A Modest Proposal For Amtrak

Last day of the Chris-bake in the tent at work. Yea! Although it has finally cooled off some, temperature is right around 70, there's a decent breeze blowing in from the east and it's fairly dry. All in all, it's the kind of day that makes the folks up north want to move down here.

On Monday as I was sitting out here I watched one of the southbound Amtrak trains go rolling by. But I noticed something different about this one. It had a big placard on the baggage car. Just a big picture of Amtrak's stylized train in the mountains logo that they sometimes use. But it set me to thinking that there might be a way to reduce the revenue shortfall for Amtrak, if not eliminate it altogether.

Perhaps, instead of simply painting the cars with some variation of the three line, red/white/blue scheme (there are something like six separate variations so far), they should try to see the rights to the side of the car for advertising.

Cities along the system could buy the rights to advertise their city on the cars. National companies like IBM, GE, GM, Ford or AT&T could buy national advertising for their products. The rail cars could be considered to be like 89-foot rolling billboards.

Bus companies, like our local one in Orlando, already do this. Airlines have done it, although with the airlines it is done infrequently due to weight concerns. Why haven't Amtrak or the railroads (they could do it with regular freight cars also) tried to implement some kind of revenue generation from this?

I don't know exactly how many cars Amtrak has, but let's assume 500 nationwide: 300 single level cars and 200 bilevel Superliner cars. I'm guessing that they could probably sell the rights to a single level car for $100,000 year, $200,000 for a Superliner. That would raise nearly $70 million a year. I realize that it's not quite the amount that Amtrak claims it is falling short revenuewise, but it's a start.

The effects would probably be greater, as I believe that Amtrak has more than 500 cars and that they could probably receive more revenue per car which would only serve to increase the effectiveness of this proposal.

Service-wise, it would affect the operations of the railroad at all. The cars would still need to be cleaned and still need to be maintained. The passengers would still be able to see out the windows to watch the world going by.

But more importantly, prospects would be intrigued. They would pay more attention to the trains as they sat at a crossing. A few - not many, but a few - would probably decide to take the train next time they traveled. It's a little more incremental revenue and Amtrak needs all of that it can get.

Amtrak and the railroads, I guessing, how already looked at something like this and probably rejected it as being beneath the dignity and tradition of the railroads. They're afraid to think outside the box. They're afraid of demeaning the dignity of the railroading tradition, which has been plain and understated since the days of the beer cars and dairy cars of the teens and twenties.

Unfortunately, they'll be dignified, but unemployed. Desperate times call for innovative measures. Too bad that they don't measure up to the challenge.