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Auto Train is an 855-mile-(1376-km-)long scheduled train service for passengers and their automobiles, operated by Amtrak between Lorton, Virginia (near Washington, D.C.) and Sanford, Florida (near Orlando). Although there are similar services around the world, the Auto Train is the only one of its kind in the United States. Specialized equipment enables customers to take along their automobile, van, sport utility vehicle, motorcycle, small trailer, and/or jet-ski as they travel up or down the East Coast. Passengers ride in either wide coach seats or private sleeping car rooms while their vehicles are safely carried in enclosed auto carriers, called autoracks. The train also includes lounge cars and dining cars. The Auto Train service offers its passengers dual benefits: they avoid the long drive on busy Interstate 95 in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, and instead of the expense and unfamiliarity of a rental car they have the convenience of the use of their own vehicle upon arrival.

The service operates as train 53 southbound and 52 northbound, making no station stops between its terminals at Lorton and Sanford.

History: Auto-Train Corporation, an innovative rail service

The predecessor to Amtrak's Auto Train was the Auto-Train of the Auto-Train Corporation, a public stock corporation founded in 1971 by Eugene K. Garfield. The company used its own locomotives, passenger railcars, autoracks, and cabooses, and used the tracks of the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac (RF&P) and Seaboard Coast Line (SCL) railroads from Lorton, Virginia to Sanford, Florida.

Locomotives, passenger railcars, autoracks, and cabooses

The Auto-Train Corporation acquired a fleet of thirteen General Electric U36B diesel-electric locomotives. These were very similar to ones used by Seaboard Coast Line Railroad, the host railroad for most of the route's length. The passenger railcars, including coaches, dining cars, sleeping cars, and dome cars, were acquired from various major railroads, including Santa Fe, Union Pacific, and Western Pacific. The Auto-Train's first autoracks were 75-foot-long bilevels with end doors, carrying eight automobiles each. The cars were originally owned by Canadian National Railway (CN), the railroad that had pioneered the use of autoracks in the North American freight rail industry beginning in late 1957. The bilevel autoracks were augmented by trilevel ones that were purchased new in 1976.

Unlike most passenger trains, the Auto-Train included a caboose at the end, which at the time was required (for technical, legal, and union-agreement reasons) by the string of autorack cars on the rear of the train. Like the rest of the equipment, the cabooses were painted in a red, white, and purple color scheme. A typical train was made up of 30 to 64 cars, pulled by two or three locomotives.

Business success and failure

The Auto-Train began operations on December 6, 1971. The service was a big hit with travelers. It reported profits for the first few years. Before long, the Auto-Train Corporation's ambitious leadership was looking to expand into other markets. A second service, from Louisville, Kentucky to Sanford, was inaugurated in May 1974. It operated only until September 1977, however, reportedly having lost millions of dollars. Two Auto-Train derailments in 1976 and a major derailment in 1978 shut down service for weeks, and cost the company more than $6 million in lost revenue. Excessively high union labor costs, of the kind that caused grave damage to most of the United States railroad industry throughout most of the twentieth century, made it all the more difficult for the company to withstand these financial blows. Debts accumulated, including millions in taxes, leading to cutbacks in maintenance that slowed operations. Eventually the company was forced into bankruptcy; and though the Auto-Train retained much of its popularity to the end, it terminated its services in late April 1981.

Several smaller companies scrambled to pick up the Auto-Train's former customers. A company operating as Auto-Bus carried its customers in buses and their cars in trucks, operating between Pennsylvania and Florida. Another company, Autolog Corporation, offered a service to carry cars by truck between the Northeast and Florida, though not providing transportation for the customers themselves. There were also several companies that hired drivers to take cars individually to their owners' destinations. No one else, however, offered a service quite like that of the Auto-Train, namely transporting a car and its passengers simultaneously to and from Florida.

While their service ultimately failed (as so many American passenger train services had previously failed in the decades prior to Amtrak's startup in 1971), Garfield and Auto-Train Corporation had identified a service that people wanted.

Amtrak steps in to fill the gap

After a period of 22 months without service, the service was revived by the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, better known as Amtrak, the corporation that operates most intercity passenger trains in the United States. Amtrak acquired the terminals in Lorton and Sanford and some of the Auto-Train rolling stock. On October 30, 1983, it introduced its slightly renamed Auto Train service on a triweekly basis. Daily service was introduced a year later.

Amtrak continued to use the bilevel and the trilevel autoracks that Auto-Train had used. For passenger equipment, it initially used a mixture of former Auto-Train railcars and midcentury long-distance railcars from Amtrak's general fleet, all rebuilt to Amtrak's "Heritage Fleet" standards. In the mid 1990s, Amtrak replaced all these passenger railcars with its newer, bilevel Superliner I and II equipment. In current (2006) Amtrak operations, an Auto Train consist is normally made up of two General Electric P42 diesel-electric locomotives and forty or more railcars (passenger and autorack), for a total length of a half-mile or more. The autoracks normally run on the rear; there is no caboose. Amtrak's Auto Train is sometimes said to have the longest consist of any passenger train in the world, although one could argue that it is actually a mixed train (i.e., incorporating a mixture of passenger cars and freight cars), not a passenger train in the strict sense of the word. Currently, two Auto Train consists are in simultaneous operation each day. At 4:00 p.m., there are departures from both the Lorton and Sanford terminals. Florence, South Carolina is the only scheduled stop on the 855-mile run: at this stop, the train is refueled and serviced and the engine crew and conductors are changed, but no passengers are entrained or detrained. Each train is scheduled to arrive at the other end the next morning at 8:30 a.m., for an average speed of about 52 miles per hour.

