October Monthly Performance Report

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Paulus

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Sadly no capital charges yet, which is a real disappointment since I thought they were going to show up in this one.

Amtrak's expecting to do about a hundred million worse than last year as expenses are increasing faster than revenue. It's early in the year though, so maybe they'll get it back under control (especially if OTP improves).

Also someone needs to photoshop the Juggernaut onto an Acela train, it's honestly a bit scary how it can just keep increasing revenues no matter what. Ridership dropped 4.4%, but revenue went up 6.2% anyhow to an average fare of 96¢ per mile.

Anyone know what's with the Palmetto's sudden jump in OTP to 91.9%? That's second in the nation, not far from the Capitol Corridor.

Hilariously, if you scroll to page E-4, "Total Host-Responsible Delays by Host Railroad," Norfolk Southern actually broke the chart. They've also got some new over time charts of host responsible delays which are pretty nifty.

Selected ones:

Acela: Ridership down 4.4%, revenue up 6.2%

NERegional: Ridership up 7.7%, revenue up 11.9%

Surfliner: Ridership up 8.3%, revenue up 16.9%

Capitol Corridor: Ridership up 4.7%, revenue up 11%

San Joaquins: Ridership up 2.1%, revenue up 2.4% (breaking a bit of a drought).

Pennsylvanian: Ridership up 3.8%, revenue up 7.9%

Coast Starlight: Ridership up 0.5%, revenue down 0.3%

Palmetto: Ridership up 7.0%, revenue up 2.0%. Missed budget goals something fierce though.
 
Lots of interesting stuff here.

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Page A-3.2: "The eight Chicago Hub routes combined were 8% below both ridership and ticket revenue budget in October and is partly a result of a drop in demand from connections with long distance trains..." Amtrak has data on how much revenue came from connecting tickets, but doesn't publish it. They clearly know the cause here, though. A bunch might be Carbondale delays caused by CN, or trackwork on the St Louis line, but apparently a bunch is due to the NS-induced OTP disaster on the LSL & CL.

The Michigan trains and the Hoosier State are actually up in revenue year over year (as is the Hiawatha) -- despite the NS meltdown causing major delays for the Michigan trains. The Quincy, St. Louis, and Carbondale trains are way down. This indicates that "connections with long distance trains" means connections with the Lake Shore Limited and the Capitol Limited.

So the LSL and CL jointly were generating a lot of connecting revenue on the Midwestern trains. The year-over year drop was $38,524 off the Quincy train, $22,130 off the Carbondale train, $137827 off the St. Louis train, in October alone. It's hard to extrapolate from this to figure out the total connecting revenue generated on these trains by the LSL & CL (it depends on exactly what percentage of passengers were discouraged by the delays, and all kinds of other things), but the most lowball estimate I can come up with is $1 million/year, and it could be over $4 million/year.

So we already know that the LSL is profitable before overhead, without accounting for connecting revenue -- Amtrak would lose more money by cancelling it. The CL doesn't appear to be (costing something like $4.9 million/year before overhead), but it depends on the amount of connecting revenue -- the CL might actually be making money for Amtrak due to connecting revenue if there's enough connecting revenue. And this is just connecting revenue for corridor trains at Chicago, without looking at the other end.

It is obviously very important that these trains run on time.

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Not only does the Palmetto have extremely good endpoint OTP in October, OTP is way up year-over-year on the Auto Train, Silver Star, Silver Meteor as well. This indicated to me that most of the Star/Meteor problems were in Florida, and sure enough, look at a later chart, you see that the bulk of delays are on the SunRail line (with some notable delays on the Meteor on Tri-Rail as well.) Hopefully these are teething issues with SunRail and the dispatchers will figure out how to handle Amtrak better once things stabilize (which they won't do for another year, until Phase II is constructed).

Good work CSX; apparently someone there knows how to dispatch trains on time. Now how about on the Empire Corridor?...that may actually be Amtrak's fault though, due to the rogue conductors.

