Tracking FY 2024 Ridership and Finances

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Septa9739 said:
Just to sum up re the Auto Train. I think its success can be attributed to multiple factors. It’s unique operating status as a mixed train helps, but the route hasn’t always made money. What really has worked is that the railroad made equipment available and applied successful yield management. Many of our trains could never make money because they simply are too short. The overhead of dispatch, T+E, MOW, access fees, stations, etc. cannot be spread across enough passengers to generate a profit on a possible average fare. I don’t know about being fully profitable, but many trains seem profitable on an avoidable cost basis and those numbers would be much improved if longer consists were available.
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Would the increased passenger revenue offset the capital costs of buying new equipment? On the other hand, it makes a good argument that the new LD equipment order should include as many cars as possible, as the bigger the order, the lower the unit cost for each car.
 
MARC Rider said:
Would the increased passenger revenue offset the capital costs of buying new equipment? On the other hand, it makes a good argument that the new LD equipment order should include as many cars as possible, as the bigger the order, the lower the unit cost for each car.
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So, in terms of raw revenue, an LD Superliner coach (72 seats, I believe) would generate something like $2.3-2.4m/yr at $100/seat with 90% availability. On that basis, the car should pay for itself in 2-3 years. That ignores costs, but it's a starting point to look at this from in terms of an incremental equipment purchase.

[I remember doing an exercise with some folks at NARP/RPA, where we determined that after accounting for operating costs, the pay-back period for adding a sleeper to 66/67 should be 6-7 years on like a 35-40% load factor. Now, Amtrak muffed handling that a few years later (during the pandemic) by not allowing folks into the sleeper south of WAS, but...well, there you go.]
 
Anderson said:
So, in terms of raw revenue, an LD Superliner coach (72 seats, I believe) would generate something like $2.3-2.4m/yr at $100/seat with 90% availability. On that basis, the car should pay for itself in 2-3 years. That ignores costs, but it's a starting point to look at this from in terms of an incremental equipment purchase.

[I remember doing an exercise with some folks at NARP/RPA, where we determined that after accounting for operating costs, the pay-back period for adding a sleeper to 66/67 should be 6-7 years on like a 35-40% load factor. Now, Amtrak muffed handling that a few years later (during the pandemic) by not allowing folks into the sleeper south of WAS, but...well, there you go.]
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I don't think it has ever been a better time for Amtrak to expand their fleet. I think the demand is there. The long distance trains appear to have high load factors with many sleepers typically at capacity. I travel to Florida on Amtrak multiple times either on the Auto train or Silver Meteor. I think the diner on the Meteor could handle another sleeper. They may need to hire another chef and another server but the diner is rarely full. In fact there is typically a booth filled with kitchen supplies and another reserved for Amtrak staff during meal times. I also notice at least one or two other booths unoccupied during prime meal times. The auto train is definitely staffed up to serve the additional sleeper passengers. The auto train sometimes uses the lounge car for over-flow dining during prime times. Again it appears the auto-train can handle the additional passengers and benefits from the revenue. The auto-train also doesn't appear to be afflicted with the exorbitant sleeper prices that are normal on the Meteor and Star.
 
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Auto Train has an unique set up. The east coast trains Meteor, Star, Crescent uses 4 train sets at close twice the mileage of Auto train.. Auto train uses what is close to 2 of each of those train sets with exception that they do not yet have their 3rd sleeper for revenue. So, Auto train's car go half the miles of the cited 3 LD trains . Car mileage and route costs are twice what Auto trains have to pay. Draw your own conclusions.
 
AmtrakMaineiac said:
I wonder if the lack of equipment had constrained ridership on trains such as the Capitol Limited.
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It has been constraining ridership on all the long distance trains, since before Covid.

It's most obvious on the Capitol and Texas Eagle... but the Starlight used to sell out in California when it ran with 3 sleepers and 5 coaches (and the best long distance trains managed 50,000+ per month.)

The one coach on the Builder was selling out between Seattle and Wenatchee in the off-season in 2018 and 2019 and they were putting people in the transdorm roomettes for a 3-hour ride.

The "slow recovery in ridership post-covid" has been hurt a little by late trains and cancellations, but hurt a lot by leaving equipment in storage that had been full before it was put in storage (as well as by the wreck losses.)
 
As a quick glance...I am very confused in seeing the Gulf Coast Limited have 10 frequencies YTD. Is there crew training that we're not aware of?
 
I’m a little shocked Amtrak’s sluggish IT Department worked on such a mundane thing this week, but November FY 2024 is up. The report is good and reflects continued strength on the system nationwide. It also shows the second consecutive month of full systemwide recovery. Soft spots do exist, but it’s good on the whole. Going forward (I hope- it’s a lot of work) I will report monthly numbers, not year to date to get a better pulse on what’s happening in the moment and then note YTD information.

