Is Amtrak under budgeting track maintenance?

Update July 27: In the comments, John Stolberg corrects me, pointing out: "Paul, you are only looking at the operating budget. Most MOW work is capitalized and shows up in the capital budget. Rail surfacing, tie replacement, undercutting, replacing signal wire, etc. are all capital expenses in the Engineering budget."
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When I was pulling up the numbers for Amtrak's engine reliability, there was another set of numbers that I saw that looked odd. Going through the March 2011-February 2012 monthly reports, Amtrak budgeted a total of 35.8 million for maintenance of way services. According to Amtrak, they own and maintain 1,555 track-miles in the Northeast and Keystone Corridors as well as an additional 95 route-miles of track in Michigan. Assuming the latter is all double-tracked, Amtrak's budgeting only $20,515 per track-mile, an insanely low figure. This study estimates 37.5-58.1 thousand dollars per track-mile for Class 6 track while another estimates $45,354 for Class 6 in a specific example. The matrix it gives starting on page 8 shows, depending on the level of freight and the curviness, a range of $37,543-$97,482 per track-mile for class 6 track predominately used by passenger trains. For a comparative example, Metrolink, which only has a few miles of 110mph track (and that for Amtrak's benefit rather than their own), budgets $27,687,000 for the ordinary maintenance of 363 track-miles, or about $76,000 per mile.

Given that these are listed as maintenance of way services, I thought it possible that this actually represents payments to host railroads for incidental MOW expenses attributable to Amtrak, but this  doesn't appear to be the case: Amtrak states that they paid $124 million for maintenance of way, dispatching, on-time incentives, and the like in Fiscal Year 2011. Although, technically, that could still include the maintenance figure.

It's possible that I'm looking at the wrong thing, that the figures are weirdly divided up (material expenses being itemized elsewhere for instance), or that there's some other perfectly good explanation. If not, however, this is a major failing on Amtrak's part that doesn't even approach "penny wise, pound foolish." It would be especially egregious in light of being such a small fraction of their total expenses and Amtrak's trumpeting of requesting a lower federal operating subsidy. In fact, I'm left curious as to how Amtrak managed to let the NEC get out of a state of good repair in the first place. Given how little the maintenance costs appear to amount to and how badly it affects the rest of the operations, it seems like it would be the absolute last place to make cuts in.

Amtrak wants 7 billion dollar overhaul of Washington Union Station

Link:

Amtrak is proposing a $7 billion transformation of Union Station, intended to triple passenger capacity and transform the overcrowded station into a high-speed rail hub for the Northeast.
The plan, to be unveiled Wednesday afternoon, calls for doubling the number of trains the station can accommodate and improving the passenger experience at what is the second-busiest Amtrak station in the country, with 100,000 passenger trips per day.
The building’s corridors, concourses and platforms — many dating to the station’s 1907 opening — are regularly jammed during rush hour and major tourist events. The station’s overcrowded tracks hinder Amtrak and regional train operators from adding new trains despite growing demand.
But what the proposal lacks is a vision for financing the plan, which even in stages probably would require huge government funding commitments.
Joseph H. Boardman, Amtrak president and chief executive, said in an interview that the rail line is reimagining what it will take to make rail a vital, viable part of the region’s transportation infrastructure.
“The problem that we have is that we’ve got a lack of balance and investment in a mode that moves a lot of people, that is an environmentally responsible mode, and that changes the way that people are going to be able to travel in the future with the technology that is available today,” Boardman said.
Much of Union Station’s expansion would come below ground, where Amtrak plans to add new platforms, tracks and shopping, all of which would enjoy natural light from a 50-foot-wide, 100-foot-long glass-encased main concourse.
Six tracks dedicated to high-speed rail would be added. The high-speed lines could mean travel times as short as 94 minutes to New York City’s Penn Station by 2030 — that’s 66 minutes faster than today’s Acela trains.
District-based developer Akridge also plans a $1.5 billion complex of offices, residential towers and a hotel. The development, to be constructed on a deck built over the tracks behind Union Station, would link Capitol Hill to the NoMa neighborhood.
Dubbed Burnham Place after Union Station architect Daniel Burnham, the 3-million-square-foot project would include a rebuilt H Street bridge and an expanded street grid that would welcome pedestrians to a large new northern entrance to the station. Pedestrian access would be added on all sides of Union Station.

At this point, someone really needs to call OSHA and have an investigation launched into the water supply of Amtrak's headquarters to find out whatever it is causing mass insanity amongst Amtrak's corporate staff.

There is literally no excuse for such an absurdly over expensive plan; not one single excuse for this monstrosity.

