(The following story by Cathy Woodruff appeared on the Albany Times-Union website on November 30.)
RENSSELAER, N.Y. — It doesn’t necessarily take a catastrophe to sour the experience for a traveler looking forward to a relaxing, hassle-free journey by train.
An untidy restroom can do it. How about a reading light that fails just as you open the cover on a much-anticipated novel? Maybe there’s no bagel to munch on during the morning ride to Manhattan and no beer to sip on the way home.
Then, there are the bigger things. Say, a train that’s hours late arriving at your destination.
“I refuse to ride Amtrak again,” declared Matt Ross of Albany, who was at Rensselaer Rail Station to greet a Thanksgiving visitor on Wednesday and recalled a trip from Buffalo to Albany that stretched to 11 hours a couple of years ago.
“People were crying on that train,” he said.
Despite ridership growth that set records in each of the last five years, Amtrak officials say there are plenty of issues that still discourage many potential passengers.
Over the next year or two, three major routes that travel through New York state will be targeted as part of the railroad’s Route Performance Improvement program, which was launched last year.
The New York routes on the 2009 list are:
The Adirondack, which travels between Montreal and New York City.
Empire Service, which includes many trains that travel to cities along the Mohawk and Hudson valleys between New York City and Niagara Falls.
The Lake Shore Limited, a long-distance train that starts and ends in Chicago and splits at Rensselaer to continue to New York City and Boston.
With dining and lounge cars, the Lake Shore is one of the more comfortable options for upstate New York passengers, but it has a notorious reputation for delays.
The on-time performance for the train reported by Amtrak was just 67 percent in October. The most frequent cause of delays, according to the railroad, was “train interference” and the most common place for those delays to occur was on tracks owned and operated by CSX Transportation, a Florida-based freight railroad.
Elsewhere, Amtrak also will look at The Crescent between New York City and New Orleans, Lincoln Service between Chicago and St. Louis, The Empire Builder between Chicago and Seattle, and the Pacific Surfliner route along the California coast.
The Route Performance Improvement program takes a new approach for the railroad, said Hank Koppelman, who is based in Washington, D.C., as Amtrak’s senior director of product management.
Past improvement programs have encompassed entire regions or states, Koppelman said.
“What we are trying to do here is take each of these routes and put them under a microscope at the route level,” looking for ways to build ridership and revenue, make trains more punctual and improve customer service, he said.
Individual routes are selected for their potential for improvement, he said, and the team focusing on each route includes staff from across Amtrak departments — maintenance, marketing, food and beverage service, scheduling, pricing, Web design and more.
“We will listen to anyone who has an idea,” Koppelman said. “No idea is rejected.”
Eventually, the collaboration will be expanded to include representatives of state governments, freight railroads that own the tracks Amtrak uses and others with an interest in improved service, Koppelman said.
An initial meeting early this month to brainstorm on possible improvements on Adirondack and Empire Service trains produced 130 ideas, he said.
“Not all of them will make it to the final list,” but many look promising, he said.
The Empire State Passengers Association, a rail advocacy group, plans to submit its own wish list for improving rail service in New York.
ESPA President Bruce Becker said likely recommendations probably will sound familiar to even occasional riders: restoring food and beverage service on Hudson Valley trains, closer attention to keeping bathrooms and coaches clean during trips, on-time arrivals, and more training and emphasis on pleasant customer service for the staff.
“Some of this is not rocket science,” Koppelman noted. “A lot of it is common sense.”
The Route Performance Improvement program takes aim at measures that won’t require major investments in new equipment or track infrastructure.
And many of the changes that mean the most to passengers don’t make for splashy press releases, Koppelman said.
“How clean is the toilet? It’s not a glamorous topic to talk about, but it’s important,” he said.
In the last round of improvements, Amtrak added cleaners who boarded trains on some routes to tidy up coaches and bathrooms along the way. “The en route cleaners have been a very good solution for us,” Koppelman said.
Other solutions that paid off in the last improvement program included a Cross-country Cafe with more casual dining, lower prices and regional dishes on the City of New Orleans train between Chicago and New Orleans. Koppelman said it boosted food service revenue by 20 percent.
Restoration of food and beverage service for trains between Rensselaer and New York City is on the list for consideration in 2009, as well as possible changes or reductions in fares, and better on-time service for the Lake Shore Limited and other chronically late trains.
“I think we’ll see a very significant improvement in on-time performance,” he said. “We need it.”
Becker said the efforts are welcome, even among his association’s dedicated rail travelers.
“Today, where gas prices have come down and travelers have to decide — Do I drive? Do I consider flying? What mode of transportation gives people the best experience? — Amtrak has a real opportunity to make a statement on that,” Becker said. “Certainly, the air experience today is erratic, at best.”