And now for Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor! The story is better than Amtrak Texas. In any case, it highlights the importance of looking at the numbers over time to detect trends. These trends, by the way, can be used to predict the probability of continuance.
Between 2009 and 2013 ridership on the Acela, which is the NEC’s primary operating profit offering, increased by 12.4 per cent, but the revenues went up by 30.2 per cent. Looks like the riders were willing to pony up more scratch for a patrician class ride. Costs dropped by $28.1 million or 11.4 per cent. Some might claim that the drop was because Amtrak dumped some of the NEC costs on the long distance train, but there is no evidence to support this notion. Other Post Employment Benefit costs (OPEBS) dropped 60.8 per cent, and the core contribution increased by 297.5 per cent.
But the NEC financial performance was not just a function of the Acela trains. From 2011 on the NEC regional trains turned in positive numbers. During the period (2009 through 2013) ridership on the regional trains increased 16.2 per cent whilst revenues increased 32.1 per cent. Total costs excluding OPEBS dropped 2.6 per cent, but OPEBS increased 56.1 per cent. The NEC regional trains went from an operating loss of $34.8 million in 2009 to an operating profit of $133 million in 2013.
The NEC Special Trains, which accounted for less than 1/10 of one per cent of NEC operations during the survey years, turned a loss of $1.6 million in 2009 into an operating profit of $2.9 million in 2013.
In 2009 30.4 per cent of the NEC riders chose the Acela and 69.6 per cent opted for a NEC regional train. By 2013 29.3 per cent of the NEC riders chose the Acela, whilst 70.6 per cent hopped aboard a regional train.
Acela riders accounted for 48.4 per cent of revenues in 2009 and 47.9 per cent in 2013. The corresponding revenue numbers for the regional trains were 51.5 and 51.7 per cent. The numbers don&rsquo
And remember not all NEC trips are “full length” trips; not all Boston-NY or NY to D.C. but many between intermediate stops. So seat or space may turn over several times during each trip. Once seat of space could actually have maybe as many as 15 or 20 fares collected; and those fares are grater than one full length fare. It would probably be a safe bet to say ACELA has longer rides than Regionals. And if the difference between an ACELA and Regional time is less than, say as much as 10 minutes, the cost difference favors the Regional ride for most people.
I have ridden the Acela from NYC to Washington three times. In all three cases the train originated in NYC, so there were no through passengers. At least half of the passengers in the car that I was in got off in Philadelphia, and they were replaced by a smaller number of passengers traveling from Philadelphia to Wilmington, Baltimore, BWI, or Washington. All three trips were 8:00 a.m. or thereabouts weekday departures from Penn Station.
In FY13 ridership on the NEC was approximately 11.4 million, which was down roughly 2/10s of one per cent from FY12. Acela ridership was down 1.5 per cent.
Ridership does not translate into number of customers. In FY13 I was one Amtrak customer who took 14 trips on Amtrak. Most of them were on the Texas Eagle, but one on the Pennsylvanian from Pittsburgh to NYC; another on the Coast Starlight from LAX to San Francisco; NEC regional trains from NYC to Washington (2); and the Pacific Surfliner from San Diego to LAX (2). I don’t believe the Acela is worth the premium fare. I prefer business class on a regional train.
I would be keen to know how many customers Amtrak had in FY13. I have asked that question in my FOIA request.
Don Phillips, Fred Frailey, etc. have claimed directly or indirectly that Amtrak distorts its financial results because of inappropriate cost allocation formulas. When challenged, however, none of them offered any solid evidence that Amtrak is materially misstating its financial results.
Good luck getting in the way of a good story. These curmudgeons, especially Frailey, aren’t doing passenger rail any favors with the media.
About fifteen years ago I completed at least two customer surveys from Amtrak concerning reserved versus “open” seating on Amtrak. I was very much in favor of reserved seating because, at that time, the only reserved seating was on the Metroliner and I was afraid of sitting in the aisle even though my trains always originated in WAS or NYP.
