Video: Chuck Jensen is one of only a handful of people that own their own train car. He rents out the nearly century-old heavyweight Pullman observation car for private trips, but mostly uses it to vacation across the country with his family.
Most of the passengers scurrying to board Amtrak’s Silver Star No. 91 at New York’s Penn Station one recent morning had no idea that Chuck Jensen had already snagged the best seat: a plush leather armchair with a panoramic view out the back.
Jensen had more than a reserved seat waiting for him. He had his own rail car, an antique painted a deep Tuscan red, hitched to the end of the train.
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“You just don’t get to see this” on other train rides, Jensen said minutes later, gazing through his car’s large back windows as the Hudson River tunnel receded into the distance on the way to Union Station in Washington. “Isn’t that cool?”
Riding in your own rail car might be cool, but it doesn’t come cheap. Jensen estimates that he’s sunk about $450,000 into refurbishing his 1923 Pullman sleeper. Even so, Jensen, the chief mechanical officer for the Morristown & Erie Railway in New Jersey, isn’t among the super rich. Like most of the 80 or so private rail car owners who operate on Amtrak tracks nationwide, he’s a lifelong train buff who depends on renting out his car for charter trips to cover the $10,000 in annual storage, insurance and maintenance costs. Jensen rides most often as a member of the crew, sometimes bringing along his wife, Ginny, and two teenage sons to help carry passengers’ luggage and serve meals.
At a time when the Obama administration and Amtrak are pushing to build a high-speed rail network that could run trains akin to Japan’s bullet trains, Jensen and his fellow rail car owners are paying big money to hearken back to the charms of passenger rail’s pre-World War II heyday.
As Northeast Corridor trains such as the Metroliner and Acela have picked up speed over the past 15 years, some private rail car owners have sought additional routes. Federal law prohibits private cars from traveling more than 110 mph — too slow for the Metroliner and Acela, let alone the 220 mph speeds that Amtrak officials are eyeing for the “next generation” high-speed trains between Washington, New York and Boston.
But those who pay $250,000 and more for cars certified to run on Amtrak tracks say they can always attach their cars to slower, long-distance trains, including those that link up to the Northeast Corridor.
They compare their private rail cars to yachts.
“It’s not for the faint of heart in terms of money,” said Jim Lilly, a federal employee and president of the Washington chapter of the National Railway Historical Society, which owns a 1923 Pullman sleeper and a 1949 coach car retired by the MARC system. “But it’s an incredible amount of fun.”
‘Always under pressure’
If they are an expensive hobby for train buffs, private rail cars are good business for Amtrak, which pulls an average of 35 private cars monthly.
Amtrak charges $2.10 a mile to pull a private car — each additional car on the same train is another $1.60 a mile — plus about $100 for overnight parking at most stations. A one-way trip between New York and Washington adds up to about $470 in Amtrak fees, and Washington to Chicago costs about $1,600. That doesn’t include crew costs or the $500 to $1,800 that car owners typically pay each way for railroads to pull their car from a storage yard to an Amtrak facility.
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