How will we play off Amtrak's best year ever?

[Paulus]

Running through some numbers for a thing and Amtrak is currently running set for its lowest loss ever, in nominal dollars, not just inflation adjusted dollars. Potentially the operational loss could come in under a hundred million dollars. The question then arises: How do we take advantage of this politically? It is, after all, something to make major hay out of.

 

[Anderson]

I'm looking at the numbers; I'm expecting a loss of around $150-200m: Slim profits or slim losses in July and August followed by a substantial loss in September. Amtrak is likely sandbagging their estimates a bit more than just projecting a "reversion to the mean".

The main thing will be to use it to offset the loss in ridership that is likely to get a bunch of attention. We're nominally showing a loss of 600,000 YTD because Amtrak screwed up ridership estimates for a long time. That will probably end up in the 750-800k range by the end of the year. Once this is controlled for, the loss is around 100,000 riders...but that's set to widen since we don't have the Sandy bounceback for the last three months.