OIG: Opportunities to Enhance Decision-Making for LD Equipment

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Paulus

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Link of Glory

Of note: Apparently the Sunset Limited went down to three trainsets from four, not sure where the equipment was redeployed. Extra sleeper is/was being tested on the Auto Train. Also additional cars on the LD trains, including the new Viewliner IIs, really don't add all that much extra money.

Business line managers told us that adding the coach car from January 2014 through May 2014 generated about $1 million in incremental revenue during the testing period, and that the revenue could amount to about $2.2 million annually. These managers also estimated that using a sleeper car instead of the extra coach could generate an additional $0.7 million for a total of up to $2.9 million annually.
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When we initiated this evaluation, the original long-distance general manager stated that he planned to put all 130 new cars into the active fleet when they were received, although no specific plan was developed for how and where they would be used. We analyzed the cost and revenues of deploying these cars on all of the single-level overnight routes and briefed the general manager on our work in May 2013. At the time, we estimated that if all of the new sleeping cars were put into full-time service, the company would lose about $6 million per year because the operating costs associated with the additional cars would outweigh the potential revenue gains.
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Possibly a reason for delays with the Viewliner II order?

Quantifying baggage requirements for the single-level long-distance trains proved to be a challenge for the group. The company had planned to replace all of the existing baggage cars because of their excessive age, but it was not buying enough new full- baggage cars to replace the old baggage cars on a one-for-one basis. Therefore, some trains needed to use a combination car, which have 60 percent less cargo space than a full-baggage car. The working group attempted to identify the trains that should get the combination cars, but data on baggage requirements for each train were limited and unreliable. Based on the data available, the working group eventually identified only one long-distance train with year-round baggage requirements that could be accommodated by a combination car rather than a full-baggage car. Therefore, they concluded that the company was not buying enough full-baggage cars to meet its requirements.

Decisions Were Made to Change the Mix of Cars Before the Working Group Had Completed its Analysis

On April 11, 2014, senior executives met with the President and Chief Executive Officer to discuss issues related to the new long-distance car procurement. During the meeting, the Marketing department presented an analysis showing that deploying the new cars would result in incremental revenue exceeding incremental costs by $2.2 to $2.8 million annually once all the cars are received and are put into the active fleet. Marketing recommended changing the mix of car types to address the shortage of full-baggage cars and also recommended route assignments for the new cars. These recommendations were not intended to be the final word on the ultimate deployment of the new cars, according to the Vice President for Marketing.

Marketing officials told us that the utilization plan presented in the April meeting was developed on short notice by a subgroup of the working group. The plan was not approved by the working groups steering committee, and it was not reviewed before the meeting by the general manager for the long-distance business line. Marketing officials added that the plan did not include a full updated analysis of the operating costs from the Finance department because of the truncated timeline, but that they focused on providing sufficient information to make an informed decision at the meeting.
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If the incremental revenue gain is only $2.8M a year, and quite possibly a loss, I'm really doubting that we'll see any additional Viewliner II orders and certainly not any sleeper/diner Superliner III orders.
 
I'd really like to see the guts of these estimates. Something just doesn't ring true on the basis of what we know...though I'll qualify that with two caveats:
(1) It's quite possible that slow-season numbers (Sept, Oct, Jan, Feb) might cause issues, and that equipment might best be idled during this time. Note that this could possibly allow some equipment overhauls to be carried out during those timeframes (and neighboring slower periods in early March and early November).

(2) It's also possible that a capital charge is being assessed here in some fashion. This wouldn't surprise me, and it would likely ding the cars' performance.

With all of this being said, I think it is more likely than not that Marketing is being overly conservative with their estimates.
 
Paulus said:
Link of Glory

Of note: Apparently the Sunset Limited went down to three trainsets from four, not sure where the equipment was redeployed. Extra sleeper is/was being tested on the Auto Train. Also additional cars on the LD trains, including the new Viewliner IIs, really don't add all that much extra money.
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That isn't the conclusion.

The actual conclusion from the Auto Train is that a sleeper adds an average of $2.9 million in revenue, a coach adds an average of $2.2 million in revenue, and added costs per car are in the $100K-$300K range. The claims that the costs will be much larger than that are ludicrous.

At the time, we estimated that if all of the new sleeping cars were put into full-time service, the company would lose about $6 million per year because the operating costs associated with the additional cars would outweigh the potential revenue gains.
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This is obvious fantasy material on the part of some train-hater -- nonsense and balderdash equivalent to the "$80 hamburger" lies. The OIG clearly has no valid estimates of incremental operating costs.

Quantifying baggage requirements for the single-level long-distance trains proved to be a challenge for the group. The company had planned to replace all of the existing baggage cars because of their excessive age, but it was not buying enough new full- baggage cars to replace the old baggage cars on a one-for-one basis. Therefore, some trains needed to use a combination car, which have 60 percent less cargo space than a full-baggage car. The working group attempted to identify the trains that should get the combination cars, but data on baggage requirements for each train were limited and unreliable. Based on the data available, the working group eventually identified only one long-distance train with year-round baggage requirements that could be accommodated by a combination car rather than a full-baggage car. Therefore, they concluded that the company was not buying enough full-baggage cars to meet its requirements.
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Now, THIS I believe. I identified this problem back when the initial order was made.
 
