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[quote user="oltmannd"] From Amtrak's 2011 annual report: "Total Expenses Selected Financial Data (in millions) Salaries, wages and benefits expenses increased by $155.3 million to $1.9 billion in fiscal year 2011, compared with fiscal year 2010, primarily because of: (i) $25.3 million increase in management salaries..... ...Management salaries increased primarily because of an increase in headcount and an increase in salaries because of the annual merit process and employee promotions." Same number of trains, same routes, same locations, same fleet size, so why more mgt employees? Also, I don't get the increase due to promotions.  Unless you are creating positions to promote people into, the flow of retirees out the door and new hires in the door should make this a wash. So, if they can save only $10M of the $25 a year by not hiring additional staff every year, that'll pay the ongoing cost for the SW Ltd.  Maybe if they cut some staff, they could come up with the $100M for the replacement rail for the route. [/quote] As long as Amtrak does not have any competition for intercity passenger rail, it has little incentive to do things better, faster, cheaper. Before competition came to the electric utility industry in Texas, most of the companies had morphed into bloated bureaucracies. As long as the escalating costs could be gotten by the PUC, there was little incentive to do things better, faster, cheaper.  Then competition came to the industry.  All of a sudden we determined that we could get by with six layers of management instead of 13 and 10, 500 employees instead of 17,250.  And whilst this was taken place, our customer base increased by 25 per cent to 3.3 million. One way forward would be to bid the routes to the lowest effective cost operator, with an independent third party taking control of Amtrak's infrastructure, and opening it up to anyone who can meet the standards. The issues are complex and beyond the scope of this post, but the country needs to think outside of the Amtrak box regarding intercity passenger rail. Maybe the California and Florida experiments will show the way.
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