Floridian Is A Clever Answer To A Real Problem

By Jim Mathews / President & CEO

When earlier this week Amtrak announced its plans to combine the Capitol Limited and Silver Star trains into a new temporary route called The Floridian, one of the main benefits Amtrak pointed to was freeing up sorely needed Superliners for service elsewhere on the National Network.

That wasn’t a secret; it wasn’t some kind of carefully hidden sub rosa justification they were trying to slip by – even though some people leveled that accusation after Monday’s release.

It might not have been in the dozens of social-media posts from railfans analyzing the Amtrak reservation system like a Ouija board on Sunday, in the process getting it wrong (“people will only get Traditional dining south of Washington,” or “coach passengers won’t get to eat in the dining car,” or “the Silver Meteor goes away.”)

Nor was it in the torrent of homemade videos on YouTube celebrating the announcement even before it happened. But that’s what happens when you get your news from YouTube. The equipment move was right there, front-and-center, in all of Amtrak’s actual Floridian announcements and fact sheets. And criticism of The Floridian as simply some kind of Three-Card Monte scam to hide Amtrak's fleet shortfalls is misplaced.

Superliners really are in short supply for a whole lot of reasons. Some of those reasons are genuinely awkward for Amtrak, but most of them are now entirely out of Amtrak’s control. Shifting the Capitol’s equipment around while responding to the East River Tunnel project’s disruptions is a smart move. We should be applauding, not throwing rocks.

It’s true that Amtrak should not have taken so many cars out of service during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and more care should have been taken to keep the maintenance troops from leaving. Rebuilding capability in the Mechanical ranks has proven to be a very tough thing to do, and so they have been short-handed on technicians for quite some time. That was something this Association anticipated and publicly warned against, including in my own testimony prepared for the Senate Commerce Committee in the summer of 2020 as Amtrak was contemplating service cuts while also asking for more COVID rescue funds.

But, bottom-line up front? In Fiscal 2024 – which started in October of 2023 – just when Amtrak had finally started to get a handle on getting stored and wrecked Superliners back in service, a series of new wrecks in the past 12 months put them behind the curve again. And just like the reasons behind shifting the Capitol’s consists westward, this also was not a secret.

To understand what’s happening, it’s worthwhile reviewing the status of the Superliner fleet. Last Fall, Amtrak entered the new fiscal year down 23 Superliners: seven lounges of all types, three coaches, one diner, and a dozen sleepers. A challenging, but manageable, backlog. But this fiscal year we’ve seen almost as many new wrecks as there were Superliners needing work: 21 new wrecks, to be precise. Consider this example: there were seven Superliner lounges due for repair and restoration, and the Amtrak Mechanical forces managed to repair and deliver seven lounges. But during that same period, the railroad lost four additional Superliner lounges to new wrecks.

It was even worse for Superliner coaches. Amtrak entered FY24 with three needing restoration. Mechanical forces managed to bring back six – but because there were eight new wrecks, that still leaves five Superliner coaches left to restore...two coaches behind the curve where they were when they entered Fiscal 2024.

In a year when Amtrak faced a total Superliner shortfall of 43 cars – nearly half of which were new wrecks this year – it shouldn’t surprise anyone that fleet managers had to come up with something clever to get more bi-levels back out to the Western trains without waiting to work through the new backlog of 18 Superliners now needing work. And if they hadn't come up with something clever, all the railfan social-media hangouts would be chock full of criticism of Amtrak management for NOT coming up with something clever to address the car shortage.

I said earlier this week, and I’ll say it again here, combining a bi-level route with a single-level route and redeploying the bi-level equipment elsewhere is a clever response to a bad situation. It’s the kind of creative thinking everyone says they want to see out of Amtrak management. So, let’s congratulate them for thinking out of the box, and let’s hope we’re finally on a path to making some headway on the equipment backlog.