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During the meeting,

the Marketing department presented an analysis showing that deploying the new cars

would result in incremental revenue exceeding incremental costs by $2.2 to $2.8 million

annually once all the cars are received and are put into the active fleet.
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I'd like to see that presentation because I don't believe it. Their numbers are clearly wrong. This must be an extreme lowball estimate.

Marketing officials told us that the utilization plan presented in the April meeting was

developed on short notice by a subgroup of the working group.
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In other words, it's a bad utilization plan and they know it. OK.

The plan relied on

analysis and estimates that were largely put together from prior working group

analyses completed from October 2013 through April 2014, which included estimates

that were not relevant to the plan that Marketing presented.
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So they're using apples to compute oranges.

Based on our analysis of the Finance department’s earlier cost projections,

which included these operating costs, we estimate that increasing the size of the

trains will increase fuel and maintenance costs by about $1.5 million annually.
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For 25 cars? So, $60,000 / car? OK, I believe this.
The revenue estimates coming from Marketing, however -- which are not listed -- are obviously ludicrously low. (Either that, or the operating cost estimates are inappropriately larded up with overhead.) Is there some sort of sandbagging going on?

The working

group did not conduct a sensitivity analysis or a similar analysis to consider how its

estimate—that incremental revenue attributable to the deployment of the new cars will

exceed incremental costs by $2.8 million annually—might be affected by variations in

those estimates.
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Well, they sure should do that, yes. Because they'll find that incremental revenue will exceed incremental costs by about $20 million annually using more realistic estimates.

At this time, our analysis

indicates that storing excess new cars is the best financial option, as illustrated in

Table 3 of this report.
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Foolish nonsense from an OIG who doesn't understand operations.'

On the whole, the OIG's conclusion -- that Amtrak hasn't done its analyses properly -- is correct. Doing the analyses properly will, of course, show that Amtrak should be deploying *more* new cars, not less; someone has been sandbagging the revenue estimates.
 
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Paulus said:
If the incremental revenue gain is only $2.8M a year,
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It isn't. It's more like $20 million a year, possibly as high as $40 million a year.
Honestly, we can estimate this in a dozen different ways, and I've done so. As long as there is the demand, Eastern sleepers will bring in $1-$2 million each; coaches a little less. We know for a fact that the demand exists *for sleepers* on the LSL, Silver Star, Silver Meteor, Crescent north of Atlanta, Cardinal, and Auto Train. We know that this demand exists, or (given current trends) will exist in a few years, for 10 months out of the year, January and February excepted. Demand for added coaches is less clear; it clearly exists on some routes during some months, but not as often.

and quite possibly a loss,
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It isn't. It's a gain. There is zero question about this. Thankfully, Amtrak's response says this:
"Ongoing analyses have identified multiple scenarios under which deployment of these cars will yield a net operating revenue benefit for Amtrak.... with limited exceptions passenger equipment is a portable asset and can be redeployed to exploit the most promising market opportunities."

I'm really doubting that we'll see any additional Viewliner II orders
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It would be shameful, a show of gross incompetence if Amtrak decided not to order more cars based on obviously bogus, inaccurate, and lowballed numbers.
Any realistic analysis shows that more single-level sleepers will be filled at high prices, 10 months out of the year anyway.

It's important to understand that the OIG's conclusion was that analyses were being done sloppily, including the marketing analysis which generated the bogus lowball numbers. Don't believe those numbers.

and certainly not any sleeper/diner Superliner III orders.
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Those looked like a bad idea anyway. Have I mentioned that the sleeper price from NY-Chicago is typically the same as the sleeper price from Chicago to LA? Despite the running costs being about twice as much from Chicago to LA as from NY-Chicago? Furthermore, the sleeping cars sell out from NY-Chicago substantially more often than from Chicago to LA.
Much of the situation Amtrak is in today resulted from underinvestment in the better-performing eastern "long distance" routes (or, if you prefer to look at it that way, relative overinvestment in the worse-performing western "long-distance" routes). The original plan to order 100 Viewliner sleepers to replace the Heritage cars was probably correct, but we only have 50 now, soon to be 75. Get it back to 100 and Amtrak will probably reach the limits of profitable expansion of eastern sleepers, but we're not there yet.
 
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My issue with the OIG report is why weren't OIG personnel present when these decisions were being made? It is a waste of money and time for Amtrak to conduct analysis on issues involving major equipment or infrastructure investments, and after several months the OIG comes in and says the analysis is incorrect. While I understand the OIG is not part of Amtrak per se, it does play a role in how the company operates, and has a $23 million budget. If they think analysis is being conducted shoddily, OIG analysts need to be present from the beginning of the projects. The projects I am talking about are the Viewliner II order, the order for the new HSR trainsets, the tunnel situation in New York, etc. I know the OIG conducts internal investigations regarding theft, insurance fraud, etc., and that is very useful, but on analysis done at the highest level of the company, the OIG needs to be present to make their opinions known so projects can be completed on a more timely basis.

