Four Northeast Corridor stations used by Amtrak and NJ Transit, including Princeton Junction, N.J., will receive makeovers in a program announced Tuesday. Here, a Princeton “Dinky” awaits departure to the Princeton University campus from Princeton Junction in August 2019.
TRAINS: David Lassen
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — Four stations used by NJ Transit and Amtrak on the Northeast Corridor will be updated, beginning with the 116-year-old station in New Brunswick.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and Amtrak Board Chairman Tony Coscia announced the remodeling projects on Tuesday, NJ.com reports.
Work in New Brunswick will include improvements to elevators and escalators, lighting, heating and air conditioning, extending the eastbound platform, rehabilitation of the exterior brick façade, and new paint.
Improvements are also scheduled at Elizabeth, Trenton, and Princeton Junction. Federal funds will cover 90 percent of the work with state money picking up the remaining 10 percent.
Mister Attenhofer:
That’s a funny thing you mention. In proper accounting (I am not an accountant but I did have to study it for my Professional Engineer licence) you realize that you have to periodically replace your equipment. Therefore, you budget over the lifetime of the good, the cost of replacement. If you do it right, when the good is up for replacement, you will have the exact cost of replacement in the kitty.
While there is no prohibition against putting the money to work elsewhere until it is needed, the cost of supplying these funds is to be charged against the cost of operation.
If Amtrak is not doing this, they are not doing proper cost accounting. But since they will not reveal their books, there is no way to know just what they are doing.
The above comments are genetic in nature and do not form the basis for an attorney/client relationship. They do not constitute legal advice. I am not your attorney. You do not need a criminal lawyer, you need a -> criminal <- lawyer.
The Northeast Corridor is profitable as long as you don’t consider the cost of replacing the equipment when it wears out, labor costs, insurance, utilities, bridges, tunnels, —-!
There is an article in Railway Age < a href="https://www.railwayage.com/passenger/intercity/a-two-amtrak-concept/?RAchannel=passenger"> Railway Age which discusses the focus of current Amtrak management on the Northeast Corridor, and which predicts train-offs for any other service.
If I am reading this article right, the Northeast Corridor is said by Amtrak to be profitable, or at least potentially so (something I find possible but not probable), and that if Amtrak could only get rid of those pesky western long-haul trains it could run in the black. Since they will not allow any outsiders a look at their books I have no way to judge the veracity of this assertion.
However. I think we can expect that any improvements to Amtrak will occur in the Northeast Corridor, and not to any other service. This is not to say these four stations do not need upgrades – but there is more to Planet Earth than the Northeast Corridor, and it all needs to be funded.
The article talks about splitting Amtrak into a Northeast Corridor operation, and everything else. This might be the way to go. The Northeast Corridor people could have their little playground (and may they prosper), and the rest of the system could attempt to recover, without the alleged burden courtesy obscure book keeping, of NEC costs shifted to the western operation.
Regardless, it is interesting reading.
The above comments are genetic in nature and do not form the basis for an attorney/client relationship. They do not constitute legal advice. I am not your attorney. Any accountant will tell you that two plus two equals four, but a really good accountant will tell you whatever you need to hear.
Anna and Charles – Really appreciate your comments on an article that made NO sense, was off base and misleading. And thank you for leaving politics out of it.
I would point out that these upgrades will be paid by the Feds and State, not Amtrak.
Also, these stations are mostly used by NJ Transit, not Amtrak. Except for Trenton, those other stations have only a handful of Amtrak trains a day.
Therefore all this verbiage about Amtrak spending of NEC is irrelevant.
Mister Landey:
When you have enough certifications the Continuing Education requirements start to chase themselves. Between PE, PP, bar, licencing, and various reciprocity fees though I drop a couple grand a year. But, it’s the cost of doing business. However, after a while you begin to feel ripe for certification …
The article (the one here on Trains, not the one on Railway Age) talks about refurbishment of four stations on the NEC.
My point, before we get too distracted, is that current management sees Amtrak only as the NEC, and all else as periphery. Thus, only the NEC matters, and only the NEC will be upgraded and funded. Whatever else the authors of the article on Railway Age say, in this I have to agree with them.
