Time To Re-balance The ‘Balancing Act’?

By Jim Mathews, President & CEO

It was deadly, bitterly, life-threateningly cold this week throughout the U.S. The worst of it was in the upper Midwest and our northern states along the Canadian border, but even the South got into the act. The friends I spent my childhood with in the Siberianoid provinces of upstate New York now live in New Orleans, where this week they giddily made a snowman in their front yard. And I got to experience it first-hand this week with a work trip to Eau Claire, Wis., where I awoke on Tuesday morning to minus-31 degrees.

It is against that backdrop that Amtrak cancelled many, many trains, a maddening number of trains. I may have missed a few, but by my count at least 27 trains got sidelined by the deep cold: the state-supported (read, “state-funded”) River Runner, the Lincoln service, the new going-like-gangbusters Borealis, the Hiawatha, the Wolverine, and the Carl Sandburg all took a hit, as did the long-distance/National Network Empire Builder, Sunset Limited, Texas Eagle, and City of New Orleans.

Passengers, advocates, and yes, state DOTs were all taken aback. Reactions ranged from bewildered to belligerent. Many aggrieved riders noted that commuter services not run by Amtrak somehow kept running. A few DOTs told me they didn’t get enough notice and that, in any case, cold-weather cancellations are coming too often to keep a viable service running. They also want Amtrak to take a harder look at why they can’t keep pipes thawed, coaches running, and locomotives in service when the winter comes, as it inevitably does every single year.

When I shared with one of my DOT contacts that forecasts called for 50 degrees below zero in North Dakota, they acknowledged that that’s simply too cold to run: “I’ll give you minus 30, or 40, or something like that. But they’re cancelling sometimes when it’s just zero. Or minus two. And that’s not compatible with running a competitive service.”

Indeed.

One of our long-time Board members, an experienced design engineer who helped to spec out and design Amtrak’s Viewliners, underscored that very point, telling me that “Clearly there are times that trains should stay home, but not just because it's cold out! Specs for rolling stock cars state operation of down to minus-30F is to be considered normal. Historically, Superliners have run reasonably well at temperatures somewhat below that, like minus-40 on the Empire Builder.”

Now, it’s true that there’s a delicate balancing act here and that in many ways Amtrak will get a punch in the nose no matter which course it chooses.

As our own field organizer Joe Aiello wrote last year: “...it is minus-29 degrees in Shelby, Mont., as I write this, with a real feel of minus-53 degrees. How could ANYONE ask someone to wait for a train in that weather? And, God forbid, that train gets stuck behind a disabled freight train that broke down due to the same conditions, or any other reason. What is Amtrak supposed to do then? Remote location, roads closed due to snow, and quite literal deadly air temps – then what? We end up in a nightmare scenario that needs to be avoided at all costs. And if they press on and something like that happens, the online brigade lights up Amtrak management for ‘deciding to leave passengers stranded.’”

Yep, we know that’s how that would turn out. Not a great choice to have to make.

This week, pressed hard by journalists who cover railroads for some kind of detailed explanation, Amtrak’s top mechanical executive, Gery Williams, addressed the balancing act in a prepared statement drawn mostly from a similar message distributed internally to employees. In that statement, Williams pointed to a combination of passenger and employee risks, mechanical considerations, and requirements from the railroads which host Amtrak’s trains in the upper Midwest, leading the dispatching teams to make decisions “rooted in safety.”

“During these weather events, we must strike a delicate balance of serving the few customers who must travel against potentially disrupting service for many more after the ice, snow and frigid temperatures are gone,” he said. “Extreme conditions can take a significant toll on equipment, displace crews and interrupt service for days.”

[Wikimedia Commons photo, public domain, credit FranklinC55]

He continued, “there are so many factors that play a role in whether to allow trains on a given route:

— We want to give customers time to plan and avoid travel on snow-covered roads and prevent them from waiting long, uninformed hours in our stations. Rail operations are often severely impacted, highly variable and notoriously hard to estimate when storms are raging.

— We want to give our employees time to plan and avoid the same risks. This helps ensure equipment and crews are in the right place at the right time when demand returns.

—Our teams consider the risks of stranded trains, or loss of power that puts the well-being of our employees, customers and first responders at risk, if our trains encounter downed trees or other hazards – especially in remote areas.

— And Amtrak must respect decisions made by our host railroads and other partners. They evaluate their own risks, staffing availability and determine what they can support. We adjust.”

As a guy who spent 13 years in the fire service, I got a front-row seat to dozens and dozens of instances when someone misjudged their risks and paid a price...sometimes an embarrassing price and sometimes the ultimate price. I’m exquisitely sensitive to the need to balance risks and to do the best to make the right call.

But as some of the state DOT officials noted to me, there’s a difference between 50 (or even 30) degrees below zero and just zero (or maybe one or two degrees above zero and a dusting of snow). Passenger railroading really should be nearly an all-weather transportation mode, and that “can-do” attitude is one of the reasons a lot of travelers switch from driving or flying to taking the train. Trains get you there when others can’t.

I will never advocate for doing the unsafe thing. I will never press Amtrak to willingly go into harm’s way. Even so, when I was still a firefighter, the safest thing for me to do when I arrived on-scene at a fire would have been to stay on the pumper and watch the house burn. But obviously we couldn’t do that; we had a purpose, a mission to accomplish. And we accomplished it. We did it safely and effectively not by avoiding risk, but by recognizing it, assessing it, and applying mitigations so that those risks were reduced to a level that balanced favorably with the outcome – lives saved, property saved, hazards to neighbors reduced.

This week might well have been the right week to cancel trains, as much as it pains me to say that. But everything is a balance, and sometimes we can tip too far in one direction or the other. In recent weeks before this one, we’ve seen trains canceled with temps in the teens, and with just ordinary snowfalls in the forecast. If you have to cancel a train in that kind of weather because you can’t keep the pipes thawed, that’s not a weather problem that’s an Amtrak problem. And that’s a problem the railroad needs to solve, not rationalize.

Amtrak’s mission is safe, reliable transportation. Safe and reliable need to be in balance. Reliable and unsafe is unacceptable. Safe and unreliable is useless. Before state DOT partners revolt en masse, it’s probably worthwhile for Amtrak to look hard inside the operation to understand the root cause of why dispatchers don’t feel good about sending trains out in cold weather instead of parking those trains and sending their would-be passengers out to make their trips in some other (probably less safe) way.