Amtrak's New Marketing Strategy: It's Not a Train, It's a Hotel on Wheels
wsj.com
wsj.com
That's not to say that train seats should ever be more expensive than airplane seats at the same time to departure, obviously.
In the Netherlands there are only a handful of international trains which have variable prices; you can just hop in any local, regional express, or intercity train, and the only price variance is the fixed peak hours surcharge; no seat reservations, no demand based pricing.
But yeah, a lot of European rail also still has a fixed-price fare you can buy on the day of departure – although that fare is usually much higher than the (dynamically priced) saver fare, if available. So functionally, it's just a cap of the maximum dynamic rate, at this point.
I wish they’d adopt airline style! A half empty train leaving in thirty minutes should have dirt cheap tickets. Instead it looks like they robotically raise prices on a time-based model.
I'm in the midwest, so rail is not remotely convenient but Amtrak recently announced a three-day ride from Ohio to Florida that I was amazed at because it somehow seemed less appealing than just grinding out the 15-hour family road trip, let alone a 2 hour flight.
If you want more people riding trains, make them faster.
But it was definitely a luxury "vacation" purchase. I looked at tickets while planning our last trip, going to Boston. It was insane. Hell, it was this past Labor Day weekend, when New Jersey rail was free for almost a week. Even then, of we'd have driven into NJ, took a free train into New York, then took an Amtrak to Boston, the tickets from NY to Boston would be so more than flying from Baltimore. How is New York to Boston not a cheaper line?!
ohio to florida is too far for a train to make sense, but you are correct trains need to move faster to be useful. But faster needs expensive track work (at 300 kmh you look both ways see the tracks are clear and then get killed by the coming train you didn't see) so amtrack tries to cheat with slow service that is more evpensive than flying
Amtrak passenger trains mostly run on rails which are owned by big RR corporations - running when, where, and if the corporation doesn't have some more-profitable freight train using the rails. And don't expect construction & maintenance standards (especially maximum speed & roughness of ride) to be any better than what the freight trains need, either.
Oh, and as for the snafu mentioned with me booking on the wrong day, Amtrak's department that deals with issuing refunds does not operate past normal hours, so if you find yourself booked on the wrong day at the last minute, there's no way to weigh your options financially because you don't know how much they'll decide to give you back. The experience really sucked for other reasons, and although I love trains, I will never be riding Amtrak again.
After taking a trip to just Tacoma to catch a flight from there she told me "no way". The trains were extremely late, customer service non-existant and on returning the train sat locked up at the Vancouver station for 40 minutes with no announcement and no explanation later.
North American train service is a hot mess.
It's a shame, though. I really love train travel, the sound, the smells, the locomotive technology - everything about it. Too bad Amtrak is stuck somewhere in the 1970's in terms of speed/cost.
I guess I agree with this broadly but I'm not sure the locations trains travel to and capacity is the issues I'd pinpoint.
I've looked into traveling via train a few times now and generally speaking I haven't because the prices were too high and the trains were too slow.
I'd happily get on a train from Maimi to NYC if I could board at 6 pm and get off at 9 am like it really were a hotel on wheels.
But the reality is that it's a 35 hour trip on Amtrack today if there are no delays. I'd have to board at 11 am, get off at 9 pm the next day and transfer halfway.
The real speed of the train would need to be faster, accounting for the fact that the route is not direct and has stops in the middle, but it should be doable with "regular" train technology.
1. You have to plan months and months in advance to find availability.
And 2. That you’re going spend a few thousand just on the train. Farther destinations can be x2 price of regular flight tickets for the whole fam. (Not considering the budget airlines for this comparison).
This may work for a single person wanting to go on an adventure.
Only 1 hour more and a bit more money for the ability to be productive or enjoy entertainment on a train is very appealing to me
Beyond airport security, you can arrive at the station minutes, not hours, before departure, and train stations are usually right in the city center, saving even more time, to say nothing of comfort (I personally value an hour spent reaching a flight at five less hours of vacation time).
On top of that, it usually saves at least one night in a hotel!
All that is for European distances though, i.e. a single night spent on the train, not a night and the better part of a day and more.
Once, I took Amtrak up from San Diego to Santa Barbara. That was a lovely scenic trip. However, upon arriving in Arizona, it saddened me to discover that our Amtrak service is practically non-existent. There's not even a proper station in our city!
Wouldn't it be lovely to hop on a local train and ride it, to Flagstaff, Sonora, Grand Canyon, Tucson, Yuma, Santa Fe(DUH!) or beyond? But that's simply impossible for so many reasons. It'd be logistically crazy for me even to ride to San Diego from here.
So I've resigned myself to just abandoning Amtrak as a transportation option, and it's quite sad because they used to have a better reputation, but powerful forces ran them into the ground, and the American Southwest is so widely sprawling, that trying to get rights-of-way and tracks laid just for passenger rail is a fool's errand, because why not simply fly on Southwest Airlines?
Now that the airlines are being decimated and falling apart, however, I see a future with more impetus to ground transportation like that. I feel also that a CA high-speed rail project, greatly ridiculed, is pragmatic planning for a realistic future.
A good rail network provides a reliable, consistent, repeatable, and straightforward three hour connection from Nowheresberg to the nearest city. Slow, but good enough to feel like they exist in the same planet. Unfortunately, that promise is subtle, and it plays out over decades, so the reward system we've created for ourselves is incapable of supporting it. And thus, we have Amtrak and confederate flags.
And between a completely stressful six hour journey and an overnight train where I can go to sleep in one city center and wake up in another, guess which one is more practical?