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Beech Grove is still having problems with Superliners not arriving as scheduled. Indicates that the Superliner fleet is overstretched. PTC is almost on schedule, except for, again, locos not arriving as scheduled.

Interestingly there are 5 "car wreck" repairs scheduled in 2015 at Beech Grove (plus 3 at Bear); I wonder which cars these are. Also, Beech Grove has overhauled one Viewliner sleeper and has 12 scheduled for 2015... I wonder if there's any truth to the rumor that they'll be changed to match the configuration of the Viewliner IIs. Probably this is just a level 1 overhaul though.

Chicago locomotive maintenance is suffering from a locomotive shortage, with notes on how the locomotives they were supposed to maintain kept being pulled away from them to go into service.

Heritage programs have been completely zeroed out. This means Amtrak is expecting those dining cars this year. Hopefully we'll see the second round of testing start sometime soon.

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Ridership on nearly all long-distance trains is up year-over-year; the exceptions are obviously the EB, LSL, CL (all with disastrous OTP problems), and the Crescent. In sleepers, again, nearly all are up; the exceptions are the EB, LSL, CL, Crescent, and (curiously) Silver Star. The Crescent was up in revenue (both in sleeper class and generally), so this may be a case of trading ridership for revenue, or just random fluctuation. The Star was also up in sleeper revenue.

The so-called "corridor" services were nearly all up in revenue as well, with the notable exceptions noted before (the Chicago hub trains which lost connections with the LSL/CL). The other exceptions are the Maple Leaf/Empire Service West (revenue down, ridership up), the Cascades (down slightly), and the Downeaster (both revenue and ridership down significantly -- I'm guessing this is related to the 24% OTP, but what caused that?).

Poor OTP is clearly the single most damaging thing which can happen to Amtrak financially.

Restoring OTP on Empire Service West should be an Amtrak priority. And in this case Amtrak can actually do something about it directly, since unusual amounts of it are actually Amtrak-caused; both "passenger holds" and "crew related delays" are exceptionally high. Current conductor boarding/deboarding practice is often inefficient; a team should be formed to optimize boarding/deboarding practice at each station and then train the conductors and assistant conductors to actually *do* it. And staffing should be thought out carefully to avoid crewing-related delays. As for CSX, it needs to get rid of its slow orders, which are creeping up every year.
 
"Acela: Ridership down 4.4%, revenue up 6.2%"\

Did my part last week to help that number improve slightly - took a Acela trip from Washington DC to New York and back to DC in one night.

Interesting Chicago to St Louis numbers - past few months Lincoln Service has been jam packed with passengers. Customer service still leaves a lot to be desired - coach looks like a frat house on most journeys - but loaded with passengers. Bustitution mania earlier in year didn't help ridership.

"Hoosier State are actually up in revenue year over year"

Amazing what adding wireless Internet, food and business class can do. Exactly what many of us argued should have happened much sooner on that route.

"CL might actually be making money for Amtrak due to connecting revenue if there's enough connecting revenue"

Just rode this route in roomette to DC - to do Acela round trip - then Capitol Limited roomette again back to Chicago. Of course using Lincoln Service business class as my connection to Chicago Union Station.

CL was 20 minutes early to DC. Coming home a few minutes late - CSX freight held us up leaving DC and then got stuck behind local commuter.
 
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Neroden, could you unpack the Florida delays a bit more for me? Were delays a one time thing due to SunRail construction? What about Florida trains being chronically behind prior to that? I'm really fuzzy on the route changes in Florida in the last decade as I understand they had some deal in place to run on a different line?

Also, what about weather and its impact on Florida trains?

Palmetto terminates in Savannah now. It's actually really sad because you can't do regional travel to the Atlantic South from Florida on Amtrak now, at least not with not-unsane ARR/DEP times or an overnight in Savannah. And Amtrak closed the Jacksonville crewbase.
 
