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[quote user="V.Payne"] Would you care to break out how much of the capital expenditure is really for commuter operations on the NEC? The problem in going from the financial statements is Amtrak keeps wildly swinging the unit output to which the capital cost is assigned. My sense is the number crunchers keep trying to make the numbers fit the Volpe hypothesis without going back to check the hypothesis from the source documents. There was a time around 1973 or 1974 where the USDOT recognized that some level of subsidy was equivalent to what was going on in the rest of the federally funded system. Back then the figure allowed was $0.02/PM, $0.09/PM in $2010, or about $0.125 per equivalent automobile VM at a 1.4 person average occupancy. This still holds true from the calculations in my paper on the other post. Here is a fun little article on the National Limited from that era, where the $0.02/PM is cited, apparently the train made a solely allocated profit in the summer. http://bulk.resource.org/gao.gov/91-518/00005252.pdf [/quote] As of the end of FY11 Amtrak showed under Property and Equipment on its Consolidated Balance sheet $9,971,446 for right-of-way and other properties before depreciation.  This would include its investments in the NEC as well as its other rights-of-way, maintenance facilities, etc., to the extent that they were not leases, although it would depend on the nature of the lease.  In a nutshell, without access to the company's property accounting records, it is not possible to know how much of this investment is attributable to the NEC, and it is clearly not possible to know how much of it is attributable to the NEC commuter operations. Amtrak owns 363 of the 456 or 457 route miles between Boston and Washington. The other 94 miles are owned by commuter rail agencies. The federal government put up the money to upgrade Amtrak's portion of the NEC, I presume, and the cost of the investment is included somewhere in the number for right-of-way and other properties. How the capital cost for the upgrade of the portion of the NEC owned by the commuter rail agencies was accounted for is unknown. It is probably carried on the books of the commuter rail agency, but without access to those books, it is impossible to know for sure. The commuter agencies bill Amtrak for its use of the portions of the NEC owned by the commuter rail agencies. By the same token Amtrak bills the foreign carriers that operate on its segments of the NEC. If Amtrak funded the capital improvements on the NEC owned by the commuter rail agencies, the agency would have to adjust its billing back to Amtrak to reflect this fact.  Otherwise it would be double billing Amtrak. You probably could get Amtrak's property accounting records under the Freedom of Information Act. The Amtrak Inspector General's website has a procedure for filing an FOIA request. To be successful you would have to tell Amtrak exactly what records you wanted.  It would cost you $38 an hour to get them. To get the information you want would entail a considerable amount of work. You would probably be looking at thousands of dollars of fees to get the information.
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