The following routes are between 95%-100% of November FY 2020 ridership
  1. Empire Builder 99% (30,400 to 30,200)
  2. Cascades 99% (64,200-63,400) down from last month, possible reduction due to equipment problems and peaky travel patterns
The following are less
  1. Acela Express 85% (348,600-299,600) equipment issues plus changing demand
  2. Keystone 86% (134,600-116,700) New high for COVID recovery, first time in years(?) carrying more passengers than the Empire Service, which was once the norm
  3. Lincoln Service 94% (51,900-50,800) a considerable drop from last month, but still remarkable vs last year
  4. Hiawatha 80% (60,600-58,200)
  5. Wolverines 90% (40,200-36,100) worse than last year
  6. IL Zephyr 70% (16,900-11,800) a hard slide
  7. PacSurf 76% (243,700-184,200) significant improvement
  8. Capitol Corridor 61% (152,700-92,400) This corridor is a mess, worst in nation by a mile. Does anyone know why?
  9. San Joaquin 93% (92,400-84,600) steady
  10. Adirondack 91% (7,400-6,700) Nov FY 2020 may have had a disruption as Oct-Nov FY 2020 was down nearly 4,00
  11. Cardinal 90% (8,700-7,800)
  12. Silver Meteor 92% (28,200-25,900) dropped from95%+ bracket
  13. Capitol Limited 71% (15,600-11,600) worse than last year
  14. California Zephyr 90% (28,900-26,100)
  15. Southwest Chief 90% (24,900-22,300)
  16. Sunset Limited 92% (7,400-6,800) worse than last year
  17. Coast Starlight 93% (35,500-32,400) worse than last year
The following trains have fully recovery from COVID, but a decline from last year
  1. Ethan Allen (8,000-7,500) Passenger miles are flat with FY 2020 and FY 2023
  2. Vermonter (11,700-9,100) Reliability issues since the flooding? Passenger miles are down by about half since FY 2020, 10% year over year
  3. Auto Train (22,300-20,100) Same deal as last month?

All in all the system looks a lot healthier than it did a year ago. I said earlier ridership is topping FY 2020 levels. This is largely due to surging volume on the NER. Regionals have slipped from 122% of October FY2020 ridership to 113% of November FY 2020 ridership. State supported is right there at around 96%. The Northeast, Southeast, and Northwest corridors are largely strong. The Empire Corridor deserves particular praise for holding its own despite the structure issue above the Empire Connection causing serious disruption. The Keystone finally overtook Empire South as the Number One state supported reporting line in the Northeast, reclaiming its old place. Of course the Empire Corridor is busier, but it reports across four lines. The Midwest is spotty. There are still about 150,000 missing California passengers. Long distance deserves huge praise for somehow showing FULL RIDERSHIP RECOVERY from pre-COVID despite about 18 concurrent issues. Allegedly we can expect transdorms to return to all trains except the Sunset/Eagle and the second Seattle coach to return by summer. These could push some routes to levels not seen in a decade.

The financials are concerning. Amtrak continues to lose money faster than expected. Fare revenue continues to be weaker than hoped for. Though to me the hope seems a bit much. I think they charted revenues to rise just about with ridership, but they can’t squeeze more out of sleepers than they already are, so they sell more NEC sale fares in coach and fewer $3,000 sleepers. There is also a $20,000,000 negative variance on employee benefits, which seems in some way ridiculous. Then there’s the classics. The Auto Train has less total operating revenue than total ticket revenue. The Hoosier State that hasn’t run in 4 years somehow generated $2,000,000 in revenue. The CONO didn’t sell any food, beverage, or special baggage service, and the Keystone, once a leader in cost recovery is losing $11,500,000 after subsidy two months into the year.

There some weird stuff going on in passenger miles too, but I’m gonna need a few days to research that.
 
December’s Monthly Performance Report is out. It was a mixed month showing, by and in large, a softening of gains made earlier in the year. YTD ridership system wide has fallen beneath the FY 2020 level, due to continued (and worsening) losses in California sinking the State Supported Business Line. The NEC and LD service lines continue to exceed 2020 levels. Soft spots do continue to exist exist, but it’s good on the whole. The numbers reflected below compare DEC FY 2024 to DEC FY 2020, not year to date figures.