As far as the Viewliner II order, I still question the number of diners being built. Right now, Amtrak has 21 diners (20 heritage fleet and the prototype Viewliner). They need 15 to cover their daily needs. When the 25 new ones come on board, they will have a total of 26. If a diner is added to the Cardinal, what will that add to the cost of the train? While we all like diners on LD trains, right now Amtrak is in a cost focused mode, and will the revenue from having a full diner on the Cardinal offset the increased cost?

The other issue involves the sleepers. There was much in the OIG's report about reduction in crew costs on the sleepers. Right now on the current Viewliner sleepers, it is 1 attendant per car. Is Amtrak looking at going to 1 attendant for 2 cars, or 2 attendants for 3 cars, etc. Just curious if anyone knows what this concept is all about.
 
In regards to the attendant in the sleepers, it is believed that since one attendant can work a superliner sleeper, with a maximum of forty or more beds/passengers, why couldn't a sleeper attendant work two viewliners, with approximately the same bed/pax. counts...
 
The initial proposal involved one attendant working a "full" Viewliner + a Viewliner which is half full of crew.

Which makes a lot of sense, because there aren't that many passengers to attend to on the half-full-of-crew Viewliner; the sleeper attendant there is not very busy. I'm guessing the crew make their own beds, but at the very least, none of them need the upper bed made, since they're all getting the luxury of single occupancy.
 
I don't think a single attendant could quite handle two Viewliners. However, two attendants could probably handle three Viewliners (with a division of the car in the middle between them) and one could handle one-and-a-half or so. If this were doable, it would mean that you could add most of the Viewliner IIs without adding new staff...though that's a big "if".

On the incremental revenue situation, I would need to see the figures to actually work on them. It's quite possible that the utilization plan was just plain bad (in fact, I think this may be more likely than not...I'll point out that a good plan might also have planned on not using some of the equipment in Jan/Feb and/or planned to move cars between trains on a seasonal basis*). It's also possible that there were higher costs in the report than we're expecting there to be and/or that the revenue projections were sandbagged. All I know right now is that the numbers look wonky.

As to the OIG's feedback, I really do get the feeling of some "Monday morning quarterbacking" here and I agree that if OIG is going to get involved like this they need to be brought in earlier. Otherwise I feel like they're basically Statler and Waldorf to Amtrak's Muppets.

*Moving cars to the Silvers might make sense. I checked numbers for January 2014 against August 2014 (both months having 31 days). Sleeper ridership in January on the Florida trains (the Star, Meteor, and Auto Train) was about 80-90% of August ridership (93% for the Star, 80% for the Meteor, and 83% for the Auto Train) versus a lot less on most other routes.
 
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Anderson said:
As to the OIG's feedback, I really do get the feeling of some "Monday morning quarterbacking" here ...
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I thought it was painful to read. It was whining mixed with jargon and

few if any new ideas from some business school credentialed guys

who weren't good enuff to get jobs actually managing any business.

They had been assigned, by Congress, I guess, to second-guess

old pros who make the correct decisions 90% of the time based on

their lifetimes of experience in the business.

Criticizing management for not having made final and fully considered

decisions on allocating cars that are to be received at the earliest two

full years after the meeting where some tentative allocations were

presented, oh please. I hope Amtrak management does not make final

decisions on which trains will get the new sleepers until as late as

possible. Ideally, I'd like to see final decisions made after some of

them are actually in service.

I do respect Amtrak management for changing the balance from

a once "final" decision in the order for 25 bag-cars and 55 baggage

cars to instead get 70 baggage cars and only 10 bag-cars. This major

decision was made without input from the B-school know it alls.

And if I read the tired phrase "sound business practice" one more time

I was gonna fwow up. Different businesses have different practices,

that is one of the ways they compete. "Sound business practices" sounds

like a catch phrase from not-too-bright first year B-school students trying

to shovel it into a report to help fill the pages. I hate to think how much

money was wasted on this useless exercise.
 
Unsound business practices include:

- making decisions based on "fully allocated costs" (nonsense)

- treating food & beverage service as a separate product line rather than a perk

- failing to account for network effects

- running obsolete equipment while storing new, improved equipment, as the idiot at the OIG suggests

"Not too bright", indeed.

The OIG's estimates for appropriate shop counts show that the OIG doesn't understand what Amtrak's *actual* operating plans are. I assume that the plan which the OIG saw was the "what we can do immediately" plan.

Example.

Current service requires 15 single-level dining cars running; a daily Cardinal with a dining car would bring this to 18. With 1 car in shop count for every 5 running cars (lower than current practice, but current practice is based on small fleet size), 18 would require 21.6 cars; with 1 for every 4 running cars, it would require 22.5 cars. Add 4 protect cars -- one at each of Chicago, New Orleans, Miami, and New York -- and you're up to 25.6 or 26.5 already. Amtrak will only have 26 dining cars when the current order is complete.

