Amtrak Crows About Ridership Gains

Amtrak on Tuesday touted ridership gains during fiscal year 2021 in a news release issued two days before a public meeting of its board of directors.

The release, though, presented a mixed picture of the passenger rail carrier’s finances.

Although ridership was up substantially on Amtrak’s three business lines, revenue fell in two of the three.

The report covers the period of Oct. 1, 2021, to Sept.30, 2022, which mirrors the federal fiscal year.

Ridership in the Northeast Corridor rose 110 percent while state corridor services ridership was up 85 percent and long-distance train patronage was up 56 percent.

However, the operating revenue of $2.8 billion in FY2022 was 15 percent below that of FY 2019, the last period to begin before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in March 2020 and sent ridership and revenue plummeting across all business lines.

The report sought to put a positive spin on revenue by saying the adjusted operating earnings at $884.9 million were an 18.2 percent improvement over fiscal 2021 and “$145 million ahead of Amtrak’s FY22 plan due to strong ticket revenue growth.”

The report will be presented to Amtrak’s directors at a meeting on Thursday in St. Louis.

The report released on Tuesday does not provide revenue information by route or business category.

That is consistent with past practices of the carrier to omit this information from public reports.

Earlier this year, Trains magazine reported that information it obtained showed long-distance revenue was up 23 percent in FY2022 compared with FY2019 while revenue for the Northeast Corridor and state corridor services were both down about 30 percent.

The report Amtrak released this week said it expects ridership and revenue to improve above 90 percent of pre-COVID levels by the end of FY2023.

Amtrak Lost $1.08B in FY2021

Amtrak lost $1.08 billion in adjusted operating earnings during fiscal year 2021.

In a report summarizing its FY2021 activities, the passenger carrier blamed the loss largely on lost revenue from ridership plunges during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The report said Amtrak provided 12.2 million passenger trips, an increase of 4 million over FY2020 ridership.

Ridership in FY2021 was 42 percent over the goal and has now reached 70 percent of pre-pandemic levels.  More than half of the FY2021 ridership came in the second half of the fiscal year.

Amtrak said it expects ridership in FY2022, which runs through Sept. 30, 2022, to be 80 percent of its pre-pandemic level.

The report emphasized that the fiscal results are preliminary. The adjusted operating earnings were $400 million “ahead of plan,” Amtrak said.

During FY2021, Amtrak said it advanced $2.2 billion in capital spending, including major milestones such as the acquiring property for the Hudson Tunnel Project between New Jersey and New York City and buying new multi-powered trainsets from Siemens Mobility.

FY2021 Figures Show How Much Ridership, Revenue Amtrak has Lost in the Pandemic

Amtrak’s fiscal year ended on Sept. 30 and information on how the passenger carrier performed during the COVID-19 pandemic is starting to trickle in and show the scope of how much revenue and ridership it lost.

The pandemic overlapped two fiscal years to date, 2020 and 2021. Amtrak’s fiscal year extends from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30.

In FY 2021, ticket revenue and ridership were both down 63 percent compared with FY 2019, the last “normal” year Amtrak had before the onset of the pandemic.

In FY 2021 Amtrak generated $882.8 million compared with FY 2019 mark of $2.3 billion.

Ridership in FY 2021 was 12.8 million passengers compared with 32.8 million in FY 2019.

All three of Amtrak’s services – long distance, Northeast Corridor and state-supported corridor services – lost revenue and ridership in FY 2021.

In response to the pandemic, Amtrak reduced service by offering fewer trains. Although no long-distance trains were suspended, all but the Auto Train operated on tri-weekly or quad-weekly schedules.

On a percentage basis, the long-distance trains lost the least amount of revenue with compared with FY 2019. The percentage loss was 33 percent.

State supported trains revenue fell by 61 percent while in NEC services fell by 74 percent.

Ridership on a percentage basis fell 51 percent in FY 2021 compared with FY 2019. The corresponding  percentage declines for state services and the NEC were 64 percent and 65 percent respectively.

