Originally Posted by
PHLviaUS
I think that corporate culture is the issue at Amtrak, and it has been an unsolvable problem for 40 years.
Amtrak was formed from the passenger rail operations of the freight railroads and, in particular, the Penn Central. In the later days of railroad passenger operations, customer service was horrible at the PC. It is my theory that Amtrak's culture was from day one was the culture of the Penn Central since so much of the early Amtrak operation was run by the PC. It's been handed down from generation to generation over the years and is engrained in Amtrak from top to bottom. Sadly, I don't see it changing anytime soon.
And, to add to this, a bit of perspective: When Amtrak was formed (originally called "RailPax", in 1969), the railroads were actively lobbying Congress to let them drop all passenger service, as they were bleeding losses, ever since the USPS dropped the mail contracts in 1967, in favor of trucks and civil aviation, which was being promoted at the time. Dropping the postal contracts was the death knell for the US passenger train, as it was the only financial thread keeping the trains operating. Passenger counts were dropping for many reasons, in large part, due to the ongoing development of the interstate highway system, but also because air travel was becoming less expensive and many schedule frequencies, making it more available to the general public.
The railroads had their own tricks to add to the pile, by actively discouraging passenger patronage, so they could make cases in front of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) that no one was using the service and it was unfair to force them to lose money. The railroads would have gruff conductors mistreat passengers, terminate dining and sleeping car services on long distance trains, establish extremely inconvenient schedules and deliberately schedule trains going to onward destinations to leave shortly before the arrival of the trains feeding them the passengers.
So, the railroads, correctly observing that, in general, government made this mess, through the tar pit called the ICC and shifting postal traffic to trucks and airplanes, said: "Ok, you made this mess, now you fix it". That fix, in 1969, promulgated by the Nixon administration, was called RailPax.
The deal the government made to the railroads to get out of having to operate passenger trains was to capitalize the new RailPax corporation, later renamed National Railroad Passenger Corporation, (operating under the trade name "Amtrak"), by doing the following:
1) Contribute all of their cars, locomotives, maintenance facilities - any capital plant dedicated to passenger service
2) Contribute the equivalent of the last two years of financial losses into the corporation
3) Shift all of the employees they had, who were dedicated to passenger service
Almost all of the railroads went along with this, except the Southern Railroad which operated the "Southern Crescent" from DC to New Orleans, The Rock Island, which didn't have a enough money to make the contribution, so continued to operate their limited service and the Denver, Rio Grande & Western RR, which continued to operate their segment of the famous "California Zephyr" from Denver to Salt Lake City.
As a side note, the Santa Fe almost didn't go along with this, but ultimately did. With Amtrak, went the famous "Super Chief". But, the Santa Fe, observing how pitifully Amtrak operated their famous namesake train, would not let Amtrak use the name "Super Chief" and forced them to change it to the "Southwest Chief" or the "Southwest Limited", I forget which.
Anyway, to arc back to the point, railroads saw this as a great opportunity to get rid of their "dead wood" and a lot of these people went to Amtrak.
That's part of the genesis of the problem, is that this culture has persisted through Amtrak's troubled and sorry history. Until the corporate culture is changed, from within or without, they will always be a marginal transportation choice and never grow to what they could be, if they were operated privately.
Today, it's a cross between a social engineering project and a government agency. The result is a transportation product that's irrelevant to today's market.