We know that Amtrak knows that the Cardinal needs to go daily ASAP, although Amtrak cannot *plan* for this unless CSX and BBRR agree. So the OIG probably looked at a plan with a non-daily Cardinal with no dining car, when Amtrak knows perfectly well that a daily Cardinal with a dining car is the more appropriate goal.

It is also entirely obvious from the charts in the OIG report that the OIG has failed to account at *all* for the need to have "protect" cars. When you add in the "protect" cars, the supposed "excess shop count" vanishes.

This report is full of the worst sort of sloppiness. Stuff like that.

I suspect that Marketing was asked to provide a pessimistic, worst-case assessment -- hence the gloomy $2 million dollar number. Marketing specifically admitted that they had a bad, hastily-thrown-together operational plan (it mentions this in the report), which was designed solely to check whether more full baggage cars were needed ASAP. Which they apparently were.

The numbers used by the OIG suggested 48 baggage cars in regular deployment. There are currently 51 in regular deployment. (Implying that Amtrak thinks one of the two LSL sections can make do with a bag-dorm -- frankly, I'm guessing the Boston section, which always has low passenger and luggage loads.)

Current shop counts are so insufficient that cafe cars are substituted (!!), whereas the OIG assumes that 1:4.8 shop counts can be maintained. But let's suppose with new equipment 1:5 will work. 48 * 1.2 = 57.6... but protect cars are needed at no fewer than 7 locations, with at least 2 protect cars at Chicago and NY, so add 9 to that and you're up to 66.6 already. The Texas Eagle is regularly having trouble with overloading its coach/bag and needs a full baggage car -- with shop count that's 3.6 more, and so you've deployed all 70. The daily Cardinal will need one more baggage car. There are a lot of other trains which could use baggage cars as well: the Vermonter, the Adirondack, the Pennsylvanian, another NY-Boston train, etc. 70 may be too few to really meet demand!
 
This report does read like sour grapes with respect to the car order and their "analysis" of car needs was incomprehensible. Certainly suggesting that new baggage cars be mothballed to keep running speed-restricted heritage baggage cars that hamper on-time performance and thereby increase Amtrak operating costs and cause Amtrak to lose revenue was the most obvious groaner in the report.

I'm surprised with all the high emotion over the AutoTrain service level "degradation" that nobody has commented on the OIG's remarks about the decision making process for AutoTrain. They make it sound very haphazard and as if Amtrak is still testing scenarios when it seems like Amtrak has made a permanent choice that would be very difficult at this point to smoosh back into that tube. Amtrak didn't seem to address that much in their response. Based on what OBS staff have stated on this board, I think there may be more issues there in terms of business processes than are described in the report.

As for OIG's glee over reducing staffing for sleeper cars--seriously? Where's the "business case" for making service suck so much you can't give sleeper car rooms away? Every gripe they had about Autotrain could be applied to their magical thinking about car attendants and then some. I agree with others about the 2 to 3 notion as opposed to 1 assigned to 2. I can put my own bed up/down (for now in my life) but there's more to car attendant than that. Sleepers cater to increasing numbers of elderly and/or mobility impaired patrons so -- what -- leave the old codgers trapped in their rooms while they wait for one car attendant to hump meals from the diner to the sleepers? Crazy. What happens when there's a station stop during lunch and two elderly people and their disabled son need help deboarding? Madness.
 
Bus Nut said:
This "analysis" of car needs was incomprehensible. Certainly suggesting that new baggage cars be mothballed to keep running speed-restricted heritage baggage cars that hamper on-time performance and thereby increase Amtrak operating costs and cause Amtrak to lose revenue was the most obvious groaner in the report.
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The kids from OIG also ignored the coming savings

in maintenance costs from having a uniform fleet --

standardized training for standardized equipment,

with one-part-fits-all stocking of spare parts. Keeping

Heritage clunkers in the fleet, while mothballing new

Viewliners,would prevent these savings from occurring.

The sad part is that the stupidities of this report will

be magnified by Congressional staffers who have

even less knowledge than the OIG team.
 
Ok, I went and checked some numbers. I worked with CY2013 (as opposed to FY13 or FY14) since that was light on the disruptions, comparatively speaking. I put all of the monthly sleeper ridership numbers into a single spreadsheet, divided by (2*days per month for daily, and multiplied by 7/3 for the two 3x weekly trains). I then did this for the whole year and divided the trains' monthly average by the annual average to get how close each month was to the average. I will detail more shortly, but at a glance and in no order the most stable trains are the Silvers (the Star gets an asterisk because it got an extra sleeper in December, which resulted in a spike in ridership versus the average), Auto Train, Cardinal, and Sunset. The most variable trains are the Zephyr, Builder, and Starlight.
 
Ok, here's a rough rundown of what I found during 2013:
-For most trains, January and February were the weakest months. Sometimes another month would pop into place, but on 13 of 14 sleeper trains one of those two was the weakest month (9 January and 4 February).
-The exception was the Auto Train, whose weakest months were September and October (third was February). Likewise, for both Silvers the second weakest month was September and the third weakest was October.
-July was the most common strongest month (7 trains), and it was #1 or #2 for 13 of the 14 trains (the outlier was the Auto Train, where it was in a fairly tight third place). March (Easter/Spring Break), June, and August were the other months with more than one train listing it as the strongest month. The Silver Star was the one outlier here (December was the strongest month by a longshot, but this was likely due to the train getting an additional sleeper for about two weeks at Christmas).