Revenue for long distance trains for the past three fiscal years has been 330.7 million, 308.2 million and $494.6 million.

For state services it was 209.3 million, $281.7 million and 538.1 million. For the NEC the corresponding numbers are 882.8 million, 1,241.6 billion and $2.354.3 billion.

Ridership of long distance trains by fiscal year from 2021 to 2019 was 2,238.0 million, 2,689.5 million and 4,554.8 million.

For state service the ridership numbers for the same period are 5,519.9 million, 8,004.3 million and 15,438.8 million.

For the NEC the ridership numbers were 4,408.8 million, 6,417.5 million and 12,526.6 million.

It should be noted that FY 2020 straddled the pre-pandemic and pandemic eras.

Among the long distance trains, the Auto Train managed to earn more in FY 2021 (85.7 million) compared with FY 2019 (76.7 million).

One reason given for that was the fact that the Auto Train continued to operate daily between fall 2020 and late spring 2021 and high rental car prices in Florida triggered by a shortage of rental vehicles encouraged traveling to take their own vehicles on the Auto Train.

The Auto Train, though, had reduced capacity just as did other long distance trains.

Although most state corridor services that were suspended during the pandemic have been restored, corridor trains that extend in Canada are still not operating across the border due to pandemic-related travel restrictions.

This includes the New York-Montreal Adirondack, the New York-Toronto Maple Leaf and the Seattle-Vancouver Cascades. These continue operate within the United States.

Rail Passenger Future Gains Some Clarity

With the signing of legislation this week granting another round of federal stimulus funding and giving final approval to federal spending for fiscal year 2021, we now have some clarity on what the nation’s rail passenger system will look like over the next several months.

It is likely to look a lot like it does today, meaning it will be more Spartan that it was a year ago with long-distance trains continuing to operate on less-than-daily schedules and reduced levels of corridor service trains.

Amtrak was granted $1 billion in pandemic emergency funding, which Amtrak CEO William Flynn characterized as a band aid that will get the passenger carrier through to the spring when he said additional funding will be needed.

That’s the same level of emergency funding Amtrak received from the CARES Act adopted last March in the early weeks of the pandemic.

The latest emergency aid given Amtrak bans it from furloughing additional workers or reducing services further, but that is not the same thing as a mandate to restore service that has already been suspended or recalling workers who have been furloughed.

In a statement, Flynn tied service restorations, employee recalls and moving ahead on capital projects to Amtrak receiving additional funding next year.

As for FY 2021, Amtrak received $2.8 billion of which $1.3 billion is for the national network and state-supported corridor services.

That is not much more than the $2 billion the passenger carrier sought back in February before the pandemic began and well short of the $4.9 billion for FY2021 that it sought last October.

The legislation contained a policy rider expressing the sense of Congress that Amtrak is to operate long-distance routes in order to provide connectivity throughout the intercity passenger carrier’s network and provide transportation to rural areas.

That is far from being a mandate to restore daily operation to trains that shifted to less-than-daily operation, primarily tri-weekly, last October and July.

The rail passenger advocacy community may be united in believing that less-than-daily long distance trains are a bad idea, but Amtrak management is doing it anyway.

The downsides of less-than-daily service have received a lot of ink and bandwidth from railroad trade publication and railfan magazines, but that hasn’t moved the needle of Amtrak management’s behavior much if at all.

Amtrak has shown some sensitivity to the accusation that reducing long-distance trains to less-than-daily service is part of a larger plot to eliminate those trains.

In interviews and congressional testimony Flynn has tried to frame the service cuts as a temporary response to plunging ridership triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic that has also devastated ridership of airlines and buses.

He and Amtrak Chairman Anthony Coscia have sought to underscore that Amtrak is committed to having a national network.

That is not necessarily a commitment to operating that network at the same level of service that existed at the beginning of 2020 or even operating that network in perpetuity.

Flynn’s most recent statement about the latest emergency aid said nothing about when daily service will return to long-distance routes.

He told Congress in October that daily service might be restored in May “when financially possible.” That is hardly an ironclad promise.

