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Downeaster Inaugurates Fifth Round-Trip
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Last Friday, Amtrak’s Downeaster inaugurated its fifth round-trip between Boston, MA and Portland, ME. Another five minutes was shaved off the one-way schedule; the current 2 hour 30-minute trip is fifteen minutes faster than when the service started in 2001. In FY2006, the Downeaster had the highest ridership increase (32%) and the highest revenue increase (34%) of any route in the Amtrak system.
A video of the press conference at the Portland Transportation Center has been posted to the DowneastRiders Blog:
Speakers and Guests:
Patricia Quinn, Executive Director, Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority
David Cole, Commissioner, Maine DOT
John Baldacci, Maine Governor (D)
David Fink, President, Pan Am Railways
Patricia Eltman, Director, Maine Office of Tourism
Mary Beth Mello, Deputy Regional Administrator, Federal Transit Administration
Rhoda Salemme, wife of former Amtrak Superintendant Victor Salemme
Wayne Davis, Chairman, TrainRiders/Northeast
At the end of the video, Davis (who is also a NARP Vice President) reminded the crowd that the federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality grant that has financed the Downeaster’s operations expires next year, and the effort to extend service northward to Brunswick has seen fits and starts.
Clearly, the political work to continue and to build upon the Downeaster’s successes have only just begun.
—Matthew Melzer
Posted by NARP
Tags: amtrak, downeaster,New Hampshire Advocates Urged to Question Presidental Candidates
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Yesterday, NARP sent the following message to its members in New Hampshire (by snail mail letter and e-mail):
To NARP Members in New Hampshire—
With the New Hampshire primary coming on Tuesday, January 8, you still have time to ask a presidential candidate (or candidates) about passenger trains. Your message could go something like this, substituting your own words where you can.
“The highly successful Downeaster train linking Boston, New Hampshire and Maine is expected to lose its federal funding next year, even though ridership is growing and the nation is increasingly concerned about climate change, a problem that passenger trains help address. As president, what would you do about passenger trains in general and the Downeaster in particular?”
Remember, it is good for ANY of the candidates to hear such a question. If that candidate drops out of the race, he or she nonetheless is likely to remain active, to support one of the surviving candidates, and possibly to help influence the eventual party nominee’s views of the issues.
The specific problem with the Downeaster involves expiration on September 30, 2009, of federal “CMAQ” funding which has been supporting the route. (CMAQ stands for Congestion Mitigation Air Quality Improvement Program.) The Downeaster is enjoying record ridership and revenue, and has stimulated increased station-area real estate values and development. Passenger rail advocates in Maine are working hard to save the service, but the fact that only one of three states served provides operating funds does present a challenge.
Thank you for your efforts to preserve and expand passenger rail service!
—Ross B. Capon
NARP Executive Director
Posted by NARP
Tags: amtrak, downeaster, presidential election,Maine’s Marvelous Train
Friday, August 14, 2009
On a recent round-trip Amtrak journey from Washington, I rode the Northeast Regional, Downeaster, and Acela Express. I have had the pleasure of riding the Northeast Regional and Acela on past trips to New York City, but this was my first time aboard the Downeaster. When I arrived at Boston’s North Station, I was expecting just another ride in a standard Amfleet I coach. As I looked around the station, I noticed several cheerful ads proclaiming “Train to Maine - So easy, so obvious, so close.”
I found the Downeaster to be quite clean, and the crew to be very friendly. We departed from Boston on time. Shortly afterwards, an announcement was made inviting passengers to use the free Wi-Fi offered onboard. As I walked to the café car—which had an excellent menu, featuring items such as fresh fruit and clam chowder—I noticed roughly half of the passengers were browsing the Internet on their laptops. Wireless Web access is a valuable amenity not found on other travel modes (except some intercity buses) that could lure passengers aboard. I hope to see it on other routes soon.
As the train approached Portland, an announcement was made that we were traveling through the most scenic part of the train’s route. We were told that had the weather been clearer, we would have been able to see Mt. Washington in the distance. The ability to enjoy the passing landscape is an aspect of train travel that I am glad Amtrak is acknowledging. We arrived into the Portland Transportation Center, which is a transit hub served by intercity and local bus routes, something that should be a fixture of all 21st-century cities. Maine has truly done an excellent job with the Downeaster, and deserves a lot of credit.
