’s stewardship to the long-distance trains is not unlike the vision that Norman Mineta had when he was Secretary of Transportation.

Mineta pushed the corridor concept and said that long-distance trains should not stop at stations in states that do not help to underwrite the costs of those trains.

That vision did not prevail, but it is part of a long history of antagonism toward long-distance trains.

For that matter, Amtrak management itself has tolerated long-distance trains, but not since the 1970s has a new long-distance route been created.

There is much that we don’t know yet about Anderson’s views toward transportation and the role that intercity rail has to play even if he has been dropping hints about it.

Anderson said at a conference in California of passenger rail officials that Amtrak’s best marketing prospects lie in corridor services of no more than 400 miles served by DMU equipment.

During that same conference, he also was said to have emphasized the high financial losses of long-distance trains and that he must follow the law in making Amtrak a more efficient operation.

During his apprenticeship as co-CEO of Amtrak with Charles “Wick” Moorman, Anderson would have been schooled on the political realities that Amtrak faces, including why the long-distance trains remain in place decades after some believed their usefulness as transportation had expired.

Moorman would have pointed out that these trains continue to run because of long-standing political support. But maybe Anderson already knew that. Remember, Anderson is not necessarily a transportation neophyte.

Of late Anderson has come under fire from former Amtrak President Joesph Boardman, who has accused Anderson and the Amtrak board of launching a campaign to eviscerate long-distance trains.

In an interview with Trains magazine Boardman told an anecdote of how he responded when asked by the board to name Amtrak’s most important train.

“I told them it was all of the long distance trains. Did that ever make it out into the rail community? No, because it wasn’t my job to (do that),” he said.

Maybe Boardman should have made it his job. And that brings me to what may be Anderson’s most significant shortcoming.

Boardman hinted at that when he wrote in an email to public officials across the country that “Amtrak is not really a ‘private business,’ it is a “state owned enterprise.”

It may be that Amtrak was set up in 1970 as a for-profit company and ostensibly it is expected to cover its operating expenses from the fare box.

But in practice Amtrak is more like a government agency, a reality that the U.S. Supreme Court recognized in a case involving a dispute over the efforts by the U.S. Surface Transportation Board to establish on-time train standards that Amtrak could use to hold its host railroads accountable for excessive delays.

The head of a government agency does not have the luxury of thinking and acting like a Fortune 500 CEO if he or she wants to be successful.

Yet that is what Anderson has been doing by playing defense rather than offense.

Anderson has done little thus far to share his vision of Amtrak’s future with the public, let alone the constituencies that have lone manned the bulwarks to provide political support when Amtrak funding was threatened.

Boardman touched on this in his email when he said Amtrak “has begun to do surgical communications in a way that does not provide a transparent discussion of what they are doing.”

What Amtrak is doing, Boardman believes, is transforming Amtrak out of the long-distance passenger train business without saying upfront that that is the objective.

If so, it is because Anderson and the board that hired him have beliefs about transportation that are at odds with those held by many rail passenger advocates who don’t want to see Amtrak change much.

Rail passenger advocates have legitimate beliefs and visions, even if they are not always well-grounded in solid economic understanding. But so does Anderson and Amtrak’s board.

Anderson and his critics would agree that Amtrak is in the transportation business, but they have different views as to how that is to be pursued. It has nothing to do with lack of understanding of “railroading.” It has everything to do with ineffectively trying to sell that.

2015 North American Rail Passenger Outlook Brighter than it Might Seem, Railway Age Reports

Much of North America’s rail passenger growth is occurring in urban rail systems. Two Greater Cleveland RTA Blue Line trains pass in July 2013 at the Lynnfield station.

If you focus on Amtrak, it might seem that passenger rail in North America is in jeopardy.

Amtrak faces a multitude of woes including falling ridership on some routes due to delays caused by freight train congestion and a new Congress that may be more hostile to funding the nation’s rail passenger network.

But if you take into account city rail systems, the rail passenger outlook in North America is much brighter than it might appear.

In an analysis published by Railway Age, the magazine reported that not only are North American rail systems growing, but so is the scope of those rail networks along with the size of their fleets.

That has resulted in strong competition among suppliers to meet the needs of those systems. In fact, the magazine reported, the number of global equipment suppliers seeking to cash in on the growth of North American rail systems is expanding, too.

That includes suppliers from China that have been courting the North American markets.

