Amtrak Must Die - New York Times Before we start on Amtrak, I should confess a longstanding bias. I have been praising trains for as long as I have been speaking. In March 1954, at the age of 11 months, I was on the station platform in Lafayette, Ind., when a train from Chicago suddenly appeared around the bend. The sight and sound of the huge diesel locomotive apparently triggered something in my brain. After my grandmother got off the train, I described her arrival by uttering my first sentence. "Gaga choochoo," I said, and went on repeating it for months. The fixation moved on to "The Little Engine That Could" and continued through adulthood. I covered the walls of my apartments with paintings of locomotives and rode trains across America and Canada, over the Andes, around Europe. I developed an appreciation for even the miserable trips, like the one on Amtrak's Crescent that ended in New Orleans with an elderly man declaring that his three years in a Russian prison during the Bolshevik Revolution were never this bad. No matter how often Amtrak disappointed, I kept riding. In the hierarchy of train lovers, I was at least a train buff and maybe even a "rail fan," which is the formal term for the ultimate obsessive. The informal term, coined by railroad workers and now used by the obsessives themselves, is "foamer," as in foaming at the mouth. I sometimes worried that trains were economic dinosaurs. But when the free-marketeer in me suspected Amtrak was a government boondoggle, the foamer said it was only fair to subsidize trains since there was already so much aid going to planes and highways. For a long time, I enthusiastically rode trains but avoided economic analyses of rail travel. My policy toward Amtrak was don't ask, don't tell. This year, though, the figures have become hard to ignore. Amtrak is nearly bankrupt, and just threatened to shut down the whole system in July. It has hocked just about everything it owns, including a portion of Pennsylvania Station in New York that was mortgaged last year to cover three months of operating expenses -- the equivalent, critics noted, of mortgaging your house to pay grocery bills. Amtrak's president, George Warrington, abruptly quit in March, shortly after a federal commission recommended to Congress that his railroad be dismantled. One of Warrington's last tasks before quitting was to go before the House Appropriations Committee and renounce his previous promises that Amtrak was on a "glide path" to self-sufficiency. "Frankly, Mr. Chairman," he said to Representative Harold Rogers, "we've run out of tools in the toolbox to keep the service together." Rogers consulted a page of numbers, frowning like a father going over his son's MasterCard bill, until he came to a line with $347.45. That was the amount of money per passenger that Amtrak lost on the Sunset Limited train running from Florida to California. "Why," Rogers asked, "is this route still being run?" A fair question. The previous week I had been contemplating it myself aboard that very train. There is a simple answer, which Amtrak's president provided, but first let me give you a foamer's perspective. I picked up the Sunset Limited in Houston, which, like many American cities, has a beautiful train station without any trains. The stately marble terminal built by the Southern Pacific Railroad now serves as the vestibule of a baseball stadium. Train passengers have been shunted to the edge of downtown to a no-man's-land of junkyards and warehouses. The station, which looks like a small-town bus depot, sits beneath freeway ramps. It's not an inspiring place to start a trip, but at least we're not standing in line to have our shoes searched, and there is still nothing like a locomotive for making a grand entrance. Boarding the train, I head for one of the two sleepers, the modern version of the Pullman cars that used to be manned by porters known for their "miles of smiles." The porter for my sleeper is not smiling. He barely looks at me as he announces: "You can't use your room. I haven't made it up yet. I go up to the dome car and watch the receding lights of Houston's skyline. A lounge car on a long-distance train must be the friendliest place in America -- nowhere do you find so many different kinds of people happy to talk to strangers. As midnight approaches, a drunken young guy in an orange T-shirt is dispensing romantic advice. "I can tell you two still love each other," he says to a 40-ish pair sitting across from him. The woman, an attractive redhead named Catherine, has been explaining that she used to be married to the man next to her, Robbie, and was amazed to run into him on the train. "No, we're not in love," Catherine says. I swear to God, I had no idea he would be on this train. Robbie, a handsome guy if you don't mind the shoulder-length gray mane of an aging heavy-metal rocker, disagrees with her. "Now tell me you don't think about me every day," he says. "I don't think about you every day," she says. Just sometimes. You're lying. The drunk persists. I never saw you before in my life, but I can tell you love each other. "It would never work," Catherine says to Robbie. You'll never change. "There you go again," Robbie says. You were always giving up on me. Just 'cause I didn't come home didn't mean I was with someone else. She starts sobbing. He gets up and walks behind her so he can stroke her shoulders. "I never stopped loving you," he says. She looks up. You slept with my sister! You slept with her first! An elderly woman nearby looks on in