On my return voyage to DC the next day, I transferred in Boston to the Acela Express by way of the T to South Station. As my train headed south, I saw a few people working on laptops using air cards, but far fewer than on the Downeaster. While the Acela is an excellent train already, Amtrak should make it a priority to equip the train with Wi-Fi to bolster its attractiveness to business travelers.
The addition of on-board Wi-Fi would help Amtrak to gain a larger share of the travel market along corridors in the Northeast, Midwest, and along the West Coast. Critics complain that the company has not taken advantage of modern technology. Wireless Internet, in addition to electronic ticketing – which should be in place at some point next year—would prove to detractors that passenger rail is not outdated, and can and will play a key role in our national transportation network, far into the future.
— Peter Roberts
Peter Roberts has been a summer volunteer in the NARP office for the past two summers. He is a rising sophomore at Herndon High School in Virginia. He reorganized our library last summer and has worked on a variety of projects this summer. We thank him for his work and his dedication to our cause. – Malcolm Kenton
Posted by NARP
Tags: amtrak, corridor, crew, downeaster, maine, scenic, wi-fi,Flag Stops: Doing the Math
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
The latest news and views round-up.
The office of Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID) has obtained a preliminary draft of Amtrak’s Congressionally-mandated study [PDF] of the possibility of restoring the Pioneer between Salt Lake City and Seattle. It presents a very conservative ridership estimate—even lower than actual ridership was when the train last ran in 1992—and says the new equipment and track upgrades required would take at least four years once the company gets the go-ahead from Congress.
A land developer from Maine went to Ohio to spread the word about the wonders that new passenger trains can work for local economies. He touted the fact that every dollar his home state put in to initiating and operating the Downeaster has brought about $70 in additional construction investment, creating 18,000 new jobs. He thinks Ohio’s 3-C corridor could do the same.
A Washington Post review of Green Metropolis by David Owen, which has just been added to the NARP Bookstore on Amazon.com, emphasizes Owen’s strongest point about the consequences of overreliance on the automobile: “The real problem with cars is not that they don’t get enough miles to the gallon, it’s that they make it too easy for people to spread out, encouraging forms of development that are inherently wasteful and damaging.” This is something NARP has been pointing out for years, even when doing so puts us in the minority of green-minded groups.
Phoenix’s 9-month-old light rail line is converting skeptics—and bucking the national trend—by carrying almost 7,000 more daily riders than projected, the vast majority being leisure riders, reports the New York Times. In most cities, 60 percent or more of transit users are commuters, but only 29% of Phoenix light rail riders take it to work and back. It goes to show how well transit can work, even in a metropolis that is practically the epitome of sprawl.
A Philadelphia Inquirer article paints a not-so-pretty picture of the condition of Amtrak-owned infrastructure, which the company revealed only after government watchdogs threatened to file suit. Several bridges on the Northeast and Keystone corridors have been rated “poor” by Amtrak’s own inspectors, showing such overt signs of decay as corroded beams, holes, and trees growing through cracks. The these pieces of the physical plant remain neglected, the more it’s going to cost, in terms of safety as well as dollars.
Amtrak adds a new city to its list of destinations this week with the reopening of Icicle Station in Leavenworth, Washington, which will be served daily by the Empire Builder’s Seattle section.
LCL: A preprogrammed “Balanced Transportation Analyzer” (Excel file) gives you the chance to play policymaker and come up with a plan to ease congestion in the Big Apple. * * * Thomas Friedman says US lawmakers don’t have the guts to raise the gas tax. * * * A video high-speed rail wish from a future rail advocacy leader. * * * A slight setback for Tar Heel travelers: a new Raleigh-Charlotte train will come, but not until early next year. * * * There’s one industrialized country the United States appears to be a few steps ahead of on high-speed rail: our neighbor to the north.