“The numbers counter pessimistic claims that North America’s rail renaissance had run its course in 2014,” the magazine observed. “Indeed, 2014 saw several huge orders for new equipment that added to a backlog of healthy equipment orders from previous years, judging by the numbers of Railway Age’s 2015 Passenger Railcar Outlook.”

The order books of rail car manufactures are filling up with orders from coast to coast, including orders from BART in the San Francisco Bay area and the Boston-based MBTA system.

New urban rail systems are being established in cities where no rail transit systems now exist. In some instances, city governments have gone forward with plans to establish rail systems without a corresponding or outside “agency” or even “authority” to do so.

That triggered grumbling by some old line transit systems about the manner in which the Federal Transit Administration has been encouraging these city government efforts.

How widespread are these efforts by cities to start laying rail and running streetcars and light rail transit systems?

A short list of cities eyeing streetcar purchases and/or new systems includes Anaheim and Santa Ana, Calif., Miami and Miami Beach, as well as St. Augustine, Fla., Grand Rapids, Mich., Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., Winston-Salem, N.C., Providence, R.I., and El Paso, Texas. On the brink of coming to fruition are systems in Oklahoma City, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Milwaukee.

Rails are being laid in Charlotte, N.C., and in Detroit. In Ohio, the Cincinnati streetcar system is under construction, having survived efforts by the newly-elected mayor to kill the project.

Some proposed city rail systems are likely to fall victim to NIMBY opposition and/or forces trying to kill rail transit for ideological reasons.

Rail systems are expensive and opponents have seized on that with a vengeance in seeking to scuttle proposed streetcar and light rail systems.

Anti-rail forces succeeded in killing a streetcar project in San Antonio and Tampa Bay voters rejected an effort to create a light rail transit system. The St. Louis Loop trolley project may be the next to fall by the wayside.

Much media attention was also paid to the challenges facing three rail projects in the Washington, D.C., area.

This included a pair of proposed streetcar proposals that died in Arlington, Va., the threatened status of the Purple Line light rail transit project spanning two Maryland counties northeast of Washington, and the District’s slow-to-open streetcar line on H Street.

Railway Age said that media accounts cited these examples and concluded that that U.S. urban rail transit growth had peaked.

“But such setbacks failed to encompass the full breadth of U.S. rail passenger progress,” the magazine said, noting that even as San Antonio’s streetcar plan faltered the project in El Paso continues to move ahead.

Urban rail projects as well as intercity and high-speed rail projects continue to face the challenge of obtaining federal funding.

The FY 2015 budget approved by Congress reduced TIGER spending from $600 million to $500 million. That means stiffer competition for those dollars.

The budget bill also funded Amtrak at levels comparable to what it received in FY 2014. Railway Age termed that a modest victory given how much flack Amtrak has taken over its long-distance trains.

Amtrak will be seeking to order new high-speed trains this year to upgrade its Northeast Corridor service.

Funding for passenger rail equipment also continues to come from state governments and regional compacts.

Last year California and some Midwest states added to their order with car builder Nippon Sharyo by adding 45 bi-level intercity cars to an existing 130-car order.

California will add 11 cars to its initial 42-car order while the Midwest states will boost their 88-car order by 34 cars.

With so much interest in passenger rail equipment, Railway Age observed that the days have ended when “build it new” was the only option for suppliers to North American passenger rail entities.

Suppliers are finding a brisk market for retrofitting existing rail cars while also building new equipment for transit agencies that will work alongside the existing fleets.

Such is the approach being taken by Kawasaki Heavy Rail Industries. It will build up to 440 R-188 cars at a factory in Yonkers, N.Y., for use in New York City. But Kawasaki will also be retrofitting numerous R-142 cars that have been in operation for several years.

Kinkisharyo will deliver 35 “mid-section” light rail transit cars to New Jersey Transit for use with existing rolling stock on the Newark Light Rail and Hudson-Bergen Light Rail lines. This will enable N.J. Transit to increase capacity on those routes.

Earlier, Kinkisharyo used a similar approach for Dallas Area Rapid Transit’s enhancement of its existing light rail transit fleet.

There remain, of course, plenty of new car orders to be had. Bombardier continues to work on building 300 new R-179 subway cars for MTA New York City Transit. It also won a BART add-on order of 365 rapid transit cars.

China’s CNS Changchun landed a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority contract to supply 284 rapid transit cars for Boston’s “T” system.

A bid is expected this year by at least one Chinese firm, likely in a joint venture, to manufacture high speed rail trains for California.