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[quote user="John WR"] Sam,   If you look at "Railway Post Office" in September's Trains (the paper magazine)  you will find a letter from Robert J. Stewart, the Chairman of the National Association of Railroad Passengers.  He addresses exactly the issue you bring up and some other important issues to.  I can't reproduce the whole letter but her is a little bit of it:  "Ticket revenues for many of these [long distance] trains cover 75 per cent of operating costs and up to 95 per cent of the costs of labor, fuel, supplies, cleaning, and maintenance.  Contrast that with the highway system where taxes and tolls cover only 52 per cent of costs." [/quote] My numbers came from Amtrak's financial reports. NARP is an advocacy group that spins numbers, without any meaningful supporting data, to make its case. I belonged to NARP for a year or two, but gave up my membership because of their tendency to distort data.  Several years ago NARP noted on it webpage that the FAA had received an infusion of $1.6 billion from the federal government for the Aviation Trust Fund. They claimed that it all flowed to the commercial airlines. FAA operations cover commercial, general aviation and military operations in civilian airspace. Commercial aviation accounts for approximately 30 per cent of tower controlled operations and 35 per cent of enroute control operations as per the FAA performance reports. Allocating the total transfer to the commercial airlines is improper cost accounting. I brought this to NARPs attention. It did not register because they did not want it to hear it. Frankly, I believe little if anything that I read in the popular press without checking primary source documents.  If I want to know about the accounting and finance for an activity, I dig into the public and private financials.  More often than not I download the data to an Excel spreadsheet and run a variety of analytic tests on it.    The issue is whether long distance trains, which are used by less than one per cent of intercity travelers, are worth a $600 to $650 million raid on the pubic treasury. Highway subsidies, which is a complex issue, has nothing to do with long distance trains or any other trains.
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