Amtrak trains during the holidays in 2024 are facing ridership demand comparable or even greater than 2019 before COVID-19’s dip in 2020. While autos jam highways where public transportation options are scarce, and airlines add flights to accommodate longer trips, Amtrak in the past also rose to the occasion by offering extra trains and expanded consists on its busiest routes.
Today, meeting such travel-demand spurts is a challenge. The steps Amtrak management took to reduce costs by sidelining equipment and reducing maintenance, onboard service, and operating personnel are finally being reversed with the deployment of state-owned Siemens Venture coaches for California and Midwest routes. At least 28 Horizon cars the Ventures were partially meant to replace have been diverted to regularly-scheduled Amtrak Cascades service in the Pacific Northwest instead of being available for extra holiday duty. They are subbing for Talgo trainsets the Washington Department of Transportation’s Rail Division chose to scrap, rather than renew the agency’s Talgo maintenance agreement. Meanwhile, some Horizons have been withdrawn from service because vestibule stairs have succumbed to rust after operating more than 35 years across salt-laden Midwest highway crossings in winter.
Historical capacity options
In Amtrak’s earliest years, beginning in 1971, elderly cars and locomotives the fledgling company declined to acquire, such as legions of heavyweight ex-Pennsylvania Railroad P70 coaches, were still available to be pressed into holiday service. After F40 and AEM-7 locomotives, Superliners, and nearly 500 Amfleet I coaches and cafes began arriving by 1980, Amtrak had leftover heritage equipment that could also be utilized for holiday extras. But the ranks of these expensive-to-maintain cars eventually thinned. Why pay to keep obsolete rolling stock around only for occasional high-demand peaks?
Meanwhile, computerization and improvements to Amtrak’s reservation system triggered the eventual phasing out of unreserved trains. This especially impacted travelers on the Northeast Corridor, where the prospect of standing without a seat for hours had become a dreaded Thanksgiving ritual. By the early 2000s, the ability to yield-manage inventory on a train-by-train basis by raising prices as seats were sold replaced simple “peak” and “off-peak” fares, effectively spreading out demand.
Managing Amtrak trains during the holidays
The biggest crush occurs the Sunday after Thanksgiving, mainly because the people who go somewhere for the holidays may choose to travel there on different days during the previous week, but likely have to be back on Monday. However, heavy demand continue to develops on Wednesday of Thanksgiving week.
Finding extra equipment to accommodate demand has been no easy task. Systemwide, this has been accomplished by adjusting maintenance cycles for cars and locomotives so that practically nothing sits in the shop for scheduled maintenance when it could be carrying paying customers. But with a fleet that has not grown appreciably in decades, this stopgap fix can only go so far.
Especially between Washington, D.C., and New York on the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak in pre-pandemic years usually leased commuter trainsets from Maryland’s MARC, Philadelphia’s SEPTA, and NJ Transit. The equipment is compatible with safety systems because it already runs on Amtrak’s own electrified tracks. Any extra trains utilizing these sets had generally been scheduled for Sunday, sprinkling in mid-afternoon and evening round trips from their overnight storage locations with Amfleet-equipped Northeast Regional trains. Because these cars don’t have reclining seats or food service, initial lower fares were generally offered.
Another tactic, both in the East and Midwest, has been to create extra trips on the busiest days by turning crews and equipment faster than they normally would cycle between one regular assignment and another. This also requires coordinating support services such as cleaning and food delivery at special times and locations. Most notable on the Northeast Corridor in recent years has been the deployment of many more Acela round trips over the entire route, adding hundreds of seats at premium fares on the New York-Boston segment. As aging Acelas are taken out of service pending the arrival of new trainsets, scheduling additional departures has become more challenging.
Additional Amtrak trains sponsored by the Illinois and Michigan Departments of Transportation have been permitted by Norfolk Southern, BNSF Railway, Canadian National, and Union Pacific with the understanding that they are holiday-only incursions when freight train starts are diminished. Schedules had been adjusted to get extra turns out of existing equipment, with supplemental round trips to Quincy and Normal, Ill., and Holland and Ann Arbor, Mich. Supplemental car lines were also added to certain long-distance train departures to provide all-weather access to rural communities and along corridors without state support, but those additions are constrained this year by lack of available rolling stock.
A crucial component of handling the additional passengers has been annual volunteering by Amtrak managers and office staff who descend on major stations. They help control the crowds and answer questions for travelers who may have purchased a ticket but need help navigating their way to the train. The company volunteers know that every personal contact made may mean a satisfied repeat customer when business isn’t nearly as brisk.
