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"I think they just put the Avoidable Costs together as one would to determine a cost function at a factory or business, count heads, material, expendables from an analysis of the operations and internal records."  So you really don't know anymore about the avoidable costs than you know how Amtrak allocates its indirect costs! A job description is going to tell me how the PRIIA teams arrived at the avoidable costs in 2009?  I have written hundreds of job descriptions. They say what someone should do in a job.  They don't tell anyone what a person did in 2009 or 2013 or at any time.  Job descriptions are window dressings in most instances. .   I could come up with a pretty good guess re: the avoidable costs (short and long term) at least by categories. Most costs associated with a product line - long distance trains - are avoidable over time, at least in the case of an aggressive, competitive business. If a real business doesn't deal aggressively with the avoidable costs of its discontinued product lines, it eventually goes out of business. Anyone reasonably familiar with financial and cost accounting knows that the numbers for the long distance trains don't add up. They are a financial sink hole, and they will remain one no matter how much lipstick Amtrak puts on this pig. Amtrak has more than 40 years to get it right with the long distance trains; they have failed miserably. My challenge was to you. You make reference to numbers that supposedly have been validated, but when challenged you cannot come up with any meaningful support.  Unless you believe that numbers generated five or 14 years ago are meaningful support!  Fobbing the question off on a job description is unbelievable! You don't have access to Amtrak's books.  Neither do I, by the way, but I don't profess to have the access or know how Amtrak has arrived at many of its numbers.  I don't speculate. I will project trend lines, i.e. opportunity costs, but whenever I do so I make it crystal clear what rates I am using, etc. I pretty much stick with the audit numbers published by Amtrak.  All of the numbers I showed for Amtrak Texas come from the company's audited financials.  Most of the PRIIA recommendations fell on deaf ears, which suggests that they were not very compelling.
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