By BEN JERVEY
Last updated: 9:45 am
July 20, 2008
Posted: 4:16 am
July 20, 2008
Ask around onboard almost any Amtrak train, and you'll get a pretty short list of reasons why people ride the rails. In the café car, chugging along one of the country's oldest routes, I counted four types of passengers. There are thrifty ones looking to save a few bucks on plane tickets. There are those who are scared of flying, a group that has no doubt grown in recent years. There are the zealots - without exception, older men - who describe themselves with charming lack of inhibition as "rail junkies," "railroad nuts," "train buffs," or, my personal favorite, "railfans." The rest - indeed the majority - say they're here for "the experience." Good thing for Amtrak, that romantic notion of the rails is alive and well. Naturally, it's something the beleaguered rail company promotes to death. The experience is an important sell; nobody ever mentions reliability or practicality.
With no rush about me, here I was, on a trip from New York to San Francisco that runs exactly 3,397 miles, rolling through 11 states, on two legendary rail routes - the Lake Shore Limited (from New York to Chicago) and the California Zephyr (from Chicago to just outside San Francisco). This could take exactly 77 hours and 15 minutes, if the trains keep to schedule. Most likely, they won't.
The American passenger rail - once a model around the globe - is now something of an oddball novelty, a political boondoggle to some, a colossal transit failure to others. The numbers show just how far this once-great system has fallen. In 1960, US rail travelers logged 17.1 billion passenger miles (the movement of one passenger one mile), the standard measure of a system's reach; by 2000, that number had fallen to 5.5 billion, just one percent of the total travel between US cities that year. Since its ill-fated formation as a quasi-public, for-profit corporation in 1971, Amtrak has seen only meager growth and loses billions of dollars annually.
The reasons for Amtrak's bad reputation are totally damning - its service is neither practical nor reliable. There are stories of 12-hour delays on routes that would take six hours to drive; of breakdowns in the desert; of five-hour unexplained standstills in upstate New York. Then there's the mother of all Amtrak horror stories: a California Zephyr that stopped dead on its tracks for two full days, victim of both an "act of God" (as corporate legalese wisely defines a landslide on the tracks) and gross staffing negligence.
