This nation, and most of the world, recently marked five years since much of life as we knew it essentially shut down because of the sudden proliferation of the COVID-19 virus. It came from China and spread to essentially all corners of the globe by mid-March 2020, placing almost all activity on “pause.”
Railroad activity, both passenger and freight, and including rail transit, was no exception. Railway Age and its sibling publications Railway Track & Structures (RT&S) and International Railway Journal (IRJ) seemed to constitute an exception during that spring of fear and uncertainty, as editors and reporters on all of Simmons-Boardman’s rail publications gathered under the leadership of Railway Age Editor-in-Chief William C. Vantuono to report decline and eventual recovery on the rails.
The first warning about the effect that the virus could have on the railroad came not from one of our regular reporters, but from Nicholas Little, the now-retired director of the railroad program at Michigan State. He raised the warning on March 3, as it pertained to the freight side of the industry. At the time, Little’s comments seemed as speculative as those of the fictional astronomer at the beginning of Orson Welles’ dramatization of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds that panicked millions of Americans in 1938. Soon we would know that the speculation which Little reported might have come out on the mild side of the reality, which suddenly came upon us less than two weeks later.
Personally, I had made the decision to take a rare (for me) winter journey on VIA Rail’s Canadian from Vancouver, which I reached on Amtrak’s Empire Builder, to Toronto. From there, an overnight bus to New York got me home on Wednesday, March 11. The virus was not yet a major topic of conversation, but that would change drastically within less than 48 hours after my arrival.
On Friday the 13th, as fate would have it, the word came down. It started with cancellations of events, at first out of an abundance of caution. There were hopes expressed that the situation would be “back to normal” soon but, the more cancellations and similar changes that were reported, the more difficult it became to believe those expressions of hope for a continuation of “normality” or a relatively swift return to it. Some people were placed on leave from their jobs “until further notice” and, of those, some ended up retiring, because their jobs essentially disappeared. Others had changes made in their work routines. They worked “remotely” (usually from home) and many offices emptied out, along with the “commuter trains” that used to take those workers to those offices. Schools were going “remote,” too, as everybody was discouraged from leaving home unless absolutely necessary, and all of us donned our masks whenever we went out, a requirement that would last for more than two years.
After a weekend of speculation, anxiety, fear, and getting used to wearing masks, everything was different on Monday. The changes were so sweeping and shocking that little seemed the same. Many schools were closed, along with government and corporate offices. Work had become “remote” as it moved out of the office and onto web sites that “hosted” meetings. Some “essential workers” had to be out working, and everybody else seemed as concerned about the risks they faced as they were for their own lives and health. As activity ground to a halt, ridership on trains and other transit (not only on rail transit, but on buses, too) plummeted. Transit providers eliminated routes and cut schedules on almost all of those which survived, sometimes drastically. Advocates did what they could to help persuade transit managers to mitigate the severity of the service cuts, for the benefit of people who still had to ride. I remember convincing management at NJ Transit to add a few trains to the normal weekend schedule in certain places for weekday service. That became the basis for the “minor holiday” schedule still in use on selected days. In most places, the weekend level of service became standard every day.
There were efforts from time to time to look on the bright side, as Andrew Corselli, who was Railway Age Managing Editor at the time, reported: “The Association of American Railroads (AAR) released U.S. rail traffic for the week ended March 21, 2020, and it contained some much-needed good news: The worst of the coronavirus’ effects on Asian trade may be over.” Less than four weeks after he expressed a level of optimism, Little commented here on March 27: “On March 3, 2020, Railway Age published my early observations on the COVID-19 pandemic’s potential impact on North America’s freight railroads. In just over three weeks, our world has become a very different place.”
There was more bad news, too. One example that struck many of us on New Jersey’s rails personally was when the virus took Raymond P. Kenny from us. Kenny was a 50-year railroader who spent most of his career at the Long Island Rail Road, fought the effects of the virus as best he could as Senior VP and Director of Rail Operations at NJ Transit, was well-liked by everyone concerned with the railroad (including other managers, labor, and rider-advocates), and had added some trains to the schedule at my request during what would be the final month of his life. Vantuono reported his passing on April 18, 2020, not long after reporting NJ Transit hiring Kenny on January 4, 2019. The virus claimed the lives of other railroaders, too, but losing a well-liked and well-respected railroader we knew hit us hard.
Service Slashed Quickly, Recovered Slowly
Throughout the spring, all of us pitched in to report the unfolding disaster on the rails, as both fatal and non-fatal cases of COVID mounted. There was hope in 2020 that companies like BioNTech, Moderna and others would come up with a vaccine that could protect us from the virus, but fear that we could be next to catch it claimed more of our attention at the time than hope for the future.
