Please sign and share this petition, asking Amtrak to revoke their charter ban:

https://www.change.org/p/amtrak-rescind ... -movements

Online petitions aren't worth the bandwidth expended on them:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/08/your-online-petition-is-useless/340316/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacktivism

As a marketing professional, the email info is valuable - sure, whatever.

But so is being able to say or report or quantify the number of people who support a particular project or thing.

Nearly 14,000 people is a pretty reasonable number. That number gets repeated in the press and suggests a sizable group of supporters or people affected.

Sure, cry a river over getting emails harvested - but that's the price of being able to qualify that you have an audience and its rightfully valuable. When I tell people that the 765 entertains over 3,000 people in a weekend or 40,000 people attended a festival with our locomotive or a million people watched a video - that's telling you something.

Otherwise, how would else you identify and illustrate your audience or base of support in a similar scenario? By cobbling together every ticket and charter ever sold by hundreds of groups and individuals and non-profits?

I'm as critical as they come, but having numbers is worth something.

Over the weekend, a bigger issue has emerged than just hauling private cars on the back of Amtrak trains. First, it was announced that full dining car service on The Lakeshore Ltd. and Capitol Ltd. was going to be ended starting June 1 in favor of a greatly limited cold plate selection, included for sleeping car passengers and maybe available to coach passengers for purchase. They are indicating a preference for serving sleeping car passengers in their rooms under this plan.

Second, last Thursday, Amtrak CEO Anderson spoke to an industry group in California, with a few passenger rail advocates in it, whom he most likely did not know were going to be there. The headline from that talk and the few questions and answers he did after is that it is his intention, and most likely that of the Amtrak Board, is do completely do away with all of the long-distance trains, sooner rather than later. He wants to concentrate on regional corridors up to 400 miles and go to using DMU's for most of that service, replacing aging locomotives, Amfleet and Horizon coaches in that way. So, here we go again, for the umpteenth time, trying to save the national system, only this time we don't have a Graham Claytor on our side, and indeed a CEO and board that are decidedly not on our side. We might finally lose everything but corridors this time.

Yes, but only if there is money behind those numbers. A big issue here is that the industry that relies on the policies in question does not generate that much money and, when it does, it has not been historically adept at using its economic impact to its political advantage. HeritageRail Alliance is a 501(c)6 Trade Association. In a world of limited resources, perhaps it would be advantageous to have HertigeRail and AAPRCO pool resources to fund a professional lobbyist who can lead a coordinated effort to inform Senators and Representatives on the committees that oversee Amtrak of the adverse economic impact of these policy changes. So all individual entities/business owners put together their own economic impact statements/numbers. Individual groups use these to lobby their local Senators and Representatives. HeritageRail and AAPRCO implement a reporting system so that the individual entities can report their numbers up the chain so that a coordinated national lobbying effort can be led by a professional lobbyist retained by HeritageRail/AAPRCO.

This approach will require resources but is a much more realistic and productive use of those resources than the filing of a baseless lawsuit.

At the level the dining service had declined to, this further reduction in service may just be a logical conclusion. The food on a Coast Starlight trip a few years ago was very disappointing and resulted in a member of our group getting such severe GI sickness that it gave a whole new meaning to the term, "special moves".

Short term, it may make sense to focus on cash-producing corridors that serve a vital transportation need, such as the NEC, and which can be provided at a competitive (vs. air and car) price point. Once the national rail network is reduced to collection of corridors, is a national corporation necessary to run them or can each corridor be run by a regional authority or a private corporation?

This corridor-focused strategy could leave the long-distance trains on the dead line. Besides those with severe Fear of Flying, what is the market for these long-distance trains? Is it growing or contracting? Recently, on one of the EBT threads, Robertjohndavis pointed out that entertainment and vacation expectations are continuing to evolve and are becoming more focused on experiences. Efforts to streamline service and cut costs to commoditize rail travel may be especially ill-timed given this fundamental shift in how people spend their vacation dollars. What can be done to make long distance rail travel more relevant in a time when experiential-based vacations are growing in popularity? Can the market, or potential market, support long-distance service as a stand-alone entity? If so, at what price point? It may turn out that long-distance rail travel is more of an experiential vacation that should be up marketed.

Bifurcating the rail-travel market in this way (commoditized corridor travel at a competitive price and high-end experience-based long distance rail travel) may go against the original intent of preserving the national rail network in the first place because it would adversely impact travelers located in rural areas that are poorly served by air travel.