Does there need to be work done? I don't doubt that, even with the best planners on Earth, that some degree of overhaul wouldn't be necessary in order to handle future growth. But seven billion dollars for six tracks? The Transbay Terminal in San Francisco is only pegged at $4.2 billion for a brand new underground facility with six tracks, a 1.3 mile rail tunnel, bus depot, and assorted other goodies. Stuttgart 21, in Germany, is €4.8 billion for "60km of new tracks, a six mile twin-tube tunnel", and eight underground tracks. So how in the world does Amtrak manage to screw this up so badly that that they inflate the cost to $7 billion and say it with a straight face? They're even managing to screw up the future by dedicating these tracks solely to high speed rail, with no increase in capacity for current operations. Washington is the southern terminus of the NEC, there is no justification for Regionals, MARC, VRE, and HSR not sharing the same platforms. In fact, I'm fairly certain there's no capacity justification for more tracks. Amtrak, VRE, and MARC have 14 trains per hour arriving at Union Station during the peak hours. Now, admittedly, I was not a math major, but I'm fairly certain that with 18 platforms and 20 tracks, Washington is not only capable of handling current traffic without problems but handling major increases in service; increases that would, in all likelihood, probably be outside of peak hours.

Now, the development on top of the station is certainly a good thing and I'm all for that, as long as the architect has all hopes and dreams of creativity firmly crushed (Washington seems to magnify already existing trends towards aesthetic insanity in art and architecture). Every new station and every rebuilt station, both commuter and intercity, should be designed with transit oriented development in, on, and around it, preferably in such a way as to enhance off-peak and reverse traffic.

As a final consideration: This station overhaul represents 14% of Amtrak's anticipated spending for NextGen HSR between Washington D.C. and New York City. Combined with the ten billion dollar tunnel in Philadelphia, at least a third of Amtrak's NextGen HSR plan between Washington D.C. and New York City is composed of utterly pointless projects that simply waste money.

Engine reliability of Amtrak routes

Numbers are taken from Amtrak's monthly reports, from March 2011 to February 2012. With the exception of the Piedmont, which added a second frequency in 2010 and thus doubled its miles, train miles are as scheduled and calculated in this previous post. So there are some slight inaccuracies, but it shouldn't affect things too greatly. I'm unaware of whether trains annulled due to engine failures are included in Amtrak's reported totals and, if so, how they are recorded.

On a happy note, Amtrak updated its system so that PDFs will actually load in the browser on their site instead of automatically downloading, removing a major frustration of mine. I would not be terribly surprised if they broke all existing external links in doing that however.

I've highlighted the four best and worst performing routes in green and yellow respectively. The Hoosier State is unsurprisingly the worst with its rather low mileage: It would need an almost unblemished record simply to be a mediocre performer.

There does appear to be a severe problem with Amtrak's mechanical department in California however. Discounting the Hoosier State, the three worst performers are based in California and the Sunset Limited is also a Los Angeles based train with significantly worse than average performance (however, the Southwest Chief is Los Angeles based but does not have any outstanding issues). The poor performance of the Surfliner stands in stark contrast to the performance of the state owned Capitol Corridor and San Joaquin fleets, both of which are below the average for engine failure related delays. With Amtrak's locomotives used for the Surfliner averaging 3.5 million miles each (page 8), it's no surprise that there's a mechanical reliability issue.

The performance of the Downeaster, Heartland Flyer, and especially the Missouri River Runner is absolutely outstanding and deserves further investigation. It is imperative that Amtrak form tiger teams with the mission of finding everything that those mechanical crews are doing right, investigating any ways of improving upon these practices, and teaching the rest of Amtrak's mechanical crews those best practices.

	Total	Train miles	Minutes per 10K Train miles
Acela	6,747	3,296,176	20.47
NERegional	31,361	5,394,480	58.14
Vermonter	1,895	444,808	42.60
Downeaster	789	422,240	18.69
Keystone	6,417	1,642,680	39.06
Empire	6,488	1,350,544	48.04
Hiawatha	1,192	429,312	27.77
Illinois Services	4,948	1,654,016	29.92
Michigan Services	5,292	1,024,296	51.66
Missouri Services	195	412,048	4.73
Heartland Flyer	189	149,968	12.60
Pacific Surfliner	11,371	1,632,800	69.64
Cascades	4,268	1,086,176	39.29
Capitols	3,397	1,201,928	28.26
San Joaquins	4,862	1,326,416	36.66
Hoosier State	729	81,536	89.41
Carolinian	1,601	512,512	31.24
Pennsylvanian	1,295	323,232	40.06
Piedmont	1,081	251,888	42.92
Silver Star	4,297	1,011,192	42.49
Cardinal	1,649	357,864	46.08
Silver Meteor	4,723	1,011,192	46.71
Empire Builder	6,483	1,897,168	34.17
Capitol Ltd.	2,195	567,840	38.66
California Zephyr	12,990	1,774,864	73.19
Southwest Chief	8,143	1,642,368	49.58
City of New Orleans	1,685	674,128	25.00
Texas Eagle	4,209	950,040	44.30
Sunset Ltd.	3,453	622,440	55.48
Coast Starlight	8,618	1,002,456	85.97
Lake Shore Ltd.	4,268	843,024	50.63
Palmetto	1,552	603,512	25.72
Crescent	4,491	1,002,456	44.80
Auto Train	1,857	622,440	29.83
Corridor Average	87,370	19,340,880	45.17
LD Average	70,613	14,582,984	48.42