horror as the drunk goes on telling them they're meant for each other. I retreat to my room, which the attendant has made up, though he left a damp dirty towel on the floor next to the toilet. There's more indifferent service at breakfast. The Transcontinental special, an omelet, is reasonably good, but the staff is unfriendly and unenergetic. When an enormous lake appears outside next to the train in the middle of the desert, I ask a waiter -- who makes this trip twice a week -- what we're looking at. He shrugs. "I have no idea," he says. Water. Up in the dome car, though, the sights are being enthusiastically described by a guide from the National Park Service, which manages this 65,000-acre lake along the Mexican border named the Amistad Reservoir. As the train proceeds west, the guide identifies the varieties of local sagebrush and tells us where a member of Butch Cassidy's gang was killed trying to rob a train. The foamers in the car are blissfully taking pictures and assiduously tracking the train's progress. Two rail buffs from England covetously fondle my G.P.S. receiver, which pinpoints our location to within 50 feet. Its electronic map one-ups their paper map, but then I'm promptly outfoamed by one of them, a composer from London named Henry Lewis, who gives me a CD of railroad songs from his musical revue titled "Brief Encounters on the Penistone Line." The musical comedy, which has been performed on that line, is the latest of what Lewis calls his "transport revues." One of his most successful, "Joan of Kent," was about an English housewife who hears voices in the supermarket telling her to oppose the new high-speed railroad from London to the Chunnel. "I was sympathetic to her," he says, "but all my subsequent shows have been pro-rail." The other passengers include some phobics afraid of flying, especially after Sept. 11, but most seem to be here because they like trains. "You see stuff you weren't really meant to see," says Catherine Suddarth, the redhead who was arguing with her ex-husband last night. She explains that the train ride is her vacation -- and that he isn't really her ex-husband. I never saw him before in my life. We made up the marriage as we went along for that other guy's benefit. One of those things you do on a train. Suddarth, a market researcher who lives in Greensboro, N.C., is on a one-week circuit of the country. It's just a great way to relax and meet people, but you have to be in a certain mind-set. You have to adapt to whatever happens. The least happy passengers are the ones paying attention to the timetable. The train keeps slowing down or stopping altogether, generally without explanation. As we cross Arizona Saturday night, we're three hours late, normal for this route. "The problem is that some passengers are on regular time," a mechanic says. We're on Amtrak time. Shortly before dawn on Sunday, we come to an especially prolonged halt in the California desert. After a cryptic announcement -- We had an accident" -- rumors circulate in the dining car and the dome car. The foamers have placed us precisely 102 miles southeast of Palm Springs, next to a campground used by young Californians racing all-terrain vehicles on the sand dunes. A passenger reports hearing thumps just after the engineer braked. The thumps are explained by another passenger who has been listening to a police radio: the train ran over someone. Were kids in dune buggies playing chicken with the locomotive? That theory is popular until we hear that the engineer saw the victim, a young man, lying immobile in the tracks, and that his dune buggy was found parked nearby. Was it suicide? Did he get drunk and pass out? A crowd in the dome car debates the possibilities as police cars come and go and teenagers go on racing their dune buggies alongside the train. One passenger, a veteran who has ridden these dunes himself, hypothesizes that the victim was dead before the train got there. "There are always accidents when guys get drunk at night and go out riding," the veteran says. Maybe he was killed, and his buddies said: 'Let's move him to the tracks. That way no one can investigate what happened, and his family will collect some money from Amtrak. Later, though, the local coroner's office will find no evidence of foul play in the death of Michael Black Jr., a 20-year-old busboy from Chino. When the train finally starts moving, three and a half hours after the accident, there's no hope of reaching Los Angeles in time for passengers booked on the train for Northern California and Oregon. To catch up with it, they have to get off at our next stop, Palm Springs, and ride a chartered bus several hundred miles up the coast. It could be worse. A few weeks ago the Sunset Limited was already so late by Tucson that it couldn't get to Los Angeles in time for the start of its return trip, so the train simply turned around in Tucson, leaving the passengers with a 500-mile bus ride to Los Angeles. We're nearly eight hours behind schedule when we pull into our penultimate stop, Pomona, but then we suddenly make up so much time that we're only six hours late arriving in Los Angeles. The secret to this miracle is in Amtrak's timetable. It allows two hours and 42 minutes for the 32-mile trip from Pomona into Los Angeles, which actually takes only about 50 minutes. Amtrak routinely pads its timetables this way, and yet one-third of its long-distance trains still arrived late last year. Tony Haswell, who led the passengers' advocacy group that lobbied for Amtrak's creation in 1971, used