I hope for 2 things: that rail becomes profitable soon, and that the parts that have never been profitable can be looked at thoroughly for changes that can make them profitable. If they can’t be done profitably by the government/Amtrak, let private companies do it. Not politics preventing the hard choices or even conversations. Companies like Brightline have found a way.
My understanding is the dense Northeastern US routes Boston down to DC and Northern VA, and those continuing into and throughout NC routes are the most likely candidates to “make the cut” if things got pared back, so SEHSR still could be an option. With so many means of getting people from point A to B without a car involved, I don’t know why we are funding once daily train trips that take 24 hours to 72 hours to move people via ineffecient and unprofitable means.
Even NCDOT admits that roads are heavily subsidized
“In the end, only about 44 percent of highway funding nationwide comes from fuel taxes, tolls, or other user fees, and about 29 percent of transit funding is from fares and other system-generated revenues (Figure 2).5 Neither mode, then, pays for itself, but both draw substantially on other public revenues to promote an interconnected, coordinated transportation system that offers options for people and goods to get where they’re going.”
So why expect rail to pay for itself? Paying for professional operating crews, and for privately built and owned and maintained rails, costs more money than putting amateur drivers on subsidized roads. “But Brightline” – they lose money on their operations, too.
It’s hilarious that anyone could think Trump and Musk will leave any rail system alone. They do not give a shit about rail, Amtrak, or SEHSR. They think that only Democrats and minorities use it, and they want to kill it so they can redistribute the budget as tax cuts. Musk wants to axe it because rail (and the laws of physics/accounting) stand in the way of his big dumb hyperloop boondoggle and he is a walking corruption charge.
If someone thinks that any rail service is safe, that person clearly just supports the larger republican political project but also happens to like trains for some weird reason is trying to square those 2 obsessions.
Amtrak was created specifically because passenger rail service could not be run at a profit by private enterprise. There are very few places on earth where it is, if you disregard “voodoo economics”. Brightline loses a ton of money operating their passenger railroad service. Why do they do it? Because they stand to make many more tons of money on real estate development along their lines.
A few misconceptions. Very few people ride a long-distance train end-to-end. Most people ride between intermediate stations. The same seat may be occupied by several different people between the originating and terminating points of the train. Aside from Southwest Airline’s legacy of flying airplane routes with 3 or more 4 intermediate stops, this does not happen in the airline industry. Very often the intermediate points are not well served by airlines. Or, at other times, the train can run downtown-to-downtown faster than an airline flight plus two slow slogs between the airports and the downtowns.
As long as people ride them, trains are more fuel-efficient than cars or airplanes. In some cases they generate less carbon dioxide. The train right of way take up less space than roadway equivalents.
Bus companies aren’t making money, either. Airlines intermittently make a profit but they seldom earn more than their cost of capital (thus, the periodic bankruptcies). And remember that airlines are having their airports financed, built, and operated for them. There are many indirect subsidies such as the ex-military pilots trained at taxpayer expense. And in most cases, the freight railroads on whose tracks the passenger trains operate are indeed for-profit companies that pay property and other taxes. Airports are almost always public operations that don’t pay property taxes despite the hundreds of millions that went into their construction.
The rail services most likely to be retained as-is are Boston-NY-Washington, Los Angeles-San Diego, and a few other short-haul corridors. I would include Charlotte-Raleigh because it has bipartisan support at the NC General Assembly. Neither the airlines nor the expressways could accommodate the number of passengers that Amtrak carries on the northeast corridor.
My understanding of the history is that the boosters for passenger rail thought that there would be enough profit in Railpax (the name used during the writing of the act) for a skeleton national network to stay in operation. There were still some profitable routes in 1970 when it passed and the hope was that they’d balance.
And the people that didn’t support passenger rail also supported Railpax, thinking that it wouldn’t stick around and would be a fitting send off for passenger rail until eventually all passenger trains ended operations.
I do think that some subsidization of transportation is inevitable but I think the way that BART was built with the expectation of profit in operations made it better. It gave them more of a focus on serving transit productive areas, like Market Street, use existing corridors in sensible ways, and led them to seek out automation that may not have happened otherwise.
However I don’t really care if it makes money today.
