By J. Bruce Richardson, Corridor Rail Development Corporation; January 29, 2021
Part Five
Amtrak is 50 years old this May. That’s a half century of train operations. Many of us are not aware of the number of Amtrak trains that have come and gone in those decades. Some contributors of Wikipedia have done yeoman’s work compiling lists of past and present Amtrak trains with a plethora of information about each route. Below is an abbreviated part of that work, focusing on Amtrak trains serving the West:
Amtrak Cascades
Vancouver – Eugene
May 1998 to Present
Capitols
Roseville – San Jose
December 1991 to January 1998
Colfax – San Jose
January 1998 to February 2000
Auburn – San Jose
February 2000 to April 2001
Capitol Corridor
Auburn – San Jose
April 2001 to Present
Cascadia
Seattle – Eugene
October 1995 to May 1998
Coast Daylight
Oakland – Los Angeles
May 1971 to November 1971
Oakland – San Diego
November 1971 to April 1972
Oakland – Los Angeles
April 1972 to Present
Desert Wind
Ogden – Los Angeles
October 1979 to July 1983
Salt Lake City – Los Angeles
July 1983 to May 1997
Expo ‘74
Seattle – Spokane
May 1974 to September 1974
Las Vegas Limited
Las Vegas – Los Angeles
May 1976 to August 1976
Metroliner
Los Angeles – San Diego
April 1984 to April 1985
Mount Adams
Seattle – Portland
October 1994 to May 1998
Mount Baker International
Vancouver – Seattle
May 1995 to May 1998
Mount Rainier
Seattle – Portland
May 1971 to October 1994
Seattle – Eugene
October 1994 to October 1995
Northwest Talgo
Seattle – Portland
April 1994 to September 1994
Orange County Commuter
Los Angeles – San Juan Capistrano
April 1990 to March 1994
Pacific International
Vancouver – Seattle
July 1972 to September 1981
Pacific Surfliner
San Luis Obispo – San Diego
June 2000 to Present
Pioneer
Seattle – Salt Lake City
June 1977 to June 1991
Seattle – Denver
June 1991 to May 1997
Puget Sound
Seattle – Portland
May 1971 to June 1977
San Diegan
Los Angeles – San Diego
May 1971 to June 1988
Santa Barbara – San Diego
June 1988 to April 1996
San Luis Obispo – San Diego
April 1996 to May 2000
San Joaquins
Oakland – Bakersfield
March 1974 to May 1999
Oakland/Sacramento – Bakersfield
May 1999 to Present
Spirit of California
Sacramento – Los Angeles
October 1981 to September 1983
Willamette Valley
Portland – Eugene
August 1980 to December 1981
Here is something to consider: Amtrak wasn’t created totally because of the dual introductions of the Boeing 707 and the interstate highway system, but also because of a singular political move by the federal government.
The private freight railroads operating their own and interline passenger trains were highly regulated by the Interstate Commerce Commission. “Strangulation by regulation” is not too harsh of a term. But, the railroads and their Railroad Robber Baron lords and owners brought this on themselves in the post-Civil War 19th Century and early 20th Century. These people were naughty, and they needed to be regulated; commerce and the country were better off for this.
But, by the post-World War II world in the United States, the regulators had become the new lords of the railroads after heavy-handed temporary nationalization during World War I and heavy regulation during World War II. The regulators become so accustomed to bossing the railroads around they failed to notice the change in the country and commerce and still thought the railroads would have to be monitored eternally.
The 1950s and 1960s brought the first wave of railroad mergers, where either smaller systems banded together for the sake of efficiency and financial health, or the larger railroads started gobbling up the smaller ones to (don’t say it out loud) get rid of competition.
It wasn’t unusual for the ICC, in the best fashion of heavy-handed government, to take a decade or more to make a final decision on allowing a merger. As an example, the merger between the Seaboard Air Line and Atlantic Coast Line to form Seaboard Coast Line took nearly a decade to win regulatory approval. Things change in a decade.