The trains with the least variation in traffic were:
The Silver Meteor, 30.6% (112.1% high, 81.5% low)
The Silver Star*, 32.5% (111.9% high, 79.4% low)
The City of NO, 32.9% (117.1% high, 84.2% low)
The Cardinal, 35.3% (111.7% high, 76.4% low)
The Auto Train, 36.6% (117.3% high, 80.7% low)
The Sunset Limited, 40.8% (123.3% high, 82.5% low)
The Crescent, 46.6% (115.0% high, 68.4% low)
The SW Chief, 50.1% (121.9% high, 71.8% low)
The Silver Star, 52.0% (131.4% high, 79.4% low)
The Capitol Limited, 56.1% (127.4% high, 71.3% low)
The Texas Eagle, 58.1% (133.9% high, 75.8% low)
The Lake Shore Ltd., 61.3% (128.9% high, 67.6% low)
The Empire Builder, 69.0% (138.4% high, 69.4% low)
The Coast Starlight, 69.9% (139.1% high, 69.2% low)
The CA Zephyr, 77.9% (147.1% high, 69.2% low)

The asterisked Silver Star excludes December 2013 from the calculations because of an obvious equipment shuffle which happened there. The non-asterisked Star behaves more like the "middle group" of trains.

The California Zephyr's numbers (massive in the summer and anemic in the winter) are very much in keeping with what showed up in the discontinuation fights during the 60s. My understanding is that the original Zephyr was profitable in the summer right until the end, but it was a disaster for the railroads in the off-season. The Coast Starlight is a more surprising presence on the list, but the fact that the Builder is #3 probably explains that: It's being dented by traffic on two of the three main connecting LD trains. Those three form the "bad group".

On the other end, the trains which are most stable are the Meteor, the asterisked Star, the CONO, the Cardinal, the Auto Train (all vary by less than 40%), and the Sunset (40.8%).

In the middle are the Crescent, the SW Chief, the un-asterisked Star, the Capitol Limited, the Texas Eagle, and the LSL.
 
fulham said:
My issue with the OIG report is why weren't OIG personnel present when these decisions were being made? It is a waste of money and time for Amtrak to conduct analysis on issues involving major equipment or infrastructure investments, and after several months the OIG comes in and says the analysis is incorrect. While I understand the OIG is not part of Amtrak per se, it does play a role in how the company operates, and has a $23 million budget.

...
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It is not the role of an Inspector General office to be involved in the decision making process. Their role is to review and criticize the process, point out lapses or poor management and make recommendations for improvements. The OIG's job is to be independent and by getting an OIG office directly involved in making the decisions, the OIG is no longer independent or separate from the management. Besides, based on this report, do you really want the OIG staff to have a direct role in making decisions in equipment purchases or deployment?
With regards to info in the report on equipment utilization, the assignment of 5 bag-dorm cars to in-service strongly indicates that the Cardinal and LSL will get the bag-dorm cars. So only NYP and CHI will have to service the bag-dorms. Using the 3 "excess" bag-dorms for a daily Cardinal and a restoration of a Three Rivers/Broadway Limited service through PHL and PGH could take care of the "excess" if circumstances allow both to happen.

The in-service use of 15 dining cars means that the April plan did not have the Cardinal getting a full-service diner car, although that had to be the plan when the order was placed in 2010 for 25 diner cars. My thinking is that the big push to reduce food and beverage losses has caused the plans for adding a diner to the Cardinal to be postponed until later. Adding new dining cars and hiring new crews will increase F&B losses at a time they are attempting to show overall improvements and get Mica off of their case. If Amtrak can cut the losses for the single level dining cars after the new cars are deployed and show that in monthly reports (along with cost recovery improvements to the single level LD trains), then there will be less downside in operating loss numbers in upgrading the Cardinal to a full service diner car.
 
Bus Nut said:
As for OIG's glee over reducing staffing for sleeper cars--seriously? Where's the "business case" for making service suck so much you can't give sleeper car rooms away? Every gripe they had about Autotrain could be applied to their magical thinking about car attendants and then some. I agree with others about the 2 to 3 notion as opposed to 1 assigned to 2.
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There is a very good business case to having 2 attendants cover 3 Viewliner sleeper cars. The proposal to have 1 attendant for 2 sleeper cars when 8 roomettes are taken up by on-board staff was discussed in the Crescent PIP report (Performance Improve,ent Plan). The Viewliner attendant support fewer roomettes and bedrooms than the Superliner attendants do, so it is not an effective utilization of personnel. The new Viewliner sleepers will have 11 roomettes instead of 12, so the Viewliner LSA workload will be further reduced.
By splitting the center sleeper car of a 3 Viewliner sleeper set between 2 attendants, not only does it save on staffing costs, it also frees up a roomette for revenue sale. In the 2011 PRIIA PIP report on the Crescent, the projection was that eliminating a LSA position would save $0.9 million and the additional roomette would add $0.2 million in revenue over a year. One reason given for not implementing the change for the Crescent back then was that the wiring for the attendant call buttons had to be replaced so it could be controlled (or reprogrammed) to direct the call button signal to an attendant room in another car. They also have to reach an agreement with the union on work rule assignments, but I don't know how sticky that is.

