First summer results for Borealis – and what it means for Australia

September results for Amtrak’s new Borealis service between Chicago and Minneapolis/St Paul are out, representing its first full summer holiday season. Monthly patronage has taken a sharp downward drop for the first time, from 22,300 the previous month to 18,800 – almost back to the same rate from its initial introduction in May. This isn’t exactly a surprise – holiday season is over and the weather is cooling down, so the post-summer slump is a normal feature for any transportation service.

What’s interesting though is that passenger miles have not dropped proportionally. In fact, the average distance per passenger remains over 12% above the pre-summer figure, which means more people are using the train for longer trips. Dividing passengers by passenger-miles, we see that the average distance per passenger has risen from 199 miles in May, to 223 miles in September – now nicely over half the 411-mile total between Chicago and MSP (though down from a high of 60% in August). Given we know that typically over a third of total rides are in the short (86-mile) Chicago-Milwaukee sector, and that these are largely commuter trips and therefore less seasonally variable, this suggests an increasing share of passengers travelling the full distance.

In late October, Amtrak reported another milestone for the Borealis, surpassing 100,000 passengers in its first 22 weeks of operation. Extrapolating that to the full month would be about 16,500 passengers for October, which suggests patronage is continuing to ease off as the winter months set in. That’s unsurprising, but it does mean the exuberance of the service’s first few months might need to be tempered – it doesn’t currently look like needing a second daily train in the short term, nor an increased number of carriages. However, keep in mind that Amtrak had originally expected demand of around 125,000 per year, so to be on track for double that figure is a hugely significant achievement.

Why is all this relevant to regional fast rail in Australia? The success of Borealis demonstrates the point I’ve been making with Hot Rails this whole time – that you don’t need the 400km/h supertrains to attract meaningful patronage on short- to medium-haul intercity routes. Borealis is a far cry from anything resembling “fast rail” – its average speed barely cracks 90km/h, about the same as the Sydney-Melbourne XPT. Yet with its 7h20m travel time, it can still capture a double-digit percentage of the air travel market between its two terminal cities.

As a case-study, Borealis is highly applicable to Australia. Our east coast cities are comparably sized, and separated by similar distances. Previous proposals for upgrading the Sydney-Melbourne line (such as the 1981 Bicentennial High Speed Railway project, or more recently the Wentworth, Centennial and Hoare deviations advocated by Phillip Laird) would have reduced travel time from the current 11 hours to around 6 hours – enough to become a serious competitor to air travel. If the performance of Borealis were replicated on Sydney-Melbourne (~10% modeshare), we could expect a 6 or 7 hour service to capture patronage of over 1,000,000 – enough for at least 6 XPT-sized trainsets in each direction, daily.

So by all means, let’s keep working towards true high-speed rail between Sydney and Newcastle, and eventually beyond. But we should have upgraded the mainline to medium-speed standards decades ago. The success of Borealis shows it would still be a worthwhile investment today.