the Freedom of Information Act to identify the worst train of all: the Sunset Limited, which, in the stretch between New Orleans and Los Angeles, pulled in late more than 70 percent of the time. Haswell refuses to take it anymore, even though the train stops right in his hometown, Tucson. "I have to go to a wedding in Houston," says the man who is hailed as the father of Amtrak, "but I'm going to fly." Why does Amtrak keep running the Sunset Limited? Because it goes through so many Congressional districts. Amtrak's president acknowledged it himself in his reply at that hearing. "We are a creature of the political process," Warrington replied. The Sunset Limited, he explained, is "important to maintaining a fragile political national coalition to support Amtrak." Amtrak's defenders often say that if Congress would just provide a generous and "secure" source of financing -- ideally a share of the revenue from gasoline taxes -- we'd have trains like the ones overseas. But those railroads are good in large part because they're not sprawling, unwieldy systems like Amtrak. If there were a European version of Amtrak, one centralized monopoly running the continent's trains, it would be pandering to politicians in the Pyrenees and in Ukraine by running a half-empty train from Madrid to Moscow -- and subsidizing it with revenues from the Paris-Lyon trains. The Acela, which runs on the Northeast Corridor, is Amtrak's closest thing to a success story, particularly since its airline competition was slowed by security delays. Before Sept. 11, the US Airways and Delta shuttles carried nearly 60 percent of the passengers between New York and Washington; now nearly 60 percent of passengers go by train. But Acela has had more than its share of embarrassing missteps. After a painfully long planning process -- the Acela's debut, in 2000, was three years behind schedule -- Amtrak produced a train that goes nowhere near as fast as its European counterparts. Because of track restrictions and a goof in its construction (it turned out four inches wider than planned, so it can't properly tilt on some curves), the Acela hits its peak speed of 150 m.p.h. for only 18 miles between New York and Boston. While European countries have been laying new high-speed tracks, Amtrak is deferring maintenance on tracks in the Northeast Corridor to subsidize long-distance trains elsewhere. Europe's national railroads suffer from some of the same problems as Amtrak: meddling politicians, inept management, a bloated central bureaucracy and an unproductive work force protected by powerful unions. Amtrak's veteran workers receive up to five full years of severance pay if their routes are shut down. But in Europe the international rivalry has put pressure on the railroads to improve service -- German pride required a high-speed train to match the French TGV. Most foreign railroads are subsidized, but the best ones require much less help than Amtrak, and some, notably in Japan, are private companies providing superb and profitable service. If America really wanted to emulate Europe and Japan, we'd break Amtrak up into smaller railroads run either by regional public agencies or by private companies. During the past decade, Amtrak's costs have been increasing while airlines and bus companies have been cutting theirs. Train lovers and Amtrak executives love to mention the "hundreds of billions of dollars" of federal money spent on highways and airports and air-traffic control. But virtually all that money comes directly from drivers and airline passengers through taxes on gasoline and plane tickets. While taxpayers provide the average Amtrak rider with a subsidy of 30 cents per mile, the average driver or passenger on a plane or bus gets less than a penny, according to Wendell Cox, a member of the Amtrak Reform Council, overseers appointed by Congress and the president. Still, don't trains deserve a subsidy because of all the social and environmental benefits they provide? Don't they ease congestion, save energy and reduce pollution? Not enough to notice. Americans use cars, planes and buses for 99.8 percent of the miles they travel between cities, so the remaining 0.2 percent scarcely matters. Analysts at the Cato Institute calculate that even if Amtrak's trains disappeared from the relatively popular Northeast Corridor lines, there would be no need for extra flights (the air shuttles would simply use bigger planes), and each lane of the New Jersey Turnpike would have to accommodate at most 47 additional cars per hour -- just 2 percent of the lane's capacity. For most Americans, trains are either unavailable or too inconvenient and expensive compared with planes or buses. Cutting the Sunset Limited might actually result in fewer trucks on the roads because it would be easier to ship freight by rail if Amtrak weren't given priority on the Union Pacific's tracks. What environmental or economic sense does it make to give 170 passengers on the Sunset Limited priority over a freight train that's keeping 500 trucks off the road? While Amtrak executives claim they need subsidies to counter the unfair competition from highways, the freight railroads have been operating profitably and gaining market share from trucks during the past decade. American freight railroads have been so successful that their biggest problem is congestion on the tracks. Their executives bitterly resent being forced to let Amtrak use their tracks at discount rates. In addition to complaining about the delays that result, they have been warning that