Desegregate Amtrak’s rolling stock acquisition

Back in 1954, Brown vs Board of Education established that “separate but equal” was not a permissible standard for providing services. The same concept applies to a proper fleet modernization strategy. Right now, Amtrak’s plans involve a completely separate set of acquisitions for the current Northeast Regional service and the Acela replacement and NextGen HSR service they plan on. This leads to needless expenses when they could, in fact, receive greater benefits at lesser cost by merging the acquisitions.

Currently, Amtrak plans on replacing about 484 Amfleet I cars over a 5-7 year period. On the high end, the new bilevel car buy for California and the Midwest is proposing $551 million for 130 cars, or about $4.24 million per car (page 78). On the low end, the regular price for one of Metrolink’s Guardian cars is $2.35 million with contract options bringing it down to $1.8 million and a total contract value of about $2 million per car. So simply replacing the Amfleets will cost about 968-2,105 million dollars. It's actually rather worse than that as Amtrak plans on purchasing 825 single level cars over the next 11 years (including the 130 Viewliner II order currently under contract), but many of these are for long distance travel. If all except for the Viewliners were counted for NEC and connected service, this would bring the total to $1.39-2.95 billion.

In addition to this, we have Amtrak’s NextGen HSR plans for the NEC which entail acquiring 12 new high speed train sets in 2020 and 32 in 2025. Since the separated right of way that Amtrak envisions will not have been complete yet, we may very well assume that these are going to be subject to all the fun and joy of FRA regulations and overweight under current Amtrak plans. That aside, Amtrak plans on spending $5.2 billion on 58 train sets out till 2040, making for an average expense of 90 million per train set for an expense of $1.08 billion for 2020 deliveries and $2.88 billion for the 2025 sets.

So let’s scrap this nonsense. We have a budget of $4.93-6.06 billion dollars to play with if we simply stop segregating the NEC fleet and new equipment acquisition. What could we get if we injected some sanity into the process?

We could, to start with, buy some New Pendolinos. These come in tilting and non-tilting versions and are capable of speeds up to the current track and regulatory maximum of 150mph (160mph if the FRA ever comes to its senses and synchronizes the signal and track speed limitations). The British, back in 1997, purchased 53 train sets, custom made for the British loading gauge, at a cost of £1.2 billion (extending the fleet to 9 cars may have cost additional however; a later contract would have been about £1 million per car). Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $2.7-3.6 billion USD, depending on your choice of measurement (simple CPI is $2.8 billion) or $52.8 million per set with CPI inflation. With the current fleet acquisition plans, that would represent 93-114 train sets that could be purchased instead. Obviously that’s a fairly ludicrous number greatly in excess of what’s needed: Amtrak’s fleet strategy plan only anticipates a daily availability of 16 Acela sets and 45 electric locomotives (which includes hauling long distance trains and any trains with multiple locomotives). If we assume a necessity for 61 train sets to replace current Acela, Northeast Regional, and Keystone Corridor service, we can recapitalize the Northeast Corridor’s fleet with custom build Pendolinos for approximately $3.22-4 billion (with 100-80% availability rates; Alstom does claim it has a 100% rate of availability maintaining Spain’s AVE fleet [page 18]).

Of course, more standardized equipment is cheaper. Czech Railways purchased seven 7-car Pendolino sets for approximately two hundred million dollars (~$28.5 million each), though these were not without their share of problems. More recently, Poland has purchased non-tilting ETR 610 New Pendolinos for 47.61 million each, a price which includes 17 years of maintenance by Alstom. Alstom also sold twenty-five 10-car AGVs, a non-tilting train capable of 186mph, for an inflation adjusted $994 million, about 40 million per train.

