This has been discussed here in the past. In order to be able to market the lie-flat seats at a price point lower than coach, you'd have to be able to fit more of them into a rail car than you can fit sleeping berths in a sleeping car. A viewliner sleeper has 12 roomettes, 2 bedrooms, and a Handicapped room, for a total of about 30 berths. The Amfleet 2 long-distance coaches hold about 60 passengers. Thus, you need to price sleepers at twice the coach fare minimum in order to yield the same revenue. Plus, you'd like to price it higher to yield the gravy from the premium level service that cross-subsidizes the operation of the whole train. The design problem is whether it's possible to fit 40 lie-flat berths in a standard rail car. (Come to think of it, in the days of the classic streamliners, there were coaches that had 40-odd seats.) We've had some discussions on this, but we're posting in an internet forum, not having a serious discussion among railcar design engineers. If it can work, it's certainly a good idea.
Yes and no. It is much easier to sell all of the lie-flat seats in a car than it is to sell all of the berths in a sleeper. However, since the sleeper fare is fixed regardless of the number of passengers in the room, we are really just talking about the rail fare.
The theory is that there is a segment of the population that does not want to ride in coach, but cannot afford the high sleeper prices. Their budget is somewhere in between.
Something seems amiss with your first dollar figure. At the present high bucket Family Bedroom rate for three adults from GBB to LAX, the round trip fare should have been 2(1827 + 460) = $4574. To get closer to the $8,000 you mentioned would require booking two Family bedrooms for those three adults, or 2[(1827 + 230) + 1827] = $7768.
Or maybe Arrow churned up a multi-train on the EB (or CZ) and the CS?
Me. Too.
Computing cost of operation involves quite a large chunk of allocated cost for shared services, which depends on how the costs are allocated, and is a matter of great deal of dispute. So while it would be nice to have a crisp number apparently it is easier asked for than provided.
They have a model for this in Queensland, Australia. It's a 2-1 configuration (on the "2" side, the aisle bed is a little shorter than the window bed). It's got some first-generation teething problems, but I think it shows promise. If you could get a design that takes up about seven feet per row, that probably gets you somewhere in the ballpark of 30-35 seats (you might lose one for wheelchair access somewhere or something similar) depending on bathroom needs and the like. While that's only "on par with" a standard Viewliner, there's also a lot of "wasted" capacity from singles in roomettes (e.g. if half of your roomette pax are solo pax, then your effective capacity is 24 on a Viewliner I and 22.5 on a Viewliner II). So a car that had, say, 31 lie-flat beds (9 rows of 3, two rows of 2 due to some mix aisle configuration/ADA window seats or 10 rows of 3 and one of 1 opposite luggage racks/facilities due to configuration) would arguably be adding about 8-9 "spaces" (or about 35-40% more capacity) vs the reality of the Viewliner.
