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All joking aside, I wonder how much work would really be needed to put either something Siemens is already doing together (e.g. the Nightjets) or to just license the Viewliner IIs from Amtrak.

"Railcars of Theseus"?

So, two asterisks apply to the prior December/January combos: (1) Brightline didn't do any Polar Express stuff in December 2023, so that wasn't there to cause a "bubble" in ridership in December. (2) Brightline opened up Aventura/Boca in December 2022, so the promo fares and attention drove up...

January 2024 results. Short Distance, Long Distance, then Combined. 2021 November 61,045 0.6 $ 582,979 $ 9.83 $ 9.55 0.8 $13.11 2021 December 95,348 1.3 $1,259,547 $13.63 $13.21 1.6 $13.63 2021 156,393 1.8...

I'm slightly grouchy - I took the train on Ash Wednesday, so I couldn't really do the beef. The tuna was quite good, however, if a bit on the small side (which actually suited the day just fine).

Since it's an hour-and-a-quarter long, could we get just a little more detail?

...eh? I'm confused...

If you go back to the early 2000s, this has always been a mess. Ridership-wise, NYP-ALB rides are dumped to that route, with VT, Adirondack, and Upstate/Maple Leaf rides past ALB going to the respective trains. In the early 2000s it depended on which train you were on.

There have been occasional issues with tickets disappearing from the app after departure (I think I've had it happen once or twice). Of course, if you've got the email handy, that usually helps as well...

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...

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...

Oct-Jan in FY20 was amazing. Feb was close. Then in early March everything went to hell in a handbasket.

So, the constraint is probably cost more than pure feasibility with equipment. There's probably a maximum speed you could "safely" do with, say, open double-stack containers operations, and the added throughput from double-stacking likely outweighs any other benefits. Santa Fe ran the "Super...

IIRC Rio Grande was already down to 3/week on DEN-SLC, which only needed one set to run, and in-season it was still profitable because of the scenery. I think that meant that the back-of-the-envelope calculations broke in favor of keeping it even with off-season losses. [Edit to add: I think...

I know that at one point, RVR was: -Tracks: CSX -Station: Amtrak -Parking lot: Part DRPT, part Henrico County That latter resulted from a bungled lot expansion and led to several years of free parking in an unpaved part of the lot (until the state+county could sort out plans to pave the whole...

I'd also point out that if Amtrak ended up short a crew, they could always work out some sort of deal with Tri-Rail. I'm pretty sure that between the two of them they could get someone off the extra board on a regular basis if absolutely necessary.

County/Municipality probably go together. What are the Federal stations? And how did you handle some of the goofier multi-party stations?

Also, it's next available train. There's a decent chance that they'll have space on one of the evening trains each way on most days.

BL offers a guaranteed ability to change with a late inbound flight (essentially HOBNAT), but the system is buggy.

Yes, but IIRC they're bonding out that revenue. Also, Brightline's business model explicitly expects several million Brightline riders within South Florida.