In looking back at the fight over the past few months over rail passenger service cuts a couple of conclusions come to mind.

First, without public funding there are not going to be passenger trains of any kind. That particularly has been illustrated by the service cuts in state-supported corridor service.

The Chicago-Detroit corridor went from three trains a day to one, which reduced service to the lowest level it has been in the nearly 50 years of Amtrak operation.

Other corridors that had multiple daily frequencies saw service cuts as well and a few state-supported corridors that were suspended have yet to resume operations.

Second, passenger train advocates continue to lack the political clout needed to realize their visions of an expansive intercity passenger rail network.

Advocates have done well at keeping Amtrak funding at a suitable level to maintain a skeletal level of intercity rail passenger service but have failed to prevent Amtrak and its state partners from making service cuts when ridership and revenue plunged during the pandemic.

Congress has not shown a willingness to unlock the federal piggy bank to open-ended levels of financial support for intercity rail passenger service.

Getting intercity rail passenger service back to where it was in early 2020 is going to be a long, hard slog.

The end of the pandemic may be in sight, but it might take much longer to get there than many want to believe.

Although it seems likely that significant numbers of people will want to travel again, airline industry observers have talked about a four-year time frame to get air service travel back to where it was before the pandemic took hold.

It is not unrealistic to think intercity rail service might be operating under a similar time frame.

It may be that pent up demand will move that up slightly in the next year or two but that is going to hinge on how quickly the economy grows and how soon larger numbers of people feel confident that traveling and unfettered social interaction are safe again.

Amtrak Lost $801M in FY2020

Amtrak warned yet again on Monday that further service cuts are possible unless Congress increases its federal funding for the passenger carrier in fiscal year 2021.

Funding for Amtrak and other federally-funded programs is currently being provided under a continuing resolution approved by Congress in late September that expires on Dec. 11.

That resolution calls for interim funding in FY2021 to be at the same levels as FY2020, which ended on Sept. 30.

“If the current level of funding is extended in a continuing resolution beyond Dec. 11 . . . and supplemental funding isn’t provided we’re going to be unable to avoid taking fairly difficult actions that could have long-lasting effects on our Northeast Corridor infrastructure and the national rail system,” said Amtrak CEO William Flynn.

Flynn said the carrier needs additional emergency funding for the remainder of the fiscal year.

If Amtrak funding continues at its current levels, Flynn said as many as 1,600 workers operating state-supported trains could be furloughed.

Amtrak Senior Executive Vice President Stephen Gardner said decisions on job and service cuts will be made based on how long the uncertainty remains.

In a news release, Amtrak said during FY2020 its operating revenue, including payments from state-supported routes, decreased 31.9 percent to $2.3 billion when compared with FY 2019.

Ticket revenue was down $1.24 billion or 47.3 percent.

During FY2020 Amtrak posted an unaudited operating loss of $801.1 million, which it attributed largely to lost ridership during the pandemic.

The carrier also reported advancing $1.9 billion in infrastructure and fleet work.

Amtrak Board Chairman Anthony Coscia said the passenger carrier projects that under current trends and future projections, ridership and revenue are expected to be down 63 percent by the end of fiscal 2021.

That would be worse than the 50 percent decline Amtrak management had predicted earlier when it announced its plans to reduce the operating frequency of most long-distance trains to tri-weekly.

Coscia said Amtrak intends to move forward on $2 billion in critical infrastructure work “that includes safety and reliability measures that we believe will permit the company to come through the pandemic with a railroad that was playing and will play in the nation’s economic recovery.”

He said Amtrak has more than $5 billion of additional investments that could contribute to recovery following the pandemic.

Amtrak said it provided 16.8 million customer trips in FY 2020, down 47.4 percent with a year-over-year decline of 15.2 million riders.

In recent months, ridership has dipped by 20 to 25 percent of pre-COVID levels.

Amtrak Looking Toward Post Pandemic World

Amtrak management is studying a number of scenarios for ramping service back up once the COVID-19 pandemic has passed.

In the meantime, though, the passenger carrier expects to lose $700 million in adjusted operating earnings as a result of the pandemic.

