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This thread has gone off on a lot of tangents. I'm just going to tackle a couple, taking issue with  both sides of the debate. [quote user="SFbrkmn"]Please don't be fooled by this yaking going on up there of sub contracting out routes. First it is an attempt by the anti Amtrakers, pro airline bunch to slowly kill the system. [/quote]Though I am very pro-passenger rail, I am not wedded to Amtrak as a concept. I don't care who is running the trains as long as they are running. Having said that, I have yet to see an alternative proposal put forth in sufficient detail to convince me it will work any better than, or even as well as what we have now, but that doesn't mean there aren't any good ideas out there somewhere. I'm keeping an open mind about the privitization issue. There are several ways it might be done successfully, and if it makes train travel more economical it is all to the good.  One must be careful not to step blindly into a proposal, but the Senate bill's option to open two routes to experimentation seems like a cautious way to test new ideas. One such idea might involve returning passenger service to the private railroads who own the tracks, with some sort of tax incentives, publicly funded infrastructure improvements, or even direct subsidies in exchange for meeting a prescribed set of service standards. Another scenario might keep Amtrak as the operator of reservation systems, locomotives, and operational crews, while contracting out everything behind the locomotives to operators who would be required to maintain certain service standards. If they fail to meet those standards or another operator bids for a lower cost, another operator might be chosen. I'm not saying these would work, but I don't want to automatically say they can't, either. Moving on to... [quote user="Paul Milenkovic"]  Senator Sununu's $200 per passenger subsidy cap may be a political maneuver, but it is a clever maneuver in that it frames the question in a way that we don't want to engage the debate.  What is a more appropriate subsidy cap -- $400 per passenger boarding?  $1000 per passenger boarding?  No cap, whatever it takes to provide the service?  If the in excess of $200 per passenger boarding for an LD train is a ficticious number owing to accounting practices, what is the correct numbers, or are we just going to wave our hands that we don't know the correct number, but it has to be less than $200?[/quote]It may be a clever political tactic, but it is simplistic (as most political tactics tend to be.) It ignores the complexities involved in the accounting. I don't think Amtrak even reports "loss per passenger" figures anymore. When they did, they reported fully allocated costs, not direct costs, and there is a huge difference.Direct costs are those associated with the day to day operation of a train, such as labor, fuel, supplies, cleaning, maintenence, etc. They do not include costs for reservation centers, real estate, infrastructure, and other fixed costs.  Fully allocated costs refer to every thing Amtrak pays for, right down to the wages of the janitor who dumps the trash in Alex Kummant's office. These are allocated to each train as part of each train's costs. However, most of these costs are not directly related to a particular train's operations. More importantly, these are costs that won't go away if a few trains are shut down. If a train goes away, those costs are simply reallocated to surviving trains, making their losses "increase" even though their individual financial performance, measured in direct costs, doesn't actually change.Fully allocated costs give you a picture of what is happening with Amtrak as a whole, but is useless in measuring the financial performance of an individual train. Thus Sununu's tactic is erroneous in its premise and ineffective at actually reducing losses. I take the opposite view. If eliminating trains does not reduce fixed costs, then why not add trains to spread those fixed costs over a greater number of routes so the loss per passenger or passenger mile could also be reduced while at the same time increasing mobility and choice for the traveling public? Amtrak can't achieve economies of scale with its present skeletal network. I don't know how large Amtrak's system would need to be to achieve critical mass (URPA estimates about three times its current size - in passenger traffic if not route mileage), but I am convinced that cutting routes won't help Amtrak's bottom line.   Here's and Amtrak fact sheet on this subject:  http://www.amtrak.com/pdf/LongDistanceTrains.pdf
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