With gas prices at record highs and air travel becoming increasingly out of reach for middle class consumers, Americans are rediscovering train travel. According to this NY Times piece, Amtrak set records in May for passengers and ticket revenue. This would be a good thing, except for the fact that Amtrak is incredibly ill-equipped to o meet this challenge:

Today Amtrak has 632 usable rail cars, and dozens more are worn out or damaged but could be reconditioned and put into service at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars each.

And it needs to buy new rail cars soon. Its Amfleet cars, the ones recognizable to riders as the old Metroliners, are more than 30 years old. And the Acela trains, which have been operating about eight years, have about a million miles on them.

The problem with Amtrak, since its inception almost 40 years ago, is that it’s never understood its place in the market and hasn’t adapted to changes. There was once a time when taking a train from New York to Miami made sense, because the price was right. Airlines and automobile travel just didn’t make sense for the average traveler, who would be willing sacrifice the expediency of air travel or the flexibility of their own automobile for the economy of a train trip.

But even with high gas prices and airline ticket prices, a 28-hour trip from New York to Miami just doesn’t make any sense, no matter how cheap the ticket. Today’s marketplace demands reasonable travel times, regardless of the fare. Amtrak would be better served to focus on clustering their service in corridors throughout the country. Their Northwest Corridor between DC and Boston has proven to be successful. It would make sense to do a similar thing in other regions of the country, focusing on large markets that might attract business passengers who’d prefer not to fly.

It appears that such a strategy would require some re-negotiating of Amtrak’s labor contracts, but I’m not sure how much worse shape they could be in, given that they’ve burned through $30 billion in federal aid since 1971.