Coach is absolutely atrocious compared to the 1990s and for me it's mostly cleanliness issues with the much higher ridership. I know that Congress is all over Amtrak to spend even less on labor costs but come on. Enough is enough. Bathrooms stay at code red and the floors can get kind of icky too. And I think I read that they're ditching anti-macassars, which, okay, dirty upholstery near my face, um, okay. At least it's cleaner than an airplane.
 
I just saw the broken chart...Good God!

As to the Chicago situation...Amtrak did put some numbers on display using either the LSL or Cap as a demonstration. IIRC, you had something like 1/3 of passengers connecting to hub trains, a fair share connecting to LD trains, and only like 30-40% terminating in Chicago. The Cap also funnels a ton of traffic to the Silvers, and it is quite likely that it would have been scooping up riders from a number of trains in the region.

Serious, sincere question: Since there was an expectation that, for example, CA would pay Amtrak some money to offset lost ridership on the Coast Starlight if they ran the Coast Daylight, could states lean on Amtrak for at least a reduction in PRIIA 209 payments due to losing ridership from all of these lost connections? I know it's not Amtrak's fault, but "We're getting our budgets screwed up because your trains are late" has a certain ring to it.

Edit: Most interesting standard: "Change in effective speed". Why? It presumably takes into account both OTP and track improvements (which can offset one another).
 
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Bus Nut said:
Neroden, could you unpack the Florida delays a bit more for me? Were delays a one time thing due to SunRail construction? What about Florida trains being chronically behind prior to that? I'm really fuzzy on the route changes in Florida in the last decade as I understand they had some deal in place to run on a different line?

Also, what about weather and its impact on Florida trains?
Click to expand...
The Silvers went through a long stretch of delays and occasional cancellations south of JAX for the Phase 1 SunRail construction. That clearly hurt the ridership numbers for the Silvers. Although we don't see the breakdowns, the ridership drops were likely mostly for the in-state trips on the Silvers. With the end of Phase 1 construction and the start of SunRail service, the OTP in Florida has slowly improved. However, AFAIK Phase 2 construction for the complete SunRail route is scheduled to start in 2015.
The other common major delay source, often good for 1 or 2 hour delays, for the Silvers and the Palmetto has been the CSX segment roughly from Staples Mill to south of Rocky Mount. The time keeping for that segment improved after the end of summer construction work in August.

Don't recall seeing any reports of weather related delays in FL in 2014. Was a quiet year for hurricanes and tropical storms. Grade crossing collisions involving Amtrak or other trains, however, appear to be an all too frequent cause for 2-3 hours delays for the Silvers in Florida. Must be a lot of people in FL who try to beat the train to the crossing.
 
neroden said:
...and the Downeaster (both revenue and ridership down significantly -- I'm guessing this is related to the 24% OTP, but what caused that?).
Click to expand...
Significant amounts of track maintenance including several canceled trains - I don't know if canceled trains drive down OTP (is a train that isn't running technically "late"? :huh: ), but track maintenance affected OTP big time.
 
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Some comments on the October 2014 monthly report. This is the first month of the Fiscal Year so all comparison results are for October 2013 vs October 2014 unless noted otherwise.

Financial Results
Total Revenue of $278.3 million, up +$15.0 million from Oct 2013. But total expenses were up by $28.6 million, mostly due to Salaries & Wages and Other expenses. After adjustments, the year starts off with an adjusted loss of $3.9 million. Capital spending is already trailing the authorized amount for the first month of the FY.

Ridership and Ticket Revenue
System ridership up +2.9% and revenue +6.2%. Overall good news as the California corridor services that had been in ridership dropoff all were up in ridership the past 2 months. If Amtrak is going to have a good FY15 for ridership numbers, it needs the CA corridors to do well.

NEC: While the Acela ridership may have dropped a little, the NE Regionals are strong. Quoting the report: "October FY15 was the best ridership and ticket revenue month ever for Northeast Regional. Ridership of over 750,000 trips was +8% vs last year and +5% vs budget. Ticket revenues were +12% vs last year and +10% vs budget. The Friday before Columbus Day (10/10/14) was the single best day on Northeast Regional since the Thanksgiving period last year. Business class ridership was +9% vs last October."

