Behind the Scenes:
The Making of 'Amtrak: All Aboard?'

http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/amtrak/index.html

By Ben Arnoldy
csmonitor.com News Producer

I am always on the lookout for stories that are best told on the Web. When I heard an NPR story on a brewing battle in Congress over Amtrak, I remember how unusually inadequate the radio report felt. I wanted to see a map of Amtrak’s current system, I wanted to compare ticket prices with airplanes, and most of all, I wanted to experience the trains that people continue fighting to keep. When I felt my fingers itching to get on the web to learn more, I knew I had a web story.

The news peg turned out to be better than I expected. Five years ago, Congress had mandated profitability in 2002 for Amtrak and created a new oversight body to draw up a reorganization plan if the railroad missed the deadline. Despite the buzz about the new high-speed Acela service and the blow to the airlines by Sept. 11, Amtrak not only failed to break even by this year, it was running bigger deficits than ever. Perennial talk of restructuring suddenly got serious.

In initial planning meetings, the csmonitor.com staff boiled these events down to three questions: Why is Amtrak losing so much money? Why do people defend it despite that? And what are the restructuring plans being considered?

Our staff had been experimenting with a number of online storytelling formats, including Weblogs, interactive maps, and audio slideshows. Each of our three questions seemed to be answered best through a different format, resulting in a presentation that makes the most of the web’s capabilities.

To get at Amtrak’s business troubles, we put ourselves in the shoes of a consumer deciding between taking a plane, train, bus, or car. Time and price are crucial factors when traveling, and we wanted to let users see how the options stacked up between cities served by Amtrak.

Comparing fares is a tricky business, however. They are based on a dizzying array of variables. The best we could do was to choose the same departure date and the same return date, spaced enough apart and far enough in advance to avoid introducing pricing penalties. I made sure to explain to readers the variables we used and noted other “hidden fees” not included.

I set up an Excel spreadsheet with the list of city pairs as rows and a travel time and ticket price column for each mode of travel. Four producers worked to fill in the data, finding the lowest prices from Web databases used by consumers: orbitz.com for planes, amtrak.com for trains, and greyhound.com for buses. The car option required some more consideration, since there is no “fare” for driving your own car. But there are expenses such as fuel and maintenance. Fortunately, AAA maintains an up-to-date per mile operating cost ratio. The AAA site also offers point-to-point driving times and distances.

We took this spreadsheet that only an accountant could love and turned the data into a fun interactive map. Users can click on an Amtrak line and get a quick snapshot of how much money the route lost (or profited) and the comparison data with planes, buses, and cars.

However, Amtrak has never been profitable and, despite that fact, it has many die-hard fans who keep pressuring Congress to fund it. To convey this emotional angle of the story, we needed to go beyond the numbers and take our users on a train trip. And what better train than the Sunset Limited, the longest ride and largest loser of money?

Another producer and I boarded the train in Orlando with an audio kit, a digital camera, a regular camera, and a laptop. The assigned seating at meals turned out to be a perfect way to meet people to interview later. (And of course nobody could claim they were too busy to talk!) Generally, my co-producer monitored the audio levels and shot photos while I interviewed the riders and staff. I admire those “backpack” journalists that do all three by themselves.

After interviews we would spend time in our cabin kicking ideas back and forth and I would start to write pieces of the story. We wanted the interviews to give people a sense of who still takes long-distance trains and why. We turned the best interviews into a slideshow with audio clips that we produced afterwards in Boston. Our own observations about spending three days on a train turned into a first-person essay.

Worried about overwhelming readers with too much detail on the three main restructuring proposals, we opted to tell that angle of the story through 200 word summaries supplemented by maps, infographics, and competing quotes from key players.

Almost as an afterthought we compiled a Weblog from Monitor archive material on Amtrak. It revealed a striking pattern over the last three decades of efforts to kill the railroad only to have it keep chugging. The narrative provided unexpected context for this season’s breathless predictions of Amtrak’s demise. We now plan to incorporate archive Weblogs into our future special projects.

While many of our projects rely on the print edition for some or most of the content, this project was produced entirely by the Web staff. The print edition ended up repackaging our material for a consumer story on train travel. It’s nice to see that content can travel in both directions.