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If Amtrak carried 120 million passengers

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[quote user="Phoebe Vet"] Comparing the percentage of seat miles sold is not a fair measure of rail vs air.  Most air travel is from point a to point b.  That makes it much easier to size the aircraft and thus the number of seats to the route.  A train travels a long route with intermediate stops all along the way.  The train must have enough seats for the highest volume portion of the route.  They cannot then shed seats for the remainder of the trip.  They must therefore bear the burden of unneeded seats for part of the trip. [/quote] The measure is about asset turnover, which is a measure of productivity.  Fairness has nothing to do with it. The Pennsylvanian, as an example, on its run from Pittsburgh to New York, makes 16 stops including the end points.  A typical Southwest Airlines bird may go from Dallas to Houston, Harlingen, back to Dallas, Lubbock, Albuquerque, Denver, San Jose, LA, and Phoenix, where it ties up for the night. And it does it all in one day. Same concept as the train, except the airplane is more efficient than the train.   Using sophisticated mathematical models, Southwest deploys enough seats for its high volume periods. No one, as far as I know, takes out seats if the airplane or the train or the bus does not sell out. It is all about anticipated load factors, which are predicated on seat mile yield, which in turn determine the type of airplane to be deployed as well as the frequency of the flights.  The problem for a railway train is unit productivity. It simply cannot match the productivity of an airplane except over relatively short distances with high volumes.
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