The sooner the Amfleet Is tied up in CA and the Midwest can move east the better.

Chicago hub ridership decline: While the poor OTP of the LD trains may be part of it, the NS meltdown clobbered the Michigan service trains for OTP. The Lincoln service was affected by service interruptions and long delays due to the CHI-STL corridor track work. There may also be a residual effect from the service disruptions during the deep freezes last winter.

The Wolverine service was up +15.6%, but that is in comparison to October 2013 when ridership was down -14.5% from October 2012. The Michigan services are likely in for another year or two of up and downs until most of the Indiana Gateway and Michigan track work projects are completed. The heavy track work is supposed to be completed for the CHI-STL corridor except for the second tracking, sidings, signals, etc so 2015 may be a year of slow recovery for the Lincoln service.

The Downeaster OTP and ridership has been affected by slow orders and track work repairs. The track work is expected to continue through next summer, so FY15 may be a bumpy year for the Downeaster service.

A bright spot is the Heartland Flyer which was up +8.1% in ridership. It has been in decline for a while, but the October OTP jumped to 85.5%. From the Amtrak website, the November OTP was 83.3% so the OTP improvement was not a one month fluke. Don't know if the HSIPR funded project to modify the grade crossings in TX for faster passenger speeds has been complete or not.

LD trains: Major downturns for EB (-17.5%), LSL (-18.0%), CL (-11.3%) ridership. October was the nadir of the NS meltdown for the LSL and CL. The endpoint OTP for the CL in October was 0%. Hard to get lower than that. The OTP charts at the end of the report with NS delays exceeding the range of the chart axis show just how bad the first part of October was.

The good news that the NS Meltdown has gone away and the OTP for the CL and LSL has steadily improved since mid-October. The EB has done much better in the past month as well. If NS can avoid the meltdown for the 2015 summer work seasion, FY2015 should be a year of recovery for the LSL and CL ridership and revenue. Although the routine delays across upper state NY for the LSL, even with a very padded schedule. are a problem.

With ridership up on 11 out of 15 LD traims for October, the service cuts are not hurting business yet.

OTP: the goal for FY2015 should be have a better year than FY2014. A lot better year. But track work and congested freight lines will make that difficult.
 
I wonder how much of the increased wage expenses is due to poor OTP on the long distance trains making for a lot of OT.
 
Bus Nut said:
Neroden, could you unpack the Florida delays a bit more for me? Were delays a one time thing due to SunRail construction?
Click to expand...
No. The Star and Meteor getting delayed by commuter trains according to Amtrak's coding.
The SunRail dispatchers are pretty much newly hired; the dispatching was only handed over to SunRail's contractor Bombardier in mid-2014. It looks to me like these new dispatchers are having trouble handling Amtrak.

I'm hoping the dispatchers will get better with practice, figure out the right tricks for threading Amtrak through the commuter service (what to hold where, what to cross over where, etc.) However, the shape of the schedule they're dispatching is going to change when SunRail phase II opens, so they can't really figure out the right tricks until after that.

It's just a hypothesis, but does that make sense? (Anyone who's done dispatching might know better.)

Bus Nut said:
Palmetto terminates in Savannah now. It's actually really sad because you can't do regional travel to the Atlantic South from Florida on Amtrak now, at least not with not-unsane ARR/DEP times or an overnight in Savannah. And Amtrak closed the Jacksonville crewbase.
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Re-extending the Palmetto to Florida would be very useful. When my connection to the Silver Meteor was broken by the collision of the Empire Service train I was on, I could still have gotten to the funeral if the Palmetto had been running to Florida.

Paulus said:
I wonder how much of the increased wage expenses is due to poor OTP on the long distance trains making for a lot of OT.
Click to expand...
No way to tell, but my wild-ass-guess is "most of it".
 
