Let's run through this quickly....
This is how Amtrak could turn a profit.
Lets take one route for example, EB route.
I would run 2 trains per day in each direction 12 hours apart. By doing Amtrak could gain short
family day trips. For Example a family in Whitefish to Spokane and back the same day. I could
see a lot of this happening between many combination of cities along that route. I would increase
coach seating by at least 3. I would have 10 sleepers per train and make them slightly more affordable.
Longer train, more snack lounges.
These changes might get Amtrak close to breaking even.
According to the March 2011 Amtrak performance report, the Empire Builder brought in $26.1m of revenue FYTD on $57m with $2.8m in OPEBs (other post-employment benefits) and other costs. That nets out to a $33.6m loss. Assuming that you ran a second EB each day, your costs are going to double. With the additional sleepers and coaches, the costs will be even more, but for the purposes of this example we'll ignore this. I'd argue that even without these extra cars, the cost would more than double, since the freight railroad involve would probably negotiate the second train at a higher rate than the existing grandfathered service. This assumes that they're interested in running it at all.
What you're arguing is that running this additional train would bring in a total of $67.2m in revenue? The FYTD ridership was 241,546. This works out to $108.05 per passenger. Assuming this stayed the same (which is unlikely if you're trying to encourage short trips by families which will bring in much lower revenue), you're suggesting your service would bring in 621,934 passengers, a 257% increase? From any numbers I've seen from expanded Amtrak frequencies, that is nowhere of even being in the ballpark of realism. I think the best I've ever seen was a 105% increase, or perhaps a bit more than that. Remember, if most of these are short trips, you're going to need substantially more riders, as they won't be paying $108.05 a ticket. If you halve the average price per ticket, you'll need over 1.2m passengers. The Silver Star, Silver Meteor, Carolinian, Palmetto and Crescent
combined don't have that kind of ridership and they operate in a market where there is more than one LD train per day.
Unfortunately, these numbers just don't add up.
Next Amtrak would need to look outside of trains for revenue. The train station. Of course the traditional waiting
room structure drains money. So make it profitable. A combination small hotel and restaurant train station owned and
operated by Amtrak. Inside the hotel station maybe a local pub, a club with live music, a casino. No, I don't mean MGM casino.
Something small, two dozen machines at most if the state allows it. The point is, even if someone is not riding the train,
that person could still visit the station and spend money. Some small cities could use a visitors information and gift shop offices.
Locate it inside the hotel station. Meeting rooms and convention rooms.
Imagine the EB route with these types of hotel stations along with the family day trips or weekend trips. The EB route would turn a profit. This would work on all LD routes.
But like I said, it would cost 10 billion to set it up.
There's a number of assumption in this too. First, for realisms sake, I'd take the casino idea off the table. Do you know how hard that would be to get licensed? Look at what horse racing tracks in NY state and many other states went through to try and get slots. Many did not succeed and those that did only got them after years of prolonged legislative fighting. Can you imagine small communities along the tracks allowing slots? Besides, if this was such a sure fire thing, why aren't there slots in every airport I go to?
The next problem is that Amtrak does not own a vast majority of the stations in the system. These would have to be purchased from freight railroads or their existing owners and that's only if they want to sell. The vast majority of structures simply could not accommodate a hotel, a club with live music, and the like. These are very small buildings. A good number can not be substantially modified or torn down because they are historic structures. If we're going to start building new buildings, why not just have Amtrak get into the hotel business - regardless of whether there's any train integration? Then you're subsidizing your rail business with hotels, which makes no sense at all - just get into the hotel business, if that's what you want to do. Amtrak in its current form could never do any of this, of course - they'd have to be owned by a private operator. (Can you imagine the backlash if Amtrak wanted to set up what would be panned as a "government subsidized hotel" in many communities?)
Perhaps there's enough space to rent out to a restaurant or pub in some stations. I say rent because I can't imagine it being efficient for a large, national railway operator to manage hundreds of locally operated restaurant. But even if they could that's certainly not going to close the gap.
Look, I appreciate your enthusiasm in making Amtrak viable, and don't think I get any pleasure in tearing your plans apart. But this truth is, spreading this kind of uninformed opinion undermines Amtrak as we know it. Passenger rail, run the way it is in this country, is not and cannot be profitable. The only way to make an operating profit is heavy government investment in infrastructure, which is politically unrealistic at the present time. The more people who walk around saying some variant of "Amtrak could be profitable" feed into the collective misinformation of voters and politicians and ultimately paint Amtrak as an inefficient entity because it isn't making the profit you said it should be able to.
And if you think I'm wrong, I'd love to hear it. But you need numbers, not just pie in the sky ideas. Pour through the Amtrak annual reports, the monthly reports, their business plans. Run some back of the envelope numbers. Understand the economics of transportation for Amtrak, private railways and transit operators. Analyze the political interests, likely reactions and feasibility. Read books about international examples to see what has been tried and what has failed elsewhere (New Departures by Anthony Pearl is a great one to get started with). And then, see if your plan works.
I work in public transit. Not in rail, but its similar enough that I've learned volumes about how this stuff works, what the economics are, and why public subsidies are required for these sorts of things. I also do a lot of side reading on Amtrak, international passenger railways and other topics. It's something I have both personal and professional interests in. Please don't take this offensively, but when I see this sort of stuff it frustrates me because it takes so much effort to burst the popular perceptions that are already out there about Amtrak. There's enough people who attack Amtrak - there's no need to help them by spreading un-vetted opinions even though your intentions are in the right place.