The following routes are between 95%-100% of December FY 2020 ridership

Illini 95% (26,600-25,200)
  1. Blue Water 98% (16,300-15,900)
  2. Pennsylvanian 95% (21,000-19,900)
  3. Silver Star 97% (36,300-35,300)
The following are less

Vermonter 93% (10,400-9,700) a substantial slump
  1. Keystone Service 85% (140,500-117,700) in line with last month
  2. Lincoln Service 86% (60,900-52,100) a considerable drop from last month, the second straight
  3. Hiawatha 80% (75,400-61,400)
  4. Wolverines 85% (46,500-39,700)
  5. IL Zephyr 77% (19,900-13,000) a considerable improvement
  6. PacSurf 72% (224,600-161,100) It was nice while it lasted. Things will get slippery again in January
  7. Capitol Corridor 56% (141,400-78,800) This corridor is a mess, worst in nation by a mile. I wrote this last month, and it slumped even more this month
  8. San Joaquin 86% (94,200-81,200) slight slide
  9. Adirondack 81% (10,700-8,700)
  10. Newport News Regional 89% (33,200-29,500) An unusual soft spot in the Virginia Regionals
  11. Pere Marquette 91% (9,600-8,700)
  12. Cardinal 80% (10,000-8,300) a large slide
  13. Silver Meteor 79% (33,200-26,300) a large drop
  14. Capitol Limited 80% (17,500-14,000) perhaps a COVID record
  15. California Zephyr 81% (37,700-30,700) a drop
  16. Southwest Chief 73% (30,400-22,100)
  17. Sunset Limited 92% (9,000-7,500) worse than last year
  18. Coast Starlight 89% (39,800-35,600)
The system continues to look strong, but some ground was given back across most routes. Only the Acela Express (finally pushing past full recovery), Empire South, Illinois Zephyr (from dreadful to bad), Cascades (the new round trips took effect here), Missouri River Runner, Capitol Limited, Texas Eagle, and Lakeshore Limited made a percentage gain from November to December. The South softened considerably, but continues to exceed FY 2020 levels. California is a bit of a disaster. Finances improved significantly. Other than that, a whole lot of status quo.
 
Septa9739 said:
December’s Monthly Performance Report is out. It was a mixed month showing, by and in large, a softening of gains made earlier in the year. YTD ridership system wide has fallen beneath the FY 2020 level,
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Do you mean FY 2019? FY 2020 would be from October 2019 through September 2020, which includes at least 7 months of the pandemic.
 
Trains News Wire did an analysis of how equipment shortages are strangling ridership on the LD trains.

https://www.trains.com/trn/news-rev...4163.27362900.1707329774-215885997.1707329773
A couple of excerpts:
"By not restoring long-distance train capacity to 2019 levels in the same way it was able to furnish additional Horizon coaches to Amtrak Cascades service last year, Amtrak management has effectively sized its national network for low-demand periods."

"More available coaches and sleeping cars could exponentially increase revenue and ridership, dwarfing the cumulative cost savings the company thinks it has achieved by not fully deploying its assets."
 
Septa9739 said:
The financials are concerning. Amtrak continues to lose money faster than expected.
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One reason for the higher expenses compared to pre COVID is the IIJA spending on new fleet and infrastructure. Amtrak has stated outright that operational expenses will necessarily be higher over the next several years in order to execute the programs funded by the Infrastructure and Jobs Act. This requires staffing, project management, and additional resources. Additionally, there's been a lot of spending related to hiring efforts, restoring equipment to service, etc. So higher systemwide expenses are to be expected to a certain degree. I don't believe Amtrak is targeting a return to break even until sometime in the late 2020s if not even early 2030s. A return to break even is essentially impossible while Amtrak is engaged in so many efforts to ramp back up and manage all these construction and procurement efforts - all of which involves spending a lot of money.
 
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lordsigma said:
One reason for the higher expenses compared to pre COVID is the IIJA spending on new fleet and infrastructure. Amtrak has stated outright that operational expenses will necessarily be higher over the next several years in order to execute the programs funded by the Infrastructure and Jobs Act. This requires staffing, project management, and additional resources. Additionally, there's been a lot of spending related to hiring efforts, restoring equipment to service, etc. So higher systemwide expenses are to be expected to a certain degree. I don't believe Amtrak is targeting a return to break even until sometime in the late 2020s if not even early 2030s. A return to break even is essentially impossible while Amtrak is engaged in so many efforts to ramp back up and manage all these construction and procurement efforts - all of which involves spending a lot of money.
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So, "break even" was always a tangled concept. There was operational break-even (which Amtrak was basically at early in FY20 - I think on the trend they were on, FY20 was possibly going to show a small operating profit and if it didn't FY21 likely would) and overall break-even (including capex, and Amtrak was never close here).

Put differently, Amtrak was getting quite close to breaking even on EBITDA but not once those things got into the mix.