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The Pennsylvanian is a revenue increasing machine. If it ends up only gaining 7.9% on LY revenue, it will have done worse than the last two FY's (+12.4% FY13, +9.7% FY14). It's gotten to the point that if I end up taking this train back, as opposed to a keystone (PHL -> Lancaster), the train is often standing room only up to Exton, and sometimes after I get off at Lancaster (unreserved seating in that stretch). Getting Amfleet cars east cannot happen soon enough. This train added 12 passengers on average each way daily over last year.

If Chicago wasn't a giant steaming pile of OTP destruction, I bet this would have been a banner month (well over budget overall, not just on the non-Chicago routes). I hope that the pace on the rest of the Amtrak lines keeps up, to cover for whatever happens to Chicago next summer and fall.
 
Some analysis:
Overall:
Trying to pick through the cost side of things is going to be interesting because of all of the disruptions of various sorts over the last year. As an example, I believe that some LD costs fell off last year because some trains just weren't running. Last year may be problematic in that respect...everything conspired to drop losses quite hard. As usual, I find the budgeting to be a bit suspect...but since when is that a new thing?

Worth noting is October's ridership situation. Granted, October 2012 saw a hit due to Sandy, but ridership for the month is still up 106k vs. the pre-adjustment numbers for that month (and 174k vs. the adjusted numbers). It does seem that October, at least, has been filling out in terms of ridership on the NEC, and as a result system ridership in October was 95% of what it was in July.

One worthwhile question: We're in October (as of the report's period). How is it that Amtrak is projecting that they will be so far off-budget this early in the year? It would stand to reason that, at least this far out, you'd still expect to be on-budget (especially with wage variables somewhat limited and revenue variables leaning towards the positive).

More on specific routes later.
 
I noticed one thing in the capital program numbers which I've been trying to make sense of:

Mechanical/Acquisitions: planned $116,119,000 (buying new Viewliners probably)

Procurement/Vehicle Replacement: planned $943,000 (maybe this is trucks and automobiles?)

Strategic Fleet Rail Initiatives: planned $690,000 (maybe this is fleet planning?)

It's hard to make sense of the bureaucratese. I'm hoping that last entry means that Amtrak is going to do some fleet planning in preparation for ordering more cars.
 
neroden said:
I noticed one thing in the capital program numbers which I've been trying to make sense of:

Mechanical/Acquisitions: planned $116,119,000 (buying new Viewliners probably)

Procurement/Vehicle Replacement: planned $943,000 (maybe this is trucks and automobiles?)

Strategic Fleet Rail Initiatives: planned $690,000 (maybe this is fleet planning?)

It's hard to make sense of the bureaucratese. I'm hoping that last entry means that Amtrak is going to do some fleet planning in preparation for ordering more cars.
Click to expand...
The Mechanical Acquisition probably covers the CAF Viewliner and ACS-64 progress and delivery payments. $690K for Strategic Fleet initiatives could be updating the Fleet strategy plan and direct costs for the Acela II bid process.
 
Procurement/vehicle replacement is likely the Acela II process. Afigg probably has the other two right.
 
Well, I was asking about weather delays for all years. I asked, though, because I was on a Silver this year that got delayed because of one of those giant low pressure storm systems around Jacksonville (the specific delay was south of there but Jax was pretty soaked as well, again--huge storm system). We never made the time up, guess we lost the 'slot' and got more and more delayed from Virginia north.

afigg said:
Don't recall seeing any reports of weather related delays in FL in 2014. Was a quiet year for hurricanes and tropical storms. Grade crossing collisions involving Amtrak or other trains, however, appear to be an all too frequent cause for 2-3 hours delays for the Silvers in Florida. Must be a lot of people in FL who try to beat the train to the crossing.
Click to expand...
 
Acela
The long-standing trend towards fare hikes being used to hold back surging ridership continues, likely to nobody's surprise. Ridership was off...but this was in the face of about a 10% fare hike, and revenue was still up strongly. The back-and-forth on ridership is likely to continue as long as the Acela's ridership is averaging over about 10,000/day (which tends to mean quite a few more on weekdays). This month it was about 10,550 vs. just over 11,050 for Oct. 2013.

