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[quote user="henry6"] [quote user="blue streak 1"] [quote user="schlimm"] sam1:  Thanks for the numbers.  Sadly, I suppose that the El Paso example is repeated over and over. at the present the El Paso example is a good example of waste.  [/quote] [/quote] and the unwed mother around the corner who gets $20 more a week in assistance than she should is also a good example of the rampant waste of government spending!  Come on!  This is BS!  Political postering that one bad thing in one place means every place in the Country has the same bad thing happening.  Scare tactic to be a scare mongering Populist to gain power of one's own convictions no matter how unfounded or how weak they may be![/quote] The El Paso situation is repeated up and down the line for Amtrak's long distance trains, with the exception of the east coast, where many points see four trains movements per day.  In Texas, the only staffed stations that see more than one train a day are Fort Worth and San Antonio, and in the case of SA it only happens four days per week. Texarkana, Marshall, Longview, Dallas, Fort Worth, Temple, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and El Paso are staffed Amtrak stations in Texas.  I don't know the number of employees for each station, although in the case of Dallas, where I lived for 32 years and return frequently on Amtrak, they have at least six employees.  Fort Worth appears to have a similar number.  Lets say, for argument sakes, that Amtrak has an average of four employees for each of its staffed stations in Texas.  If this number is accurate, then it takes an average of 40 employees to staff the stations.  These employees would be classified as customer service representatives in the Bureau of Labor Statistics wage database.  The average national pay for customer service representatives in 2008 (latest verifable data) was $40,960.  Comparative data shows that Amtrak's wages are competitive with national averages.  If this is true, then the wage cost to staff the stations in Texas would be in the neighborhood of $1,638,400.  Add an average payroll loading of 35 per cent, which is common in the U.S., and the annual compensation package for Texas station employees works out to be $2,211,840.  And this is just for Texas.  Whether the cost to staff Amtrak's Texas stations, at least, is wasteful is debatable, but clearly it is not very efficient, which was the original point.  Moreover, there is nothing political in arguing that the cost of staffing a station for two train movements a day is costly and inefficient.
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