Name: Why Trains Are So Expensive (Sometimes More Than Flights)
Uploaded: 2021-06-11T11:32:34.000Z
Duration: 9 min 8 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Have you noticed, when shopping for travel tickets, you occasionally come across prices

For instance, you can get to your destination in 1 hour by plane or take a train for 7 hours

I think it's fair to say that there's a bigger question about un-fair fares: how

do these passenger rail companies stay in business if air travel is faster AND cheaper?!

The obvious benefits are catching it right in the city versus having to fight traffic

You can also take as many liquids with you as your heart desires, you don't have to

worry about bad weather delaying your trip, and there's no stress at all if you're

Environmentalists will also say that using clean electric power is much better than spraying

All this sounds great and justifiable, but the real explanations behind why train tickets

cost so much have less to do with comfort and emotions and more about practicality…

When you travel by plane, it takes off at a certain airport and lands at another.

These planes need maintenance, and airports are packed with staff, no doubt.

But the journey itself, no matter how long it is, happens up in the air, which needs

And to be able to move on those at high speeds, or even move on them at all, the tracks need

This maintenance includes changing sleepers, adjusting switches, tightening any loose components,

and keeping straight parts straight and curved parts curved within limits.

There's even the little yet important job of spraying the ballast with herbicides so

From time to time, sections of tracks and ballast need to be renewed.

While most of this work is now done by specialized machines, the materials and those machines

Taking care of a small section is already a lot, but think of how many tracks a national

Amtrak, for example, owns 730 miles of its tracks and rents an additional 20,000 miles.

That means they have to pay the owners for any maintenance costs.

Expanding the route network and building new tracks is extremely expensive as well – just

The trains themselves come with a hefty price tag too.

Just 1 locomotive traveling from DC to New York will run you about $6.5 million if you're

Not nearly as expensive as a plane, but still a lot!

Add 8 passenger cars worth $400,000 each, and you'll see that this train costs nearly

No one wants to travel in old cars with broken door handles or other parts, so every now

and then, they have to be fixed and eventually replaced at some point.

The largest expense, however, is not the tracks or the trains – it's the people servicing

Now, think about it: when you're traveling by plane, depending on its size, you'll

usually be accompanied by about 5 friendly flight attendants and 2 pilots.

They'll be taking good care of you for an hour and a half on a flight from LA to San

Amtrak workers on the same route will work for 9 hours and get paid accordingly.

It gets even more interesting if you look at a trip from LA to DC.

You'd spend 5 hours in the air but 2 whole days on a train!

I'd opt for the plane in this case, but what would you choose?

Anyway, that's a huge difference in pay hours.

Now multiply all those hours by the number of people working for rail companies.

It's not just the train attendants, but all kinds of jobs that come together to make your

Together, they service the 87,000 passengers that travel on more than 300 trains every

That's about 1 staff member for every 4 passengers.

And because they're all highly skilled professionals, they expect good money for their work.

So, while they spend lots of money on great staff and vehicle maintenance, how much do

One of the most popular routes in the US is the commute from DC to New York.

You can get a ticket for $75, give or take depending on how far in advance you book the

- One-third of this price goes to staff salaries.

- Maintenance of rails makes up another 5%.

But all this stuff I've talked about so far is just half of the ticket price.

- Like any company, and in this case a huge one, Amtrak needs to pay someone to run the

So, 3% of the ticket price is used to cover administrative costs.

- Even though everyone knows their name, Amtrak still has to advertise good deals and new

- There are also settlement fees the company has to bear.

Yes, trains are an incredibly safe kind of transportation.

But accidents still happen, and around 1% of that ticket cost would go to those who

- Different minor costs eat another 8% of the ticket value.

In the end, you can see that the profit for the company is roughly 35% of the average

And that's just on one of the most popular and profitable routes.

The more passengers it gets and the faster and more frequently it travels, the more profitable

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