neroden
Engineer
First, the Service Line plans.
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The route-level and even service-line-level accounting is still essentially fraudulent, double-counting costs on the Empire Builder and Lake Shore Limited, for example. It has enough data, however, that I was able to back out a rough estimate of the avoidable costs of running each train, using my previous methodology (I'm still relying on Boardman's bar chart from 2012, but I have updated overhead estimates). For the so-called long-distance trains, I concluded:
-- The Auto Train, Silver Star, Palmetto, Silver Meteor, Empire Builder, Coast Starlight, Crescent, and Lake Shore Limited are all profitable (roughly in that order), in the sense that cancelling any one of them would make Amtrak require more operating subsidy. (If you disregard seasonal effects, you could also say this as follows: each time one of these trains is cancelled, Amtrak loses money.)
-- The City of New Orleans and Cardinal are essentially breakeven, in the same sense.
-- The trains which probably actually cost slightly more to run than their revenues are the Sunset Limited (by a large margin the most expensive, probably about 11 million a year net), Southwest Chief, Texas Eagle, Capitol Limited, and California Zephyr (all together, probably about 13 million a year net).
This doesn't include costs of replacing equipment, but does include maintenance. It's coming out plausible, without large changes from 2014 (the last year I have estimates for in my spreadsheet).
Profits are probably down significantly from 2014 on the Auto Train, and Meteor, but up on the Palmetto and Star. Down significantly on the LSL (obviously due to the trashing Amtrak has inflicted upon it in the last few years); down on the Capitol Limited. Up substantially on the Crescent and CONO; up on the Coast Starlight, CZ, and SWC; flat on the Cardinal and Texas Eagle.
The Capitol Limited needs to become the Broadway Limited again, but more importantly, Amtrak needs to stop promulgating fake accounting. Amtrak lies outright in its service line plan, saying "... $543.2M funded operating losses on long-distance routes," which is a flat-out dishonest fraudulent lie.
The long-distance routes are, as a group, profitable before overhead and depreciation. If you try to estimate depreciation costs (also not really doable with Amtrak data), then they probably cost something, but way less than that fake number. (The fake number would require that reequipping the fleet for 20 years costs $10.9 billion dollars, which it won't.)
I am, however, glad that the first thing in the Long Distance Service Line discussion after the fake numbers is On Time Performance, and that they promptly single out the freight train interference. That is a good focus.
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Unfortunately, they continue with some more deranged lies. This sounds like Stephen Gardner, who does not know what he's talking about: "Long-distance trains have littele attraction for Millennials, the nation's largest population group which already accounts for more travel spending than any other age cohort. Olnly 16% of adult long-distance passengers are less than 35 years old."
Only 16% of adult passengers! Sounds like a big deal!
Except that they don't give this number for the Acela. I bet you there are hardly any Millennials on the Acela; they mostly can't afford it. And they don't give this number for the Northeast Regional either.
Now, let's look at the US population.
https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/distribution-by-age/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel={"colId":"Location","sort":"asc"}
21% of the US population is 1935, but 25% are children, so that's 21/76 or 28% of the adult population. 16% is certainly *lower* than 28%, but people ages 19-35 have *less money* than older people, and trains are relatively expensive, so this is only to be expected.
As far as I can tell, long-distance trains are pretty popular with millennials; they're just more popular with people with more money, and they have a hardcore set of older riders. (According to older studies, the weak spot in train ridership habit was the Baby Boomers, currently considered to be 55 to 75 years old.)
Further on, we see that 37% of adult riders are 65 or older. Wait a sec -- only 16% of the population is that old. Yes, there's a hardcore set of older riders.
So let's exclude them and look at the 19-65 demographic. That's 60% of the population. We might expect 21 / 60 = 35% of that to be Millennials. Now let's look at the 19-65 Amtrak rider population -- that's 63% of the *adult* Amtrak riders. In fact 25% of that is millennials. Still a bit low (are we GenXers riding more than average?), but quite within the volume of "explained by high prices and poor OTP". This is probably a higher percentage than the Millennials riding the Acela, which Amtrak did not report.
