Be interesting to see how the Winter goes and how this plan plays out, at best it will probably be revenue neutral
Yeah. Even saving a little bit on the seasonal costs does good things, though.
By my rough calculations,
the main savings here will be in car maintenance & fuel, not in OBS labor.
With $700K-$750K in maintenance and fuel per year per car, it could be worth about $100K/year/car (plus or minus 30%, maybe more) in fuel and maintenance to take a car off for two months.
Maybe $50K/year (again this is a vague guess based on wage levels) to take one attendant off for two months. A certain amount of labor costs ("premium based" ones) are invariant to number of hours worked, amounting to roughly $24K/employee on average, so those are never saved by furloughs. And obviously removing a baggage car or a crew car doesn't remove any attendants. And removing a coach car might not either depending on exactly how many there were on the train; I'm going to assume not.
Based on these vague numbers and Frailey's information, this would save costs of about:
- $300K on the SWC
- $350K on the CZ
- $250K on the EB
- $650K+ on the Coast Starlight (this probably does relieve a coach attendant, but I didn't include it in the number)
- $450K on the Capitol Limited
- $100K on each of Crescent, Star, Meteor, Palmetto
- $200K on the LSL
- less than $100K on the Cardinal (three-a-week messes up my calculations)
For most of them, this will be lost in the noise, and it'll be hard to tell whether anything changed financially. $100K-$200K is lost in the noise of revenue fluctuations on any route. Real operating subsidies on the CZ and SWC (before overhead) are over $16 million. The EB has so much disruption going on that it's impossible to tell anything.
However, on the Coast Starlight and Capitol Limited, this might be noticeable. The CL seems (from my estimates) to probably still require operating subsidy, but to be *very close* to breaking even before overhead, so even a few small changes may tip it over the line. (The next time Boardman makes a bargraph about losses on a "direct costs" basis, you can bet he wants more trains to be on the positive side of the ledger!)
The Coast Starlight is a lot further away from breakeven, but it looks like it saves by far the most money of all the consist adjustments. This is probably not quite right because I think one of those coaches was already being cut off seasonally.
Still, it's interesting that the Starlight has its consist adjusted more than the CZ -- Anderson's analysis said that the Starlight was the second-most-seasonal, but that the CZ was the most seasonal. I suspect this is because the CZ consist has fewer sleepers to start with, and doesn't have a "PPC", and therefore offers less opportunity for adjustment. The Starlight and EB are the only trains to lose a full sleeper during January.