Passenger Miles Per Train Mile Metric

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The third train to Florida from New York was seldom a perennial affair. It was an on again, off again sort of thing which progressively became more "off" than "on" until it disappeared.

Interesting thing about the Brock proposal was that in general almost everyone believed that proposal to be DOA. Those were my early days of involvement in rail advocacy, having been in this country for less than two years back then. The issue was of saving some specific trains rather than really being worried about cut down to 9. Amtrak back then was bleeding money worse than almost any time after that, and a lot of equipment withdrawal with the advent of the new Superliner and Amleet, and a fleet of tired Heritage Cars was on the horizon, so everyone knew something had to give, and they also knew that the proposal was way beyond what was really necessary or plausible. The result at the end reflected more realistic handling of the situation.
 
neroden said:
Looking at those 1977 reports, I'm realizing that the current tactic of the haters is to hide the avoidable cost numbers, which were readily available in the 1977 reports. Perhaps because they show so many routes generating a surplus. I don't see why Amtrak should stand for this; the avoidable cost numbers should be published as well as the ludicrous "fully allocated" numbers.

There's something else going on: Chicago-Laredo had a lower avoidable yearly cost than Chicago-Houston (probably it wasn't daily). North Coast Hiawatha had a lower avoidable yearly cost than Empire Builder (again it probably wasn't daily). I haven't checked the frequencies.

The report has a fabulous section near the end giving the true underlying passenger potential on all corridors, based on the sqrt( (city A pop) * (city B pop) ) / (distance)^1.33 model.The result (Figure A-1) shows the massive potential in Chicago-East Coast service -- as big as the potential in the NEC -- a potential *still* hasn't been realized due to stupid politicians. (Figure A-2, by contrast, is no good because it makes the fatal assumption that railroad infrastructure won't be improved.)

Armed with this analysis, I feel quite comfortable saying that speed and frequency improvements to NY-(intermediate points)-Chicago service are *more* important than *any* improvements on the NEC.

It would be very enlightening to do this again with current population rather than 1980 population projections. NY-Florida would probably look even better, and I'm not sure what would happen in other regions of the country. NY-Chicago would still look very good.
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June 1977 timetables.org:

Both Texas trains ran daily.

http://www.timetables.org/full.php?group=19770622&item=0052

EB was daily, NCH was dally until Sept. 7th, then three times/week beyond that (said so on the schedule)

http://www.timetables.org/full.php?group=19770622&item=0053

http://www.timetables.org/full.php?group=19770622&item=0054
 
PM/TM might be important but Revenue/TM might be even more important. Then costs /TM and combine them and you get operating profit(loss) / TM. Then of course there are total costs/TM Which includes but not limited to mileage charges, station rental & station keeping charges. Some of the other charges might be higher such as reservation costs that include more computer time for LD, multi train, & sleeper charges.

A thought if station stopping costs at each station were assigned to by number of passengers then a metric could determine if that stop should be kept.

then if it costs more to keep station open than passenger revenue then a case can be made for closing the station. EX: Sanderson, Tx.
 
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PM/TM (and other) numbers for Q1 FY 2016 (Oct. Dec. 2015): http://www.fra.dot.gov/eLib/Details/L17387

Data listed in the PM/TM table (Table 5) are from Jan. 2014-Dec. 2015.

Another table I found interesting was "PERCENTAGE OF FULLY ALLOCATED OPERATING COSTS COVERED BY PASSENGER RELATED REVENUE". There are two versions, one including state revenue and one not including state revenue. The %'s for the LD trains in both tables are obviously the same.
 
Interesting document. I find the detailed OTP statistics and the responsibility for such delays in Appendices A and B quite illuminating.

One trend seems to be that the Commuter Rail lines screw Amtrak trains way worse than any freight railroad host. Which sort of runs against the theory that if all railroads were owned by some government agency or the other passenger trains would do much better.

