I personally think that if the AutoTrain were discontinued and its equipment were dispersed to other trains, they would provide a better financial return.
Well, there are two problems with that.
First, I don't know what train you plan to put the autoracks on.
(ba-dum-ching!)
Second, I can't think of a Superliner train where they'd be better allocated right now, in terms of profit maximization.
* All the other Superliner trains have relatively poor revenue and relatively high costs
* Almost all of the state-supported corridors are already going to get their own equipment soon enough
* The Coast Starlight, arguably the most capacity-constrained of the western trains, is long enough that it can't add more cars without adding more locomotives, which aren't available
* The Capitol Limited, unlike the various Viewliner trains in the East, doesn't seem to routinely sell out
* The City of New Orleans also doesn't seem to routinely sell out
* The Southwest Chief *also* doesn't seem to routinely sell out (maybe if it had a few bigger cities on the route...)
* The Empire Builder has such poor OTP right now and is losing so many riders that extra cars won't do much good to the bottom line (unlike the situation a year or two ago)
* The Sunset Limited can't really be improved or get enough added ridership to make it worth lengthening unless it goes daily...
* So, um, a car or two to the California Zephyr and Texas Eagle? OK, but we can probably do that with other cars (the CZ already runs one more car than it used to).
As Superliners get wrecked, and as (hopefully) the OTP of the Superliner routes improves, the calculation here may change, but at the moment, the Auto Train is probably a better allocation of equipment than of the alternatives. :-( Clearly, the real shortage is in single-level cars; if the Auto Train were running single-level cars, then it really would be worth reallocating them.