—Malcolm Kenton
Posted by Malcolm Kenton
Tags: amtrak, bridges, cars, costs, development, downeaster, economy, empire builder, green metropolis, infrastructure, lawsuit, light rail, maine, ohio, passenger trains, phoenix, pioneer, restoration, sprawl, study, transit, washington state,Hopping the Local: News from State Rail Advocacy Groups
Monday, October 05, 2009
The first installment of an occasional blog feature reporting interesting news from NARP’s state-level cousins.
—Malcolm Kenton
Posted by Malcolm Kenton
Tags: albany, downeaster, finger lakes, geneva, john baldacci, legislature, maine, meadowlands, new jersey, new york, passenger trains, rail authority, sports, stadium, trainriders, vision, yankees,Budget Threatens Passenger Rail Modernization
Thursday, April 14, 2011
With Congress cutting spending left and right, one of the casualties has been President Obama’s high-speed rail initiative. The loss of $2.8 billion in funding is a major blow to the program.
The next few months could be a do-or-die moment for supporters of efforts to build a 21st-century transportation infrastructure in the United States. If opponents of improved passenger train service get their way, Americans will face rising fuel costs with few alternatives to costly car travel.
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House Republicans’ proposed budget for the remainder of the current fiscal year contains no new funding for the federal High-Speed and Intercity Passenger Rail (HSIPR) program, and rescinds $400 million in funds that had been awarded to Florida’s Tampa-Orlando bullet train, but were turned back by Gov. Rick Scott.
The HSIPR program, created by a 2008 law and capitalized with $8 billion from the 2009 Recovery Act, consists of grants awarded on a competitive basis to states, groups of states, or Amtrak to pay for capital projects aimed at making intercity passenger train service faster, more frequent, more reliable and safer. This includes building new world-class high-speed rail systems, as well as making meaningful upgrades to existing rail infrastructure and equipment to greatly enhance current Amtrak service.
The latter type of investment, often deemed higher-speed rail, is just as important as the former, as it is a cost-effective way of giving more Americans the choice of train travel. This builds the domestic production capacity and the train-riding culture necessary for the U.S. to begin to approach Europe in terms of the energy-efficient choices available to travelers.
The elimination of the program from the 2011 budget unwisely stunts the growth of a program that has already begun to prove its worth.
Posted by Malcolm Kenton
Tags: 2011 budget, downeaster, federal railroad administration, high-speed rail, hsipr, illinois, maine, passenger train modernization,Downeaster’s Mobile Device Field Test
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Passengers on Amtrak’s popular Boston-Portland, ME Downeaster service will be seeing something new beginning this week—a technology that will fundamentally change the way Amtrak accepts and tracks tickets.
Currently, conductors collect paper tickets from customers and carry them in their shirt pockets—a system relatively unchanged since the days when locomotives were powered by steam. While it is true that there is a digital documentation of a passenger’ reservation, the only record of who actually boarded the train resides in the conductor’s paper tickets.
That’s all about to change. Passengers on the Downeaster will be part of a mobile device field test beginning this week. [See image of Amtrak’s seatback notification, at bottom] For the time being, there will be nothing different about how customers purchase tickets. The only difference passengers will see is the portable ticket-scanning device conductors will be field-testing, which will be used to instantly send ticket information to a central database.
First and foremost, this will increase the safety of passengers. Accidents are a rare occurrence, to be sure, but recent accidents on the California Zephyr and the Downeaster—both caused by trucks colliding with trains—are unfortunate reminders that these incidents need to be prepared for. Amtrak’s first responders need to have an exact manifest of passengers; know who they should be looking for and how many people are unaccounted for. Currently, Amtrak’s emergency workers are forced to rely on a manifest of who bought tickets beforehand. But train stations aren’t like airports, with rigid and uniform passenger controls. They are often open, bustling centers of social and commercial activity or isolated rural outposts. People miss trains; or buy tickets on-board; or catch later trains with an unreserved ticket. Any delay that arises from the manual construction of a manifest from a loose assortment of ticket stubs is a delay that puts people at risk. For this reason, Amtrak should be applauded for developing this scanning capability on its perpetually inadequate capital budget.
As for other benefits of the portable ticket-scanning devices, only time will tell. But looking at how airlines use similar ticket-scanning technology—offering tickets that can be printed at home or carried on a smartphone—should make passengers cautiously optimistic for the coming years.
