The question is whether 2 Viewliner sleepers on the Cardinal is a permanent change until the Vw IIs show up or something they are doing for a few weeks or the summer because they can supply 2 sleepers for a while until they need to yank them for overhauls & inspections?
This was clearly the latter; get some extra cash on peak days, like they do at Thanksgiving.
However, the Viewliner IIs will start showing up in the autumn, so capacity will probably expand permanently then.
Permit me to go off on a tangent...
Looking at the demand which was shown for the extra Cardinal sleeper, I'm thinking Amtrak really needs to order *yet more* Viewliner sleepers, by exercising at least part of the option.
I worked out possible allocations of added sleepers on a spreadsheet. If one goes to #66/67, the Pennsy/Cap through cars get one, every existing LD train gets one extra (with the Boston section of the LSL still only having one), the Cardinal goes daily, and the shop count is increased to Amtrak's preferred level, there aren't enough.
The bag-dorm roughly doubles the available rooms on the Cardinal, but apparently even more than that can be sold at high prices! It's quite possible that the Pennsy/Cap through service will justify two sleeping cars, as well.
Amtrak really could use at least 10 more sleeping cars in its order just for these possibilities. (Also, roughly 1 more bag-dorm to allow for desired shop time.) This is without considering any new frequencies other than the daily Cardinal. I'm not as sure how many more baggage cars would be useful (I don't have a spreadsheet for it), but counting them up I think 10 more would be useful immediately.
I don't know what the option pricing is on the Viewliner II option; if you divide naively, you get a price per car of $2.3 million, but a lot of the cost has to be initial production line setup, and the different types of cars probably cost different amounts, so it's probably significantly less than that.
Each Viewliner sleeper raises roughly $800K to $1 million dollars in revenue per year; although Amtrak accounting makes it impossible to really identify the incremental cost of running them behind existing trains, a really high estimate would be $500K per year. (It is worth noting that the Superliner sleepers generate more variable levels of revenue per sleeper, but even higher, up to roughly $2 million a year. However, there aren't very many Superliner routes where demand for sleepers is through the roof the way it is on nearly all the single-level routes.)
Even with worst-case estimates involving a lot of interest payments on financing, extra Viewliner sleepers will pay for themselves well before their commercial life is over. With cash, they should pay for themselves in 10 years with pessimistic estimates, and 5 years with optimistic estimates. Even if the cost on the options is $2.3 million per car (and it's probably significantly less), it would be $25 million well spent to get 10 more sleepers and an extra bag-dorm.
The financial case for 10 more baggage cars is a bit harder to make but I think they'd be worth it just for allowing more trains to carry bicycles, which should increase demand noticeably.
If I were optimistic enough to believe that Amtrak would be able to negotiate additional slots on the freight railroads for NY-Chicago and NY-Florida, I could make good arguments for 9 more bag-dorms, 9 more dining cars, and even more sleepers. But even without any additional frequencies, Amtrak really needs to exercise part of the option.