Amtrack Rebranding

I love trains. I have such fond memories of riding sleeper cars on Amtrak, feeling cozy and secure tucked in bed watching the lights whiz by.

But Amtrak seems to lose money every year amid declining ridership, and they're always being bailed out by congress. It pains me to see them struggling year after year, especially when I see a perfectly bright future for them once they truly use their unique asset in the right way. Because I'm not the only one who enjoys the experience of a train ride. Everyone would if it were done right.

The mistake Amtrak makes in my view is that they try to compete in ways where they can never win. As I understand it, the Acela cost $2 billion to develop, and it shaved just 15 minutes off the Boston - New York journey. (BTW its top speed is still nothing compared to the French TGV or the Japanese "Bullet" -- anyone know why we didn't build a truly fast train?) But even the fastest train in the world isn't even half the speed of a plane, so we have to accept this fact and stop the futile advertisements trying to compare the speeds of the two. True, maybe on a very short route, the two can be comparable, but generally speed is not the great strength of trains. And for price you can't beat the flood of new Chinatown-style buses, which do the NY-Boston journey in roughly the same time as the train. But there's one thing a train has that neither the plane nor the bus can ever have, and that's room, plenty of it (at least until zeppelins become popular again).

So if I were CEO of Amtrak, this is what I would tell my company:

We need to stop focusing exclusively on time so much -- we'll never be as fast as an airplane -- and instead start making use of our inherent strength, which is space and comfort -- airplanes and buses will never be as spacious as a train. So we need to make the ride an enjoyable social experience, similar to what Barnes & Noble did for the book business (remember how drab and dull the old B. Daltons used to be, and how in the 80's people declared books were dead in America?). We should stop chasing planes and start chasing boats, which are the slowest means of transportation by far, and yet people gladly pay a premium just to ride on them (think of the luxury cruise-liners) because they're fun. They're fun because they have space and they make good use of it. We can also provide some of that same social fun, because we have space, too, while we can still at the same time travel fast enough to be a viable travel and commuting service, and we're always faster than a bus.

We therefore need to install a books and records store with lounge chairs and listening booths and fancy coffee machines where people will enjoy their ride so much that they'll actually look forward to taking the train just as they look forward to spending a few hours at Borders. And an area for social games like poker and scrabble, and another car for other kinds of shopping, too. We can even divide a car into booths and lease it to retailers, so these additional cars would actually generate revenue while simultaneously improving the ride experience for our passengers. Amtrak can once again become a social scene where people meet... there's a reason after all why so many memorable scenes in old movies occur on the train, while in modern movies the only plane scenes are generally disaster scenarios. So I'm proud to unveil our new slogan: "Planes are scary, trains are fun."

Because trains truly are fun to ride, and they can provide a superior ride experience to what a bus or plane could ever provide. Amtrak: listen up, use my slogan! "Planes are scary, trains are fun." And if by any chance you're looking for a new CEO or board member, I might be persuaded to take the job for the right compensation package...