10th anniversary post: Yonder comes the train?

 

Amtrak station, Mount Pleasant, Iowa

Since moving to Iowa in 1989, I've made regular trips to Chicago for family, pleasure, and professional reasons. I've made exactly two of those trips by train, which requires a 75 mile drive south to Mount Pleasant. The first was in July 2014, with my then-17-year-old son Eli; that train was 2 .5 hours late getting in; we passed the time agreeably at a coffee shop on Mount Pleasant's town square (See my posts "Yonder Comes the Train?" and "California 2014 (With Postscript, Chicago with Eli)." But we were fully four hours late arriving in Chicago, and had little food and no Wi-Fi en route. The return trip to Iowa also experienced considerable delays. At the time, I noted quite a fair number of passengers were willing to put up with even this level of service, and that with some effort "There could be" a future for interstate train travel in America.

The train arrives, 2014

It took more than ten years, but I tried the train again last month when I went to Chicago for one of the Center for Neighborhood Technology's Visionary Voices panels on housing. The experience was altogether better, and I'm encouraged not to let another ten years go by before I try it. The train from California was an hour or so late, and the return trip was on time. Parking is still free at the Mount Pleasant station, though due to construction in the area, it was difficult to find--impossible, in fact, in the absence of signage, but in time I was able to get directions from the station agent.

Remote parking, two blocks from the Mount Pleasant Amtrak station

The train seemed near capacity in both directions, with a surprising proportion of passengers being Amish. There was plenty of room for my backpack and small suitcase--there was no baggage check in Iowa anyhow--and plenty of legroom, unlike any airplane I've recently experienced. On the train, I cheerfully avoided the constant clot of traffic around Chicago, and spent less on tickets than I would have for two nights of parking at my hotel north of downtown. However, there still is no Wi-Fi on the California Zephyr, and the snack car closed almost as soon as we boarded. 

Some of my improved experience might be random coincidence, but the administration of President Joe Biden did supply some long-overdue upgrades through a $66 million appropriation won from Congress (Hughes 2024; see also Bragg 2024). That is being used to improve tracks, purchase new cars, and add at least one route. The Floridian goes from Chicago to Miami, following a route east through Cleveland and Washington, and then down the East Coast. This neglects the cities of Tennessee, but that state's government is working on service to Chattanooga and Nashville (Gang and Mazza 2024). Meanwhile, the states of New York and Pennsylvania are confident there soon will be service from New York City to Scranton (Ionescu 2024). Those states must be less rail-hostile than Iowa's government. Or Indiana's. 

All this progress is contingent on not being stopped by the incoming Trump administration appointees, many of whom (like efficiency doge Elon Musk) have ties to the auto industry. A lot depends on how much Republicans in Congress and state legislatures value the presence of Amtrak in their states, which is really difficult to predict. More ideological conservatives find trains to be an unwarranted use of government power, though of course they have no objections to the government building and maintaining highways (Russell 2024).

Eric Godwyn of the Transit Costs Project, interviewed last summer on the Strong Towns podcast, recently published, with three co-authors, a set of recommendations on how to improve rail transportation in the U.S. (Godwyn, Levy, Ensari, and Chitty 2024). Godwyn advocates a federal government commitment to intercity high-speed rail, developing minimum technical standards and testing to enable cross-country integration, stronger connections to universities and industry for labor force training, better internal project management and assessment, and better and more expedited planning (pp. 17-39). High-speed rail is defined as at least 155 miles per hour, which would get you from Mount Pleasant to Chicago in an hour and a half.

Whether this is even imaginable depends on broader agreement that the need to "decarbonize intercity travel" (p. 41) is enough of a public good to put public money behind it. If policy makers can agree on that, then they can focus on an efficient and enjoyable experience that will entice passengers. My experience last month suggests there's been some progress in that vein, but more could be done.

The California Zephyr crosses the Mississippi River,
12 November 2024

Yonder comes the train?

California Zephyr pulls into Mt. Pleasant, Iowa

It had been a few years since I'd ridden Amtrak, what with the nearest station being 75 miles away and me always coming up with some reason to drive. But driving and parking in Chicago are getting old, and Eli was game, so the two of us took the train to Chicago and back last week. The pleasant and unpleasant aspects of the journey leaves me with no clear answer to "Is there a future for passenger rail travel in the United States?" All I can say is, "There could be."

The positives: It was a very pleasant mode of travel, far more relaxing than driving in metropolitan traffic jams, and more with more room to move around than a car affords. Certainly trains are far more spacious and comfortable than flying in a commercial airplane.There's more room for luggage, and you can bring your own drinks.

Passengers packed into a commercial airplane. Note the "fasten seat belt" sign is lighted.

As the usual driver, I had the luxury on the train of reading, looking out the window, or fiddling with my iPod. Once we arrived we could be on our way, with no parking fees or hassles.

The negatives: With a car you can leave whenever you wish, instead of having to conform to the train's schedule. You can also stop for refreshments wherever you wish; the train has an on-board restaurant and snack bar, but by the time we boarded the snack bar was thoroughly picked over, with only beer and one can of Red Bull remaining to drink. You can also not stop: The train made four scheduled stops between Mt. Pleasant and Chicago, which would be unnecessary unless you're traveling with very small children. You can smoke in your car, though your lungs and any fellow passengers would rather you didn't. Costs are hard to compare; using the current IRS compensation rate for driving (55 cents per mile), and adding tolls and parking fees, two round-trip train tickets are more expensive, but only slightly (if you discount the 75 miles we had to drive to get to the station).