I will say that even allowing for some of the Superliners being idled, Amtrak has just under 75 Viewliners (I and II), which should at least either allow the single-level trains to be made longer or the conversion of the Capitol Limited to single-level. [1]

[1] So, running down the math, with all Eastern sleeper trains running at three cars except for the Cardinal (1) and LSL (4), that would give about 50 in use. That's enough to put 3-4 sleepers on the Capitol Limited and leave a reasonable spare/shop count in play. Coaches are another story, but with the diner access constraints couldn't you could run a split-level train with a transdorm in the middle and just have an attendant go to the cafe if someone in the sleepers needed something from there that wasn't covered in the diner? This is probably the only place where the no-coach-pax-in-the-diner constraint would be useful. And, on top of everything else, tagging that equipment onto a WAS-NYP run might actually help ridership as well as get it to/from Sunnyside. But even aside from that, they've got the equipment to solve the Cap's constraints.
 
Anderson said:
So, "break even" was always a tangled concept. There was operational break-even (which Amtrak was basically at early in FY20 - I think on the trend they were on, FY20 was possibly going to show a small operating profit and if it didn't FY21 likely would) and overall break-even (including capex, and Amtrak was never close here).
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You’re of course correct. Amtrak’s version of breakeven is what I was referring to. They have no plans to achieve that until a few more years.
 
I'll add to the above: One of the biggest issues Amtrak is facing is on the NEC, and that's the non-recovery of Acela ridership. Pre-pandemic, Amtrak was able to exercise a lot of pricing pressure there (ridership got boxed into a corner at the high end), and they also had (IIRC) about 16x/day vs 12x/day now NYP-WAS. And of course, in 2019-20 they briefly had an extra "express" in the morning.

Losing a quarter of capacity (let's say that hit ridership by like 15-20% since at high frequencies, dropping a train can result in people shifting their trips by an hour) on that section is probably costing Amtrak somewhere in the ballpark of $100m/yr (Acela revenue is down $100m vs 2017; I have a data gap on revenue in 2018-21 because of the reporting methodology Amtrak was using, which didn't differentiate between ticket revenue and other revenue, resulting in a lack of comparable numbers to 2003-17) and the loss of business traffic is probably another $50-100m (PPR on the Acela was lower than 2017 as well, by about 4%, in 2023 - but the fact that it is down despite six years passing and the loss of capacity does not speak well of the situation). I've heard an estimate that every non-running Acela costs $15k in lost revenue; four round trips/weekday at that rate would translate into $31.2m in lost revenue.

YTD in FY20 (so, December 2019), the Acela's "total revenue" was $186.6m. [1] YTD in FY24 (so, December 2023) it was $145.4m. [2] That's a gap of $41.2m over those three months (other revenue in FY24 is like $600k). That's a decline of 23%. Going back to FY18 (when I have both figures for Q1 - IIRC they stopped publishing gross ticket revenue sometime later in the year), total revenue was $166.9 and ticket-only revenue was $163.2m [3], so it's still off by 13% vs 2017 (though there's less of a gap between "total revenue" and "gross ticket revenue" these days). Acela Q1 total (e.g. including cafe revenue) PPR was about $184/passenger in FY18Q1, $195-196 in FY20Q1, and $179 in FY24Q1. The difference in those Q1 PPR figures represents $13m or so lost in the quarter.

Also looking at total revenue, for FY19 that was $662m for the Acela. In FY17 that was probably right about $600m, so there was about an 11% increase over those two years. Getting that to $700m over the following four years doesn't take a lot of imagination (that's a 6% increase); getting that to $750m (up 13%) feels more likely and $800m (up 21%) isn't out of the ballpark. And all of this is before the Acela II mess comes into play, with the attendant loss of capacity (admittedly, to the Regionals' benefit).

Basically, pre-pandemic Acela operations would be throwing off at least $200m more per year - there's a raw decline of $160m and there "should" be some additional gains. The total could easily be $250m/yr and possibly as high as $300m/yr.

Obviously this isn't all of Amtrak's shortfall (some costs are up and the State Supported picture is always a mess), but it helps explain how Amtrak showed a $66m operating profit in FY20Q1 and showed a $118m operating loss in FY24Q1. The Acela drop is almost a quarter of that, and "lost gains" are probably a bit more on top.

[1] https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/...-Monthly-Performance-Report-December-2019.pdf
[2] https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/...-Monthly-Performance-Report-December-2023.pdf
[3] https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/...-Monthly-Performance-Report-December-2017.pdf
 
I doubt Acela per passenger revenue is returning anytime soon. Business travel is still lackluster, reliability has fallen significantly, and the pre COVID fares were ridiculous, unless you were on Wall Street money. I think the better model will be attained when economy of scale improves with the Alstom equipment, and not banking on commanding those sorts of fares. The market has changed.
 

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