A Rant About Amtrak Service Reductions

This week was the first of three in which Amtrak will make all of its remaining long distance trains outside of Auto Train triweekly. The criteria the company has in place will set these trains to miss the intended targets by June 30—and therefore fail. The horrendous online booking scheme says it all.

Everyone has to deal with the fact that Amtrak's current management simply doesn't care about the long distance system because There are severed connections all over the place among other things.

Even at previous low points, Amtrak at least kept portions of certain long distance routes daily before breaking them into less than daily segments. Consider these examples:

• Crescent daily to Atlanta
• Empire Builder daily to St. Paul
• Texas Eagle daily to St. Louis
• Some type of daily service between Chicago and Salt Lake City

However, with this pandemic the current management didn’t even have the courtesy to even do that outside of the Florida trains. After all, Stephen Gardner and Anthony Coscia have openly expressed their hostility to the overnight trains as did previous president Richard Anderson. When it comes to current president William Flynn, my initial reaction to him being named was justified because he’s going to go along with whatever Gardner and Coscia tell him. If the presidential election goes the way the polls are predicting, then, Gardner may very well get a chance to finish the job he, Anderson and Coscia started, with the overnight trains going away.

·       Amtrak was caught being dishonest about Florida, and this graph put together by RPA (fka NARP) and retweeted by All Aboard Ohio demonstrates just how much management is willing to sacrifice other parts of the country for its beloved Northeast Corridor.

 The rail community has to be very weary of Amtrak management’s pledge of these cuts being “temporary.” History is an indicator:

1. George Warrington was supposed to be a temporary president, but the Amtrak Board selected him over Andrew Selden in 1998. The result was Warrington nearly bankrupting the company after he bet the farm on Acela Express
2. Joseph Boardman was supposed to be a temporary president after the 2008 presidential election, but the Board removed the “temporary” tag at the beginning of 2010. Amtrak stagnated because the expansions that took place were done by the states, not Amtrak itself. The company didn’t show any interest in proactively operating any new routes—its interest was in trying to keep well-established HSR operators out of the country and trying to prevent its commuter competitors from entering the intercity market (the Tea Party wave made the former possible and Congress’s inaction was responsible for the latter)
3. A now ex-CFO went behind Boardman’s back to take the diners off #91 and #92 five years ago. A few months later, the alleged “experiment” was made permanent. The only reason why the diners were put back on the Silver Star was because the Anderson regime downgraded meal service on all long distance trains