So for a 3 Viewliner sleeper set as the Silver Star, Crescent, and LSL NYP section are likely to get when the new equipment is deployed, by having 2 LSAs support 3 cars, they will add 12 roomettes (or 13 until the current Viewliners are upgraded) and 3 bedrooms without adding to on-board staff costs. That is a win-win, regardless of the OIG odd numbers. If the Silver Meteor goes to 4 sleeper cars from the current 3, don't know how they would split that. But they could still stick with 3 LSAs, again adding an additional full car with no increase in on-board staff costs.

It is interesting news in the OIG report that the LD business line will begin implementing LSA staffing changes on routes in FY2015 on routes not requiring new equipment to do so. Maybe on the Meteor and a 2 car experiment on the Crescent?
 
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Anderson, thanks for your analysis of seasonal patterns.

Anderson said:
The trains with the least variation in traffic were:

The Silver Meteor, 30.6% (112.1% high, 81.5% low)

The Silver Star*, 32.5% (111.9% high, 79.4% low)

The City of NO, 32.9% (117.1% high, 84.2% low)

The Cardinal, 35.3% (111.7% high, 76.4% low)

The Auto Train, 36.6% (117.3% high, 80.7% low)

The Sunset Limited, 40.8% (123.3% high, 82.5% low)

The Crescent, 46.6% (115.0% high, 68.4% low)

The SW Chief, 50.1% (121.9% high, 71.8% low)

The Silver Star, 52.0% (131.4% high, 79.4% low)

The Capitol Limited, 56.1% (127.4% high, 71.3% low)

The Texas Eagle, 58.1% (133.9% high, 75.8% low)

The Lake Shore Ltd., 61.3% (128.9% high, 67.6% low)

The Empire Builder, 69.0% (138.4% high, 69.4% low)

The Coast Starlight, 69.9% (139.1% high, 69.2% low)

The CA Zephyr, 77.9% (147.1% high, 69.2% low)
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It is unsurprising to me that the Capitol Limited (snowbelt), LSL (even more snowbelt), and EB (even more snowbelt) have serious drops in the January-February period; the cultural habit is to hunker down for the winter. If Amtrak ran a short consist on the LSL in January and February, it would be about the same length as the consists on a lot of the other trains are normally, so it would still be a reasonable-length train. (And it wouldn't have to make double stops at the short-platform stations.)

I'm somewhat more surprised at the severe drops on the Coast Starlight and California Zephyr. They must be quite dependent on seasonal tourist traffic. (Though I guess the CZ does go through snowbelt territory, too.) There's no way to break ridership out by segment on either of those trains; I still suspect the CZ of having different patterns west of Denver and east of Denver, and the CS of having different patterns north of Sacramento and south of Sacramento.

The Meteor, Star, and Auto Train are clearly being boosted in January and February by "snowbird" traffic... which is apparently not coming from upstate NY or Ohio or Chicago. :)

The high seasonality of the Crescent, SW Chief, and Texas Eagle also surprises me. I guess the SWC and the Texas Eagle both terminate in the snowbelt in Chicago; but I would have expected less seasonality on the Crescent. It may be more tourist-dependent than I expected; I suppose the less-seasonal traffic has substantially been diverted to the Lynchburg train or the Carolinian.
 
Nathanael,

In the California Zephyr's PIP, one consideration was cutting the train length east of Reno to run it longer west of Reno. Apparently, Christmas aside (when everything can sell out...only the Builder ran at less than 90% for December 2013, and I want to say that the Builder was already suffering a bit from massive delays. If I went back and counted up trains that didn't run and made a note of times with altered operations (the Silvers get disrupted every year for a bit in the spring).

Actually...

The Silvers were hit with cutbacks (due to trackwork in FL) to JAX in January and February of 2013 on about 1/4-1/5 of the days. It looks like the Meteor got the worst of it in January and the Star in February...I want to say that the Meteor was the one that kept the bus connection further south, but I'm not sure there. It's probably telling that the only times the Silvers fall outside of a tight box around their averages seems to be when you either add equipment (on the high side) or disrupt the schedule (on the low side). The exception seems to be early fall, and I'll note that early fall is the one "slow season" in Orlando (the parks all end up doing wacky Halloween shows and so forth to draw folks in, while you're not actually to the cold weather season).

Edit: Was there any significant disruption in September/October 2013 on the east coast? I'm thinking this really is a seasonal problem, but I do want to be sure.
 
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Further notes:
-The Cardinal, Crescent, and Silver Meteor have no months over 115% of their annual averages. The Crescent also got disrupted during the week (I want to say it was cut back to Atlanta several days per week) in January, which means that it is also an artifact of a non-Amtrak disruption. So the Crescent "actually" behaves like the Meteor and Star as well...as long as it's running normally. The January drop looks like it was as much a loss of space resale as anything (28 sleeper pax/train is not much below a sale of every roomette that's available once and each bedroom twice, so the train probably didn't do atrociously under the circumstances).