Posted by NARP
Tags: downeaster, mobile, safety,Amtrak’s eTicketing off to a smooth start
Monday, November 28, 2011
[Corrected: November 29, 2011]
As NARP reported back in August, Amtrak recently launched a pilot eTicketing program on the popular Boston-Portland Downeaster train. I’m happy to write that so far, the launch of the pilot has been a big success.
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| A standard eTicket, as issued by a Quik-Trak machine |
Anyone who has ridden an airplane in the last decade has a general understanding of what an eTicket is—a document that serves as a physical representation of a digital record, as opposed to a value-bearing document. With eTickets, authenticity is verified via an electronic scanning device connected to a database, rather than the material characteristics of the paper ticket.
There are some significant benefits to both passengers and Amtrak to this way of storing ticket information.
Passengers will now be able to print tickets at home. Value bearing paper tickets require controlled printing environments to ensure a uniform ticket for conductors to verify. But since conductors will be using mobile scanning devices on eTickets, only the unique barcode on an eTicket is important. Passengers can provide Amtrak with their email address and simply print their eTicket from their home or work computer. This convenience is a boon for passengers who do not live close to a staffed Amtrak station and this streamlining will eventually allow Amtrak to phase-out the mailing of non-multi-ride tickets, an unnecessarily costly and time-consuming process for the company and the passengers.
Posted by NARP
Tags: airlines, downeaster, eticketing, safety,Opponents push differing lessons on high-speed and intercity passenger rail
Thursday, December 08, 2011
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| Keystone Corridor [Image: Centpacrr] |
The presses have been churning following a contentious hearing on high-speed rail before the House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure Tuesday, featuring Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and NARP’s own president, Ross Capon. The hearing was titled “The Federal Railroad Administration’s High Speed Intercity Passenger Rail Program: Mistakes and Lessons Learned”. Judging from the statements put out following the inquiry, however, the program’s supporters and detractors walked away with an entirely different set of lessons in hand.
[Click here for archived video of the hearing]
On the DOT’s Fast Lane blog, LaHood continued the vociferous defense of the program he initiated in response to animated questioning during the hearing:
Since 1991, Presidents and Congressmen—Republicans as well as Democrats—have had an American high-speed rail network on their agenda, in good economic times and bad. What’s changed today is that we have a President and Vice President who are backing up their words with actions. We’re not just writing reports and filing them away; we’re hiring workers, we’re laying track, and we’re building stations.
…
From here, the future is bright. During the next six months, more than $1.1 billion of new job-creating construction projects will begin. We’ve invested in increasing the Acela’s speed from 135 to 186 miles per hour. We’ve invested in bringing 110 mile-per-hour service to the Midwest. We’ll soon break ground on a new line between Portland and Seattle. We continue planning for a southwest network that connects Dallas to Houston and Oklahoma City.
And we’re committed to helping the people of California achieve their vision for high-speed rail, too. It’s not a cheap project, but it’s an essential one. And we are in it for the long haul.
Over on the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee website, the view from Chairman John Mica (R-FL) was much dimmer:
We’re funding slow-speed projects all over the country, most of them for Amtrak, that will not result in high-speed service. $3.6 billion – more than one-third of the $10.1 billion that has gone to projects – was turned back by states. The one project funded that offered the most hope for achieving high-speed, the California project, appears to be in disarray. In fact, the Committee will hold a hearing specifically to review this project next week.
We need one high-speed rail success, and our country’s best opportunity to achieve high-speed rail is in the Northeast Corridor. Now that federal funding for this program has been stopped, we have an opportunity to learn from those mistakes and make the needed changes to develop at least one truly successful high-speed rail corridor in this country.
Political media outlets seemed split on how to interpret what transpired. Politico’s piece, “High-speed rail has a bad day”, focused on the tongue lashing that House Republicans gave the program, and transposed the hearing with news of a Field poll that claims a majority of Californians would like to see the high-speed rail bond resubmitted to the voters on the 2012 ballot. Streetsblog Capitol Hill and The Hill chose to highlight the back-and-forth between LaHood and critics of the program, with pieces titled “LaHood Defends High-Speed Rail Program At House Hearing” and “LaHood squares off with critics of high-speed rail”, respectively.
