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How about profit loss on interstate highway

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They all pay the fuel tax! Amtrak pays the railroads funds to use their tracks. Airplanes pay the landing fees at airports. Trucking firms pay for state licenses. As far as I am concerned it is a wash. Usually over a period of several years, toll roads pay for themselves. However, most of the trucking industry travel on free highways and freeways. The government gets nothing in return except incomes taxes on income from the trucking firms and airlines. Since Amtrak is owned by the government it does not pay an income tax, a hoax really, since there isn't any profit at all in the passenger train business. I suggest you surf over to the DOT budget pages at its web site. You will begin to notice that the DOT spent $33 billion last year on highways, $11 billion on airports, runways and terminals (not to mention the $16 billion in loan bailouts), $7 billion on intracity buses and rail systems, and $512 million (plus $200 in loans) on Amtrak. You will also notice that Amtrak pays the railroads for their usage of their track and that a few of the railroads received a $20 million bonus for acheiving 90 percent on time arrivals in dispatching (sadly the Union Pacific did not receive this easy money). Amtrak is definitely the second cousin once removed when it comes to federal funding. Starved of captial, it leases just about everything: its engines, its cars, many of its stations and depots. If Amtrak was given a proper capital budget, Amtrak could then afford to purchase equipment and real estate which would eventually cost less in the long run. Who knows, Amtrak might turn a profit one year the future. This is good and bad news. The good news is that Amtrak can easily lease new spaces and or equipment easily. The bad news is for a company with so much debt it has to pay quite a bit of interests to pay off its debts. The most interesting thing about this is just about everything else the government is involved in is in the same situation too.....; lots of debt, paying lots of interests, without much capital. It is the way government works, obviously, it is not the way most successful business work. Some in Congress are attempting to place the blame on Amtrak's management. Yet, Congress has failed since its inception to provide Amtrak with an adequate capital budget to run Amtrak as a profitable business! These congressmen are being hyprocrites, and they know it. If you read some of my other posts about Amtrak, we can afford and can operate a national passenger railroad network of high speed rail with new trainsets that would be the envy of the world when we decide to fund the enterprise fully. Any half steps and efforts will fail..... For starters, we need to run our trains on time. Luckily most of the nation's trains run pretty close to on time. Yet on Union Pacific tracks, our trains do not run anywhere near to close on time. Two trains are heavily affected by this unfortunate fact: the Texas Eagle and the Sunset Limited. While the Eagle is nearly full leaving Chicago, by the time it gets to San Antonio it is nearly empty. No one in Texas catches this train to go south, because it is usually 3-4 hours late, if not more. One can easily catch a bus to go south, and get to your destination long before the Eagle arrives. Most Texans catch this train to go either north, east, or west far past Texas. No local business means no local customers on this train. The Sunset Limited is the same story plus a twist, it gets to San Antonio in the wee hours of the morning, that is if it is on time which it never is. Sometimes the Eagle gets there in the wee hours of the morning too. Most people in Texas are more interested in sleeping at those hours rather than interested in catching a train....
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