I hate to use the term incidental when referring to train customers, because it reminds me of George Warrington referring to off-peak riders as incidental on NJ Transit. But I can't think of a better word.
For Amtrak, long-distance coast-to-coast riders are incidental to their business.
Alan, just because the passenger rides a long distance train does not mean they are a long distance passenger. A person riding the Lake Shore Limited from Buffalo to Erie is riding an LD train a short distance. Statistically, that is the bulk of LD train revenue.
I think you are wrong on both counts. The reason I think so follows. However, I am willing to be educated if you can show plausible concrete evidence otherwise.
Well. on the first count if you seriously think that only coast to coast passenger are long distance passengers and the rest are short distance ones, you need to do a slight definition adjustment. To be a long distance rider you don't have to go coast to coast. By current definition all that you have to do is travel more than 600 miles.
Without taking any position on the matter of SSL I would just like to bring to the attention of the gathered certain statements made by Emmet Fremaux who is in charge of running Amtrak's Product Development and Marketing.
He is quoted in the latest issue of PTJ by Karl Zimmerman, noted writer in this subject area, as saying that "This is a new day for long distance trains , recognized as essential to Amtrak's mission." He went on to state further that LD trains at present account for 42% of revenue system-wide, 44% of passenger miles, and 39% of train miles.
Admittedly this includes revenues from both short and long distance passengers carried by the train. Given the mix of typical car allocation to short vs. long distance on the LD trains my impression is that no more than a third of the seats are allocated for shorts, which would suggest that the other two third are going medium and long distance, may not be coast to coast, but long distance nevertheless. The fact that the average distance traveled by an LD train passenger was 626 miles in 2008 appears to support my contention that very likely a majority of LD passengers actually traveled long distance.
Furthermore, if you take into consideration connected journeys, a proportion of the shorts on one train are likely connecting to become a long distance traveler on a connecting train, typically through Chicago. So at least to me it is not at all obvious that long-distance riders are incidental to the business. I would like to see more substantiating evidence to be convinced.
In the ridership figures presented in the latest issue of PTJ, LD trains grew full 3 percentage points more than the SD trains, and 3.8 percentage points more than the NEC. Of the LD trains, the much maligned SSL grew by 25.7% the highest of all trains (not just LD trains), barring just the Piedmont. So this would suggest that the LD market is currently growing faster than the SD and NEC market, and it would be foolhardy of Amtrak to treat it as "incidental to its business". Fortunately Emmet, who actually runs the thing as opposed to armchair quarterbacking the thing like us here, realizes this apparently.
Interestingly SSL's ridership numbers projected to daily service would make its ridership greater than that of the Capitol Limited and equal to that of CONO. Also interestingly, the Cardinal is essentially in the same situation as the SSL, its projected ridership as a daily train would have it be a better performer than the Capitol Ltd. So if only ridership number were used, perhaps the Capitol Limited should be canceled and its cars used to make the SSL and Cardinal daily, and extend the Pennsylvanian with a few Viewliners and and Diner Lite to Chicago to restore Chicago - Pittsburgh - Philly - New York service. Afterall, the Pennsylvanian by itself already carries more passengers than the Capitol, and its ridership grew by 6 percentage points more than that of the Capitol!
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But when you throw in revenue numbers which are skewed a lot by those fat cat old farts, as GML put it, who insist on paying huge fares in sleepers and who otherwise were stated to be incidental, and the fact that the Cap does not have to exclusively bear the cost of any significant station on the route it travels, and involves no split/join en route, makes the Cap look much better as a financial performer. But that is yet another story, that will wait for another posting another day.