Per-passenger revenue (PPR) was $175.92 on tickets alone (i.e. ignoring any OBS revenue); at this rate, this should hit $200 in another 2-3 years. As a sidenote, it seems quite possible that at least some of what is going on here is higher fares squeezing out shorter-distance riders on the Acela and knocking them back to the Regional. I'd note that the relative increase in Acela fares vis-a-vis Regional fares does seem to hint at this...from what I can tell, fares themselves are only up 3-4% year-over-year (in line with patterns over the last few years), so there was clearly another factor at play. Additionally, I'm inclined to rule out the effects of overly-aggressive revenue management alone...so a squeeze-out seems most likely.

Of course, with that being said there's also a tale of two markets: South of New York, ridership slid pretty hard (diversion onto Regionals). North of New York, however, ridership still rose; this suggests that at least north of New York, Acela ridership (and revenue) are the beneficiary of the limited number of trains Amtrak is allowed to run there.

NE Regionals
In contrast to the Acelas, the Regionals saw a massive surge in ridership. Some of this is probably down to noise in the system, some of it down to diversions from the Acela to the Regionals, etc. Still, the spike was accompanied by a small bump in average fares (about 4%, in line with fare levels). PPR was $75.28.

One thing I would like to see is hard ridership numbers on NEC-North vs. NEC-South. It really does seem that the massive surge in ridership north of NYP was on a relatively low baseline. Another observation on this front: If NYP-WAS was up 18% while overall ridership on NEC-South was up 6%, what does that say for the remainder of the markets (NYP-PHL, WAS-PHL)? My best guess is that this is mainly accounted for in the form of a major drop WAS-BAL year-over-year (we're reaching the end of those effects kicking in; by Jan/Feb the initial effects of the added MARC service should have worked their way through the system).

Virginia Regionals
While these fall under the "state-sponsored corridors" label, the simple fact is that these trains are not behaving like the rest of the system. All four routes showed nominal profits of somewhere in the range of $1.2m after all costs were taken into account, though some of this was due to a reduction in the costs allocated to the Richmond trains. Let me count the ways I hate Amtrak accounting...no, on second thought if I try that every time I count I'll get a different number.

Ridership and revenue on all four trains spiked (ridership was LYH +11.1%, NPN +7.7%, NFK +11.5%, RVR +5.6%; there's an error omitting the change for the RVR trains) though PPR was off in all cases except the Norfolk. Still, in all cases both ridership and revenue exceeded the budget, in the cases of Norfolk and Lynchburg by a wide margin. I would need to go back and check, but I know this is one of the best months for Lynchburg, with average ridership at 283.4 per train.
 
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I'd love to have good, or even mediocre, numbers for the overhead allocated to each state-supported train -- and to the NEC trains, for that matter. I've got estimates for the long-distance trains thanks to that presentation by Boardman, but I have no estimates for the others, so it's hard to tell which ones actually require an operating subsidy and which ones only get subsidy to cover overhead.
 
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Nathanael:
Just a suggestion, but how much overhead was accounted for in the chart-vs-Monthly Report difference? If we can reduce that overhead out of things, that might give us an idea.
 
FWIW, the allocations to the individual state-sponsored trains are particularly hard to untangle. The annual budget told me how much is allocated to the NEC as a group; I'm not sure I care about allocations between NE Regional vs. Acela.

But knowing how much is allocated to state services in toto doesn't give me a clue as to what's allocated to which ones -- and I haven't seen any charts for them which remove the overhead -- and the problem is further compounded by having to separate the state subsidies out.
 
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Definitely agreed, though I think we could probably produce some synthetic models. Let's assume we go with something train-mile related like you found with the LD trains...where would that put us, assuming we could separate the NEC and LD trains?

(And actually, how much overhead is there to allocate?)
 
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