it's dangerous to mix faster passenger trains with freight trains on congested tracks. The freight railroads, like the airlines and bus companies, were forced to become more efficient after their industry was deregulated. Would Amtrak's customers also benefit if the federal government stopped trying to control the passenger-train business? Congress could make a clean break by reviving a 19th-century tradition for dealing with failing railroads: liquidation of assets. That's the approach recommended by Joseph Vranich, a former spokesman for Amtrak who became its chief critic with a 1997 book titled "Derailed." He calls the railroad "a halfway house for bad managers." In conjunction with libertarians at the Cato Institute and the Reason Public Policy Institute, Vranich has proposed letting a court sell off Amtrak's assets and consider bids from public organizations, like regional transit agencies or consortiums of states, and also from private companies. Vranich, unlike some of his libertarian allies, doesn't mind the idea of continuing federal subsidies to the new owners of the tracks and trains. "But if we have to subsidize any passenger trains," he says, "let's get our money's worth." A less radical reform for American trains would be to introduce competition gradually, as the Amtrak Reform Council recommended to Congress. Its plan would turn the Northeast Corridor over to a new public corporation, essentially a regional public agency run by state and federal officials. Amtrak would initially keep operating trains in the Northeast and elsewhere, but within several years, private and public competitors could be allowed to bid for routes. Some optimists believe that short-distance trains in the Northeast and other densely populated corridors -- Southern California, Florida, parts of the Midwest and Texas -- could cover their operating expenses and possibly generate a profit if they were run by a private company freed of political constraints (like labor contracts dictated by Congress). Not even optimists, though, expect Amtrak's long-distance network to become profitable. Long-distance trains have been losing passengers to planes throughout the world, including Europe. Whatever reform or rescue gets through Congress may well involve shutting down some of the costlier trains, starting with the Sunset Limited. Yet even if the Sunset Limited no longer crosses the Southwest, there may still be solace for train buffs who want to see the desert in style. The new hope, as I discovered on my way home from California, is to reinvent another grand railroad tradition: Fred Harvey and the Harvey Girls. When you board the American Orient Express, as I did in Los Angeles, the first clue that you're not on Amtrak comes in the lobby of the train station. A line of smiling porters in crisp blue-and-gold uniforms is waiting there, and they will not take no for an answer when they offer to carry your bag. They escort you to the train, a collection of half-century-old Streamliner sleepers and lounge cars with gleaming brass and rich mahogany. The trains were refurbished at a cost of $15 million during the 1980's in the mistaken belief that business travelers wanted a deluxe overnight train between Washington and Chicago. There weren't enough people with both the time and the expense accounts to support a regularly scheduled train. Only after that venture went bust did a new owner find a way to profit from long-distance train travel. The secret was to go even slower than Amtrak. Our train would take 10 days to get from Los Angeles to Washington. It would meander on little-used tracks -- rare mileage," as foamers call it -- and stop along the way to let the passengers go sightseeing. We were on a "land cruise," a new term in the travel industry, although the concept wouldn't have seemed novel to 19th-century railroaders. The national parks in the West were created in large part because the railroads wanted to sell tickets to sightseers. The first stop on our trip, the Grand Canyon, became a tourist destination thanks to the Santa Fe Railroad. When we got off the train a few steps from the canyon, we were visiting not merely a natural wonder. To historians of the travel industry, to scholars of chain restaurants and hotels, this was the shrine to Fred Harvey, the great patron saint of tourists. Until Harvey came along in the 1880's, service in the railroad industry was even worse than it is today on Amtrak. When the train stopped to get water for the steam engine, passengers would dash into a shack next to the tracks for a 20-minute meal of greasy, stale, often rancid food. Harvey, a freight agent on the Burlington Railroad, couldn't interest his own railroad in better meals, so he took his vision of a fast-food chain to the Santa Fe, which was then desperate to attract riders. After he took over restaurants along the Santa Fe's route, the railroad prospered with a new advertising slogan, "Meals by Fred Harvey." To improve service, Harvey trained a crack corps of waitresses called Harvey Girls. At a time when it was said there were "no ladies west of Dodge City and no women west of Albuquerque," Harvey carefully recruited girls of "good character" and housed them in supervised dormitories. Dressed in starched aprons and high collars, they became Western icons of domestic virtue, inspiring a Judy Garland movie ("The Harvey Girls," with its Oscar-winning train song, "On the Atchison, Topeka & the Santa Fe") and a Will Rogers line: "They have kept the West supplied with food and wives." Harvey