Amtrak Chairman Anthony Coscia along with new CEO William Flynn and Executive Vice President Stephen Gardner gave those assessments during a conference call with news reporters.

Amtrak ridership across its system has fallen by 95 percent and it has suspended 57 percent of its services.

Amtrak is receiving $1 billion in emergency federal aid and Coscia said that assistance will enable Amtrak to avoid having to tap its capital reserves and avoid employee layoffs.

He said that before the pandemic began Amtrak was “on track” to break even in operating earnings by Fiscal Year 2021 for the first time in the railroad’s history.

That figure counts as revenue funding that Amtrak receives from various state governments to operate corridor service.

Flynn said the carrier has been taking advantage of the lower ridership period to perform track work and other “critical” projects.

In looking to the future, Flynn said Amtrak officials are studying touchless technology at fare gates and changing some food service.

One idea being explored is enabling passengers to pre-order food and beverages from café cars.

Flynn said Amtrak expects it will take three months or more for ridership to return to pre-pandemic levels.

It is not clear when that clock would start. Some governors have been talking in recent days about easing social distancing restrictions on or after May 1, although some forms of social distancing are expected to remain in place either by mandate or recommendation.

Flynn said Amtrak has been researching various ideas of what the pandemic recovery will look like and have created several service plans based on “surveys of customer sentiment.”

In some instances, Flynn indicated, Amtrak will “introduce product ahead of demand.”

“We have to demonstrate to our customers that we have an attractive product that they will value when they come back,” Flynn said.

Gardner said Amtrak is looking at implementing new ticketing kiosks and text messaging to inform passengers where to head once they arrive at their station.

The downloadable schedules that have been removed from the Amtrak website will be reintroduced once services are restored.

Flynn said none of Amtrak’s unions have thus far shown an interest in delaying or giving up negotiated wage increases.

“But we continue to work with union leadership so they understand where we are in this crisis and how we are going to move forward,” he said.

Trains magazine reported that Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari said 58 percent of onboard service employees are on an extra board that guarantees them 150 hours per month of work.

Regularly assigned employees are guaranteed a 180-hour month, so their pay cut works out to about 16 percent.

“Engineers and conductors have a 40-hour-a-week guarantee, but many of them previously worked assignments that included overtime, which has been reduced,” Magliari said.

Pennsylvania Congressman Challenges Amtrak’s Depiction of How Well it is Doing Financially

An Amtrak vice president found himself under fire Wednesday by a skeptical congressman who expressed doubt that Amtrak’s finances are as strong as the carrier says they are.

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pennsylvania) told Amtrak’s Stephen Gardner that he took issue with Amtrak’s description of its finances.

Perry said $235 million that states provide to Amtrak to operate corridor services are subsidies and not passenger revenue.

He also expressed doubt about Amtrak’s claim that it is close to breaking even on an operating basis.

In particular, Perry said Amtrak’s net revenue figures fail to account for $870 million in depreciation in 2019. “This represents a loss of over a billion dollars,” Perry said.

In response, Gardner, who is a senior vice president and chief operating and commercial officer, said the payments are “very transparent.”

He said depreciation is “a cost primarily associated with our vast Northeast Corridor infrastructure funded by the federal government.”

A analysis posted on the website of Trains magazine said Gardner was in effect admitting that the full costs of operating trains in the Northeast Corridor don’t enter into the profit-loss equation that Amtrak presents.

The exchange occurred during a meeting of the House Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee.

The committee heard from six witnesses as it continues to work toward approval of surface transportation renewal legislation. The current surface transportation law expires on Sept. 30.

Rep Steve Cohen (D-Tennessee) continued to complain about Amtrak’s onboard dining services, saying he still hasn’t received any survey data from Amtrak that justified food service downgrades on eastern trains.

That comment was in reference to Amtrak’s replacement of full-service dining cars on overnight trains in the East, Midwest and South with a service now known as flexible dining.

Sleeping car passengers are served food prepared off the train in lieu of meals freshly prepared aboard the train.

