WILL STUART SAUNDERS WIN THE ARGUMENT?

To this day, the Amtrak we have is the Amtrak the member railroads left taxpayers with.  Thus, for example, Penn Central worked with the federal Office of High Speed Ground Transportation to establish what we understand today as the Acela corridor, and it continued the frequent corridor service New York Central had sold to New York state authorities as a way to get rid of long-distance service beyond Buffalo.

Penn Central staff were working on a similar plan to replace long-distance service on former Pennsylvania Railroad lines, and west of the Alleghenies more generally, with short regional trains on the Empire Corridor model.  Mr Saunders, the Penn Central chairman, reportedly walked into the meeting where this project was to be presented, said, "Kill the d**n trains," and left.

Railway Age's Lyndon Henry suggests that the spirit of Mr Saunders possesses the current Amtrak management.  "After 48 years of providing long-distance passenger train services, is Amtrak preparing to scuttle these operations and dismantle its National Network? That nightmare prospect, long desired for decades by anti-passenger-rail politicians, now seems a real and perhaps imminent possibility."  He notes,

One of my own sources elaborates that a working group within the agency is mulling the possibility of converting long-distance train routes into fragments of “stand-alone” segments, not more than 400 miles in length—effectively rendering long-distance travel by rail between many cities and among smaller communities intolerably arduous to impossible.

Disparaging longer routes, Amtrak CEO Anderson often cites the relatively low proportion (under 10%) of end-to-end long-distance travelers to disparage National Network trains. But this ignores the cumulative percentages of passengers that traverse overlapping segments among the hundreds of intermediate cities and towns. And, as the MHSRA/RPA data paper points out, even those end-point-to-end-point trips shouldn’t be denigrated: “Consider that the people who travel the entire distance between Chicago and Los Angeles account for just 8% of passengers but 20% of the route’s total revenue.” The paper emphasizes that “the economic benefits of attracting people who travel long distances is substantial.”

Yes, but under the Current Dispensation, only Acela passengers deserve amenities. Sleeping car passengers can order take-out.

The problem of the national network, though, is that it is held together by over-purposed long distance trains.  Here's how Mr Henry breaks it down.

Far more than any other mode, Amtrak provides interconnectivity for hundreds of smaller communities nationwide, linking them with one another and with larger urban centers. In the apt observation of MHSRA/RPA, Amtrak’s long-distance trains “bring economically viable mobility to rural areas and small towns, many of which are becoming more isolated from major cities as regional airline and intercity bus service disappears.”

Amtrak’s National Network services provide a viable option to personal car travel in ever-more-congested traffic, America’s increasingly crowded air travel system, and deteriorating intercity motor coach services. Moreover, for a significant proportion of the population (I’ve seen estimates over 30%), particularly many seniors and mobility-impaired travelers, transport by private cars or commercial airplanes is difficult, dangerous, or simply impossible.

Yes, and the surviving bus routes can also be dangerous, as are the regional air carriers, that is, if there are any. The late Mike Potemra, literary editor of National Review, made a cross-country listening tour through the Greyhound archipelago once.

But you might more effectively build ridership by, oh, through-routing the 400 mile trains and stitching together some longer routes, or maybe by adding a few 400 mile trains to existing routes.  My candidates:  Chicago-Kansas City, Chicago-Twin Cities.  Oh, and run the long-distance trains reliably and frequently.  Like this.

Trains columnist Fred Frailey has a few ideas of his own on how to combine those stand-alone segments and protect the national network.  "How would you rearrange today’s long-distance network without adding more than 700 train miles per day (that’s the same as a 350-mile round trip, the distance from Cleveland to Chicago)? You can’t touch the Northeast Corridor trains or the state-supported services."  What he comes up with, among other things, is a restoration of the early 1990s Broadway Limited and Capitol Limited splitting or combining at Pittsburgh, and the Nebraska Zephyr leaving off the remnant of the Kansas City Zephyr at Galesburg, if without the spiffy articulated train.

The story is still developing.