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[quote user="Falcon48"] With respect to the ongoing discussion between Sam1 and CMStPnP on whether railroads made money on their passenger services and what they said about the profitability of their services in theuir financial statements, I took the advice of one of them (I forget which) and looked at some of the Milwaukee Road annula reports available on the web at the following address: <a href="http://milwaukeeroadarchives.com/AnnualReports/MilwaukeeRoadAnnualReports.htm">http://milwaukeeroadarchives.com/AnnualReports/MilwaukeeRoadAnnualReports.htm</a>  I looked at every fifth year from 1940 through 1970 (the year before Amtrak took over), and what I found was interesting. As far as I can tell, the Milwaukee didn't even try to quantify the overall profitability or unprofitability of its passenger services in its annual reports, and it can't be determined from the figures the railroad reported. The reason it can't be determined is that the reports separately show passenger operating income (passenger, mail and express), but they don't seperately show passenger operating expense.  Rather, both freight and passenger operating expenses are lumped together.  I haven't looked at other RR's reports (I'm not masochistic enough to spend the evening doing that) but they are probably the same, because they should have all been based on ICC Rail Form A.  I suspect (but do not know) that the reason there's no segregation of passenger operating expenses is that the ICC couldn't come up with a principled way to allocate railroad operating expenses between freight and passenger services on a system basis. [/quote] Thanks!  Now I don't have to go there. Another key point is that the reporting by the Milwaukee may have been an outlier.  To know what the other carriers reported regarding the passenger segment, one would have to take a statistical sample from all the reports, which would be a daunting task to be sure. Sounds to me like you were a lawyer involved in railroad law and regulation.  Correct?
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