became renowned for paying his employees well while also terrifying them with surprise inspections. When he died in 1901, his last words to his sons were reported to be, "Don't cut the ham too thin." After visiting El Tovar Hotel and the rest of Harvey's legacy at the Grand Canyon, I realized he wouldn't last long at Amtrak. The railroad has some wonderfully dedicated workers who love trains, but Amtrak has never figured out what to do with the ones just there for a paycheck. Even after its recent Service Success program sent the entire work force off for weekend training sessions, the ratings of customer satisfaction did not improve. But Fred Harvey would feel right at home on the American Orient Express. As we were heading away from the Grand Canyon, we sat down to dinner at tables decorated with flowers and set with china, silver and crystal. The four-course meal was prepared by Warren McLeod, a veteran of Manhattan's best restaurants. His last job was as poissonier at Alain Ducasse. His food was consistently great, but the biggest contrast with Amtrak was his attitude. Unlike the dining-car attendants on the Sunset Limited, he did not believe in ordering diners out of the car the minute he was scheduled to be off duty. When some stragglers showed up one morning just as breakfast was supposed to be ending, he immediately announced he'd be open for another hour. When I talked to him later, he couldn't understand my surprise. "It was just common sense," he said. Food is available all day long here. If you come to me and say, 'I've got a snacky thing going on,' I'll say, 'Give me 10 minutes, and I'm all over it.'  The American Orient Express could afford service like this because it had three dozen workers taking care of just 80 passengers, whereas Amtrak had just a dozen or so staff members looking after the 170 passengers on my trip. Still, there isn't that much difference in the cost. The American Orient's basic fare -- covering meals and a shared room with a couch, two bunk beds, a sink and a small cubicle with a toilet -- was $3,990 per passenger, which sounds astronomical compared with the $660 it would cost for similar amenities on the Sunset Limited's transcontinental trip. But then, the trip on the Sunset Limited is only three days, whereas the luxury train keeps you fed and entertained for 11 days. The fare per day per passenger works out to $220 on Amtrak versus $363 on the luxury train, and remember, the fare on the Sunset Limited doesn't cover all of Amtrak's costs. The Sunset Limited loses an average of $115 per day per passenger. When you add that in, the cost per passenger on the Sunset Limited climbs to $335 per day, nearly the same as the fare on the luxury train. The American Orient Express is doing so well that it is refurbishing a second train and expanding its itineraries, adding trips through Mexico, the antebellum South, the Canadian Rockies and New England during foliage season. This summer a rival, the Acadian Railway Company, is starting similar trips from New York through Maine and Canada. So far the land-cruise business is still beyond most people's price range and appeals mainly to the elderly, but then that was the condition of the ocean-cruise business a couple of decades ago. Ship operators have since cut costs to attract the middle class as well as younger passengers, and train operators could probably do the same if the heavily subsidized competition from Amtrak didn't make it harder for them to build a larger customer base and achieve economies of scale. If Washington had reacted to the demise of the trans-Atlantic passenger ships by nationalizing ocean liners and subsidizing mediocre service, there'd be a lot fewer private cruise ships plying the waters. I tried making these arguments to the train buffs on the American Orient Express. We were sitting on what we called the foamers' bench, a round settee, watching the Texas desert through the wraparound windows at the rear of the train. The view couldn't have been lovelier, and we were thrilled to think that this very observation car had once been part of the fabled Twentieth Century Limited, but my companions wanted more. "I love this train, but I want Amtrak too," said Karl Zimmermann, a railroad historian who was one of the lecturers on board. I like a working train that's taking me from one place to another. I don't want to just have cruises. I said it's not fair to have taxpayers subsidize our hobby, but my conviction wavered when the conductor came by and mentioned an upcoming sight. The reason we were pulling into a siding, he said, was to make way for the Sunset Limited, which was coming from the opposite direction on this stretch of single track. I dashed to the vestibule and leaned out to watch the distant locomotive approaching. Bracing for the roar, for another gaga choochoo moment, I wondered if this would be the last time I would ever see this train. Was the Sunset Limited going literally and figuratively into the sunset? I was preparing to mourn the end of a tradition as the last car disappeared into the West, but I didn't get the chance. The Sunset Limited ingloriously coasted to a halt right alongside us. "They've lost their head-in power," our conductor said. As we pulled out of the siding, the Sunset Limited was still sitting out there in the sagebrush baking in the midday heat. It was not the romantic last glimpse I was hoping for, but maybe that's just as well. Sometimes a foamer needs to see that Amtrak is going nowhere. All it's doing is blocking the tracks.