But either way it remains a fact that there will be a battle royale for LD funding this year.
Again, these trains are not like one another. And I really wish someone in power would recognize this.
Avoidable-cost accounting is an appropriate metric for whether service cuts have a chance of actually improving the bottom line. It actually slightly underestimates the value of particular services because service cuts cause loss of connections, which causes cascading losses in ridership and revenues. Anyway, when Amtrak released "direct-cost" accounting numbers for the so-called long-distance trains, we saw that the Palmetto and Silver Meteor contributed to the bottom line, the Auto Train broke even, and the Lake Shore Limited was close enough to breaking even. The City of New Orleans, Capitol Limited, and Silver Star each cost about $5 million to run. The Silver Service as a whole (Star, Meteor, Palmetto) broke even.
The Cardinal also cost about $5 million/year net to run. The PIP tells us that the Cardinal would be more like $7.5 million if it ran daily (with basically no other improvements). It obviously needs a lot of other improvements, particularly from Indianapolis to Chicago. Even a dorm car should boost sleeper revenue massively.
The Crescent costs about $7.5 million net. Given ridership patterns, I strongly suspect that a potential profit from NY-Atlanta is disguised by a loss from Atlanta to New Orleans; in the PIP, cutoff cars were expected to improve the bottom line by $1.5 million! The PIP's "reduced sleeper car staffing" proposal was expected to improve the bottom line by $1.1 million; the dorm cars should therefore improve the bottom line by something similar.
These both have major potential *if* improved.
To repeat:
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Florida services as a whole (Star, Meteor, Palmetto, Auto Train) break even and therefore don't need funding for anything but overhead, which Amtrak has to fund somehow anyway.
The LSL costs roughly $2 million to run and the Capitol Limited $5 million; this is peanuts. If these two NEC-Chicago connectors were removed, the lost revenue from connecting "corridor" and Florida trains alone would probably exceed that.
The core Florida-NEC-Chicago network needs to stay intact and its incremental cost to operate is pretty much $0.
Adding the CONO and Crescent to the core Florida-NEC-Chicago network costs $10 million. Adding the Cardinal as well brings the total costs to $15 million/year, or $17.5 million with a daily Cardinal. So that's roughly the net avoidable cost of the eastern long-distance network.
Some will say that cancelling multiple eastern trains at once would have economies of scale, which is true; but this cost isn't much either. The stations which are shared by the CL/LSL and nothing else amount to 3 staffed, 4 unstaffed. The stations shared by two or more of the Star/Meteor/Palmetto but nothing else (counting Sunrail and TriRail as something else) are 7 staffed, 3 unstaffed -- a bit more, but still not much. The Crescent and CONO have one such station: New Orleans. The Cardinal has none. Apart from these shared stations, any train discontinuations will merely increase the costs charged to the states for the stations used on corridor and commuter trains. Cost of maintenance facilities is basically fixed.
The finances of all these eastern trains will improve due to already-committed projects. The new Viewliners; the new locomotives on the NEC; station and track improvements in upstate NY; track improvements in North Carolina and Virginia; Englewood Flyover; double-tracking due to Sunrail; track improvements by the MBTA in Massachusetts. Illnois, Virginia, and Vermont are actively developing corridor routes which will generate yet more connecting traffic. Plans being actively pursued by states would cause further route operations improvements: specifically the NY, VA, NC, and MI ("South of the Lake") HSR plans. There is yet more potential for fairly quick improvements: a new Atlanta station allowing cut-off cars would improve the Crescent's financial performance by a lot immediately; almost any track improvement between Indianapolis and Chicago would do wonders for the Cardinal; implementation of the PIPs would improve the LSL and Capitol Limited.
Furthermore, the population patterns demand train service: Ohio, for example, is denser than France, and eventually hopefully it will regain a government which understands this.
It is worth noting that Boardman's warning in his presentation of March 2013 was of an Amtrak system without *western* Long-Distance services. If there is any sense in the Amtrak administration (and I don't know if there is), the battle royale should be entirely over west-of-Chicago service funding.
I've discussed the six western services before and will do so again some other time, but that's not my point right now. My point is:
Cuts to the eastern services are *plain dumb*.