In retrospect, however, I believe Acela would have been far more popular if reserved seating was restricted to Metroliner and later the Acela trains. The Regionals (then Northeast Direct) should be non-reserved, “open” seating. In those days, non-reserved trains usually meant that you might find yourself sharing a cafe table during peak travelling times when boarding a train between WAS and PHL or anywhere in New Jersey. You wouldn’t be standing in the aisles and vestibules, Thanksgiving notwithstanding, to coin a pun.
The use of reserved seating may be tied to labor contracts regarding crew size since reserved seating allows a more accurate passenger count in advance.
Thank you for your statistical research on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor Service.
Recently I traveled from New York to Providence on a Northeast Regional train. The fare was $47 which is so low that I could not add my senior citizen discount to it and a regular fare with my discount would have been higher. However, had I taken one of the discount buses that now run I could have traveled for half of the fare in about the same time. I do think that while Amtrak does not have to go as low as competing bus service it cannot ignore that bus service either. And your own research shows that Amtrak has to be doing something right here.
I think your post about cost of Amtrak’s Northeast Regional Service relative to Acela service is correct. On my trips, between New York and Providence, the time saved on Acela is about 20 minutes, 30 minutes at most and the fare is much much higher. But many people will pay the extra fare to ride Acela.
I don’t know how many times seats turn over. On my last trip more people got off the train than got on throughout the journey. However, people got off and to on at every single station including Old Saybrook, CT and Westerly, RI which are small places.
As I said above I could have taken a discount bus for a lower fare. But there is no way anyone is going to get a discount bus from New Rochelle, NY to Mystic, CT. Either you drive or you ride Amtrak.
Finally, I am always surprised to see the number of people who ride Amtrak from New York to stations up to and including New Haven. You know better than I how much lower the fare is on Metro North. But a fair number still ride Amtrak.
Are you certain most of the people you saw leaving at stations up to New Haven boarded at New York and were not riding through from Newark and points south? But,a t the same time, Amtrak is more comfortable than MN mu cars.
We rode up to Bridgeport from NYP a month ago on a Regional and there were quite a few passengers on and off from NYP who didn’t want to go via MNRR for less than half the price. Half hour to 45 minutes faster and 100% more comfortable. Same with May’s NYP to Poughkeepsie Empire Service with stops at Yonkers and Harmon…faster, more comfortable. Now, you can’t tell on these two trains where those got on were coming from…we came from NJT’s Lake Hopatcong station. Others could have come up from Newark or Philadelphia or DC on Amtrak or in from LI on the LIRR. But the service is used by many more than I expected to see.
This trend is good but when ( not if ) a bridge on the NEC fails and stops all traffic then it is going to be a whole different ball game. MNRR had a swing bridge failure this morning that plugged the route for hours.
"Don Phillips, Fred Frailey, etc. have claimed directly or indirectly that Amtrak distorts its financial results because of inappropriate cost allocation formulas. When challenged, however, none of them offered any solid evidence that Amtrak is materially misstating its financial results."
The people that made this argument have also been inside Amtrak such as Claytor and a early NRPC board member Joseph V. McDonald. There have also been multiple cost allocation schemes, both RPS with its errors, the new APT with its estimation and others such as the Penn Central allocation formulas from the early 1970’s. Nothing in the links is authoritative, but it isn’t nothing at all.
When was Claytor associated with Amtrak? When was McDonald associated with Amtrak? What are the current accounting period errors? Please point them out! Numbers please!
Had I presented the executives and senior managers of the Fortune 250 corporation that I worked for with the unsupported, aforementioned historical data statements, I would have been fired.
I wrote to Phillips and Frailey, via snail mail to emphasize the seriousness of my request, asking them to support their implications that Amtrak’s cost allocation system is deeply flawed. The system for the current period; not the system that was in place at some time in the past!