-The Silver Star only had December over 115% (see above).

-In January, every train was below 85% of its annual average with the exceptions of the Auto Train (97.2%) and Silver Star (88.1%).

-In February, every train was below 85% of its annual average with the exceptions of the Auto Train (88.9%), Silver Meteor (97.2%), CONO (92.6%), Sunset (91.0%), and Crescent (86.0%).

-In June, every train was over 115% of its average except the no-month trains, the Silver Star, and the Sunset (which only spiked, oddly, in March)...as well as the CONO.

-In July, swap the CONO (at 117%) for the Auto Train (drops to 113%).

-In August, the trains over 115% were the Builder, Cap, Zephyr, Starlight, and LSL.

-The LSL also went over 115% in October (115.6%), the only train other than the Star to do so post-August.

==========================

Trivia point: I finally realized why the LD trains are in the order they are in the MPRs:

-Everything down to the Coast Starlight had a predecessor on A-Day (even if the routing was different).

-The LSL wasn't restored for a bit, and it went back away before returning again due to a funding fight with New York. It did not run on A-Day.

-The Crescent wasn't picked up until the late 70s (when Southern finally gave in).

-The Auto Train wasn't picked up until the 80s (when Auto-Train went under).

The Capitol Limited is sort of the odd duck in all of this (it grew out of the split in the Broadway), but the others have an obvious late addition nature where the Cap is more ambiguous.
 
neroden said:
I'm somewhat more surprised at the severe drops on the Coast Starlight and California Zephyr. They must be quite dependent on seasonal tourist traffic. (Though I guess the CZ does go through snowbelt territory, too.) There's no way to break ridership out by segment on either of those trains; I still suspect the CZ of having different patterns west of Denver and east of Denver, and the CS of having different patterns north of Sacramento and south of Sacramento.
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Regarding the CZ, I don't understand why Amtrak doesn't aggressively market it as the ski train in winter. If I were a skier living near Chi, it couldn't get any better than taking an overnight train to Winter Park and then using the free shuttle bus service to get around. Except maybe for a side trip to the hot springs in Glenwood Springs.

The compartments at the end of the superliner cars that are accessible from the outside used to be called ski lockers. But I haven't heard the term in years.
 
Anderson said:
Actually...

The Silvers were hit with cutbacks (due to trackwork in FL) to JAX in January and February of 2013 on about 1/4-1/5 of the days. It looks like the Meteor got the worst of it in January and the Star in February...I want to say that the Meteor was the one that kept the bus connection further south, but I'm not sure there. It's probably telling that the only times the Silvers fall outside of a tight box around their averages seems to be when you either add equipment (on the high side) or disrupt the schedule (on the low side). The exception seems to be early fall, and I'll note that early fall is the one "slow season" in Orlando (the parks all end up doing wacky Halloween shows and so forth to draw folks in, while you're not actually to the cold weather season).
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I used the Status Maps Archive database to pull up some data for the Silvers and Crescent in early 2013. The Star and Meteor reached Orlando 25 out 31 days in January 2013 and 21 of 28 days in February, 2013 while reaching Jacksonville all 59 days. The Crescent got to Atlanta all 31 days in January, 2013 but arrived at NOL only 15 out of the 31 days. Those are large enough disruptions to distort the ridership numbers for the those months.
The problem obviously is that the monthly reports don't provide a metric for the total revenue track miles or something similar in the route performance table, so we can't adjust or normalize the ridership and revenue numbers for each route. The CZ Jan-Feb numbers could look worse because of cancelled or shortened trips due to winter weather. The archives database provides a neat new tool to look up number of arrivals for an LD train, so if there is an unusual drop in ridership in a month, we can check if there were cancellations if one wants to investigate.

The pattern of reduced travel in January and February is pretty widespread. Same goes for retail store sales after the New Year over much of the US as far as I know. For comparison, I downloaded government data for air passenger travel in the US for 2013. The overall pattern is the pretty much the same as the Amtrak monthly ridership numbers, but these are for all domestic flights against individual LD trains. Worth noting that while February had the fewest total air passengers, it actually had sightly more air passengers per day than January. The shorter number of days in February can make February look worse than it is.

Domestic air travel passengers by month in 2013. I added percent of the overall monthly average, number of days in the month, and the average passengers per day to take out the effect of the length of the month.

