Ok, finally getting to posting some reactions here.
I've noticed the budget numbers for ridership and revenue are much closer to realistic than they used to be. Not sure if this was by accident or on purpose, but I'm glad to see many lines come within about 5% +/- of budget projections, and quite a few within about 3% +/-. I'd call that a (small) victory.
The clear exceptions to this are ones that had a terrible month (such as the CZ and its flooding problems) or ones that had a bounce for a certain reason (such as the speculation of a big bounce for the end of the IP-run Hoosier State).
I've also noticed a trend with a few of the host railroads (specifically, NS, CN, and CSX) : Looking at the OTP charts, all of those hosts seem to have a spike up in FTI (freight train interference) around the beginning of the calendar year, then it seems to settle down for the rest of the calendar year with any month-over-month increases being minimal in comparison. I don't know what to make of this nor do I know why it seems that way, but all three of those hosts are fairly regularly gumming up the works in the first couple months of the year. I'll be very curious to see how they each do in the March report, since either March or April is when they start to snap out of it each year. So maybe it's weather issues? No idea...
The Illini/Saluki went back in the tank after a few months of being pretty solid.
All the west coast corridor routes were off a bit (though if you account for the roughly 3.5% buffer for the extra day last year, Cascades was pretty flat).
The Heartland Flyer had an interesting anomaly - a pretty solid month ridership-wise, but took a huge hit in revenue. Did they lower fares? Run some sort of special deals?
System-wide ridership was flat to slightly higher year-over-year when you factor in one less day in the month. Year to date, all categories (NEC, State-supported, and Long Distance) are up in ridership and revenue (long distance revenue is only up about $55,000, so the margin is razor-thin, but an increase nonetheless).