QUOTE: Originally posted by Paul Milenkovic Don Oltmann: I am really interested in the matter of Amtrak load factors and fuel economy because of the burgeoning debate. Various "right-wing Amtrak and rail critics" give numbers and arguments why rail doesn't measure up, but you have to run those articles "through a filter" because they have a political platform. I am trying to work off numbers from government agencies which should be at least neutral on this. I followed jeaton's suggestion of going to the Amtrak Monthly Financial Statements, which is rough sledding because they are huge things to download and a lot of their spreadsheets are turned sideways. They place a big, big emphasis on riders (a "political" metric) and the sort of railroad operations numbers of passenger miles, load factors, train-car miles are buried someplace. They seem to be reporting 55 percent summer load factors, about 45 percent year-round load factors -- that is great news because you can't push load factors much higher without really making Amtrak travel inconvenient and unavailable. But they were reporting an annual fuel/electric bill of 180 million dollars, and assuming they are paying a wholesale/before road tax fuel/energy price of about a dollar per gallon of gas equivalent, and dividing into their fiscal-year passenger miles, I came up with 25 passenger miles per gallon, which squares with the Oak Ridge boys (the ORNL-DOE report). I want to keep working on getting better numbers because those numbers are key to answering Amtrak critics. How do the different types of train (long-distance, NEC, other corridor) do on fuel use, car-miles, passenger-miles load factor. The pro-Amtrak side needs hard numbers, not pro-train sentiments, and if the numbers are mixed, some favorable others unfavorable, we need to know what they are and face the facts.
I tried to sell my two cents worth, but no one would give me a plug nickel for it.
I don't have a leg to stand on.
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
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