Code: 
Month	DOMESTIC	Percent of Avg	Days	Avg/Day
Jan	47,816,859	88.9%	        31	1,542,479
Feb	45,740,158	85.0%	        28	1,633,577
Mar	56,564,538	105.1%	        31	1,824,663
Apr	53,228,575	98.9%	        30	1,774,286
May	56,562,929	105.1%	        31	1,824,611
Jun	57,990,789	107.8%	        30	1,933,026
Jul	59,310,478	110.2%	        31	1,913,241
Aug	58,115,405	108.0%	        31	1,874,690
Sep	50,766,098	94.3%	        30	1,692,203
Oct	54,706,246	101.7%	        31	1,764,718
Nov	50,542,543	93.9%	        30	1,684,751
Dec	54,332,936	101.0%	        31	1,752,675
Avg	53,806,463	    	        	1,767,910
 
It looks like, absent the disruptions to the Silvers and Crescent, the "southern" trains for Amtrak just don't see a significant effect in the winter (at least, based on 2013...I'll start poking around in some other years to see how much this holds up year-to-year). I seem to recall running some similar numbers a few years back and finding something similar on the Silvers at the time; I'll admit, for me the biggest surprise might well be the relative stability on the CONO. It makes sense on further thought, but it's a surprise on first glance.

That being said, I'm willing to bet that if you could break out airline travel by market you'd see something akin to what is going on with Amtrak...witness the seasonal flights from New York to Florida that Virgin America adds, for example. Likewise, there are almost always a few batches of days where a bunch of airports get shut down because of a major blizzard (Amtrak is somewhat less prone to those shutdowns since even if a train runs late, it can at least keep running).

Now, for the practical implications of all of this in terms of future equipment orders and/or equipment allocation...

1) The CONO should be switched to a Viewliner set. I know this seems counter-intuitive, but there's a clear case to keep adding Viewliner equipment (and a likely medium-to-long term single-level car order coming for the NEC as well) and it seems likely that the CONO could use additional capacity much of the year. Basically, it seems like it would be easier to grab another 25 Viewliners than to get more Superliners.

2) As to the present Viewliner order, the allocation for Viewliners that I see working would be as follows:
Summer:
-LSL (x3): 3 sleepers NYP, 1 sleeper BOS (12 sleepers total)

-SM (x4): 4 sleepers (16 sleepers total)

-SS (x4): 3 sleepers (12 sleepers total)

-Cre. (x4): 3 sleepers (12 sleepers total)

-Car. (x3*): 2 sleepers (6 sleepers total)

-Cap. (x3): 2 sleepers (6 sleepers total)

This would use 62 sleepers (of 75 theoretically available), allowing for spares and what-have-you. 2 more are technically free with a non-daily Cardinal (hence the asterisk).

Winter:
-LSL (x3): 2 sleepers NYP, 1 sleeper BOS (9 sleepers total)

-SM (x4): 5 sleepers (20 sleepers total)

-SS (x4): 4 sleepers (16 sleepers total)

-Cre (x4): 3 sleepers (12 sleepers total)

-Car (x3*): 2 sleepers (6 sleepers total)

-Cap (x3): 1 sleeper (3 sleepers total)

This frees up 6 sleepers from northern trains (3 LSL. 3 Cap-Penny cars). 8 are added to the Florida trains (4 each, one extra sleeper per train). There would be a transition period over Christmas where the Cap and LSL would also have additional sleepers (total utilization would be around 70 sleepers...not out of line with present practice). The question does come up of using a second diner on the Meteor as a table car and/or going 6/3 instead of 5/4 on the Florida trains, but that's a more complicated question.
 
Anderson said:
It looks like, absent the disruptions to the Silvers and Crescent, the "southern" trains for Amtrak just don't see a significant effect in the winter (at least, based on 2013...I'll start poking around in some other years to see how much this holds up year-to-year). I seem to recall running some similar numbers a few years back and finding something similar on the Silvers at the time; I'll admit, for me the biggest surprise might well be the relative stability on the CONO. It makes sense on further thought, but it's a surprise on first glance.

That being said, I'm willing to bet that if you could break out airline travel by market you'd see something akin to what is going on with Amtrak...witness the seasonal flights from New York to Florida that Virgin America adds, for example.

...

The question does come up of using a second diner on the Meteor as a table car and/or going 6/3 instead of 5/4 on the Florida trains, but that's a more complicated question.
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Florida's population has grown so much over the past 40 years along with tourist travel for spring break, summer and winter seasons, that is not really a surprise that total travel flow to/from Florida has evened out to a large extent over the course of a year. There are still peak direction periods with the snowbirds heading south in October/November and north in March/April that probably offsets what otherwise would be declines in those months, but we don't the north-south breakdowns in the monthly totals. All of which is good news for keeping the Silver equipment fairly busy year round for better returns on equipment costs.
As for the CONO, Mardi Gras takes place in February or early March, so that must offset what would otherwise be a winter season decline in February. The Crescent must get a bump from Mardi Gras travel as well.

There are clearly seasonal changes in domestic airline travel patterns in Jan-Feb with more flights to FL and, for that matter, Hawaii, and less traffic between the smaller market northern cities. There is a lot of airline and airport travel data available, but I'm not inclined to spend much time digging it up.

If an extra long Meteor for the peak of the peak periods with 4+ sleeper cars and extra coach cars needs a table car between the diner and Amfleet II cafe/diner car for spillover crowds, an Amfleet I cafe car would likely be the most cost effective option. Amtrak still has spare Am I cafe cars and the cafe car could be used to store extra refrigerated food and supplies.
 
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