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Part of the reason that Amtrak is expensive is that it's so slow. For a flight from Chicago to Seattle you only need to pay pilots/flight attendants/etc for around 5 hours of work, whereas for Amtrak it's 46 hours or more.

Wendover Productions goes into detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA

Your question reminds me of this video by Wendover Productions: Why Trains are so Expensive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA (12m38s)

> I really don't get why trains can be so expensive and what we need to do to fix that.

I recently watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA which covered much of the cost breakdowns - especially for American passenger rail. TL;DR:

* Labor is expensive. That 10 hour train ride is 10 hours you're paying every employee on the train. The faster speed of an equivalent plane ride means you're not paying pilots for as long, or allows them to make more trips.

* Rail is expensive. You have to buy the land between point A and point B. You have to build the rails, bridges, crossing guards, with lots of labor to build and maintain it all, with plenty of regulatory burdens to work through (ecological, safety, eminent domain, ...). The sky between airports, on the other hand, is free.

I've seen some suggestions that the sweet spot for trains is in medium length routes ("too far to drive, too near to fly"), with short haul routes being dominated by road vehicles (cars, taxis, buses) and long haul routes being dominated by airplanes (fast, don't need to buy/lease/maintain rails across thousands of miles)

⬐ chrisseaton

> That 10 hour train ride is 10 hours you're paying every employee on the train.

A driver, a ticket inspector, and someone to run the café? Three people? Shared amongst a few hundred passengers? Is that really a significant cost?

⬐ MaulingMonkey

If they're each pulling down $100k/year (this is slightly bellow amtrack average!) or ~$50/hour in total comp, 3x50x10 = $1500 right there for none of the support staff - managers, staff back in the control rooms switching signals, staff on call for maintainence issues - and none of the associated costs of putting the staff up in hotel rooms on account of being 10 hours away from home when their shift is over, etc. Spread it out over 300 riders and that's perhaps only $5 for the trip and your 1:100 employee:rider staffing ratio. Not so bad!

Of course, there are also 44 hour routes. Or less popular routes without 300 passengers that are run for political reasons, or because they feed passengers into the more popular routes. Or the popular routes when run off-peak, so passengers can still use the route even if they may occasionally need some flexibility in when they travel. The video suggests amtrack employs 1 person per 4 riders, not per 100! For a route half the distance (DC to New York - 3.5-5 hours) they attribute $25/ticket to labor costs.

You've got stories like this where Japan is keeping open a train station for a single passenger - do you think that route has 300 people on it there? And this is in a country where trains are popular and some routes are packed to the brim in the middle of rush hour: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2016/01/japan-keeps-t...

This video does a pretty good job of explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA

Wendover Productions made an interesting video on the economics of Trains in the States:

https://youtu.be/fwjwePe-HmA

Also because it's so slow. You're tying up a lot of personnel on the train, as well as capital equipment, for multiple days, rather than hours for a plane. With the same personnel (which cost about as much as pilots/cabin crew), you could run ~10 equivalent flights. Capital equipment is cheaper for rail than in the air, but the portion of rail capex/opex (either directly, or usually via fees to freight lines) is also high.

This video is a good analysis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA

I understand the root issues is Amtrack unions. Amtrack staffing is one employee to four passengers. I dont know what the ratio is for airlines but it must be lower. This video does a pretty good explonation i think: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA

⬐ forapurpose

> Amtrack staffing is one employee to four passengers

I've been on Amtrak trains and have seen nothing like that number of employees. My impression is that 1 in 40 or 80 might be closer.

⬐ hexane360

It's certainly a labor issue, but can you explain how it's the union's fault? Staffing a train for 30+ hours is 10x more expensive than staffing an airplane for 3. It's not the number of workers, but the time cost of workers. Don't forget to account for the ground crew when discussing planes.

There's a lot of reasons as to why this is the case, but the bulk of it is labor.

* Trains ultimately require close to 1 staff member per 4 passengers, much more than a budget airline.

* Unions and legacy salaries further add to those personnel costs. The average Amtrak employee ($75K/yr) nearly makes as much as the average commercial pilot ($77K/yr).

* Since train journeys take longer, the labor cost per trip is considerably higher, especially for long haul routes. When you're doing a long trip like Chicago to Los Angeles, a train takes a lot longer than a plane, so you're paying for yet more labor for that trip. 44 hours of labor for the train versus 4 hours for the plane.

There's a good video that breaks down the costs that make up your train ticket: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA&t=29s

⬐ dx034

> * Trains ultimately require close to 1 staff member per 4 passengers, much more than a budget airline.

Maybe in the US. In Europe, a train with 500-750 people capacity has one train driver and maybe 3-4 staff (plus on-board restaurant but that's run at a profit). No staff at smaller train stations and only minimal staff at many larger ones.

Maintenance needs staff but that's the same at airports.

⬐ MrFoof

As stated in another comment (which links to a transcript by the author with ~two dozen cited sources), this isn't staff on the train, but calculated by breaking down Amtrak's headcount of 20K people, and amortizing it over the number of annual trips and passengers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16179794 Result is ~1 employee per 4 passengers per trip.

The author has some other really interesting (with cited sources) videos about many other transit topics, including how hub-and-spoke/direct played out in the aircraft marketplace, how budget airlines have such great profit margins, long haul aircraft economics, airline schedule methodology, etc.

⬐ ComputerGuru

Do you have a source for the 1 employee per four passengers? Metra trains here in Chicago typically have only one conductor.

⬐ MrFoof

Watch the video, which cites sources (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2p-HoK9KXEAamNTTkdSaERqdGc...). This isn't just staff active on the train, but maintenance, administration, back office, etc.

Amtrak employs ~20,000 people. When you get to the number of annual passengers, and how many trips they operate a year, it breaks down to ~4 passengers per employee per trip.

⬐ meddlepal

> Trains ultimately require close to 1 staff member per 4 passengers, much more than a budget airline.

Err, why? I've taken my share of commuter and Acela rides in the Northeast and there is nowhere near that level of staffing.

⬐ usr1106

Very good argumentation.

However, when comparing to airlines it needs to be noted that they use heavily subsidized infrastructure (airports, he indicates that at least for the rural ones) and benefit from tax exemptions (no added value tax, no petrol tax. My perspective is European, but I would be surprised if that were much different in the US.)

The main cost difference between trains and airplanes is the staffing required X hours. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA

There's a good Wendover video on airline classes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzB5xtGGsTc

And another great one about AmTrak in relation to flight:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA

⬐ nitwit005

Thanks, the Wendover video was quite well done.