Today, Amtrak's Auto Train carries about 200,000 passengers and grosses about $50 million annually. It is notable, especially within the Amtrak system, for the high quality of its equipment and of its customer service. Operating on leased CSX Transportation tracks for the entire distance, it is considered Amtrak's best-paying train in terms of income in comparison with operating expenses.

Lorton Terminal

Lorton, Virginia is about a half-hour drive south of Washington, DC, just off Interstate 95. Amtrak's new Lorton terminal opened in early 2000, and features a large, modern waiting area with high glass walls. The station was designed by architect Hanny Hassan. The suspended sculpture in the lobby was designed by Patrick Sheridan. Outside the waiting room are the tracks where passenger cars are set out for boarding. The platform is 1,480 feet (about 3/10 of a mile) long.

Sanford Terminal

The Sanford Auto Train terminal is about a half-hour drive north of Orlando. It is an older and smaller facility than the terminal at Lorton. Currently, the Auto Train loads its passengers on two tracks in Sanford, as no one track is long enough to accommodate all the passenger railcars. Amtrak and the State of Florida are working on plans to replace the facility in Sanford with a new terminal designed to accommodate large numbers of passengers more comfortably.

A model for similar services

A North American predecessor to the original Auto-Train was a service run by the Canadian National Railway (CN) that allowed passengers to bring their automobiles along on selected passenger trains; this service proved unsuccessful. As discussed above, the original Auto-Train reported profits on the Virginia-Florida route in its early years, but ultimately failed financially. Amtrak's Auto Train has been relatively economically successful due to the following factors:

1. A substantial number of passengers are willing to accept a single departure and a single destination point, making route expansion initiatives unnecessary.
2. A substantial number of passengers are willing to pay a premium price in order to avoid driving and to have the use of their own car at their destination.
3. A substantial number of passengers find the overnight train travel experience provided on the Auto Train to be restful, enjoyable, and expeditious.
4. The parallel superhighways are congested.

Candidate for contracting-out or privatization

Amtrak services are federally subsidized, and are operated by an corporation that, while technically for-profit, in some ways operates like a government transportation agency. There is a certain amount of debate in the United States over whether Amtrak's services could and/or should be contracted out to private companies through a competitive bidding process, or even completely privatized. Auto Train is often cited as one of the most likely candidates for such changes, partly on the grounds that its predecessor the Auto-Train reported profits during its early years of service. It is debatable whether Amtrak's Auto Train could, under the government-distorted transportation market conditions existing currently and likely to exist in the foreseeable near future, be made to fully cover both its operating and capital costs, and earn a profit for shareholders on top of that. There is no question, however, that at present the train is satisfying a substantial consumer demand.

Other Auto Train-type services

First Great Western in the United Kingdom operates the Motorail service between London Paddington and Penzance.

In Germany, DB AutoZug (website) has services from sixteen stations to cities in France, Italy, Austria, and Croatia. These are very popular, with 200,000 automobiles transported yearly and half a million passengers. In 2005, DB AutoZug celebrated 75 years of automobile-and-person-carrying trains.

In France, the SNCF's Auto/train (English: Auto-Train) service (website) provides extensive automobile-carrying routes throughout France, also connecting with neighboring countries. In the past, all of the Auto/trains also carried sleeping cars, but many no longer allow passengers to travel on the same train as their automobiles. Typically, passengers drop off their car anytime during the day, then use the TGV or other service to reach their destination, where they can pick up the car anytime the following day. The hub of the Auto/train route system is in Paris at the Gare de Bercy. Three other cities (Avignon, Narbonne, and Fréjus-St-Raphaël) also have specialized stations for the car-carrying service; in other cities the service is operated from a normal passenger facility. The automobiles are carried in open railcars, and for this reason the SNCF offers passengers a free car wash in the arrival city.

In Austria, several of the regular day and night trains of the Österreichische Bundesbahnen include automobile transport cars.

In Finland, VR (website) has a popular automobile-carrying service on their night trains between the south and the north. VR has recently bought 15 new auto carriers for €8 million, and transports 35,000 automobiles a year.

In Chile, EFE (Empresa de los Ferrocarriles del Estado) operates a similar service called Autotren (website) between Santiago and Temuco.

See also

• Rail terminology
• Auto-Train Corporation
• Amtrak
• Motorail

External links

• Amtrak's page on the Auto Train
• The official Amtrak website
• Trainweb site with thousands of photos and links to other rail-related sites
• Bill's Railroad Empire--the original Auto-Train page N-scale modeling
• George Elwood's Fallen Flags site, original Auto-Train pages Lots of locomotive and rolling stock photos
• From a 1971 Auto-Train Corporation brochure, including information on the short-lived Louisville-to-Sanford Auto-Train route
• A Yahoo group for Auto Train enthusiasts
• Diesel shop rail photo site Photo of Auto-Train diesel-electric locomotive when almost new
• Photos and data, Amtrak autoracks
• Orlando Sentinel newspaper article about Auto-Train Corporation and Amtrak's Auto Train replacement
• Motorail trains in Europe
• Autotren in Chile

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