Phillips had implied that he had a contact in Minnesota who could verify that Amtrak’s cost allocations were flawed. I am still waiting for a reply. And I will be waiting for a very long time, I suspect, because he and his ghost contact in Minnesota don
What is the rate of bridge failure on the NEC? How many loss minutes reported by Amtrak in FY13 were due to bridge failures and/or other infrastructure failures?
I understand the need to maintain and repair the infrastructure. But the problem should be presented in a robust format.
Periodically we hear that the nation’s bridges are falling apart and/or they are obsolete. The American Society of Civil Engineers, hardly a disinterested group, claims that we need a massive bridge rebuild program. Here are some numbers from the DOT re: highway bridges. Admittedly, they are not railroad bridges, but they show, if nothing else, that the condition of the nations bridges are not getting worse but are getting better.
As per National Transportation Statistics, Table 1-28: Condition of U.S. Highway Bridges, 1990 to 2012, in 1990 the U.S. had 572,205 highway brides, of which 137,865 were classified as structurally deficient, and 100,355 were classified as functionally obsolete. Obsolete, in many instances, means that they are serviceable, but if the engineers were to rebuild them, they would use a different design and perhaps materials. Translated into percentages, in 1990 24.1 per cent of the bridges were structurally deficient and 17.5 per cent were functionally obsolete.
In 2012 the number of bridges had increased to 607,378. The number of bridges classified as structurally deficient had shrunk to 66,749 (11 per cent of the total)
Thank you for remembering my father. Joseph V. MacDonald was on the Amtrak board from July 19, 1974 until his death, June 17, 1978. I think Dad’s belief was that Amtrak should just run the trains, and not own tracks, especially not Penn-Central tracks, lest that burden cause long-distance trains (like the Montrealer!) to be diminished or sacrificed.
Mike, sorry for misspelling the last name. I was in government, at a state DOT, until this month and have always really appreciated the people who actually work to make the system function for what is often poor pay.
As a engineer I refer to textbooks whose first printing may have been 80 years ago. Sometimes, those books are a lot better at providing context to a problem as they trace the development of thought on a question. The links provide a good synopsis of the development of problems during the history of NRPC cost accounting.
IIRC there have been three route level accounting methods used in the last ten years, and the current APT method that produces only Total Costs, assigning all overhead to routes, has the least application to whether a route should be continued or not. Consider this summary from NPRC’s annual report right after the Claytor years, note the amounts in the Corporate column that are looking for a revenue center to be assigned toward.
In particular note the cash loss in the Intercity column. I think this was the beginning of the new equipment orders, hence the jump.
As to authoritativeness of references, this is a Discussion Board. I don’t think I can get fired for under-performing here:)
You are correct. You cannot get fired from this discussion board. But relying on very old data, which may not be relevant, destroys any credibility, although I get the impression that you don;t care.
You don’t have any access to Amtrak’s current accounting methodologies; yet you imply that the numbers that were cobbled together decades ago are relevant to your argument. Good luck with that!
It is a huge pain in the neck to change trains from Amtrak in NYP to Metro-North at Grand Central Terminal. Nobody wants to do that. Maybe I misunderstood and you’re talking about people originating in New York. As decrepit as NYP is, and as fancy as Grand Central may be, perhaps they just work downtown.
The only GCT MNRR destination unreachable from NYP is the Harlarm line. Take Amtrak to Yonkers, Harmon or Poughkeepsie on the Hudson Line or to New Rochelle, Stamford, Bridgeport or New Haven on the Shore Line and transfer to MNRR trains. A through Amtrak ticket is probably not that expensive, definitely less expansive than an NYP to Transfer Destination ticket (except for Acela) and is virtually hourly out of NYP.
I don’t have a hard time believing this is true. Inertia and sloth are two of Amtrak’s core values! [:D] While is is possible that the cost allocation schemes may have been skewed to drive home some political point long ago, I find it believable that nothing has changed because there was no push to change and nobody would take on risk without any possiblitly of reward. So, the status quo prevails for no particular reason!
I think that trying to read between the lines and say that Amtrak does “this” or “that” because of a particular internal bias toward one service or another is giving Amtrak too much credit!