Cohen said all he has heard from Amtrak passengers is that they don’t like the food, which is heated in a microwave oven.

“Millennials may like to look at their phones, but they don’t like bad food either,” Cohen said. “You need to put that back and attract more customers.”

In response Gardner said Cohen should receive the survey information by the end of the week.

“We have a variety of different services, and that requires us to experiment and try new ways to meet the requirements and needs of our traveling public,” Gardner said.

“We will continue to experiment to find the right mix, the right balance. For sure we know passengers expect a much broader set of food options — healthier choices than the historic railroad menu that had been offered. We also know people prefer a variety of different environments to eat in; it’s become quite clear that many people prefer to be served in their own rooms or to be able to use the dining car in a more flexible way.”

During his testimony Gardner appeared to contradict the feasibility of a plan put forth recently by U.S. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao that Amtrak should repair the tunnels leading into New York City from New Jersey beneath the Hudson River before building a new tunnel.

Amtrak and various public agencies in the two states have been seeking federal funding for a massive multibillion project to upgrade infrastructure in the Northeast Corridor.

The Gateway project includes building new Hudson River tunnels.

But federal officials have been resisting giving the project federal grants and have suggested the states need to greatly increase their financial contribution to the project.

Gardner initially tried to duck being critical of Chao’s proposal before finally acknowledging during questioning that he didn’t think rebuilding the existing tunnel before building a new one was a viable idea.

“We have to be able to excavate the current track structure, repair the drainage underneath, and inspect the tunnel lining — which hasn’t been looked at, frankly, in 109 years,” Gardner said.

“To do that during a four-hour slot in the evening or on a 55-hour weekend outage scenario could present incredible difficulty … which is why we have always proposed to do a full rehabilitation of the tunnels once new tunnels are in place, allowing us to maintain all of New Jersey Transit and Amtrak service.”

Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Massachusetts) ripped Amtrak for using non-union contractors at a Chicago worksite.

“It shakes my confidence in Amtrak … With all the challenges we have,” Lynch asked, “do you really want to pick that fight to try to save a couple of bucks by bringing in workers who don’t have ongoing regular training on rail systems? As an iron worker, it’s a very different environment when you’re working on a live transportation system.”

Lynch is a former iron worker and organized labor official.

Gleaning Insights Into Amtrak’s Anderson

Amtrak CEO Richard Anderson is not one for giving interviews so much of what we know about his views of the future of his railroad must be gleaned from his public behavior and statements made in Congressional hearings.

Richard Anderson

The Wall Street Journal recently published a profile of Anderson that portrayed him as being stubborn, focused and the type of person who loves a good fight.

The article mentioned a June 2018 meeting that Anderson had with a group of six U.S. senators and one congressman about the fate of the Chicago-Los Angeles Southwest Chief.

At the time, Amtrak was proposing operating the train between Chicago and Dodge City, Kansas; and between Los Angeles and Albuquerque.

Passengers would ride a bus for the 475-mile gap between Kansas and Albuquerque.

The sticking point was Amtrak’s refusal to pay to install positive train control on the BNSF route over Raton Pass near the Colorado-New Mexico border.

BNSF has little to no freight traffic on the route and won’t pay for it and Anderson told the lawmakers that the PTC issue was for Amtrak a “math problem.”

Anderson repeatedly insisted Amtrak would implement “alternative solutions.”

The Amtrak CEO’s intransigence angered Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico. He angrily walked out of the meeting after saying, “These are not solutions. “These are not solutions our constituents deserve!”

The newspaper suggested the meeting illustrated how Anderson’s doggedness can become arrogance.

“There was zero deference [on Anderson’s part],” the newspaper quoted one person who was in the Southwest Chief meeting as saying of Anderson.
As it turned out, the senators pushed through a clause in Amtrak’s fiscal year 2019 appropriation mandating the Chief to remain an all-rail operation until at least Sept. 30, 2019.

There are a number of takeaways from the article that provide some insight into Mr. Anderson’s thinking.

He came to the passenger carrier determined to cut costs, streamline operations and reduce Amtrak’s deficit.

