Seaboard92
Engineer
The problem with Rocky Mountaineer is they have some financial issues not withstanding from the pandemic. They have had a ridership issue in the last few years.
Now this stems from multiple points which I have went over before but I'll briefly recap again.
1. They have been running the same route from the 1990s on to now. While there are plenty of people who haven't ridden either of those routes it is a problem all excursion operators have. The longer you operate on one stretch of track the less likely you are to get repeat business. That is something that hurt the Virginia Museum of Transportation's last year of excursions when a lot of the trains had large amounts of empty seats. You keep running the same route you exhaust your ridership base. Now that being said I think their current routes are definitely famous and can draw ridership from around the world still.
2. They are slowly pricing the working class out of the experience. A few years ago they had the Red Leaf experience which provided some rail only trips as little as $750 if I remember correctly. I tried to verify it but the internet wayback machine isn't functioning well. But back in the early 2010s they converted a handful of the Red Leaf coaches (EX CN CC&F Day Nighters) into Silver Leaf cars which basically have the skylights like the Seaboard Airline SunLounges. At some point they decided to convert the entire fleet of Red Leaf Coaches into Silver Leaf cars and with that the price moved up to the Silver Leaf product which is a significant increase. That is causing there to be a lighter load factor as more groups are priced out of it. Rocky doesn't quite understand that a large portion of their Red Leaf market were retired baby boomers living on a fixed income. So as that ridership number went down they started to have a problem.
3. The Gold Leaf cars while they are newer than the Red/Silver Leaf CC&F coaches are from a builder that has long since gone out of business. There isn't a large part market for these speciality cars seeing only Rocky Mountaineer and the Alaska Railroad roster any significant number of these odd balls. So one thing to think about in their operations budget is how expensive it is to find custom parts.
4. The economy isn't as strong as people like to make it out to be right now, and even before the pandemic. The best way to tell is what I call the Freight Train Index, the longer the trains are, and the more frequent they are the better the economy. If the economy isn't great less people are traveling especially on a luxury product.
Now this stems from multiple points which I have went over before but I'll briefly recap again.
1. They have been running the same route from the 1990s on to now. While there are plenty of people who haven't ridden either of those routes it is a problem all excursion operators have. The longer you operate on one stretch of track the less likely you are to get repeat business. That is something that hurt the Virginia Museum of Transportation's last year of excursions when a lot of the trains had large amounts of empty seats. You keep running the same route you exhaust your ridership base. Now that being said I think their current routes are definitely famous and can draw ridership from around the world still.
2. They are slowly pricing the working class out of the experience. A few years ago they had the Red Leaf experience which provided some rail only trips as little as $750 if I remember correctly. I tried to verify it but the internet wayback machine isn't functioning well. But back in the early 2010s they converted a handful of the Red Leaf coaches (EX CN CC&F Day Nighters) into Silver Leaf cars which basically have the skylights like the Seaboard Airline SunLounges. At some point they decided to convert the entire fleet of Red Leaf Coaches into Silver Leaf cars and with that the price moved up to the Silver Leaf product which is a significant increase. That is causing there to be a lighter load factor as more groups are priced out of it. Rocky doesn't quite understand that a large portion of their Red Leaf market were retired baby boomers living on a fixed income. So as that ridership number went down they started to have a problem.
3. The Gold Leaf cars while they are newer than the Red/Silver Leaf CC&F coaches are from a builder that has long since gone out of business. There isn't a large part market for these speciality cars seeing only Rocky Mountaineer and the Alaska Railroad roster any significant number of these odd balls. So one thing to think about in their operations budget is how expensive it is to find custom parts.
4. The economy isn't as strong as people like to make it out to be right now, and even before the pandemic. The best way to tell is what I call the Freight Train Index, the longer the trains are, and the more frequent they are the better the economy. If the economy isn't great less people are traveling especially on a luxury product.
