Passenger Trains > Pre Amtrak profitability by train

One of the things I've been searching for years was the profitability of Penn Central's Metroliners.  I've never found anything until this week.  And I discovered a mother lode.

Although not exactly pre-Amtrak it shows profit (loss) by every single train number as billed by the railroads for Amtrak in its first 2 months of existence May and June 1971.  (Just May for PC as they hadn't sent the detail for June by the date of the report.)   The report was from the ICC to the President and Congress on the effectiveness of the Amtrak act.  I doubt it was intended for public consumption and Amtrak has never released anything like this.

It does not include any Amtrak allocations because there weren't any in these numbers.  It's as billed by the railroads to Amtrak.   Amtrak in it's first few months of operations had only a handful of employees as noted in the report.  Probably just an accountant, lawyer, president, secretary, and treasurer.  All operations, revenues and expenses were handled by the railroads.  Amtrak's sole role those first few months was to collect grants from the government and disburse reimburements to the RRs.

Just about the only trains profitable were the Metroliners.  And they were pretty profitable too.  About $1/2 million per month in total for May 1971.  That's serious coin.    Almost all of the rest lost money.   $12 million in total for May 1971.

Attached were the exhibits to the report.

 

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That is very interesting.  I may apply an inflation adjustment and compare the losses to today's Amtrak numbers.  Should be fascinating.  It may take a few days.

Interesting, so what makes it hard for Amtrak to be profitable then if The Metroliners were the only trains being ptofitable!

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Metroliner and Acela have long enjoyed very high revenue per seat mile fares. High utilization, high rev per seat mile = $$$

No dime per mile, 15 hour layovers.

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Adding a page I missed that has bilings for Seaboard and Union Pacific.

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This is interesting data to review. Since Amtrak was merely a "shell of itself" back then, and literally was just processing reimbursement payments to freight RR's, could that be re-wired to some degree to see if it would be cheaper and more efficient to go back to that methodology for the non-state supported trains and the non-NEC trains? Could that be a study or consideration for moving forward? It'll be interesting to see inflation baked in. Yet, I am not sure if I would trust the Penn Central numbers as this was the lowest of lows for them. The Broadway Limited loss seems out there for "May numbers." Surprised they were reporting such favorable numbers on the Metroliner, when considering their context at the time! I forget when Bevan and Saunders were exactly shown the door, but the environment, overall was still there. For better or worse. Absent, though, is ALL the capital costs that would come to maintain what is "Amtrak Owned" - the NEC. Capital intensive infrastructure.

The idea - that's been floated from time to time - is the FRA (or other federal entity) would fund the NEC infrastructure (like highway infrastructure) and then you'd have a private "operator" running the NEC trains. Presume the private operator would pay an "access fee" back to the federal government. I do believe the operating model of Amtrak needs to change or at least be tweaked - even if it's how T&E crews are assigned to operate the LD trains vs. the "corridor/NEC" trains. There's a TON of costs tied up in Amtrak maintaining "crew bases" and other facilities that freight railroads also maintain across LD trains outside the Boston, Albany, Harrisburg, Washington DC bubble. There could be more synergy and "shared services" here. That's a new line of thinking since 1971, especially with all the Class I mergers that have occurred since 1971. I am not saying it can work, but I'd love to see an analysis done (that doesn't cost millions to study). 

A caveat to be clear on though - to operate US passenger rail service - you can NOT get away from federal subsidy of some sort no matter how it is masked or what it may be called in the end. 

It would be important to know just how these figures were arrived at.  There is a lot of disagreement among passenger train advocates about just what accounting method to use to determine what trains are profitable, or how much money they loose.  You can "cook the books" one way or the other, depending on the accounting method and the outcome you desire.  I believe even Amtrak has had a tough time figuring out just what their costs really are over the years.

Topfuel Wrote:
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> It would be important to know just how these
> figures were arrived at.  There is a lot of
> disagreement among passenger train advocates about
> just what accounting method to use to determine
> what trains are profitable, or how much money they
> loose.  You can "cook the books" one way or the
> other, depending on the accounting method and the
> outcome you desire.  I believe even Amtrak has
> had a tough time figuring out just what their
> costs really are over the years.

The billings were based on avoidable costs only. The government did not want to be reimbursing a portion of allocated RR corporate headquarter overhead that would still be incurred even if pax trains were eliminated.

The one point I tried to make is that at least these numbers did not reflect any internal allocations of Amtrak costs. Many people here have a jaundiced view of Amtrak’s accounting. These posted here were pure billings by the railroad.

Congress required the ICC to report on the effectiveness of the billings. I doubt they were materially wrong. Examiners nit pick! Amtrak had lawyers too. They would have been all over any overbillings.

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