How To Save Amtrak. Or Ruin It

The head of America’s passenger rail system isn’t particularly attached to trains. Maybe that’s a good thing

- Devin Leonard

My journey from New York to New Orleans on the Amtrak Crescent began forebodingly. I was stowing my bags in the sleeping car. As the train left the station, the Amtrak attendant who’d be taking care of me on the trip stopped by. “Settle in,” he advised. “We’re going to be here for a while.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thirty hours.”

“All that,” he replied knowingly, “and maybe more.”

The Crescent is one of Amtrak’s tardiest trains. Southbound, it leaves New York’s Pennsylvania Station every day at 2:15 p.m. Around 9 the next morning it pulls into Atlanta, where many passengers either depart or step offfor a long-awaited cigarette. It ambles through some hypnotically beautiful Alabama countryside and somnolent Mississippi towns before arriving in New Orleans, according to the schedule, at 7:32 p.m. Almost three-quarters of the time, however, the Crescent is late, often by two hours or more. Last year, Amtrak lost $39 million on the line, which comes as no surprise. How many people want to take such an unreliable train?

The people I spoke with in the dining car all had stories about the Crescent’s delays and why they endured them. A semiretired cotton company executive from Montgomery, Ala., was a train lover and just happy to be aboard. “I enjoy it,” he said, “even when it’s late.” We ate dinner with an Atlanta dentist returning from a wedding in New York. Normally he would have flown, but he’d had knee surgery and couldn’t sit still for several hours on a plane.