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[gmushial]

Anyone have past numbers to reference? I went by EB because Larry gave us figures for the 70's.

The older timetables have it near the back. So, for example, on A-Day, New York-Chicago was $51.25 in coach or $98.11 in a roomette. In 2014 dollars, that's $300 for coach and $574.30 for a roomette. Going off Amsnag, on the Lake Shore Limited, for the month of August, the fares NYP-CHI are $101 for coach and range from $367 to $520 for a roomette. Starting tomorrow, the fares range $101-159 and $445-520 with several sold out dates.

These numbers confirm the widening spread which really has nothing to do with inflation. In 1970 the spread for this example was less than 2X and today, according to those figures it is anywhere from 3.5X to just over 5X. And of course we now have these damn buckets to deal with, something that did not exist in earlier days.

Is it possible that this is about apples and oranges, ie, is it possible that in the 70's vs now, a) Amtrak then had a different view in terms of an appropriate pricing model, and b) Amtrak wasn't under the pressure they are today with today's Congress to break even? I suspect what we're simply seeing is: Amtrak has looked at the pricing models and response functions, and has simply found that the coach pricing has a steeper response function, ie, as prices increase, ridership decreases even faster; vs. the response functions for non-coach is more forgiving, ie, they can increase prices, and yes they may lose some passengers, but the net still increases.

 

[Anderson]

Amtrak was at least theoretically under the same sort of pressure to eliminate losses. IIRC, one of the underlying justifications for putting Amtrak together is that it would be able to knock out about $100m in losses in the passenger rail business through consolidating services, and would be able to act a bit more flexibly to return passenger rail to profitability.

Obviously that never quite came to pass for a host of reasons (including aging equipment, management mistakes, underinvestment in infrastructure by just about everyone imaginable, and the costs of buying and operating the NEC), but the same general threat/pressure has existed on and off from day one.