Trains are much slower than airplane for long-distance travel, and training is slower than driving, especially since--and this was the most negative of the negatives--the train left more than two hours late both going and coming, and was running even later by the time we arrived at our destinations. Our train into Chicago, scheduled to arrive at 2:50 p.m., actually arrived at 6:30. This was not an exceptional experience; every other run of the California Zephyr I observed while in Chicago was profoundly behind schedule.

In Mt. Pleasant the train's lateness meant we spent a couple unanticipated hours exploring a charming small town. In Chicago it meant we spent a couple unanticipated hours packed into Union Station's waiting room...

...with everyone else waiting for various trains that were all running late. It's worth noting that all these people, for whatever reasons, were willing to endure considerable hardship in order to travel by train. How much ridership could trains expect if they were somehow able to mitigate this hardship? You see why I'm stuck on "There could be" when contemplating the future of passenger rail travel.

There's been a lot written about Amtrak of late, some of which are listed and linked at the end of this post. Most indicate both the positives and the negatives I identified are widely perceived. Most suggest solutions to the problems, as opposed to closing the system altogether. The principal remaining obstacle is identifying the source for those solutions. Here we have a product for which there is substantial demand (see above picture) and widely-credited public goods, yet neither the private sector (which favors short-term return over long-term investment) nor the public sector (which favors distributing benefits widely over rational allocation) are oriented to grasping the opportunity.

[Note: This glib formulation skips over parts of both sectors that are overtly hostile to intercity rail. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California), for example, is committed to blocking federal funding for that state's proposed high-speed rail line from San Francisco to Los Angeles. He wants to use scarce transportation funding on highways. Some of the congested highways we traveled on during our recent California vacation are already 12 lanes wide.... Similarly, here in Iowa, the unremitting hostility of legislative Republicans, eventually joined by Governor Terry Branstad, led to blocking the Iowa portion of a proposed Chicago-to-Iowa City route ("Iowa Slams Door on Amtrak" (2013)).]

If I were Emperor of Transportation, with no worries about congressional approval, I would:

• close on some lines in the 46 states currently served by Amtrak, and reduce runs on the long-distance lines. This would allow focus on the more profitable routes, and entering into the world of bullet trains, while leaving occasional adventure options for serious train enthusiasts. Eventually we could add more frequent runs on the profitable lines, as well as add routes once our now-excellent performance stimulates demand.
• build and operate tracks everywhere Amtrak runs. Except for a few megalopolises, Amtrak rents track from freight operators, which means slower and more interrupted runs on degraded tracks. Owning our own tracks means we could quickly address scheduling issues, and probably improved safety as well.
• upgrade service on trains. We shouldn't run out of food. There should be Wi-Fi. (Jarrett Walker cheerfully posted to his "Human Transit" on the Cascades line, but the only Wi-Fi on my train was when we stopped briefly in Galesburg, Illinois.) I'm not pro-frills, but there are ways to make trains more comfortable and attractive.
• upgrade the human face of Amtrak, which currently is uneven. There is no reason to begin a trip by berating passengers who have been stuck in train station limbo for two hours, as our conductor on the return trip did. All Amtrak staff should use words accurately with the intent of informing passengers. The words "brief" and "momentarily" have specific meanings in the English language, and should only be used to convey those meanings.

America seems to me to be no longer taking for granted that single-occupancy automobiles are the answer to every transportation need. An intercity rail system that is comfortable, reliable, and affordable could be an important part of our future. Could be.

A COUPLE STOLEN MAPS...

On-time performance by route, from washingtonpost.com/wonkblog

Swiped from modernsurvivalblog.com

MORE ON THIS SUBJECT

"Amtrak Unlimited" site includes a discussion forum: http://www.amtraktrains.com/

Christopher Ingraham, "The Sorry State of Amtrak's On-Time Performance, Mapped," Wonkblog, 10 July 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/07/10/the-sorry-state-of-amtraks-on-time-performance-mapped/

Jeremy, "Transforming Amtrak to a Useful and Sustainable Network," Critical Transit, 26 May 2013, http://www.criticaltransit.com/2013/05/26/transforming-amtrak-to-a-useful-and-sustainable-network/

David Levinson, "Travels through California: Berkeley to Davis via BART and Amtrak," Transportationist, 6 February 2014, http://transportationist.org/2014/02/06/travels-through-california-berkeley-to-davis-via-bart-and-amtrak/

Christopher MacKechnie, "Review of Waiting on a Train," Public Transport, n.d., http://publictransport.about.com/od/Transit_War/a/Review-Of-Waiting-On-A-Train.htm

James McCommons, Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service (Chelsea Green, 2009)

Bruce Nourish, "Talking Sense About Amtrak," Seattle Transit Blog, 18 April 2013, http://seattletransitblog.com/2013/04/18/talking-sense-about-amtrak/

Tanya Snyder, "Jarrett Walker: Empty Buses Serve a Purpose," Streetsblog USA, 14 August 2013, http://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/08/14/jarrett-walker-empty-buses-serve-a-purpose/