Mushroom
Gold Member
Amtrak is owned and operated by the government as Amtrak went bankrupt, passenger rail is almost dead while freight is doing wellSince you obviously think I am joking...
The Capitol Corridor is a 168-mile (270 km) passenger train route operated by Amtrak between San Jose and Auburn, California. Most trains operate between San Jose and Sacramento, roughly parallel to Interstate 880 and Interstate 80. Some trips run from Oakland to San Jose, while a single daily round trip runs all the way from San Jose to Auburn, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Capitol Corridor trains started in 1991.
Auburn is actually a town about 40 miles farther East, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
During fiscal year 2017 the Capitol Corridor service carried 1,607,277 passengers, a 2.9% increase over FY2016. Revenue in FY2017 was $33,970,000, a 5.3% increase over FY2016, with a 57% farebox recovery ratio. It is the fourth busiest Amtrak route by ridership, surpassed only by the Northeast Regional, Acela Express, and Pacific Surfliner. In large part due to the route's success, as of 2017, Sacramento is the busiest station on the route, the seventh busiest in the Amtrak system and the second busiest in California.
The Capitol Corridor is used by commuters between the Sacramento area and the Bay Area as an alternative to driving on congested Interstate 80. Monthly passes and discounted trip tickets are available. Many politicians, lobbyists, and aides live in the Bay Area and commute to their jobs in Sacramento, including those connecting to the train via Amtrak Thruway Motorcoach from San Francisco, while workers in the Oakland, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley employment centers take the Capitol Corridor trains from their less expensive homes in Solano County and the Sacramento metropolitan area.
Starting on August 28, 2006 the Capitol Corridor had 16 weekday trains each way between Oakland and Sacramento, up from twelve in 2005 and three in 1992. (Seven of the sixteen ran to/from San Jose.) According to its management, ridership on the Capitol Corridor trains tripled between 1998 and 2005. On August 13, 2012, the Capitol Corridor dropped from 16 to 15 weekday round trips between Oakland and Sacramento; one round trip was discontinued due to high fuel costs, low ridership, and a new ability to store an extra train overnight in a Sacramento railyard.Capitol Corridor - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
I worked at a "Dot Com" in SF, and they even offered to pay a percentage of your fare if you used mass transit. When I started I was the only one that took the ferry. But by the time I left, 3 others were taking it (but from Oakland and not Vallejo).
Once again, government mismanagement. That to me was the single biggest case I can think of where it should have long ago been turned over to a company to run.
I actually used to take the train a lot. Several trips in the 1960's and 1970s from LA to San Francisco. In the 1980's it was my normal way to get from Camp Pendleton to where my dad lived in LA. I even took it when I returned from deployment to get from the Naval Air Station at San Diego to where my wife was in LA. But over the decades they have killed more and more lines, removed amenities, and raised prices. It simply makes no sense anymore to take the train for travel, they have destroyed it as a workable system.
I wrote an article about this decades ago for a now gone Internet Magazine, and laid out most of their problems. First was when they destroyed the "Rail Pass" system. Until the 1980's, it was a great system. Buy a pass for 7-30 days, hop on and off the train whenever you wanted. College kids loved it, as did families on a budget. But first they restricted the number of times you could get off, then added in things like fees to change trains and more insanity. They still have it, but why? It is now more expensive than just booking your trip as usual.
In the early 1980's, the train from San Diego to LA (and on to San Francisco and Seattle) and was almost always full. Now, the coast route only goes to San Louis Obispo, and it jumps inland for most of that route. $135 and 36 hours, I can fly nonstop for less than that in 2 hours. Even more insane, I have had to take multiple trips for the military. Sometimes 2 or 3 states away, sometimes across the country. Multiple times I even tried to arrange to take a train, but it was refused as it exceeded the allowable budget for the trip.
OK, now seriously, WTF? The government owns the system, and yet they will not let me take it because it costs to much? That is some serious Orwellian garbage there, they should be pushing their own employees to take the system, we could probably get better and more service from that alone, with all the government employees that fly all over regularly. That alone screams that they do not know what in the hell they are doing.
But the real problem started in the early 1990's when they killed smoking. Already by then, smoking was restricted to the last car in the train only. They could have kept that in place, and likely picked up a lot of travel from smokers. But nope, kill that also. My son used to take the train from LA to visit us in El Paso (and later from LA to Fairfield), and he said he hated that part. Could only have a smoke every 3-4 hours, having to rush off, get it down then back on the train in 15 minutes or less. Then they killed the club car, and finally the dining car. Now, if you want food it is only a snack bar with sandwiches, or things you can heat in a microwave.
And the fares! Good god, it is cheaper to fly across the country in most places than a few hundred miles by train.
Most countries can make their trains at least break even. And even if not, the huge ridership keeps them open. The US Government can do neither one, because they refuse to listen to experts who have been telling them for decades how to get people back on them. Cut the price, make it attractive for people to take the train again. But it is like they are doing everything in their power to kill what is left other than their commuter services.