Stardate 20020606.1443

(On Screen): Amtrak is in financial trouble again. It needs an immediate infusion of $200 million or it will have to stop operating in less than a month. Perhaps it's time we all stopped pretending that Amtrak even made any sense.

I've ridden the railroads in Europe, and they work very well there. But Europe has a lot higher population density than the US, and the cities are not as far apart. Trains make sense when you're traveling a couple of hundred kilometers. They don't make sense when you're traveling a couple of thousand kilometers.

The commercial rail companies ran passenger rail for a long time as a profit making operation, back when it was the best way available to move a lot of people a long way rapidly over land. But the golden age of passenger rail ended in the 1950's with the development of the first practical large-body passenger aircraft. The airlines could move you further and faster and charge less for doing so; it was a win all around. And by the 1960's, the railroads were beginning to feel the economic pain. Problem was that they, as a regulated industry, weren't being permitted to drop passenger routes which routinely lost money. Eventually the new plan was to nationalize all passenger rail and leave the commercial rail companies to do what they do best: move freight.

Amtrak has been losing money ever since. It could have been profitable, but not with the route structure which was imposed on it. Politics got in the way: Congress decided that if tax money was going to get used to finance the system, then it was going to serve as many states as possible. So there's a rail route which runs from Seattle to Chicago and takes about three days to get there. Or you can fly in about four hours. Not too many people are taking the train.

The reality is that train travel only makes economic sense as a commercial transportation technology in areas where the population density is as high as it is in Western Europe. Right now there are only four ways it can be done profitably:

1. Commuter rail inside a metropolis. This means things like the Long Island Railroad, or passenger rail around metropolitan Boston.

2. As a novelty. The best example of this I can think of is that Silverton-Durango railroad.

3. Between cities in high density areas. That means Boston-to-Washington, LA-to-SD, Dallas-to-Houston, and perhaps Detroit-to-Chicago-to-Milwaukee.

4. As cruise-liner-on-steel-wheels. In other words, marketed as an experience directly, at high price, emphasizing luxury and the experience.

That last one is the only justification for an LA-to-Chicago run. It means to follow the path that passenger shipping did after the airlines appeared. There are still a lot of cruise liners, but now they're marketed as vacations in themselves, as floating hotels, rather than as a way to get from here to there. Indeed, in most cases you get off at the same place you got on. You can still actually travel that way, such as London to NYC on the QEII, but those who travel like that do so because they like luxury ships. Trains can do the same thing, but it means a radical change in nearly everything. It means that the train consists mostly of cars with rooms, with the rest being services such as diners, bars, dome-cars and so on. It means you don't stop at every whistle-stop town along the way. It means you choose your route mainly for scenic value, places like the Rockies or the route between Portland and San Francisco (which is really lovely in southern Oregon). It mainly means you abandon the idea of rail as a form of comprehensive transit between cities.

Amtrak isn't any of those four, really. It runs some intra-city transit in a few places, but mostly what Amtrak was designed to become was airline-on-steel-wheels, and for that there is nothing that rail can do which can't be done better by jets, buses and cars. Until now, the only way Amtrak could compete with the airlines was on price, and that's why they're still in the red.

It's time to give up. Amtrak was a romantic notion but it's not economically viable and we don't really need it. 9/10ths of the system needs to be lopped off right now; Amtrak needs to be permitted to concentrate just on the corridors where rail really works. If Amtrak is really going to be privatized, then part of that deal is to give its management the power to shut down unprofitable routes.

The fact that Europe can make commercial passenger rail work has nothing to do with us. It's 850 kilometers from Berlin to Paris; but it's more than 1100 from NYC to Chicago and nearly 4000 from NYC to LA. In a nation as prosperous and spread out as the US, rail no longer makes sense as a form of long distance passenger travel.