Am I missing somethong here it seems that excursions and private cars are still allowed.

Under conditions that may well make the business model of either owning and operating a PV or operating the excursions themselves physically or financially untenable.

An analogy: Suppose you have invested large amounts of money in a nice, roomy vacation home in North or South Carolina, say a place you rent out as a vacation rental to pay the bills until your retirement and occasionally stay in with your extended family in the off season. Now the government comes along and says "you may only have vacation homes in Florida and New Jersey, they must be two-bedroom houses, and you must abide by these strict regulations to rent them out."

The value of your investment has just been trashed. If you had known this was coming, you might have never bought such a house, or made do with a humble shack instead of a luxurious, comfortable house. But, hey, "vacation homes are still allowed," right?

I have a client who just spent in the mid-five figures over the past several years to acquire the necessary parts, including "impossible to find" trucks of a specific design, in preparation for an expensive rebuild to Amtrak specs to keep his car running, after an accident that wasn't his fault damaged one piece of metal just enough to condemn the truck at one end. And I can assure you that unless he sells his car to the likes of the Grand Canyon Ry. (who have enough luxury cars at their disposal, thank you very much), there's no way in Hades that rebuilding the trucks now makes any economic sense under this new model Amtrak has announced. Imagine if he had just rolled the car out of the shop finished.

The long-term effects of these proposals/restrictions will be that the day of the PV owner that does it out of love, operating out of his beat-up pick-up truck in a forgotten spur off the main at some station somewhat close to his home--the guy many of us met as he sweated underneath his car in overalls to install a septic retention tank, emerging covered in brake shoe dust and rust (yes, I'm invoking you, Brother Catalpa!)--is finished for good. PV operation will end up being the province of the "professionals" like American Orient Express, Greenbrier Limited, and Iowa Pacific.

Oh, wait........

Pay attention to this line:

"Charter Trains must not be one-time trips."

It appears that if you want to run your excursion every Tuesday, you are OK. This would allow services Like the Iowa Pacific luxury cars added to the City of New Orleans.

But steam excursions are a different matter.

Seems to me that the 'one-time' prohibition leaves the door open for scheduled sets of steam excursions, in particular of the kind that were run with 611 and 765. But pointedly not for something like the Loewy commemorative with 4935 or 'Save Grand Central' kinds of trains ... or Bennett Levin's trip to the 50th Anniversary.

Remains to be seen, of course, whether intermittently-scheduled or 'weekend' excursions on a schedule would satisfy what Amtrak is saying, but it does seem to me that many of the scheduling and operational consequences that the 'ban' is intent on eliminating can be addressed for even a fairly sparse set of regular excursion operations.

Let me say at the outset that I have absolutely no 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 "Amtrak special movement" 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.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer....but I deal with contracts everyday...

In the case where a trip operator had a deal in place to run a trip and that deal was rescinded, I would think a breach of contract suit would be possible. The other organizations impacted by this would have a tortuous interference case in my mind too. Plus, a suit for funds expended with the understanding that the trip was a go.

Couldn't operators who have to cancel their trips because this new policy is harming their ability to do business with private car vendors also pursue tortuous interference suits?

I would think the ambiguous language of Anderson's decrees would leave Amtrak vulnerable at the Philly Arb Center.

I'm interested in hearing our resident counselor's thoughts.

Well, I'm not your "resident counselor" But, as I pointed out in one of my earlier posts, the only basis for a lawsuit against Amtrak I could see would be if Amtrak was violating some kind of contractual commitment to run a particular excursion. So, yes, IF Amtrak had contractually obligated itself to run a particular excursion or series of excursions and breached that obligation, there would be a basis for a claim against Amtrak for that particular excursion or series of excursions.

But I've highlighted the word "if" for a reason. I don't know what contracts Amtrak may have, but I think it highly unlikely that Amtrak has contracts that obligate it to run a program of excursions for any excursion operator. The more likely scenario is that Amtrak makes a deal a trip at a time, and the deal is made fairly close to the date for the trip. And the contracts probably also give Amtrak the right to unilaterally cancel on fairly short notice. I don't see much basis for a "tortious interference" claim based on Amtrak's refusal to contract for an excursion which it has no legal obligation to run, or for exercising whatever contractual rights it has to cancel an existing excursion deal.

Now, maybe someone could come up with a factual scenario where Amtrak had affirmatively led an excursion operator to understand that it would sponsor a particular excursion, knew the excursion operator would sell tickets based on that understanding and then pulled the plug. Something like this might provide a colorable basis for a lawsuit. But even if you had this situation, it would only apply to the excursion involved, not to Amtrak's policy as a whole.

Bottom line. This is not something that's going to be resolved with "lawsuits".