Silver Service

[neroden]

The only thing I can think of is the SS has a large number of passengers traveling only a very short distance that inflates the passenger count while adding very little to the total revenue.

Tampa-Miami is very busy.

Put another way, if the SS diner is returned to service (and SS sleeper prices increased) we might expect the average sleeper revenue per passenger on the SS to increase $35 (to restore the FY15 difference of $66). Is $35 per sleeper passenger enough to justify the returen of the diner to the SS? Does it even matter?

That depends on the number of coach passengers using the dining car. My estimate a while back was that a dining car cost at least $3.8 million per year, including foregone revenue from roomette sales (a number which might be low). If we assume that each coach passenger also spends $35 in the dining car, we'd need about 108,500 passengers per year to use the dining car. This is pretty easily met on the Silver Meteor -- it only requires about 20% of the coach passengers (and some may have multiple meals and pay more than $35).
On the Star it also only requires about 20% of the coach passengers to patronize the dining car. But with more short-hop riders, it's not so clear-cut. I still think it's probably profitable.

Dining cars (like every other damn thing on a railroad) like high volumes.

 

[jccpbc]

Thanks for all the input. All I know is that I took the SS in September with no diner and it was not enjoyable without the diner. I take LD trains often, always in sleeper, and the diner is a much needed service. I am taking several family members on the SS in June and I certainly hope the diner is back in service. I have expressed my concerns to Amtrak for whatever that is worth.

 

[afigg]

....The only thing I can think of is the SS has a large number of passengers traveling only a very short distance that inflates the passenger count while adding very little to the total revenue.

The Silver Star has a lot of Tampa to southern Florida traffic. According to the 2014 NARP ridership stats by train service (available as a PDF document on this NARP page in the By Route link), the top 4 city pairs for the Star all include Tampa as 1 endpoint. Tampa is also the busiest stop for the Star, So the Star indeed has a larger number of passengers traveling shorter distances in the inter-Florida market.

 

[Philly Amtrak Fan]

Did the Three Rivers train ever have a dining car? I believe every old timetables.org schedule I found said there wasn't one.

 

[Heading North]

No, the Three Rivers didn't have a dining car. But when I rode it in coach westbound in 2003--during the brief period when it also carried a sleeping car--there was a dinner offered to sleeping car passengers in part of the cafe. A handful of extra dinners were available to coach passengers ($16 I think); I would have bought one but by the time I got to the car, they were sold out. The only other time I had a similar meal was on the Twilight Shoreliner northbound in 2001 and a hot breakfast was served to sleeping car passengers at Providence.

No idea about breakfast on the TR but its scheduled arrival was 7:45 CT I believe. Lacking a diner on a train with one or two meal times is a little different IMHO than the Star which has at least four meal periods over its run.

The trouble isn't just the lack of a diner, it's the poor cafe car options especially for breakfast. Even a half-decent tray meal would be better.

 

[Cho Cho Charlie]

Put another way, if the SS diner is returned to service (and SS sleeper prices increased) we might expect the average sleeper revenue per passenger on the SS to increase $35 (to restore the FY15 difference of $66). Is $35 per sleeper passenger enough to justify the returen of the diner to the SS? Does it even matter? I don't know the answer to these questions and will leave that for those who understand these numbers better than I can ever hope to.

If I am reading your (great) summary correctly, adding the diner only generates $35 per sleeper passenger, and for that, Amtrak has to run the diner car and feed that passenger roughly (typically?) three meals for the trip? With that, now I can understand Congress's concerns.

For those that might wonder, I hope the diner is returned to the SS as I don't see much value in a LD train without a diner.

Agreed. The original value of a dining car, though, was to eliminate the 1 hour stops, every four hours, so that passengers can get out and find a meal.

 

[valkyrie]

Put another way, if the SS diner is returned to service (and SS sleeper prices increased) we might expect the average sleeper revenue per passenger on the SS to increase $35 (to restore the FY15 difference of $66). Is $35 per sleeper passenger enough to justify the returen of the diner to the SS? Does it even matter? I don't know the answer to these questions and will leave that for those who understand these numbers better than I can ever hope to.

If I am reading your (great) summary correctly, adding the diner only generates $35 per sleeper passenger, and for that, Amtrak has to run the diner car and feed that passenger roughly (typically?) three meals for the trip? With that, now I can understand Congress's concerns.

For those that might wonder, I hope the diner is returned to the SS as I don't see much value in a LD train without a diner.

Agreed. The original value of a dining car, though, was to eliminate the 1 hour stops, every four hours, so that passengers can get out and find a meal.

I would not attempt to draw any detailed conclusion from my simplified analysis. Having said that, *IF* the FY15 numbers are representative of what you can expect to see going forward and *IF* the Aug-Oct numbers are representative of the SS without a diner then you *might* expect to see about a $35 per passenger increase in sleeper revenue on the SS if the diner is returned and sleeper prices increased. But we already know the FY15 numbers include 3 months of the SS without a diner so it may not be so representative of what we might expect if the diner is returned to the SS and the Aug-Oct numbers are going to be affected by seasonal variations so they may not be all that representative either. And as neroden correctly points out, this only looks at sleeper revenue and says nothing about dining car revenue from coach passengers which may very well be significant and must also be acounted for. Even so, I believe this does give us some idea of the general magnitude of the sleeper revenue generated (or lost) by the presence or absence of the diner on the SS.

 

[neroden]

Agreed. The original value of a dining car, though, was to eliminate the 1 hour stops, every four hours, so that passengers can get out and find a meal.

This! Definitely this. Honestly, if Amtrak doesn't step up its food service, they're going to have to go back to the hour-long food stops.

I'm not wedded to dining cars. But a fresh-cooked omelette for breakfast really does make a huge difference in how tolerable the trip is.

----

Regarding the Silver Service, there is a sense in which Tampa is a problem. The Silver Star can't do a good job serving all its markets at once. There really ought to be an independent Tampa-Miami day train, and probably an independent Tampa-Orlando day train too.

 

[ronkstevens]

I have to book a trip for October. Should I stick with the Meteor to assure myself that there will be a diner?

 

[niemi24s]

But what if they move the Meteors diner over to the Star? :blink:

 

[VentureForth]

SS actually has fewer Coaches (one less) than SM in its no Diner incarnation. You can have higher ridership with lower overall revenues if one train has a large number of very short turn passengers whereas the other has fewer but longer distance passengers.

I could've sworn that the SS always ran with one fewer sleeper and one fewer coach than the SM.
I wonder how they count Tampa riders that take the through coach to Orlando? I mean, if there are a LOT of passengers in Tampa and Lakeland, could that be the reason there are more passengers? More stops = more pax?