You can get a better idea of what happened by reading https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal70-1291580#_=_. The path to NRPC had many twists and turns. It was, after all, a Republican administration and there was insistence among some that the organization be explicitly for profit. It’s fair to say that many people knew this was a completely unrealistic expectation. The only two railroads that arguably were making money on passenger trains at that point were the Santa Fe and the Seaboard Coast Line. However, the equipment they had purchased for their trains in the 1945-1955 period was wearing thin and there was no financial justification to replace it. If new equipment were procured and its depreciation was factored into the P&L statement, even the Santa Fe and SCL trains would be money-losers. (See what happened to the private Auto Train Corp in the 1970s, or what happened to the railroads such as Southern, Rock Island, and D&RGW that opted out of Amtrak.)
As you might expect, one of the first things Amtrak did was to purchase hundreds of locomotives and new cars. There certainly were many people who believed Amtrak would fail, primarily because it would be dragged down by the labor agreements it inherited and the vastly under-maintained properties of Penn Central in the northeast. The diesel locomotives that Amtrak ordered were specified so that they could be repurposed for freight service.
In the end, the U.S. government rescued Penn Central as Conrail – maybe the best success story in the history of nationalization – and also provided Amtrak tons of money to rebuild in the northeast.
Don’t have to take our word for it, via the Yale School of Management we have Warren Buffett’s writings, via Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters, about the industry.
“the industry will remain unprofitable for virtually all participants in it… The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines… if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down. The airline industry’s demand for capital ever since that first flight has been insatiable. Investors have poured money into a bottomless pit…”
The current situation is a Rorschach test. I realize why NCDOT cannot stop its preliminary activities and must act like the federal funding will eventually come through, but let’s be honest: there is zero chance that this project will be finished by 2030. Whether it will ever be funded is anyone’s guess, frankly.
Interesting, and disappointing, though not surprising.
However, I think it’s not actually “false”, on a technicality. The Durant grade separation is stilll under construction, and I imagine the other ones in NR and WF like Millbrook and Rogers are still moving forward too - even if the rest of the corridor is stalled. Remember these already-programmed projects on the corridor were essentially rolled into the SEHSR project, and then leveraged as NCDOT’s “matching contribution” in the grant application.
This is why Buttigieg came to Raleigh for the Durant groundbreaking, and could claim such a quick start on construction: NCDOT had been planning, engineering, and had this project lined up for funding for years. It was a clever political shell game that’s still playing out today.
Anyway, let’s all just wait and see whether today’s “big” announcement is meaningful, mid, or pointless.
That’s true, but until SEHSR or Wake Forest commuter service becomes more likely, it’s a waste of money to build bridges over Durant, Millbrook, Rogers etc. To protect the public against two short freight trains a day that run at 35 mph or less? If that’s the rationale, there are a hundred grade crossings between Raleigh and Charlotte that ought to be bridged.
NCDOT is using a “build it and they will come” approach. Whether it works remains to be seen, but the downside is that if neither SEHSR nor WF commuter rail ever happens, we will have spent money on these bridges unnecessarily.
It’s more dangerous if you wait to get rid of railroad crossings until after you start passenger services, though. And as a government agency, giving off a perception of danger is one of the easiest ways to make your pet projects politically toxic.
Also, this is the approach that Brightline took before they expanded into Orlando, since they just plopped higher-speed trains onto existing freight tracks and are procrastinating on grade separation. Even though they got to bring trains into service more quickly by doing as little track work as needed for their first phase in Miami, this strategy made them the cause of half of all rail-related deaths in 2024.
To be clear: (1) this is still theoretically lowering the number of traffic accidents by getting people off the highways, and (2) I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who carelessly put themselves in lethal situations. But even then, you’re not doing a lot to improve people’s trust in public transit when people show off T-shirts that brand you as “the Death Train” on the internet.
I know you didn’t explicitly say it’s the only reason NCDOT is taking this build-the-little-things-before-the-big-'n-sexy-stuff approach, but:
don’t grade-separate at all and don’t expect S-line passenger service to ever happen (this is our null hypothesis)
grade-separate first while you try and hope to make Southeast Corridor service a thing, or;
try to make Raleigh/Apex-to-Richmond train services happen ASAP and worry about optimization later.
However, certain pieces of track work (straightening out some curves on existing tracks between Raleigh and Wake Forest, restoring the Norlina-Petersburg track segment etc.) have to happen before any passenger services are in place. Plus, any track upgrades you put off until after services start means that you have to immediately kneecap yourself with future construction - so you’re slowing down trains, defeating the whole point of investing so much money in avoiding the Selma bypass. This means Option 3 doesn’t make much sense from a practical perspective, either.
