The June 2016 monthly report is overall a fairly good one with Amtrak having close to a break-even month and ridership increases overall for the NEC, state supported corridors, and the LD trains. Revenue continues to be down a bit and well below budget projections.
For the state supported corridors, the Downeaster had a huge rebound month with a +118.5% ridership increase from a summer of numerous service disruptions in 2015. The ridership increases for the Surfliner, Capitol Corridor, Cascades, Keystone are helping to offset the declines for the Albany-Buffalo-Toronto trains, Wolverine service (-6.9% in June), Lincoln service (-7.6% in June), Piedmont service, NHV-SPG, all of which are getting hit by trackwork disruptions. With the stimulus funded improvement projects almost all supposed to be completed by June 2017 to meet the funding deadline, next June should see stability and reduced trip times for most of those corridors.
For the LD trains, the allocation of the NEC passengers to the Palmetto is causing a large increase in its ridership numbers which is goosing the overall LD numbers. Subtracting the Palmetto increase, however, still leaves an overall increase in LD ridership. So the LD trains as a group are doing ok. The California Zephyr had a really good month with a +19.3% ridership increase. Will be interesting to see if how much of that is from Denver with its big year of transit openings when the FY16 station stats are posted.
Summary stats from the June 2016 monthly report by category for the month and first 9 months of the fiscal year compared to prior years.
Ridership and Revenue summary for the month of June compared to 2015:
System: ridership +2.7%, revenue: +2.0%
Acela: ridership -3.1%, revenue: -1.2%
NE Regional: ridership +5.0%, revenue +5.6%
State supported corridors: ridership +1.3%, revenue +1.3%
LD trains: ridership +7.8%, revenue +2.5%
Ridership and Revenue summary for the YTD from October to June:
System: ridership +0.7%, revenue: -0.7%
Acela: ridership +0.7%, revenue: +0.6%
NE Regional: ridership +1.8%, revenue -0.9%
State supported corridors: ridership -0.7%, revenue -0.2%
LD trains: ridership +3.4%, revenue -2.3%
System On-time performance continues to improve from 2015. The NEC endpoint OTP was 81.1% in June, 10% better than June 2015. Still well short of the >90% it should be at, but trending in the right direction.