Omnibus Spending bill FY18

[Ziv]

At this point, I think getting 20 cars a year from CAF would be a blessing, even if the contract had to be revised to allow CAF to charge 10-15% more to get CAF to do so. I get the feeling CAF is either losing money on the cars or barely breaking even. Amtrak might be able to find $100Mn a year in the cushions, so to speak, for 20 cars and the odd locomotive but I don't see them finding $200Mn a year for several years to make a larger buy.

There is a military axiom to never reinforce failure, and maybe the Amtrak corollary would be that they would be better off reinforcing the successful routes rather than trying to bring back old, failed routes. At least for the next 5 years or so.

I know there are complexities I am not aware of, but it would be great if Amtrak could dedicate just $100Mn a year over the next 4 or 5 years and buy an additional 20 cars and 2 locomotives each year to build additional capacity by scheduling more frequent trains on the more popular routes.

The essential problem is that most carbuilders don't really want to look at orders of less than roughly 100 cars / year. CAF excepted. That said, $100Mn/year might buy that if not for "unique in the world" FRA regulations...

I am not sure what routes have the highest percentage of seats sold, but that would be a good place to start. The Lincoln Service, the Lynchburger, the Blue Water, the San Juaquins & the Hoosier are all mentioned as being the highest growing routes in an Amtrak article I read the other day, but I am not sure how up to date that is. Getting old routes back would be nice, but it is possible that adding additional rolling stock and more frequent trains may be as good as we can expect in the near future.
I wish my hometown train, the Empire Builder, had sufficient demand to schedule a second train a day departing from both Seattle and Chicago. It would be cool to hit some of the scenic parts at different times of the day. But I am not sure that the demand is there.

Yeah. There's definitely demand for a second St. Paul - Chicago train, though (and a place to turn it around and service it). There's demand for another Chicago-Upstate NY-NYC train, as I've mentioned before, and for a direct Chicago-Pittsburgh-Philadelphia train.