Chicago to Seattle on the Empire Builder.
The California Zephyr offers a more scenic route and I love those wonderful parlor cars on the Coast Starlight, but I’ll always have a soft spot for the Empire Builder. There’s just something majestic about this train. It’s a damn shame it can’t seem to run on time.
The problems began in the wee hours of Sunday morning. The computer in the lead engine of this consist stopped talking to the computer in the B unit which, as a consequence, would not release its brakes. Give our crew credit: they swapped positions of the two engines and communication was restored. But figuring out what to do, consulting with Amtrak’s powers-that-be, then physically exchanging positions of the two locomotives and taking care of paperwork required because we now had a different A unit . . . all that took the better part of three hours.
And so our train fell out of its “slot”, if such thing truly exists, and from first light Sunday morning, we dawdled along behind a number of slow BNSF freights, falling farther and farther behind.
I couldn’t resist taking a photo of a big pothole on the platform in Minot, North Dakota. The hand-painted sign says “DO NOT STOP”.
Most of the time, especially in the past few years, the Builder’s on-time problem has been freight congestion … more specifically, the oil trains.There are many times the number that were running up here before the big oil discovery in the Williston area a few years ago, and they have been cluttering up great stretches of the Builder’s route.
In fairness, I must say that throughout the day today I have seen quite a lot of what certainly appears to be new track, both sidings and double track. Indeed, we have repeatedly heard about the multi-billions BNSF is spending to increase capacity. Still, that increased congestion, plus a couple of unusually awful winters, has done damage to this train’s proud reputation. There’s just no overlooking the fact that the Empire Builder’s On Time Performance is consistently lousy. Padding in the schedule helped a bit today and we arrived in Seattle exactly 3:30 late.
Personally, I don’t connect anymore; I overnight. It’s just a lot safer. But a lot of people can’t or just don’t. There was at least one couple on board that is supposed to connect in Seattle with a bus that will take them to Vancouver for the start off on an Alaskan cruise. Their connection time in Seattle was three hours. Multiply that by other passengers on other Builders missing other connections and it all adds up to costing Amtrak a lot of dollars and a great deal of good will and lost future business.
And you don’t hear a damn peep about this from the think-small crowd in Congress. They’re too busy trying to reduce Amtrak’s pitifully small subsidy and passing a law requiring Amtrak to accommodate pets and demanding that Amtrak cut costs in its dining cars. Can you find any sense in any of that? I sure as hell can’t.
It’s also the case that management of BNSF owes a legally-enforceable fiduciary duty to manage the affairs of the corporation for the benefit of its owners (here, Berkshire-Hathaway), not for anyone else. The suggestion that BNSF should clear the railroad to make way for a tenant, and a poorly-paying tenant at that, is simply wrong and indefensible. If Amtrak wants superior dispatching for its trains, it needs to get out its checkbook and head down to Ft. Worth to bargain, and pay, for that. BNSF is already doing more than it is legally or morally obligated to do to keep the Empire Builder or any other Amtrak train on schedule.
The Empire Builder doesn’t take any subsidy. Its revenues more than cover its costs of operation. At least that’s what Amtrak told a U.S. Senator recently.
And Amtrak is hardly in a position to criticize BNSF for conducting its business for the benefit of its customers and shareholders. Perhaps if Amtrak paid BNSF the fair market value of its use of BNSF facilities, it would have standing to complain. The history of this line is that BNSF dispatchers always do their level best to keep 7 and 8 moving, even at the expense of regularly holding BNSF’s hottest trains in sidings for the Empire Builder.
It’s troubling for me to hear talk about the profitability (or lack thereof) of specific Amtrak trains, as opposed to the entire system. That just invites members of Congress like Pete Sessions of Texas to start lopping off routes from the bottom … routes that may be providing essential public transportation for a lot of people. As for BNSF, if they’re doing their level best to run the Builder on time — one train a day! — it strikes me as a pretty feeble effort.
Actually, Amtrak stated that ALL of the LD trains–as a group–produce a positive net cash flow, and that the elimination of all of the LD trains as a group would increase, not decrease, the annual subsidy needed to run what was left of the system.
What is really a shame is that the so-called National Assiociation of Railroad Passengers has never done a thing to correct the record on Amtrak’s fatuous and utterly false statements that the various LD trains, especially the Sunset Limited, “lose $xxx per passenger.” A campaign to correct that misimpression would go a long way to cut off the enemies in Congress, who, after all, are only reacting rationally to what Amtrak and NARP tell them the financial results of operations of these trains is.
Agreed! Furthermore, I hope you will take a fresh look at NARP in the months ahead. We have a terrific new president and CEO in Jim Mathews and, if I have anything to say about it, we’ll do our very best to organize an effort to counter all the misinformation that has become accepted as fact by an increasingly lazy media, as in the examples you have cited. In fairness, it is not accurate to say NARP “has never done a thing” to refute that stuff. But what little we’ve been able to do has been done by amateur volunteers. It is my hope and expectation that that will soon change. Finally, it is true that NARP has, in the past, rarely criticized Amtrak publicly, even when criticism has been deserved. That does not mean our views have not been expressed forcefully one-on-one, especially over the past couple of years. Right or wrong, the rationale has been that Amtrak gets more than enough public criticism without NARP joining in. At any rate, I do hope you will keep an open mind and judge NARP by our future actions and activities. And I truly appreciate receiving comments from such a well known authority. Aloha and mahalo.