NEW: This year at Washington D.C. Union Station, which handled 149,000 travelers during 2023’s Thanksgiving rush, Amtrak has opened a temporary waiting area opposite the ticket counter (media.amtrak.com/2024/11/amtrak-opens-temporary-ticketed-passenger-waiting-at-washington-union-station/) staffed by employee volunteers and regular station personnel.
Higher fares, continued sellouts for 2024
Although additional daily round trips have been added to daily schedules since last year’s holiday season between New York and Washington, D.C., as well as Seattle-Portland, Ore., the rest of the system will generally be operating no more than regular departures.
Where there is plenty of frequency and enough capacity on each train, Amtrak has been able to fend off sellouts by continuing to raise fares. This is true for the Boston-Washington, D.C. electrified Northeast Corridor. The biggest problem on other corridors is Sunday, Dec. 1 , but advance sellouts are also occurring on Tuesday and Wednesday, November 26-27. Some examples when checked two weeks in advance on November 17:
Empire Corridor: Virtually all Tuesday, Wednesday, and Sunday trains between New York and Albany-Rensselaer, N.Y., were sold out, with sellouts extending to western New York on Sunday. The corridor lost two round-trips to East River tunnel work [see “New York Governor asks Amtrak to reverse…, “ Trains News Wire, Nov. 16, 2024], but Amtrak restored one of them, the northbound Adirondack and southbound Maple Leaf for the holiday week.
Chicago: Sellouts on Dec. 1 include all five trains to St. Louis (including the Texas Eagle); all three to Carbondale, Ill.(including the City of New Orleans) four to Battle Creek, Mich., both the Empire Builder and Borealis to St. Paul, Minn.; and the westbound Southwest Chief.
Seattle-Portland, Ore.: Even with expanded service, about half of the trains are sold out on Wednesday and Sunday including the Coast Starlight, which also has no coach seats between Los Angeles and the Oakland, Calif., on those two days.
Master planner of Amtrak holiday trains
No recounting of holidays past would be complete without acknowledging the immense contribution of strategist Bruce Van Sant. The company’s former Director of System Operations quarterbacked equipment acquisition for extra trains and helped orchestrate the distribution of a finite number of Amfleet, Horizon, and Superliner coaches while keeping an eye on train length and crew turns. Van Sant, who succumbed to cancer in 2017, oversaw the Thanksgiving process for decades.
Part of his daily routine was looking at available inventory across the entire system to spot corridor ridership trends and anticipating future capacity needs, but an August 2011 visit to Bruce’s office at the Consolidated National Operations Center in Wilmington, Del., confirmed the value of his attention to detail.
“If we don’t add a seventh coach to (Northeast Corridor) train 148 on Fridays, we’ll be turning lots of people away, so we have to balance the cost of adding the extra car with the revenue it could bring in,” he said. Van Sant was already looking at the previous year’s Thanksgiving ridership and revenue stats to see how he might fine-tune plans for the upcoming surge of Amtrak trains during the holidays.
There are many dedicated professionals at Amtrak who work to make the most out of the yearly holiday challenge and opportunity with limited resources, but it is hard to replace the institutional knowledge Van Sant brought to the table. It’s something people who benefitted from his expertise will always be thankful for.
Original article written Nov. 22, 2021. Updated Nov. 19 with link about Amtrak’s temporary waiting area at Washington D.C. Union Station.
Very nice read. It does seem that equipment that works for season loads should exist…..if Amtrak has a vision for it to exist.
A run down on the manufacturing base that is building up in the US would be interesting.
In the past Amtrak used to rent or lease cars from Metra/RTA for at least the Chicago to Carbondale trains. People grumped a bit about the seating compared to Amfleets or Superliners, but they got a lot of students home for the holidays and back. Metra may be running short of available cars in their aging fleet too though.
Before Amtrak, I rode to Newark on a string of MP54 MU cars representing the “Advance Midday Congressional” on the day before Thanksgiving. I don’t know about the other riders but I enjoyed the ride.
Those Siemens Venture cars – Someone here wrote a story on June 3, 2021, explaining that states were not deploying them due to lead in the water lines.
They are the unsung hero’s at Amtrak. Thanks for telling us about them.
Now what is the hang up with the Siemens’ Venture coaches not being available. Who or what is the cause for that?