Wendover Productions
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2017–2022
12:39 · 3.2M views · Apr 7, 2017
A Wendover Productions explainer on why train tickets, especially Amtrak in the US, cost so much compared with flying. It breaks down staffing, speed and the cost components behind a ticket.
HN links it in rail-versus-air threads as a clear cost breakdown of American passenger rail.
7 comments from Hacker News
> I really don't get why trains can be so expensive and what we need to do to fix that. I recently watched this video 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)
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: this video
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. this video
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: this video
There's a good Wendover video on airline classes: [LINK] And another great one about AmTrak in relation to flight: this video