More detailed analysis, as promised!
February was a decidedly mixed bag, as noted above. The weather was part of this, and I am really inclined to blame that for a lot of the issues. On the LD front, there's the added complication of the equipment cuts (I'll discuss that in a bit more depth when I get to it), but suffice it to say that while those may have helped on the cost front (and may do some good if the downtime is used to coordinate shop schedules and increase peak-season capacity a bit), it likely made a modest dent in revenue.
Northeast Corridor
As always, we have two participants on the NEC: The Acela and the Regionals. For anyone reading one of my analyses for the first time, I ignore "Special Trains" as an erradic footnote with no material impact on Amtrak's operations.
The Acela did not have a great February. As we can all remember, February was a memorable month for Boston and the surrounding area, mainly for the mountains of snow which piled up with great fervor. Such mountains of snow are wont to trigger mountains of cancellations, and of the two services the Acela always seems to get hit harder by these. In particular, if the wires go down the Regionals can get a pinch-hitting diesel in. Not so much for the Acelas. The cold also does a bit more harm to the Acelas' mechanical side, and per the report shop counts spiked.
The Regionals, on the other hand, had a good month. I'm going to give more credit to the weather than Amtrak is here: Amtrak is about the last service to shut down when the weather goes bad, and the Regionals likely picked up diversions not only from the Acelas, but from some mix of cancelled flights and so on (the bump in Keystone ridership hints at this as well...I seem to recall a few cases where Amtrak was able to keep running in the face of slashed commuter operations). Still, the spike in ridership for February is quite stunning (anytime a spike breaks 10% it is worth taking note). One other factor that hints at weather as the factor is that while ridership spiked dramatically, revenue didn't rise by nearly as much. This hints at there either being a major sale or an increase in short-distance ridership to offset any spike in load factor-induced revenue. Given the circumstances, I'm betting on increased short-distance ridership.
State Corridors
As usual, I'm going to look at the highlights (and, yes, lowlights) here. The numbers are a mixed bag, but it should be noted that 18 of the routes showed a ridership increase year-over-year (11 showed declines), but in at least one case of a decline (Richmond-Washington) the decline was more than offset by an increase on a corresponding route.
Weather was an obvious culprit for ridership *ahem* sliding on the Cascades, as well as the Downeaster (and probably the Upstate Empire and Ethan Allan). There was a generalized softness in the Midwest (about half of the routes saw ridership slide). There was a plus to the weather, though, as most of the Virginia Regionals saw major jumps in ridership, as did the Vermonter and the Keystone (the Keystone saw a PPR slide; again, I'm betting that the Keystones got stuck pinch-hitting for SEPTA on a few days).
A word on Virginia: There's some accounting garbage in the mix here (witness the disconnect between ridership moves and revenue moves). In short, some costs (and likely some revenue) got shifted between the Richmond trains and the Norfolk and Newport News trains. With that said, Norfolk is having a good year as its opening ramp-up continues to play out. All four are in the black prior to OPEBs, etc. (Richmond is barely in the red once those come into play). The state's performance in FY15 is not as strong as it was in FY14, but (again) that's down to a bunch of costs moving around.
Outside of Virginia, high marks without qualification for weather go to the Pennsylvanian (which has been on an impressive run the last year or so) and Surfliner (which has had a complex history as of late but has been doing well in spite of the infamous fare hikes a few years back).
Long Distance
As noted earlier, I'm distinguishing between sleeper performance and "whole train" (i.e. sleeper plus coach) performance.
Ridership was down on the LD trains in general, but a lot of this was buried in disruptions (LSL, Starlight, and Cardinal) and capacity cuts (LSL, Starlight, Builder, Capitol Limited). The capacity cuts did their damage because a number of trains would still fill at least some of the cut cars on a few days...but also because of how the cuts interacted with Arrow's emphasis on achieving certain load factors.
On the sleeper side of things...well, the sleepers and the coach+sleeper numbers might as well be separate trains. Sleeper ridership was up by 1200 while overall ridership was down by 12,000 (meaning that coach ridership got smacked by about 13,000). Except in cases where capacity cuts seem to have played a role (particularly on the Cap and Starlight) or where the disruptions were grave (the Cardinal), sleeper traffic performed about 10% better than coach traffic. Possibly the most jarring case was the Cardinal: Overall ridership was down by 8.5% but sleeper traffic rose by 10%.
The Starlight was about the only train where the sleepers significantly underperformed the coach side of things. There were two factors to blame for this, both related: On the one hand, sleeper space got cut drastically (there were, IIRC, two sleeping cars cut for a time) which likely squeezed the train over Presidents' Day (and other peak-ish days). On the other hand, the cutting of the PPC likely cost Amtrak a good deal of daytime "second sales" of sleeper space on each end of the trip. The combined effect here is drastic; were it not for these factors, based on other trains' behavior I'd expect that sleeper traffic would have been down by somewherein the range of 5-10% (rather than off by over 20%).
Overall
(1) The improved load factors for the month can probably be ignored, by and large, due to the LD capacity cuts. In a sense, there was not much improvement here...this is down to the fact that the cuts pulled some mostly-empty cars off the tracks more than Amtrak filling space.
(2) There's a broad-based bit of shenanigans going on with the "OPEBs, IG, etc." line in the financials. That line is up sharply, such that Amtrak would be ahead of last year without it but is notionally behind last year with it. Something is being screwed with here (this set of items has been messed with on an almost annual basis over the last few years).
Edit: Cut a second paste of the report.
