Who can resist the romance of the rails? The glorious train halls of old; the art deco travel posters; the hourslong stoppage between towns while the train has dysfunctional Wi-Fi, the cafe car is closed, and the stink of the bathroom by your seat is inescapable.
Such is often the reality on Amtrak these days. One January 2023 trip from the Washington, D.C., area to the Orlando area, scheduled for 17 hours, turned into a hellish ordeal: "Passengers had been cooped up in their seats or compartments for 37 hours, complaining of stale air, dwindling food supplies, trash piling up in the aisles and a lack of timely information from the crew," read the New York Times report.
Overall, one in four Amtrak trains is delayed, or one in two on routes over 750 miles. Amtrak blames freight train interference for most of its delays, complaining that when Amtrak trains operate on rails owned by other railroads, dispatchers ignore federal laws that require Amtrak get preference. Even so, Amtrak admitted to 21,654 hours of self-caused delays in 2023—a far cry from the 1990s, when that number never surpassed 10,000 hours a year.
It's no wonder Amtrak can't manage to make a profit—it was never expected to. The late Jim McClellan was on the Federal Railroad Administration's policy team during the legislative debate over Amtrak's creation. "Most (including a number of us on the planning team) were dubious of the 'for profit' claim, but the reality was that neither the White House nor the more conservative members of Congress were going to sign off on an entity that was set up to be a perpetual ward of the state," he later wrote in his memoir My Life with Trains. "The 'for profit' mandate haunts Amtrak to this day."
The only routes where Amtrak can make a (questionable) claim of making profit (in addition to the D.C. to Florida Auto Train) are in the Northeast Corridor, where regional population density is at its highest. These routes made a modest $202 million profit in FY 2023. But overall, Amtrak lost $750 million that year, with almost $600 million lost on long-distance routes. Those financial numbers are somehow much worse than the FY 2019 numbers, even though ridership has nearly recovered to pre-pandemic levels—Northeast Corridor profits were 2.8 times higher in FY 2019, and Amtrak overall lost only $29 million.
Those numbers also don't take into account depreciation of Amtrak's assets. Amtrak owns 80 percent of the rails it uses in the Northeast Corridor, and maintaining rails and infrastructure is expensive. The corridor needs tens of billions of dollars in capital improvements, and the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will only put a modest dent in the backlog.
But poor performance isn't the chief reason Amtrak should be abolished; it just helps the public get on the right side. The federal government simply has no business running a transportation company. (Some might claim it doesn't, given Amtrak's status as a quasi-public for-profit corporation, but the Amtrak board is nominated by the president, and the federal government owns a majority of its stock. If it looks, smells, and runs like a poorly managed nationalized railroad, then it probably is a nationalized railroad.)
Amtrak's Northeast Corridor could be privatized, and private management may be able to use profits and private loans to chip away at the maintenance backlog. Brightline, the only intercity railroad in the U.S. that's privately owned and operated, is struggling to make a profit on its Florida operation, though its ridership is growing. (The federal government gave the Nevada Department of Transportation a $3 billion grant to support a high-speed Brightline operation connecting the Las Vegas and Los Angeles metropolitan areas.) All the long-distance Amtrak routes that will never be profitable (like a new temporary route connecting Chicago and Miami via D.C.) should be put to bed, serviced by airlines and private bus companies. Amtrak doesn't even have good plans to make most of its long-distance routes profitable—in FY 2029, for example, it expects to lose more than $600 per passenger on the Sunset Limited's New Orleans to Los Angeles route.
If full-scale privatization is off the table, other reforms would certainly improve Amtrak's reliability and fiscal situation. But whether Amtrak is performing well or poorly is immaterial. The federal government shouldn't be in the business of doing business. No matter how romantic the golden age of rail travel may seem, its time is long past—and so is Amtrak's.
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