The Orlando-Los Angeles run. It loses nearly $300 for every passenger it carries. That dog should have been put out of its misery years ago and everybody knows it. So instead Gunn decides to raise a panic by threatening trains like the Metroliner, which carries more passengers between New York and Washington than the two airline shuttles combined. He got his panic, all right. But who in their right mind would pull the plug on routes that turn a profit?
First, let’s do the easy one. The Metroliner/Acela does cover its operating costs. However, it does not turn a profit. With out Federal or State money to buy new equipment and maintain the tracks and wires, this train will cease to run.
Now lets go to the loss on the Sunset Limited. This train continues to be singled out, since it’s numbers look so bad. The reason however that the number looks so bad, is the fact that it only runs 3 days a week. You might ask, well what does that have to do with it’s loosing so much money. Well in addition to the paying engineer’s and crew on the train, the fuel costs, and the food costs; Amtrak also has to allocate the costs of management, reservations, advertising and various other things. These costs are allocated to each route Amtrak runs.
Now for the sake of easy math, I’m going to choose a few numbers here. These are not by any means the real numbers, but they will serve to show what I’m trying to explain here. Let’s say that Amtrak decides that each route it runs gets $1,400 in allocated expenses. If you divide that number by 14 runs a week, the typical long distance train runs 1 a day in each direction, for a total of 14 runs. Well $1,400 in expenses divided by 14 runs means that each train carries 100 bucks in allocated expenses, above and beyond it’s actual costs.
Now let’s look at the Sunset Limited. This train only runs 3 times a week in each direction for a total of 6 runs. Now we take that same $1,400 in allocated expenses and divide it by 6 runs and we discover that each train gets $233.33 in allocated expenses.
This is bit of an over-simplification of the problem, but it does show why the Sunset Limited technically looses so much money.
Hardly. Ridership was up for a few days, but overall, Amtrak did 6 percent *less* business in September 2001 than it had in September 2000. As one member of the Amtrak Reform Council, a federal watchdog panel, put it, "If they couldn't get a spike in ridership when the airlines were shut down, when thousands of people were afraid to fly, when are they going to get it?"
Interesting quote, however what he failed to take into account two things with that statement. One, while Amtrak was done 6% the airlines were down close to 40%. The second thing he didn’t account for here, which also factors in to the percentages, is the simple fact that many people just stopped traveling for both business & pleasure for the first few months after the 9/11 disaster.
So while Amtrak did suffer a ridership loss, it’s loss was now where near as bad as the airlines loss.
Sure. It works in Australia, Canada, Britain, Argentina, and Japan. It works for cars, buses, and airplanes. What *doesn't* work is Amtrak. It's time we derailed it, and let a better rail system get on track.
That’s patently untrue; I don’t know where he got this info. First VIA-Rail (Canada’s passenger service) is owned by the Provincial Government and subsidized by the Government. In Britain they tried to privatize the railroads. That experiment failed miserably. After numerous wrecks with fatalities, Britain is once again putting passenger service back under Government control. Unfortunately they learned their lesson the hard way, as they are now spending almost triple the amount of money there were spending to fix the mistake.
I don’t think that Australia is privately owned, although I’m not positive. I’m not sure about Argentina, although I think it unlikely that it’s privately owned. In Japan, some of the trains are government run, while some are private. However, in all cases the government of Japan has invested Billions of dollars into building a first rate, world-class system. They first had to make the trains fast, new, highly functional; before they could turn them over to private companies. We haven’t done that here. Additionally in Japan, they don’t spend as much money on their highways as we do here. Therefore more people want to or have to take the train. They don’t have a choice.
Now they also talk about in that article, which I actually hadn’t seen even though I’ve seen similar types of articles, about the percentages spent on transportation. First off, we’ve let our trains deteriorate for years, while we poured our monies into the highways and planes. So is it any surprise that more people use the other methods?
We spent years building airports and roads using trillions of dollars, while giving nothing to the railroads. So their infrastructure is now far superior to that of the trains.
Secondly, I’m sure that he’s not considering the cost of the ATC system and the security into his numbers. He’s only using the numbers where the money was directly handed to the airlines.
Third, as anyone knows and as I proved above, those numbers are deceiving simply because you are dividing by a big number.
Had America invested in RR’s like it did in the airlines and highways during the 60’s and the 70’s, then trust me Amtrak’s ridership would be much higher than it is. In which case those percentages would be much closer than they are right now.
Finally to answer your question, Amtrak is considered to be a private company technically. However the owner of almost all of Amtrak’s stock is the Federal Government. You can’t go to a stockbroker and buy Amtrak stock. Since the Government owns the stock, Congress likes to tell Amtrak what to do. It should also be noted that it’s the President, with Senate approval, who appoints the Amtrak board. Normally the shareholders appoint the board in a regular company; here since the government holds most of the shares, they appoint the board. And in many cases these are political appointees, not necessarily someone who actually knows how to run a railroad.