Here the railroads were in 1967. The airlines, also heavily regulated by the Civil Aeronautics Board, were trying to get their industry established. Their shiny new jets full of passengers were doing okay, but the airline boys really wanted the financial gravy – they wanted the U.S. Mails and express business. A compliant Lyndon Johnson Administration made that happen.
The Johnson Administration took the financial gravy away from the railroads and gave it to the airlines.
The Johnson Administration did nothing to ease the railroads’ pain when this happened. The ICC demanded the local trains – mostly carrying mail and express – still be operated. When the railroads petitioned the ICC to drop the trains, often the regulators said no, because in the opinion of the regulators, it was “in the public interest” to continue running these trains.
It’s an entirely different conversation of how the railroads fought back – mostly at the expense of the traveling public – to make these trains so uninhabitable the public “stayed away in droves.” It wasn’t a pretty picture for either the corporate image of the railroads, nor their remaining passengers.
Flash forward a few years to 1970, and the beginning of the formation of Amtrak, a government solution to ease the pain the government caused by moving the mail and express purposely away from the railroads and gave to the airlines.
While many of the former mail and express trains had in fact been discontinued or truncated to shorter routes which made no sense (it’s tough to sell a train whose route ends in the middle of a field of corn), the reduced expenses of these trains still were not great enough to cover the financial gravy losses of mail and express.
Looking globally at the picture, those local mail and express trains literally “paid the freight” and had enough profits built into them that helped subsidize the main line streamliners and the necessary infrastructure to maintain fleets of passenger trains.
As a brief example (which Amtrak often fails to enunciate), if you have a fleet of a dozen trains spread out over a system, the expenses of those trains (capital costs, maintenance costs, costs of stations and facilities, reservations systems, labor, marketing, insurance, depreciation, headquarters expenses, etc.) are charged to a dozen different trains.
Take away two of those trains, and all of those same expenses remain except for the expenses to actually run those two trains, such as labor and maintenance. While you may park the equipment for those two trains, you still have to cover the original capital costs of that equipment, ongoing insurance, etc. Suddenly, all of those expenses that were spread over a dozen trains are now spread over only 10 trains, which effectively increases the expenses of the remaining 10 trains.
Take the example further, and cut from the original dozen trains down to half that amount, just six trains. Same formula as above, the overhead stays the same – a station facility is a station facility, whether or not a single train a day uses it or a dozen trains a day use it – but the expenses for each remaining six trains go up because there are only six trains to allocate the overhead, which doesn’t change.
(This, by the way, is the huge inherent problem of trains only operated three days a week instead of daily.)
By 1970 the private railroads had fewer trains in their fleets, but still the same infrastructure, both in terms of facilities for station and maintenance, plus passenger departments, reservations systems, etc.
While it was true the freight side of the railroads provided a good base of income and profit, the railroad managers kept looking at line items charged to passenger trains and were shaking their heads at the red ink. The financial gravy of the mail and express which used to keep at bay that red ink was gone, thanks to the Johnson Administration.
It is true more than a few of the named streamliners were making money in 1970 and, of course, the Southern Railway and the Denver & Rio Grande, along with the Rock Island all decided to stay out of Amtrak, along with some other smaller railroads. We know the story; in the end, it all ended up with Amtrak as the sole passenger railroad provider, courtesy of the Nixon Administration and the federal government, providing a financial solution to the passenger trains which had been killed by its immediate predecessor, the Johnson Administration.
A healthy debate can be had whether or not if the Johnson Administration had merely expanded the mail and express service to include airmail as a choice for first class mail instead of taking everything away from the railroads and giving it to the airlines and trucking industry, whether or not just part of the mail and express contracts would have been enough for the railroads to have financially healthy passenger train fleets.
If the railroads had kept their passenger trains, would the soon-to-come business of FedEx and UPS been enough to re-imagine mail and express trains? We know that the Railway Express Agency went out of business simultaneously with the removal of these trains. We also know the federal REA Express operating permits were obtained by FedEx to start that service. The possibilities may never be known other than for speculation as to what may have happened.
It has been said the most chilling sentence uttered is “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.” Half a century later, the government certainly “helped” the railroads and taxpayers who choose to travel by passenger train.