Streetsblog captured that interplay nicely with a paragraph on a contentious exchange between LaHood and Representative Bill Shuster (R-PA), who chairs the T&I Subcommittee on Railroads:
When LaHood said that the HSR vision isn’t “Ray LaHood’s vision”—it comes from the states themselves—Shuster said yes, but his daughter wants a luxury SUV and he don’t have the money for it, so she’s not getting it. “I’m glad you didn’t think that about the Keystone Line,” LaHood shot back. He said Shuster asked for the money for that line and the DOT gave it. “Right,” Shuster said, I believe in rail investment “where it makes sense.” But, Shuster noted, he didn’t ask for help funding rail improvements between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh—and that line goes right through his district. But it’s not a strategic investment priority for the country.
Now, to my knowledge, no one is advocating for a 220 mph train between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh in the near-term. Rail advocates—like the Western Pennsylvanians for Passenger Rail, whose efforts we reported on in November—are advocating for a plan to reduce total trip time from 5 hours to 4 hours, and add an additional frequency (from one daily to two), so business travelers could use the service.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is reporting that U.S. Airways’ round-trip fare for business travelers from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia will increase by almost 500 percent next year, due to Southwest Airlines’ decision to drop its nonstop service between the two cities. With a few simple upgrades, trains could begin to dominate the air-rail market between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia to the extent they do in New York City-Washington, D.C. (69 percent) and New York City-Philadelphia (93 percent). That’s the kind of simple improvements to our transportation network this country should be looking at: a strong business case paired with a low public cost to high public benefit ratio. And with interest rates as low as they are, construction projects can be financed extremely cheaply.
Capon made a similar point in his presentation, using the restoration of the Downeaster service between Portland, Maine and Boston as a case study: although many critics predicted in advance that the train would flop, the service had more than 519,000 riders in fiscal year 2011, up 8.6 percent from 2010.
The limited availability of government funds is an argument for a national rail program. If there the resources aren’t available to fund the $117 billion plan to bring 220 mph service to the Northeast Corridor, or to fund California’s $98 billion Los Angeles-San Francisco corridor, policy makers need to look at how best to use the limited money at their disposal> growing population will need to travel one way or the other, and providing the same level of mobility in the absence of world-class passenger trains will be far more costly than developing our rail network.
NARP President Capon sums it up:
We understand Chairman Mica’s strong support of the development of the Northeast Corridor (NEC). We also support that development both in the Northeast Corridor and elsewhere. Richard Harnish, Executive Director of Midwest High Speed Rail Association and a member of our board, testified before your Railroads Subcommittee on April 20, 2010, “At 220 miles per hour, we can achieve a transformative tipping point where journeys become commutes and business travelers can spend a productive day in a distant city and still be home for dinner.”
[But w]e believe that the HSIPR program must be national, regardless of how few states are currently ready for very high speed trains. Only 18% of the US population lives within 25 miles of an NEC Amtrak station. If the HSIPR program had been focused solely on the NEC, national support for and enthusiasm for the program could not have been sustained and many projects elsewhere would not have been funded. Moreover, the needs of the NEC greatly exceed the totality of the funding that has been provided, thereby limiting the impact the program could have had on the NEC.
Posted by NARP
Tags: bill shuster, downeaster, high-speed rail, john mica, keystone corridor, pittsburgh, ray lahood, regional rail, ross capon,Amtrak’s eTicketing in action
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
A while back, NARP talked about the advances eTicketing would bring to Amtrak operations. Well, now we give you an advance look at what the eTicketing device looks like in action.
Here’s hoping the roll-out continues to go smoothly, and this becomes a common sight across the national network by the end of Summer 2012.
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| Amtrak Conductor Stephen Currier eLifts passenger Mark Petrillo’s ticket on train 684 (Portland,ME to Boston North) between Exeter, NH and Haverhill, MA. |
Posted by NARP
Tags: downeaster, eticketing,©2010 National Association of Railroad Passengers | » NARP website
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