PHILADELPHIA — Yes, they could just as easily fly, according to the Washington Post. But aboard the Acela Express No. 2172, which rumbles past the smokestacks and clotheslines between Washington and Boston, passengers can quickly rattle off the reasons to stick with the rails. The 150-mph pace on some stretches of the journey. The convenience of downtown drop-offs at most stops. And the dead quiet, save for a handful of offending cell phones.
“Look around. Why on earth would I take anything other than the train?” said Joan Emery, 66, a psychologist from New York City, as the Amtrak train pushed north across the Susquehanna River. She pointed to the wide table in front of her, with room enough for a hot dog, a bottle of water and a magazine. “Show me that space on a plane.”
And since the Sept. 11 airline hijackings, perhaps no other factor was in Amtrak’s favor more than this one: It wasn’t an airline, with the accompanying security concerns and hassles. But the turmoil unfolding on Amtrak’s rails — cracks on high-speed locomotives, curtailed service and a crush of daily cancellations — is straining the allegiance of its regular riders, a fiercely loyal group. And it may shift the balance in the elbows-out battle between Amtrak and the nation’s airlines for East Coast business travelers, a battle that Amtrak began winning only this year.
The 31-year-old railroad’s ridership is up across the Northeast Corridor even as its national ridership flags and it sinks deeper into debt. The high-speed, high-class Acela is a big reason why. Ridership on the two-year-old service, which now includes 18 trains, is up 11 percent over a year ago.
The airlines are losing ground. US Airways, which operates weekday shuttle service between Boston, New York and Washington, said it had 18 percent fewer passengers during the second quarter compared with the same period of 2001. Delta Air Lines, which offers shuttle service for the same routes, declined to provide comparable figures.
Now come the cracks, which have sidelined all but a handful of the Acelas and 15 high-powered locomotives made by the same manufacturer. Amtrak plans to run five Acela trains today and tomorrow, making 17 departures — a sliver of the regularly scheduled 50 on a weekday. Typically, the Acela fleet carries 10,000 passengers a day.
Aboard train No. 2172, which departed from Washington on Monday afternoon, passengers said they are sticking with Amtrak and the Acela, for now. Some were visibly anxious about the hairline fissures that engineers discovered last week in shock-absorber systems on Acela locomotives and again this week on the main body of the distinctive slanted car. Others are more cavalier, dismissing the cracks as harmless signs of wear and tear.
As the ticket collector passed her, Joan Ullman, a freelance journalist from New York, leaned over and asked if the train was safe. “I asked him twice, and twice he said it was inspected and cleared,” she said. “I feel a lot better now.”
She flew to Washington to see a show at the Kennedy Center but is heading home on the train. “I’ve gotten to detest flying because of the searches,” she said. “They pulled me aside twice and I found myself barefoot in the middle of the airport.”
As the Acela pulled into the Wilmington, Del., station, the grinding of wheel and rail produced a loud thud. Jittery riders stiffened their backs and peered out the window. “I don’t like that noise,” said Daniel Malamud, 62, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
That anxiety, and thousands of frustrated passengers up and down the East Coast, has Amtrak worried. “We are testing the loyalty of our customers, and there is disappointment,” said Clifford Black, an Amtrak spokesman. He thinks the riders will return when the complete Acela service does.
Amtrak, its faithful contend, is still the only hassle-free mass transit in the Northeast in the age of full-body searches and two-hour-early airport check-ins. A routine photo ID check — demanded irregularly — is about all the screening riders encounter at Washington’s Union Station these days. The result: Passengers can show up 10 minutes before a scheduled Amtrak departure and have time to spare.
The airlines, meanwhile, are waging their own battle against delays to win back passengers who defected to the trains. Just this week, US Airways extended a program that offers passengers a $200 voucher if they can’t reach their boarding gate within 20 minutes of checking in at the ticket counter. A similar Delta program rewards delayed travelers with frequent-flier miles.
The airlines are also going on the offensive. Beginning today, US Airways will run newspaper advertisements in Washington, Boston and New York that revive an old slogan with sudden relevance: “Time flies, it doesn’t wait for the train.” Delta introduced a similar slogan in April that declared, “Planes are faster than trains.”
“There will be a group of people who migrate back to the airlines” because of the Acela cracks said Stephen M. Usery, vice president of marketing for US Airways. But not, he conceded, “the hard-core train people.”
To understand the mind-set of an Amtrak loyalist, spend a few hours inside Philadelphia’s gilded 30th Street Station. There, riders say they want more government subsidies for the troubled railroad, not less. Many speak disdainfully of the airlines, which they say they’ve given up on. And driving? Not a chance.
As they waited for the next Acela, James Salander, a physician in Rockville, and Rosanne Hynes, who works in the Office of Homeland Security at the Pentagon, railed against Amtrak’s critics. “I don’t understand why there is a big brouhaha about funding Amtrak, as if there is some unique need for it to be self-sufficient,” said Hynes, who logs about 50,000 miles flying a year. “Look at the airlines. They are all bankrupt. At least this is a pleasant way to travel.”
The 6:09 p.m. Acela to Philadelphia was running 10 minutes late, and a small line took shape in front of Gate 6. Salander didn’t mind, he said. “People who have to travel have to spend the time and the money, but what offers the least aggravation? For many of us it’s the train.”
Not everyone on the Acela is partial to the rails. Paul Lietzan, 40, who lives in Fredericksburg and works for American Express, would fly the Delta Shuttle up and down the East Coast if the cabin were larger.
“If they had a 747 from here to Newark I would take it,” he said. “We fly at discounted rates and the company pays.”
And, of course, there are the accidental riders. Mike Masanque, 25, who lives in New Brunswick, N.J., walked out of a shopping mall in Virginia and found his Honda Civic stolen. He bought a one-way Acela ride home. “Twenty dollars of gas versus $140 for this is a no-brainer,” he said, “if I still had my car.”
Both Delta and US Airways said passenger traffic has picked up in the past two weeks, but they are not ready to link the spike to the crack crisis at Amtrak, not yet at least. And they admit that Amtrak’s biggest fans, like Joan Emery, cannot be converted to the skies. The New York psychologist swears by Amtrak and insists she will not fly because of the security and delays.
“I spent too many years in therapy myself to go through that kind of stress voluntarily,” she said.