Vantuono, along with Executive Editor Marybeth Luczak and Senior Editor Carolina Worrell, continued to report the decline, and reports form writers whose work usually appeared in RT&S and IRJ turned up more frequently in Railway Age, too. I did most of the reporting on the passenger and transit side, while colleagues also pitched in when there was a lot of news. There often was, and not much of it was good. In one of my updates on the passenger and transit side, I reported on Oct. 22: “It has now been more than six months since the COVID-19 virus hit the United States and CanCanada andso hit transit hard in both nations. The riders disappeared. On some systems, ridership dropped as low as 5% of prior levels. Service plummeted in many places, too. Here at Railway Age and its sibling publications, we kept track of the downward progress of everything on rails: freight and passenger/transit. This writer was on the team that documented rail transit’s decline. Ridership is beginning its slow upward climb, how far up it will eventually go is anybody’s guess. So is service, in some places more than others. This article will present a comprehensive look at how rail transit is returning.” Advocates noticed the situation, too. In the same article, I reported on a conference held by the Rail Users’ Network (RUN, with which I am involved) about transit’s future recovery, with Arthur S. Guzzetti, Vice-President of Policy and Mobility at the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) as featured speaker.
On the railroad, freight activity slowed dramatically, as reported by my fellow Contributing Editor Jim Blaze and commentators from the freight side of the industry. People weren’t going out, and they weren’t buying much. Manufacturing was slowing down. With a reduction in purchases by producers and consumers, there was less to ship. The freight side recovered slowly over time, while we reported hopes and delays concerning that recovery. For example, Luczak reported on Sept. 30: “Intermodal’s growth path may help railroads sustain COVID-19 recovery. Participants from Class I railroads were positive on current trends and cautiously optimistic that these trends can continue for the remainder of 2020 and beyond,” TD Cowen analysts Jason Seidl (Managing Director and Railway Age Wall Street Contributing Editor), Matt Elkott and Adam Kramer reported, following their attendance and participation at the North East Association of Rail Shippers (NEARS) Fall 2020 Virtual Conference. “Continued tightness in trucking is benefiting intermodal.”
At the end of the year, Blaze advised our readers: To Track 2021 Rail Freight Recovery, Bypass 2020. He began his report by saying: “There’s not much statistical sense in using 2020 data as the benchmark when looking ahead to 2021. The statistical coverage of railway freight volume changes in Canada, Mexico and the United States is excellent. But after the extreme changes week-over-week due to the COVID-19 business impacts, maybe it is time to consider a different method.”
Railroaders, on both the passenger and freight sides, as well as the folks who kept our transit going, deserved respect, and I remember writing a few commentaries to that effect, praising everybody who keep the railroads and transit running when going places was an activity that was usually discouraged.
On the passenger side, Amtrak slashed service, even on the Northeast Corridor (NEC). There were no Acela trains, and conventional service was cut. Some state-supported trains and corridors were discontinued entirely, although most of those corridors were cut to a single round-trip per day. The entire long-distance network was reduced to tri-weekly operation in the fall, except for the Auto-Train, which is not available for non-motorists (except for guest of the motorist who purchases the ticket for the vehicle and the driver, the basic ticketing unit for that train). The same thing happened on VIA Rail in Canada, where the railroad’s corridor operations in Ontario and Quebec were slashed to one round trip per day. Most of the railroad’s “adventure” trains that run through remote areas were reduced to one round trip per week. VIA Rail’s long-distance trains between Toronto and Vancouver, and between Montreal and Halifax, were also reduced to once-a-week schedules. The service manager on the Ocean between Montreal and Halifax told me when I rode that train in 2023 that the on-board crew roster at the Halifax crew base was down to seven employees when the train ran only one round trip per week. Some VIA Rail trains, as well as Amtrak’s Vermonter and Adirondack, did not run at all for a while.
Local rail transit was cut almost everywhere, with wider headways between runs. Many providers shortened the service day by shutting down earlier in the evening than under “normal service” times. Bus service was generally hit harder than rail service. One example is San Francisco, where so many bus lines on MUNI (the city-sponsored provider) were eliminated that some riders would be required to walk for one mile to reach a bus stop. In addition to the specific news about Amtrak, VIA Rail, and rail transit in the United States and Canada, I reported comprehensive updates for three years after 2020.
Rails Recovered, Problems Remain
Five years after the virus struck the United States and Canada, we can look back and see that Amtrak, VIA Rail and rail transit have recovered essentially to their pre-COVID levels of activity, although ridership has not come back to the levels reported in 2019. The freight side seems to be recovering well, too. Still, times have changed in many ways during the past five years, and new unknowns and fears have come to take the place of the fear of the ravages of the COVID-19 virus, especially the way many of us felt before vaccines to fight the virus became available early in 2021.
