Less travelled routes have a chicken-and-egg problem: nobody uses them, so they’re not a priority, so they get even worse. NYC to Montreal, for example, should be 2x as fast as it currently is....
personally I find traveling on amtrak to be a lovely experience. even on the NE regional I usually get a whole row to myself if it isn't a holiday weekend. of course, this is probably why it's so expensive. on the other hand if the ridership went up, it wouldn't be such a nice experience anymore.
The days/times when you can get through the Puget Sound, JBLM corridor in less than 2 or more hours for that segment alone are rapidly declining. It can easily take 2h+ to get from Federal Way to Olympia, even in non peak hours.
I’m sure that line accounts for some wildly disproportionate revenue for Amtrak, but in most other places people prefer to pay cheaper fares and don’t care about the surrounding quality properties enough to pay more for them.
In principle, this could easily be fixed—-and cracking down operators ignoring the preference rules did help a lot—-but people have to want it.
The last time I rode coach on NE regional lines, my girlfriend & I arrived over an hour early for the train & we had to stand up and hold our suitcases for the first 90 minutes of the ride because there were simply no seats. We walked back to front every coach car and every seat was taken and all of the luggage racks were filled. I get frazzled by hectic transportation experiences so it was especially nasty for me.
For a $70-80 fare, I expect easy access to a comfortable seat, ample space for 1-2 bags / suitcases directly at my seat area, and easy ability for multiple people in the same party to get seats directly next to each other.
I hate that Amtrak locks these (basic) amenities behind business & first class fares, and essentially acts like a slumlord towards their coach class service.
The gist of the essay is that the railroads incrementally made the passenger experience worse and then as demand declined they used the declining demand to justify further worsening the passenger experience[2]. From the railroads' perspective this was a virtuous positive feedback loop, insofar as it got them out of the relatively low margin passenger business. That then got dumped on Amtrak, which is awful for many reasons, not least of which is their trains are the lowest priority on the tracks they lease, so they are virtually never on time. I imagine Amtrak executives would also love to get out of the passenger transport business too, if they could somehow swing it to keep getting federal money. Anyhow it really is a great essay and I highly recommend reading it since my summary can't do it justice.
[1] https://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=91313
[2] A lesson corporations now apply with disappointing prevalence.
This is wrong. Amtrack has a subordinate lease to almost all of the freight lines it leases access to, meaning that they have lower priority to the lines than the cargo trains. Acela is the only Amtrack route in the nation that might have priority over cargo trains sharing the rails.