While it's not improbable that a few dozen, maybe even a few hundred, rides over the last few months of the year on the Acela were a result of a combo of points runs for status and pre-12/31 "card burning" with upgrades, the effects there are too large (and too sustained) to really attribute to anything minor like that. This may, however, play some role in the spike in first class ridership being a bit stronger.
Due to all the issues with both Sandy and Thanksgiving sliding around, I'm taking the first quarter of 2013 as a single unit. I agree with some others on here: The noise has just been too much to really analyze each month as a stand-alone unit, and I'd have to make a redundant caveat on half of the routes as a result.
The NEC
The Acela: It's hard to overstate how stunning the Acelas' performance over the last few months has been, at least on paper. The "hard spike" in the Acelas' ridership is nothing short of stunning. While a decent portion of it is likely an artifact of Sandy and the Thanksgiving Slide, the weather, and a bunch of other incidental factors, ridership is still up around 8.5% vs. FY12 (i.e. two years ago). A notable standout on both the Acelas and the Regionals has been the improvement of ridership on the north end (NYP-BOS was +30% on the Acela and +22% on the Regional in December). Notably, however, October was also a strong month (even accounting for Sandy); ridership for the three months has been 342,795 (October), 302,779 (November), and 282,831 (December).
On the revenue side, things are also looking strong. For December, PPR was $168.01 (vs. $161.39 last year), though this was likely an artifact of the first class situation. Year to date, it has been $161.78 (vs. $162.07 last year), though last year's numbers were notably messed with due to the Sandy effects.
Regionals: As usual, there's a lot of redundancy with the Acelas. Ridership is up on almost all segments, and December was about as strong as November, even without Sandy getting involved. The ridership increase wasn't as dramatic as the Acelas, but (A) the Regionals lost some riders due to the accounting shift, (B) there's a far larger ridership base, and © the Regionals have added about 600,000 riders since FY08 while the Acela has been flat.
In both cases, it will be interesting to see how the next few months pan out and whether substantial ridership bumps can be sustained. I don't see them continuing at this level, but it wouldn't be unbelievable to see the Regionals end up at +4% for the FY13.
Short Corridors
Broadly speaking, there's not a lot of news here. You have a few corridors in the NE that are up sharply, period. Beyond that, a large number of corridors are muddled by the bad data on multi-ride tickets.
The Empire Service is having the best year of any single corridor. Ridership is up 13-15% (depending on which base you use for last year), and revenue is up roughly in line with this. The rest of the NEC-based corridors are generally showing a strong year after accounting for the ridership adjustments, though at the same time they're also mostly showing a drop in ridership pre-adjustment; the biggest example of this effect here has been on the Keystones, which have seen 45,000 riders vanish into the ether. The Pennsylvanian is having a good year as well, as the effects of the loud "YOU HAVE A TRAIN" reminder that the fight over the train's future provided seem to still be working their way through the system.
The big exception has been the Carolinian, which got trashed in November (due to continuing trackwork issues). However, it is a clear outlier in the East.
In Virginia, the news this year has been good. As usual, ignore the individual route comparisons for the Richmond-Hampton Roads trains. Combined, the three routes had 64,421 riders in December 2012 and 167,765 riders YTD in FY13. In December 2013, the combined total was 67,696 (+5.1%) and YTD in FY14 the combined total has been 179,974 (+7.3%). Last year's YTD revenue was $9.95m, while YTD it has been $10.93m (+9.9%). The improved revenue picture is likely down to a bit more longer-distance ridership into Norfolk, plus the fact that the Norfolk train isn't running its startup special this year.
On the other side of the state, the Lynchburger has had a good year so far (revenue up 12%, ridership up 7.2%, p
utting PPR up 4.4%). The train may make a run at 200k this year; it remains to be seen how close it can actually get.
The Midwest is a mixed bag. Some routes are doing well (the Hiawathas and Blue Water), some so-so (the Lincoln Service), and some not so well (the Woverine, the Pere Marquette, and the Hoosier State). In the case of the badly-performing routes, I'm going to single out the Hoosier State as getting the "Espee Treatment" from Amtrak. Based on what I've heard about Amtrak botching up the crew handling, Amtrak very much deserves either to lose this contract or to have IN start micromanaging its services. Shame on Amtrak's handling here.
Going out west, it's depressingly bad news all around YTD, with all four western corridors showing ridership drops. To be fair, a lot of this was down to the accounting ****, but the poor revenue performance is also a bad sign. December was better (the Cascades and San Joaquin showed ridership increases, and the Surfliner and Capitol Corridor nearly broke even in terms of ridership post-adjustment; all four routes showed a bump in revenue for the month, with the Surfliner leading the way). Given how toxic November was (and that October wasn't much better), it looks like at least some of this is down to the holiday slide, so I'm generally going to brace for the worst out here for the rest of the year.
Long Distance
There's a lot of bad news with some bright spots thrown in. The good spots were the Capitol Limited (ridership up 4.5% YTD and 9.2% in December), the Crescent (ridership up 6.3% YTD and 4.9% in December), and the Auto Train (ridership up 2.0% YTD and 7.2% in December). The Silvers lagged, with the Palmetto likely gaining some from the Meteor's (and to a lesser extent the Star's) issues.
Everyone else is having a middling-to-bad year, with the Builder getting the award for worst results year over year. The Starlight comes in second on this front, likely in part due to connections there going to pieces, though it had its own issues in December. It really looks like the LD trains are set for their roughest year in an extremely long time.
Outlook
January is going to be utter hell on the LD system, and it's probably going to be bad for the Midwest trains as well. In both cases, I would not be surprised to see ridership slides in the 5-10% range on a number of routes. With that said, the LDs are going to get a bit of help from the number of folks who were diverted to Amtrak by the storms.
With that in mind, I would not be surprised to see the eastern trains get a good bump in ridership from the storms. IIRC, the disruptions to Amtrak in and around the NEC were pretty limited (there were a day or two of cancelled Acelas, but that was about it) while the airlines got messed up by the weather pretty badly.