-----
The route-level and even service-line-level accounting is still essentially fraudulent, double-counting costs on the Empire Builder and Lake Shore Limited, for example. It has enough data, however, that I was able to back out a rough estimate of the avoidable costs of running each train, using my previous methodology (I'm still relying on Boardman's bar chart from 2012, but I have updated overhead estimates). For the so-called long-distance trains, I concluded:
-- The Auto Train, Silver Star, Palmetto, Silver Meteor, Empire Builder, Coast Starlight, Crescent, and Lake Shore Limited are all profitable (roughly in that order), in the sense that cancelling any one of them would make Amtrak require more operating subsidy. (If you disregard seasonal effects, you could also say this as follows: each time one of these trains is cancelled, Amtrak loses money.)
-- The City of New Orleans and Cardinal are essentially breakeven, in the same sense.
-- The trains which probably actually cost slightly more to run than their revenues are the Sunset Limited (by a large margin the most expensive, probably about 11 million a year net), Southwest Chief, Texas Eagle, Capitol Limited, and California Zephyr (all together, probably about 13 million a year net).
This doesn't include costs of replacing equipment, but does include maintenance. It's coming out plausible, without large changes from 2014 (the last year I have estimates for in my spreadsheet).
Profits are probably down significantly from 2014 on the Auto Train, and Meteor, but up on the Palmetto and Star. Down significantly on the LSL (obviously due to the trashing Amtrak has inflicted upon it in the last few years); down on the Capitol Limited. Up substantially on the Crescent and CONO; up on the Coast Starlight, CZ, and SWC; flat on the Cardinal and Texas Eagle.
The Capitol Limited needs to become the Broadway Limited again, but more importantly, Amtrak needs to stop promulgating fake accounting. Amtrak lies outright in its service line plan, saying "... $543.2M funded operating losses on long-distance routes," which is a flat-out dishonest fraudulent lie.
The long-distance routes are, as a group, profitable before overhead and depreciation. If you try to estimate depreciation costs (also not really doable with Amtrak data), then they probably cost something, but way less than that fake number. (The fake number would require that reequipping the fleet for 20 years costs $10.9 billion dollars, which it won't.)
I am, however, glad that the first thing in the Long Distance Service Line discussion after the fake numbers is On Time Performance, and that they promptly single out the freight train interference. That is a good focus.
----
Unfortunately, they continue with some more deranged lies. This sounds like Stephen Gardner, who does not know what he's talking about: "Long-distance trains have littele attraction for Millennials, the nation's largest population group which already accounts for more travel spending than any other age cohort. Olnly 16% of adult long-distance passengers are less than 35 years old."
Only 16% of adult passengers! Sounds like a big deal!
Except that they don't give this number for the Acela. I bet you there are hardly any Millennials on the Acela; they mostly can't afford it. And they don't give this number for the Northeast Regional either.
Now, let's look at the US population.
https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/distribution-by-age/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel={"colId":"Location","sort":"asc"}
21% of the US population is 1935, but 25% are children, so that's 21/76 or 28% of the adult population. 16% is certainly *lower* than 28%, but people ages 19-35 have *less money* than older people, and trains are relatively expensive, so this is only to be expected.
As far as I can tell, long-distance trains are pretty popular with millennials; they're just more popular with people with more money, and they have a hardcore set of older riders. (According to older studies, the weak spot in train ridership habit was the Baby Boomers, currently considered to be 55 to 75 years old.)
Further on, we see that 37% of adult riders are 65 or older. Wait a sec -- only 16% of the population is that old. Yes, there's a hardcore set of older riders.
So let's exclude them and look at the 19-65 demographic. That's 60% of the population. We might expect 21 / 60 = 35% of that to be Millennials. Now let's look at the 19-65 Amtrak rider population -- that's 63% of the *adult* Amtrak riders. In fact 25% of that is millennials. Still a bit low (are we GenXers riding more than average?), but quite within the volume of "explained by high prices and poor OTP". This is probably a higher percentage than the Millennials riding the Acela, which Amtrak did not report.