The above comments are genetic in nature and do not form the basis for an attorney/client relationship. They do not constitute legal advice. I am not your attorney, from Bangor all the way to Maine.
WALTER – I stand corrected on the arrival times for SB and NB Amtrak at Memphis. Thank you.
Charles Landey, The arrival times of the City of New Orleans at 6:27 AM and 10:40 PM at Memphis are not quite the middle of the night. You could have picked a lot better small town examples.
It’s absurd (as in the Railway Age article) to think that Amtrak is one reorganization away from success, i.e., rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, i.e., micromanaging failure into failure. By “success” one could mean either increased political support and/or economic improvement. Either one is a pipe dream (cannabis – fueled pipe dreams still illegal here in Wisconsin).
The merger of two, later three, failing railroads into Penn Central produced a single, bigger failing railroad. Works in reverse, too. Splitting a failing Amtrak into two systems won’t change a thing.
Anna, I let my P.E. license lapse when I retired. Not because I’m too cheap to pay the annual license fee to the State of Wisconsin, but because I’m too lazy for the CEU requirement. I suspect the CEU’s would be more time-consuming than challenging – all the more reason why I’d be aggravated. I think CEU is the term – I’ve been retired so long I’m no longer sure even of that.
Mister Landey:
You are, as I recall, a Professional Engineer, so you had to do it too.
Let us assume United Pemmican needs a left-handed smoke-shifter for its operations. It is, after all, how it gets that thin, thin, sixteen millimetre shell. The smoke shifter has a life expectancy of 10 years, costs 1 million dollars, and has to be replaced at the end of the ten years. The salvage value is $200K. Inflation runs at a constant 3 percent, and United Pemmican can put the money in the replacement fund to work at 5 percent. Here’s what happens.
At the end of the ten years the replacement cost is $1.34M. If they put $100K per year away at 5 percent return, they will have $1.32M in the kitty at replacement time. But, they need only $1.14M (remember the salvage value).
It turns out – I set up a spreadsheet and ran the numbers, if they put in a constant $86,500 per year they will hit the target at the end of the ten years. Of course, prudence indicates that they put in a little more, and be prepared to change their figures depending on current conditions, but this is an example of how to cost out a replacement.
What it also says is that the smoke shifter has to add $86.5K per year to the bottom line to pay for itself, or it is not worth having.
The math isn’t particularly difficult. If anyone wants to play around with this, ask.
The above comments are genetic in nature and do not form the basis for an attorney/client relationship. They do not constitute legal advice. I am not your attorney. Never listen to or take the advice of anyone under the age of 30 as they may have listened to or taken the advice of someone over the age of 30.
ANNA HARDING P.E. thanks for the link. I read the article. The writer shows a profound ignorance of Amtrak, making Amtrak out to be NEC and the LD’s, ignoring the corridors in Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, California and the Pacific Northwest.
The article is absolutely terrible. At length it focuses on management style, regional politics, and accounting tricks. What it ignores is why the national network is both hopelessly uneconomic and utterly irrelevant to the travel needs of most Americans.
We haven’t had this discussion in a while. Let me go back to it. Amtrak as now constituted has a train to some town in Kansas, or some town in North Dakota. It doesn’t have a train to most “flyover country” towns. (For example, there are two Dakotas, North and South. One Dakota has Amtrak and the other never has had Amtrak.) Don’t people in North Dakota go to Denver? Don’t people in Kansas go to Dallas? Don’t people from all over America go to Orlando? Isn’t there travel to or from Nashville, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Knoxville, Chattanooga, Des Moines, Columbus etc. etc., none of which have a single train. “Single train” is what there is in the entire state of Tennessee, serving one of Tennessee’s four metro areas and coming nowhere close to the other three. From Middle Tennessee, the site of BNA, a busy and awesome international airport, it’s a three-hour drive to Amtrak for that single train which calls in the middle of the night.
I’m sorry, the article was a waste of ink. Anyone who posts on this forum, from the political left to the center to the political right, has more to say about Amtrak than the writer of that article. Railway Age should stick to being a trade publication because it seems to lack the ability to filter out an article that has nothing coherent to say on issues of politics.