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[quote user="Flashwave"][quote user="henry6"][quote user="Samantha"] I would eliminate all of them.  They bring in only 23 per cent of Amtrak's revenues while racking up 142 per cent of the operating expenses before other charges.  After other charges they eat up 48 per cent of the federal subsidy required to cover Amtrak's loses, as per the 2007 operating and annual reports.  Although ridership is up in 2008, so are expenses.  As a result, some of the long distance trains are losing even more per passenger mile than the lost in the first eight months of 2007.   [/quote] You sound like an accountant!   Many businesses have suffered under such thinking.  When you order a sandwich in a resturant they could elimiate the pickle or chips, the lettuce, the mayo, even the plate because they are all extra to the two pieces of bread and a piece of meat!  I know Amtrak is not a sandwich, but I have enounterd so many businesses who have suffered with that kind of thinking.  Railroads who had shed branch lines and local services because there was a cost attached lost the business to trucks thus they had no cars to put on their long distance trains so they elminiated the whole railroad.  So when you are providing a service, such as a rail passenger service, you have to look at the whole of the operation and know that this train or that feeds into the system so that the whole system somehow succeeds.  Maybe what we really should be looking at is what I have advocated over the past several years and that is rationalize groups of regional systems inter linked with services.  Maybe there would be one train that linked it all from Portland, ME to Portland, OR, maybe not; but some kind of model based on regional needs coupled with inter regional needs has to be looked at.[/quote]I;ll shorten this: WHy have a XCorridor if I can;t go anywhere?[/quote]Amtrak classifies the Hoosier State as a State Supported and Other Short Distance Corridor Train.  If Amtrak discontinued the Cardinal, Indiana could run the Hoosier State as a daily train.The overwhelming majority of Amtrak's passengers have shown that they do not want to ride a train across the country.  They take the train for relatively short distances.  For FY 2007 the average distance traveled by an Amtrak passenger was approximately 220 miles.  However, this figure is distorted by the relatively small number of people who rode one of the long distance trains.  Most passengers travel less than 150 miles on Amtrak.I am a retired CPA.  A railroad is not a restaurant.  The railroads, which are equity companies, shed branch lines, giving up the traffic to truckers or turning it over to short line operators, because they were losing money operating the branch lines.  This also is the reason why they gave up passenger service.  Most commercial activities in the United States, indeed the western world, are operated by private enterprise.  The objective of a business is to cover all of its costs and return something to the owners, i.e. shareholders in the case of a corporation.  Accountants don't tell management what products and services to offer.  They don't tell them what business they should be in.  They don't advise management on marketing strategies.  But the do tell them how much it costs to run the business, product line by product line, and how much they have to charge to cover their costs and provide a return to the shareholders.  How much management prices the service is a management decision, although most managers and executives turn to their accountants for advice on pricing.    Amtrak, interesting, is a government sponsored business.  However, it has never come close to covering its costs, and it probably never will.  It came into existence because the privately owned railroads could not make money on their passenger service; in fact, it was killing them, and they told the government that they were going to get out of the railroad passenger business.  The Nixon Administration stepped in and formed the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak) as a quasi government business because it perceived that it would be politically unpopular to allow the nation's remaining passenger trains to be discontinued.  Thus, they opted to turn a commercial enterprise into a social service.  Most insiders at the time knew that Amtrak would never turn a profit.    One can make a reasonable case for trains as a social service in high density corridors where the cost of building additional highway and airway capacity is prohibitive.  There is, however, no case for long distance passenger trains as per Amtrak's classification.
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