Allocated costs and avoidable is a rabbit hole that Amtrak and Anderson has not fully understood. In the airline business allocated costs and avoidable costs are fairly close to the same. If Delta schedules extra sections during holiday times the Airplane, crew, fuel, extra agent time, ground handler times, ATC, and most other costs follow allocated costs very close. Even every extra passenger on an airplane will increase the fuel consumption.
The only real cost figure that ever slipped out of Amtrak's classified files was a figure of about $4.00 / mile operating cost of a passenger car. So for a 1000 mile trip $4000 in revenue would cover its costs. Did not say if that included an OBS person or not. That would mean ~ 20 passengers to met that cost to operate the car. That does make the Crescent look bad south of Atlanta with 2 coaches and one sleeper essentially dead heading to New Orleans,
If Amtrak is applying all allocated costs to the avoidable costs then there is there costs are skewed. Now reservation costs are allocated how. Is it by passenger mile traveled or by reservation ? If my LD 1000 mile on line reservation allocation is 5 times my 200 mile on line NEC reservation something is wrong. The same for agent assisted. Now if average agent time for LD and SD is allocated separately then that would be more fair. Then we have as well agent time and baggage time for LD, SD, and corridor allocations.
The performance improvement plans ( PIP ) noted that adding one extra car and filling it would bring in incremental revenue of a large amount. ( example $700,00 for another coach on the Meteor ). It does get complicated for the many stops of the LD trains and somewhat less for the shorter routes such as the NEC. Next how are station costs allocated. Just ignore the MIA snow removal. Is it by passenger or train or some other metric? Do extra passengers add to the allocation or are all passengers getting a discount ? ( Gets complicated doesn't it ) So if a station gets more passengers than say the last year it has a surplus allocation and cost allocation ? Of course extended cancellations of trains for what ever reason may skew items more.
How crews are assigned and allocated on the NEC especially northbound out of WASH that are often late from south of WASH.
Amtrak adds an extra section train only when all its trains are close to be booked full. Coach weight around 150,000# and 70 passengers only add approximately ~ 15,000 # . So very little fuel consumption difference for another car.is the fuel figure of 2+ gallons per mile allocated by passenger mile ?
So...
