I'm confused .. not for the first time I'm sure. What would change in the calculation for the Lynchburg train specifically that makes it go from being profitable to losing money for the state and requiring some portion of the ~$30 million a year mentioned above. I also don't understand why my home train, the NER from NPN to BOS is not considered a LD train when the Capitol Limited is. Admittedly the former is 650 miles whereas the latter is 700 miles but that seems like a distinction without difference.
Blue skies ..
The Capitol Limited is 780 miles. The line for what is long distance and what is not is usually drawn at 750.
That's about the sum of it. As to the VA situation, I was referring to VA's Amtrak trains as a whole for the $30 million, which include the Lynchburger, 3/day that terminate in Richmond, and 2/day that terminate in Newport News. Both sets (WAS-LYH and WAS-RVR/NPN) appear to be showing profits at the present:
-Per the FY12 budget in the five-year financial plan, expected revenue on the RVR/NPN leg is to be $32.9m against expenses of $27.4m, on 549,060 riders. On the LYH leg, it's revenue of $8.9m against expenses of $5.7m on 158,067 riders. These offer per-rider profits of $10.0) AND $19.87, respectively.
-In both cases, Amtrak is running far above projections: On the RVR/NPN leg, revenue YTD is at $10.5m vs. a YTD budget of $9.8m; on the LYH leg, it's at $3.8m vs. a budget of $3.2m. Even assuming that the expense budget is lousy, there seems to be absolutely no reason that
either leg should require a subsidy; though I could see one or more individual trains needing one, I'm hard-pressed to see a reasonable explanation for Amtrak demanding money to run trains that are on course to earn them roughly a net $10 million this year.
--Just to compare, this seems to be next to the DRPT getting $1.5m in surplus from the Lynchburger last year. IIRC, that means that Amtrak still got 40% of the profit when the state is assuming most or all of the risk in funding it.
And of course, the feeling that I am getting with the politicians up in Richmond is that there's a great deal of "***?!?" at the idea of being told in one sentence that the trains are doing this well and then being told that they're going to need to put money in to operate them.
Of course, I'm also trying to tease out legal tricks that could be used to deal with the dog catching the car here. For example, would it be possible for Amtrak to simply lease the equipment to Virginia and be paid to operate it (and paid for trackage fees, etc.) under some agreement (i.e. instead of being a state-sponsored Amtrak train, you'd have an Amtrak-operated state train)? Amtrak would probably make a bit more than they do now (I'm assuming that revenue from non-VA traffic would be worked out as part of the deal), but wouldn't be on the hook of the train failed to perform. VA would get any excess profits, but would be on the hook for losses should the materialize. And capacity on the NEC wouldn't be adversely affected.
Technically speaking, this would make the trains "hosted trains" on the NEC...but then again, wouldn't this just turn the trains into really long-distance versions of Amtrak's commuter contracts?