As a result of desegregating the Northeast trains and pursuing a rational fleet strategy, Amtrak could save billions of dollars while simultaneously greatly increasing the service speeds of what are currently the Northeast Regional trains and, depending on the performance characteristics of what it buys, significantly improve upon its current Acela running times (this is almost a given with any significantly lighter rolling stock: a Talgo official calculated that a Talgo train set, limited to only 125mph, would be only four minutes slower than the Acela on a Boston-Washington run [page 7]). In turn, these savings can be used for track and catenary upgrades which minimize slow zones and otherwise speed up the train service allowing Amtrak to meet many of their NEC goals for significantly lower expense.

USPS OIG suggests moving back to rail

Could save $100 million annually in the short term and significantly more over long term.

Intermodal rail is a “sensible option” that could help the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) reduce expenses, improve environmental sustainability and maintain service standards if some mail that now moves by truck is transported by railroads, according to a report recently issued by the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General's Risk Analysis Research Center.

Titled, “Strategic Advantages of Moving Mail by Rail,” the report found that in the short term, shifting a portion of mail volume from truck to intermodal rail could yield $100 million in annual cost savings without requiring changes to the postal service’s network. In addition, USPS could save significantly more in the long run by realigning its processing and transportation network, and “strategically recommitting to the use of intermodal rail,” the report states.
...
USPS has a long and storied history of moving mail on rail dating back to the early 1800s, but today, it mostly meets its surface transportation needs by using trucks, the report states. Last year, the postal service spent more than $3.3 billion on highway contracts and only $40 million on freight-rail contracts.

“By contrast, postal competitors have greatly expanded their use of rail and have worked hard to realign their networks with the nation’s railroads,” the report’s authors state in the summary.

The study in question. About time really; I'm surprised that previous Republican harping on about trying to cut inefficiency in government didn't result in going back to rail earlier. Then again, taking this long does feed back into Republican complaints about government efficiency.

I don't believe Amtrak will receive the contracts; the Class Is are perfectly capable of forming consortia to bid for a coast-to-coast train if need be and the last thing Amtrak needs is to screw up its long-distance routes and offend the host railroads by stealing business from them again.

American railroad passenger injury and fatality rates since 1976

From the previously mentioned FRA data:

Year	Passenger Fatalities	Passenger Injuries	Passenger Ridership (millions)	Million Passenger Miles	Million Passenger miles per fatality	Million Passenger miles per injury
1976	5	998	124.2	5601	1120	5.6
1977	4	503	179.2	8078	2020	16.1
1978	13	1252	176.5	6836	525.85	5.46
1979	6	1001	308.5	11663	1943.8	11.7
1980	4	593	317.6	11871	2968	20.0
1981	4	409	300.8	11815	2954	28.9
1982	9	387	285.1	10603	1178.1	27.4
1983	4	502	291.9	14151	3538	28.2
1984	12	1000	309.6	10829	902.42	11
1985	3	657	338.2	10909	3636.3	16.6
1986	4	686	333.7	11421	2855	16.6
1987	16	475	336.4	12108	757	25.5
1988	2	337	369.5	12620	6310	37.4
1989	8	399	375.9	13600	1700	34.1
1990	3	473	373.0	13665	4555	28.9
1991	8	382	369.1	14004	1751	36.7
1992	3	411	366.9	13764	4588	33.5
1993	58	559	371.6	13777	237.53	24.6
1994	5	497	393.6	14046	2809	28
1995	0	573	385.8	13719	0	23.9
1996	12	513	397.4	13587	1132	26.5
1997	6	601	408.6	14134	2355.7	23.5
1998	4	535	440.0	14596	3649	27.3
1999	14	481	464.9	14857	1061.2	30.9
2000	4	658	501.8	16142	4036	25
2001	3	746	517.2	15657	5219	21.0
2002	7	877	503.9	15167	2166.7	17.3
2003	3	727	494.3	15562	5187.3	21.4
2004	3	703	513.3	15395	5131.7	21.9
2005	16	957	523.4	15779	986	16.5
2006	2	936	602.3	16961	8481	18.1
2007	5	1514	644.6	18864	3773	12.5
2008	24	1329	664.8	19972	832.17	15.0
2009	3	1201	640.8	19204	6401.3	16.0
2010	3	1365	637.8	19805	6601.7	14.5
2011	6	1489	654.1	20242	3373.7	14
Total	286	26726	14916.3	501004	1751.76	18.7

Do note that there is some screwiness in places (for instance, the jump in ridership between 1978 and 1979). Reporting definitions and requirements may also differ between the US and other nations, so keep that in mind for comparisons.

Update July 16: Courtesy of John Stolberg, a pair of graphs showing the five year average injury and fatality rates. As noted previously, the risk of injury seems to be increasing, but fatalities are steady.