On the train from LA to Portland, Amtrak’s ride-or-dies make the case for passenger rail
On the train from LA to Portland, Amtrak’s ride-or-dies make the case for passenger rail
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law represents the biggest investment in passenger rail in this country since Congress created Amtrak in 1970, according to the Biden Administration.
And you can immediately tell where the Law’s passenger rail priorities are by comparing two announcements the Administration made late in 2023: $16.4 billion for the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington versus $8.2 billion for all of the rest of the country.
That discrepancy makes sense, given that passengers take more than half a million rides every weekday on the Northeast Corridor, versus just over 60,000 trips a day on Amtrak nationwide.
And yet plenty of folks really love the trains that occasionally crawl along lines far from the Northeast Corridor.
Nathan Udall needed to get from Los Angeles to Oakland for a family reunion. So he did what relatively few travelers on the West Coast would think to do: He booked a train ticket.
“When you think about what you do while you go on vacations, this is kind of it. You want to see as much as possible, in as much comfort as possible,” he said.
I found him in the observation car, taking photos of the views whizzing by. He says he feels more relaxed aboard an Amtrak train than he would crammed onto an airline flight.
“That’s why trains are my favorite form of transportation.”
His fellow passengers included a pair of sisters who said the train offers the cheapest ticket to see their uncle in Eugene, as well as a grandma from Spokane who likes that Amtrak claims the train has a much lower carbon footprint, and a woman on her way to Seattle to see an old college friend whose vertigo precludes air travel.
What they all have in common is time to spare.
The Coast Starlight route goes from Los Angeles to Seattle. My trip from LA to Portland takes about 30 hours if everything is running on time. Planes take the same trip in less than 2.5 hours.
And yet, the train ticket sells out regularly in the summer.
“Today I looked at the trip and I said, ‘There’s something wrong with Amtrak,'” said Ed Leska.
He lives outside of Santa Barbara and has worked on this route since 1998 as a volunteer with the National Park Service who tells passengers about points of interest along the way. “I’ll make it home on time. You see that, and you say no way.”
Amtrak wouldn’t comment for this story, but its website says on the Coast Starlight — whose punctuality is pretty average — 58% of passengers arrive on time. It’s a reality that set in hard when we woke up on day two to learn we fell an hour behind schedule overnight. And frequently it’s not Amtrak’s fault.
“They share the track with the freight lines,” said passenger Lois Kaminsky. “They rent the use of the rails but it’s owned by the freight companies. And so they yield the tracks.”
Sometimes, we had to pull over to let the freight trains by. Plus, many of those host railroads impose a speed limit of 79. Electrified railroads are faster, and pollute less. One of the very few is the Northeast Corridor route that Amtrak mostly does own from Boston to New York and DC.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law represents the biggest investment in Amtrak’s history. Most of that money is slated for the Northeast Corridor, which hosts more of Amtrak’s business than any of its other routes. The owners of the other 97 percent of rail lines that Amtrak borrows don’t have any incentive to invest in electrification.
Amtrak’s leisurely pace is one reason why in its 53-year-history, it has never turned a profit.
“I don’t find that to be a very useful metric for understanding any type of transportation network,” said Sean Jeans-Gail, vice president of policy at the nonprofit Rail Passengers Association. He’s a Portlander who lives along this route who said highways aren’t profitable. Neither are airports, the postal service, or most public transit systems.
“It’s a utility, it’s not something that you look at as a profit center in our society. It’s something that allows people to go on about their business,” he said.
Plus, as one Amtrak conductor told me, there are lots of small towns along the train routes where Amtrak is the only game in town. Jeans-Gail said preserving those routes is a matter of equity.
“When you disinvest in passenger rail, you will just leave a lot of smaller communities in the dust,” he said.
Train and station upgrades are on the way, thanks to the more than $20 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The hope is Amtrak could return to pre-pandemic ridership levels, which were the closest the company has ever come to breaking even.
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