Yeah, the PM/TM table is very interesting too. I am amazed at the high numbers some of the single level trains rack up in spite of being somewhat more capacity constrained than the transons. The LSL and the Atlantic Coast Service trains stand out in this respect. Incidentally this is a significant change from the late 70s and early 80s when visibly the single level trains were much less crowded and PM/TM was lower in spite of there being more available seat miles than today. Wonder how that came about even in the face of much higher fares now.

Hey, thanks for finding this document Philly!
 
jis said:
One trend seems to be that the Commuter Rail lines screw Amtrak trains way worse than any freight railroad host. Which sort of runs against the theory that if all railroads were owned by some government agency or the other passenger trains would do much better.
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Well, it is kind of a weird metric. It seems to heavily penalize the hosts that control very short portions of the route, such as the NMDOT, which controls just 80 miles of the SWC route. A very short (minutes!) delay per train can add up to very many "minutes/10,000 train miles". Same with MNRR and MBTA, which each control very short sections of the LSL route. The relative delay _per train_ (kind of a more interesting metric for me, at least) is much much smaller for these hosts than appears from the chart.

Ainam "lies, damn lies, and I forget how the rest of that goes" Kartma
 
So is PM / TM a measure of the average load on a train ? The number can only be a good measure if the specific train has no constraints on available seats. Wonder how many trains have enough available seats at least 90% of time ?
 
Something that I'd like to kvetch about: Good grief, how long is it going to take Amtrak to come up with an avoidable cost metric? At the risk of calling for Mica-management, there needs to be some sort of hard deadline on Amtrak to work something out (we can criticize what they come up with is...let's face it, plenty of us will do that) but I at least want a starting point.
 
Apparently Amtrak laid off its more competent accounting and projections people when they decided to ignore and not implement the PIPs.

Honestly, I don't know what Boardman was thinking. Things were going quite well and then they just decided to ignore a bunch of their own recommendations because, I don't know, manana?

The avoidable cost numbers are an important weapon in the fight for funding. Everything I've looked at says that, at this point, nearly all the Amtrak routes are profitable enterprises, and the savings from cancelling any one would range from minimal to negative. Amtrak's problem is that it is not large enough scale to cover its large fixed overhead with those profits. This is an argument which at least the *intelligent* Congressmen (a small subset, I know) should be able to understand, but it's hard for Amtrak to make the argument if Amtrak doesn't compute the numbers.
 
And of course, while Amtrak has to include the fully-allocated numbers (IIRC) there's nothing saying they couldn't include other metrics such as avoidable costs (or at least costs freed of certain fixed or near-fixed overhead costs).
 
west point said:
Philly Amtrak Fan said:
Updated for Second Quarter 2016 (Jan-March):

http://www.fra.dot.gov/eLib/details/L18308#p1_z25_gD_lRO_y2016
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Report is great best train of course is auto train but the 2nd best is the Lynchburg train. 340 PM / TM Really great.
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OK, sorting by PM/TM:

Auto Train 374

Lynchburg 340

Newport News 274

Carolinian 254

NE Regional 227

Adirondack 226

Coast Starlight 219

Silver Meteor 214

Pennsylvanian 213

LSL 206

Richmond 204

Acela 194

SW Chief 191

Capitol Limited 186

Silver Star 179

Norfolk 179

Texas Eagle 170

California Zephyr 169

Empire Builder 164

CONO 161

Blue Water 159

Ethan Allen Express 157

Crescent 154

Pacific Surfliner 154

Palmetto 149

Keystone 146

Wolverine 146

Sunset Limited 133

Empire Service 132

Cascades 127

San Joaquins 124

Cardinal 121

Maple Leaf 116

Illini/Saluki 116

Pere Marquette 116

New Haven-Springfield 113

Carl Sandburg/Ilinois Zephyr 92

Capitol Corridor 85

Downeaster 84

Kansas City - St Louis 83

Heartland Flyer 83

Piedmont 72

Hoosier State 59

This should only be used as one measure, because it doesn't accont for, among other things, ticket prices or number of trains per day (there are economies of scale from running more trains on the same route, so a lower PM/TM doesn't necessarily indicate worse financial performance if there are more trains per day). It also doesn't tell you if the train is full from NY to Atlanta and empty from Atlanta to New Orleans, for example.