TL/DR: I think it’s important to remember that the article @Daniel posted is just the NCDOT saying “hey they haven’t killed off the ‘big one’ yet!” - and it doesn’t make much sense to read into it any more than that. But also, I don’t think we need to view what’s currently under construction so negatively?
It’s more dangerous if you wait to get rid of railroad crossings
until after you start passenger services, though.
My point exactly. Every year people are killing themselves at grade crossings used by existing passenger trains in this state. First things first. Otherwise we are effectively accepting the deaths we already incur while making ourselves feel good that we might be preventing further deaths in another place… assuming those trains ever come to be, which is far from clear at this point. I’d say it’s 50-50 that 20 years from now the bridges at Millbrook, Durant, etc will still have nothing running under them except the slow short freights that run today. And after those 20 years, how many people will have died between Raleigh and Charlotte at grade crossings that could have been eliminated but were not because we spent the money between Raleigh and WF?
Or to put it differently, the cost of building the Raleigh-WF bridges is spit in the ocean compared to the cost of SEHSR or Raleigh-WF commuter trains.
With respect to grade crossings, Brightline is a private sector abomination driven by real estate speculation. They built it cheap and residents are paying the price.
Unfortunately at-grade crossings are the only feasible option for Brightline in Florida due to terrain and geology. That is why there are so many massive intersections in Florida, to avoid building interchanges until it is the only choice. I believe the combination of these massive intersections and at-grade crossing make things worse, of course along with the large presence of retirees.
Fortunately we have terrain that makes building more grade-separated crossings feasible.
Terrain and geology did not prevent them from creating a “sealed” corridor with four-quadrant gates and such at most of the crossings on the southern part of the line. That was just them being cheap.
In addition, terrain and geology do not prevent them from building oodles of massive freeways and toll roads. Yes, I know, highway grades can be steeper than rail. But it’s perfectly possible. Just not within their budget.
Florida has a road fatality rate higher than the national average: 1.55 per hundred million miles driven. Brightline has carried about 550 million passenger miles, and has caused over 120 grade crossing fatalities. That works out to a rate of 18 fatalities per hundred million passenger miles - over an order of magnitude worse. I thought trains are supposed to be safer than cars!
As much as you can dismiss this problem by blaming it on the drivers (and people on urbanist and transit forums tend to do so) that is a very callous thing to do. The lives of the people outside the trains are in reality just as important as those inside and each fatality is no less of a tragedy simply because somebody was behind the wheel. These people are mothers, fathers, children - perhaps confused about what to do in heavy traffic, perhaps made a poor judgment not thinking of the consequences, or perhaps this is the culmination of a lifetime of bad driving and bad habits - but none of them truly deserve to die.
Meanwhile, NCDOT has been working on a sealed corridor for the Piedmont corridor for decades, and what we see now is the same work getting underway on the S-line which is supposed to start off its life as an extension of the Piedmont. This is the right way to do it.
I tend to mention the train operator as well. I can’t imagine what it’s like to drive a train that kills someone, likely I’d never want to drive a train again.
Much of the Florida East Coast Railway is right next to US-1, with the same layout as our Capital Boulevard. I can’t imagine a frequently used rail line with a lot of grade crossings running at grade next to Capital Boulevard. Especially if it had been infrequently used for a generation before hand.
I also feel like we have a blind spot in our policy handbook, we do grade separations somewhat frequently but usually only for the sake of the road, rarely for the sake of the railroad. So you’ll find examples where there’s a big road grade separated but the little road is still there with a grade crossing.
However to say that we should insist on a sealed corridor for 79 MPH operation, feels incorrect for me. FDOT, the cities, the Florida East Coast Railway and Brightline should work together to map the most problematic grade crossings and work on grade-separating, quad-gates, center-medians and other interventions in order to prevent people from getting onto the tracks.
The true integrative approach IMO would have put the high-speed trains on the Tri-Rail tracks, and fully grade separated them. They already have far fewer grade crossings, and run right next to I-95 anyway so aesthetics would probably hardly even come up as a concern. That corridor is the only one that could conceivably host a true high speed train through south Florida, and running Brightline on the FEC is almost a distraction from this obvious final solution.
FEC could be used for slower-speed commuter trains, far better suited to the complex urban environments that the FEC runs through. Happily, that could still be the ultimate solution, but I don’t believe I’ve heard of any serious discussion in that direction since work toward Brightline was launched about a decade ago.