The Bird Flu is today’s health threat, as it has killed many egg-laying chickens and sent the price of “hen fruit” (as eggs were called many years ago) through the proverbial roof. Beyond concern about the price of that commodity, people are starting to worry about whether the bird flu will cause a pandemic as COVID virus did. That sort of uncertainty might cause more problems on the freight side of railroading than on the passenger side but, in uncertain times like today, anything can happen.
On the passenger train and transit side, the recovery was slow, seemingly affected by a sort of “long COVID” that that slowed the recovery process. Money was a problem, and Congress passed COVID relief bills late in 2020 and early in 2021. These bills, as well as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA, otherwise known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, BIL) helped the capital side, too. As we reported in depth at the time, the relief bills helped provide operating funding to transit providers, including the “transit railroads” that serve a few of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas by moving the remaining commuters and other people who go to the city for any number of reasons. Even the New York City subways, which had run all night since 1904, shut down overnight for slightly more than one year during the pandemic. Before the virus hit, that sort of cut was inconceivable to New Yorkers.
Even without the virus as a direct threat, prospects for transit generally appear grim. Ridership has not recovered to pre-COVID levels, so neither has revenue. There is little reason to expect that there will again be as many riders on the nation’s rail transit as there were until five years ago, because demographics and human nature are moving in the opposite direction. While some employers are forcing more employees back into the office on a five-day basis, others are not, and some employees continue to resist the move. More are going to the office two or three days a week, but ridership on Mondays and Fridays is lower on many lines serving the old commuter sheds as on mid-week days. As more employees from the “baby boom” generation retire, there will be less commuting on that account, too. The challenge for transit providers, which is part of that industry’s “Long COVID” situation, is to find the money to keep serving the population of their service area with available mobility, even though Washington will not participate in funding that mobility as it had done in the past, especially when the pandemic was at its worst. In effect, today’s fiscal cliff is part of the transit industry’s “Long COVID.”
What if Another COVID-Like Emergency Happens?
While some Americans did not like the idea, the Biden Administration did what it could to keep people from getting too close to each other for comfort when the effects of the virus were at their worst. Health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci constantly pushed Americans to get their shots as soon as they became available. Absent an apparently impracticable change in circumstances, it seems inconceivable that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. would push for widespread acceptance of vaccines and other health measures if a similar emergency were to take place during POTUS 47’s Administration. It’s not beyond the realm of comprehension that such a scenario could occur. The bird flu has claimed some victims in this country. How many more there will be remains to be seen, but the COVID experience left many of us with fear and uncertainty, and some of us with dread that it can happen again soon.
Even with a Congress that cared about the mobility that was available to non-motorists as well as motorists, it sometimes took a relatively long time for Congressionally mandated policies to become effective. It was during the winter of 2021 that Congress required Amtrak to restore the twelve long-distance trains that had been reduced to tri-weekly schedules to daily operation. That did not happen until the beginning of the summer of 2022. In line with POTUS 47’s and First Pal Elon Musk’s push to downside the Government at breakneck speed, it is inconceivable that the present Congress would pass any bill that remotely resembles a mandate that Amtrak run more frequencies or any more trains.
The health picture doesn’t look too good these days, either. With the federal government pushing to cut Medicaid drastically, people who can’t afford health care through the private sector will get much less of it than they get now, so they will be less healthy. So, if another health emergency occurs, the country will need to endure a higher death toll and will recover more slowly. All of that means less shipping for freight, less travel for passengers on whatever trains survive, and less riding on transit.
So, in a sense, the entire country, including the railroad industry, is suffering from a sort of “Long COVID” that carriers over from the original pandemic, even if the main symptoms today are fear and uncertainty about something similar happening in the future. This time, though, there does not seem to be as much of a system in place to help railroads, transit providers, or individuals in the United States in the event of another health emergency. The government in Canada is not eliminating jobs (and even entire departments and programs) as is happening in Washington, but Canadians are not free from the memories of the doubt and fear that began five years ago.
To make matters worse, relations between the United States and Canada have not been this strained in anyone’s memory, perhaps not since before Canada became a country in 1867. That state of affairs will probably not have much effect on the passenger side of railroading, but disputes leading to new tariffs will certainly affect shipping between the two countries, including shipping by rail. I’ll leave it to Jim Blaze and the other freight experts to cover that situation.
Wherever developments take us, only a few Americans could conceive at the start of 2020 that life in the United States and Canada would change so drastically at the middle of March. With the travel restrictions put into effect at the time, I was effectively limited to New Jersey, New York State, Connecticut, and part of Pennsylvania, including Philadelphia. With restrictions in effect, all of us needed the reporting that everyone here at Railway Age and its sibling publications joined forces to produce, so all of us could stay up-to-date on all aspects of the rapidly-changing situation on the rails. We all sprang into action to bring you the news, while we also hope such action won’t be needed again.
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