It is interesting to see which state-supported trains are at the bottom of the patronage scale, though. And it reinforces again that three-a-week is stupid; the Cardinal and Sunset Limited would undoubtely have better PM/TM if they were daily.
 
Also, train lengths, i.e. total number of seats offered per train matter. I tend to believe that the SS would do much better if it actually offered more seats. I wonder if one calculated the Offered Seat Miles/ Train Miles and PM/TM were seen side by side, what patterns would emerge. Is the ratio between those tow number pretty similar or does it vary wildly, and if so what is the pattern?
 
neroden said:
It is interesting to see which state-supported trains are at the bottom of the patronage scale, though. And it reinforces again that three-a-week is stupid; the Cardinal and Sunset Limited would undoubtely have better PM/TM if they were daily.
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Don't forget train miles would also go up as well. If the # of passenger miles increase by a factor of 7/3 the PM/TM is the same.
 
Table 1 is what I'd really like to see.....

Although nothing more than speculation, an immediate suspicion is the degree to which the better performing long-distance routes on a passenger mile per train mile basis are artificially limited by capacity.
 
A Voice said:
Table 1 is what I'd really like to see.....

Although nothing more than speculation, an immediate suspicion is the degree to which the better performing long-distance routes on a passenger mile per train mile basis are artificially limited by capacity.
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Yeah, I don't know how the **** they have been getting away without publishing Table 1 -- or Table 3! -- for 10 years running.

I have to back-estimate the contents of Table 1 using Boardman's bar graph from 2013. Bluntly, there is NO short-term avoidable loss for most of the eastern trains; they are profitable. But for some reason Amtrak has not seen fit to notify the FRA of this fact, even though they're supposed to.
 
neroden said:
A Voice said:
Table 1 is what I'd really like to see.....

Although nothing more than speculation, an immediate suspicion is the degree to which the better performing long-distance routes on a passenger mile per train mile basis are artificially limited by capacity.
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Yeah, I don't know how the **** they have been getting away without publishing Table 1 -- or Table 3! -- for 10 years running.

I have to back-estimate the contents of Table 1 using Boardman's bar graph from 2013. Bluntly, there is NO short-term avoidable loss for most of the eastern trains; they are profitable. But for some reason Amtrak has not seen fit to notify the FRA of this fact, even though they're supposed to.
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Painful though it is, I have to wonder if the FRA couldn't look at pursuing some sort of remedy against Amtrak for not providing this data (or indeed if there's some other way to pursue it).
 
Several routes may need breakdown for sections of PM/TM.

Best example most familiar is Crescent. Would like to see breakdown of PM/TM Crescent north of ATL and south of ATL.

Must believe Amtrak probably can produce but will not each leg of a train.
 
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One other issue with this metric: You have some trains, such as the NYP-ALB-SOMEWHERE ELSE trains. A lot of pax on those trains board at NYP but the trains sort-of only "exist" past ALB...so you get some inflation of their PM/TM figures since, for example, NYP-HUD or NYP-ALB pax are removed.

This also doesn't give you a breakout between, for example, 94/95 and 66/67 (both of which are "Newport News" trains). I can tell you that 66/67, in particular, is pretty much incapable of fitting 274 pax many days (let alone loading that many at NPN), so some of that total is going to be spill-over from 94/95.
 
jis said:
... The 1990 reroute together with certain, shall we say, prejudices at Amtrak HQ, did the BL in. They tried mightily to kill the BA at that time, which remains unexplained to me. We fought hard. But Amtrak is Amtrak. they'll just do whatever random thing they and their paymasters come up with.
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Is "BA" a typo meant to be "BL"? Or is the "BA" some kind of ghost train, cuz I don't recognize it.
 

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