Amtrak LD trains recover more of their operating costs than the corridor trains do, run near capacity most of the time (just try and get a same-day reservation on most LD Amtrak trains), and serve intermediate points that have often been abandoned by intercity air and bus service. Most LD passengers do not ride end-point-to-end-point. We need to get past this old tired argument that is just simply not true anymore, if it ever was. Most importantly, those trains still exist because whenever proposals have been made in the past 45 years to do away with them, the non-enthusiast public has turned out to demand that they stay. Time to do it again.

This could be the key to ending charters, you can't pull heavyweight cars behind DMUs, and they want to limit the fallout from the ending of long distance trains in advance.

Absolutely true about the costs (NEC only makes money if you ignore the hefty capital costs, for which the long distance trains is only cars and engines), and there are places out on the Great Plains that depend on Amtrak service. My dad, in his late 70s now, takes the CZ back to central Illinois once or twice a year from Denver, getting on and off at Princeton. Could he take a flight to Chicago? He could, but all of his friends back home are also in their late 70s, which means an easy drive to Princeton but a horrible one to O'Hare, and so that would essentially mean not going home at all again for him.

Let me say at the outset that I have absolutely no personal experience in mainline excursion operations (steam or otherwise) on freight railroads – none, nada. While I was pretty heavily involved in things like steam locomotive regulation during my railroad days, I never had anything to do with any arrangements between my railroad and excursion operators.

So, from my perspective of relative ignorance, I have a very simple question. Why is Amtrak’s involvement in these excursion operations so essential? After all, there is nothing that legally prevents a freight railroad from running its own excursion trains, either with its own equipment or with the equipment of an outside group, without any Amtrak involvement. Why is Amtrak’s involvement so vital that their new policy threatens the continuation of these operations?

I don’t know the answer to that question. But the answer may also be the answer to what needs to be done to permit these operations to continue. My guess (and that’s all it is) is that the primary value Amtrak brings to the table is their statutory liability cap (which applies not only to Amtrak but their host railroads). Without that cap, freight railroads are probably unwilling to take on the essentially unlimited liability exposure of permitting an excursion operation (steam or diesel) – after all, the freight railroad would be the “deep pocket” if there were an accident. If I’m right about this, the answer may be legislation extending the Amtrak liability cap to non-Amtrak excursion operations, which would probably be a lot easier thing to get through Congress than legislation mandating that Amtrak continue to sponsor steam and other historic excursion services .

For what (if anything) it may be worth. I've also posted a copy of this note to the "Is there a basis to sue Amtrak" thread, so there is ample opportunity to tell me that I'm full of you know what, as I'm sure some of you will want to do. Have at it.

It doesn't seem like anyone learns from history, and this new Amtrak president seems to be woefully ignorant of the history of Amtrak. Long distance trains exist because of the powerful political support they receive, from both political parties. In fact, the last political move I recall was a directive in Congressional legislation to bring back service on the Gulf Coast from New Orleans to Jacksonville.

In order to get Federal support for a national rail system, you need votes from the Senate, which is more representative of the lower population density areas. If you discontinue long distance trains, I think the next logical step is splitting up Amtrak into regional systems owned by the states. The states are going to refuse. The price for keeping the national system is long distance trains linking all the pieces together.

We've talked about shutting down long distance trains since the Reagan administration.

What he said.

The heads of all of the larger groups need to band together, and bargain as a unit. Call it "American Historic Rail Tours" or whatever and run all excursions through one point of contact, with tickets available through Amtrak. Otherwise, you'll be reduced to one or two groups with political sway operating while the rest die on the vine.

Also, just because you schedule a trip, doesn't mean you have to run it. Submit for 16 Saturdays and only run the trips that sell out. You're not on the hook financially to Amtrak for anything, so what's the difference? I am sure the operators would gladly run more trips if the customers are there.

And how did that directive work out?
I don't think your analysis is correct.

Richard Anderson was a brilliant CEO at Delta and foresaw things none of his competitors did. The other guys all invested in new, more fuel efficient aircraft to fight rising fuel costs. Delta bought the fuel hog planes the other guys were disposing of, for cheap, then refurbished them in house. Delta also bought a refinery to help control its fuel costs. When Southwest started serving Delta's main hub airport (Atlanta), the pundits were all saying it would lower ticket prices.... Anderson said the competition would be good for Delta and he was right about that too!

Tickets for The Joliet Rocket, a weekend of round-trip steam excursions between Joliet and Chicago, Illinois on Metra's Rock Island District - are scheduled to start next week. FWRHS had paused its initial ticket sales date while it evaluated the availability and sourcing of passenger cars to operate behind NKP 765, all of which are coming in via Amtrak.

We are lucky that the event is in Chicago, an Amtrak terminal, and that a handful of the cars from the consist is kept within a reasonable distance and along Amtrak routes - and of course fortunate that Metra is such a great partner.

More details: http://fortwaynerailroad.org/the-joliet-rocket-2018/