WASHINGTON—In addition to its “Equipment Asset Line Plan” [see “Amtrak fleet plan would replace Amfleet I cars, prepare for replacement Superliners,” Trains News Wire, March 25, 2019], Amtrak this week released companion five-year plans dealing with the following categories (click on each for the documents):
Infrastructure
Service lines (Northeast Corridor, state-supported, and long distance)
Taken together, the planning documents cross-pollenate performance and information derived from all of Amtrak’s businesses and represent the first extensive articulation of company goals for the next five years under the leadership of President and CEO Richard Anderson.
The service line plans, in particular, reveal current corporate thinking by attempting to identify key issues, the competitive landscape for each product line, challenges and risks, and “Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats” (dubbed “SWOT”) analyses.
There’s a wealth of information in each section, but management’s biases against long distance trains are consistently apparent. In discussing that product line, for example, no mention of the transportation actually delivered — passenger-miles — is ever made. Instead, it talks of “subsidy per passenger” and a “$543.2 million funded operating losses on long-distance routes.”
Trains has repeatedly asked for specifics on just one route, the Southwest Chief, for the past year in preparation of a report revealing that 90 percent of these expenses are allocated [“Amtrak’s money mystery,” January 2019 Trains], but the company has yet to respond.
It also states that the long-distance network does not meet “the preferences of today’s travelers,” but makes no mention of specific marketing efforts to reach them. Trains News Wire will have more analyses on all of these plans in the weeks ahead.
