I'm taking the train tomorrow and they better have room for me?!

Amtrak system not on track: Ridership is up, but it may not have enough trains to serve all
Peter Bacque Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va.

Released : Friday, July 18, 2008 4:00 AM

Jul. 18--In the era of $4-a-gallon gasoline, travelers are flocking to ride Amtrak.

But the national passenger rail service, dogged by delays and aging equipment, may not have enough trains to accommodate them all.

"The trains are very frequently sold out, especially now," said Meredith Richards of Charlottesville, president of Virginians for High-Speed Rail.

Amtrak's Richmond ridership is up 17 percent from last June to this June, said station RT-D

EXCLUSIVE agent Chuck McIntyre at the Staples Mill Station, Virginia's busiest passenger rail terminal with 234,670 boardings last year on its 16 trains. Boardings at Main Street Station in downtown Richmond numbered 12,757.

"We're not sold out in Richmond," McIntyre said. "There are spaces here. You just have to be a little flexible in your travel plans."

Nationally, Amtrak's June ridership grew 11.7 percent compared with last June, according to Tracy Connell, a spokeswoman for the rail corporation in Washington.

"We're attributing about half of the increase to fuel prices and the rest to people finding alternate means of transportation," Connell said.

For travelers in the Northeast Corridor, which includes Virginia, Amtrak offers a relatively inexpensive way to travel.

Keith Vincent, a Chesterfield police officer, rode Amtrak last week to Washington to take in some baseball. His $75 round-trip ticket compared favorably to the cost of driving. Filling up his sport utility vehicle runs about $70 now, he said: "I'd use most of that, there and back."

. . .

According to transportation economist George Hoffer at Virginia Commonwealth University, Amtrak offers discounted pricing in the Richmond and Hampton Roads markets because it has capacity available to Washington, while at the same time it is competing with low-cost airfares for passengers to the Northeast.

"It's a relative bargain to the Northeast on Amtrak, compared to what residents north of here pay," Hoffer said.

And then there's the avoided hassle of driving in the northeastern urban corridor.

"To drive around D.C. is just a disaster," said Suzanne Fischer-Huettner of Baltimore, who used Amtrak to come to Richmond on business last week. "I hate getting on [Interstate] 495."

During fiscal 2007, Amtrak welcomed aboard more than 25.8 million passengers across the nation. That accounts for less than half of 1 percent of all intercity travel in the U.S., according to federal figures.

Amtrak received a subsidy of $1.27 billion from the federal government last year.

"Every single mode [of transportation] has received some kind of subsidy," said Jack Brown, who teaches the history of technology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

The rail service operates 20 trains daily in Virginia, where 933,266 people used the system last year.

Nationally, Washington was the second busiest station -- behind New York -- handling 4,108,569 passengers, about one-third of whom come from Virginia.

However, 11 of Amtrak's 19 Virginia stations -- most in smaller communities -- see fewer than 20,000 passengers a year.

. . .

Amtrak's system has about 1,500 passenger cars. They average about 30 years old, while some of the dining cars serving Virginia rail travelers were built in 1949.

"We don't have additional equipment" to pick up a big spike in travelers, Amtrak's Connell said.

"They've got a very large number of cars that are out of service . . . in need of overhaul, and they have not had the money to fix them," said Richard L. Beadles, a member of the state's Rail Advisory Board and former president of RF&P Railroad.

According to Amtrak, 26 percent of its passenger cars are not in good repair.

Last year, only 69 percent of Amtrak's trains ran on time, the rail service said in its annual report.

Amtrak owns almost none of the tracks on which it runs, except between Washington and Boston. Because it is subject to the policies of the host freight railroads for use of the tracks, Amtrak's on-time performance frequently suffers.

. . .

Meanwhile, though capacity in the Northeast Corridor is strained, nationally Amtrak's cars ran only 49 percent full.

"A large number are empty, but they're in the middle of nowhere," said economist Kenneth J. Button, director of George Mason University's Center for Transportation Policy, Operations and Logistics in Fairfax.

Passenger rail services do best in areas of high population density, such as the Northeast, experts say.

"The politicians don't like that," Button said. "They want to spread their butter over the whole country rather than concentrating on where services would be useful."

Soaring gasoline prices could make Americans rethink their views of mass transportation, U.Va.'s Brown said.

Congress is considering a significant increase in the Amtrak subsidy, which would help with its capacity issues, Richard said.

Contact Peter Bacque at (804) 649-6813 or pbacque@timesdispatch.com.

Amtrak ridership

From June 2007 through June 2008 there were:

234,670

Staples Mill Station passengers

12,757

Main Street Station passengers

933,266

Virginia passengers

25.8 million

national passengers