In short, Anderson is laser focused on efficiency, increasing revenue and seeking to do something that has never been done at Amtrak in its 48-year history even if his predecessors often talked about it: Breaking even.

The article suggested that Anderson was brought aboard at Amtrak after an airline career that included serving as CEO at Delta and Northwest specifically to stabilize the railroad’s finances and improve its reliability.

Anderson said that by cutting costs and teasing new revenue from the carrier’s commercial partners Amtrak could reduce its operating loss from $170.6 million in 2018 to zero by 2021.

The article said Amtrak’s annual adjusted operating loss, which excludes capital expenditures and some other costs, will fall to zero over the next year.

“We took many steps to streamline the company so that we could free up investment in the core product,” Anderson in an interview with a WSJ reporter.
The carrier has been building up cash as it prepares to invest in infrastructure repairs and new equipment.

Anderson is not opposed to public funding and noted that all modes of transportation benefit from it.

He told the WSJ reporter in an interview that he knows from his experience in the airline industry about dependence on government-funded infrastructure.

“No one thinks twice about the fact that the federal government maintains the locks and dams system on the Mississippi River, right?” he said.

As Anderson sees it, what is at stake is credibility with Congress. That, in turn, will result in a greater likelihood that lawmakers will agree to requests for funding for new rail passenger cars and infrastructure projects in the Northeast Corridor.

He also argues that if Amtrak is in a better financial position it will be better able to attract private investors to help fund those projects.

Next year Congress will take up reauthorizing Amtrak and there are bound to be conflicts over its finances and the level and type of services that it provides.

In Anderson’s eyes, the Northeast Corridor is profitable and the long-distance routes are not. Hence, Anderson may believe that the latter are a barrier that needs to be surmounted to reach the break-even point if not profitability.

Critics have taken issue with Anderson and Amtrak’s assertions of how profitable the Northeast Corridor is and how much money the 15 long-distance trains lose. But that is a debate for another time.

The WSJ article listed a number of cost cutting measures that Anderson has imposed since coming to Amtrak in July 2017.

It has quit some travel industry trade groups, cut nearly 200 consultants and ended 400 management positions in a 2017 buyout.

Scores of phone and fax lines were removed and Anderson canceled a plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars building a dedicated wireless network along the Northeast Corridor to improve Wi-Fi service.

He also discarded a project to place TV screens in the seat backs of Amfleet cars.

Some cost cutting moves have raised the ire of unions representing Amtrak workers including the closing of a California call center and plans to reduce the ranks of the Amtrak police department.

Private car owners howled in protest when Amtrak increased charges to carry private rail cars and sharply decreased the number of stations at which private cars could be added or removed from a train.

As Anderson saw it, doing the latter at intermediate points was a source of delay to Amtrak trains.

And, of course, there is the on-going fight over the carrier’s long-distance trains.

Anderson acknowledged that he hasn’t won every battle.  “Everything takes longer than I want it to take,” he said.

The article portrayed Anderson as unapologetic about his efforts to force Amtrak to change and his willingness to forge his own path forward even if that makes him something of a lone wolf.

While at Delta he pulled the airline out of an industry trade association because he disagreed with its position of privatizing the air traffic control system in the United States.

Safety has been a major concern of Anderson’s but his airline centric views have raised hackles in a railroad world used to doing things in certain ways.
Anderson has pushed Amtrak’s host railroads to work harder and faster to install and implement positive train control systems.

Under his watch, Amtrak has sought to borrow some safety practices from the airline industry, notably imposing a no-fault method of reporting risks and near misses.

But implementing another proposal that Anderson favors will require talking the Federal Railroad Administration into changing its rules. That could be a tall order.

The FRA prohibits the use of cell phones, tables and screens in locomotive cabs, arguing that they could be a distraction to locomotive engineers who must remain focused on the track ahead of them.

Those rules were adopted after cell phone use and texting were implicated in a series of fatal accidents.

Anderson believes that tablets containing moving map displays would help locomotive engineers in the same manner that use of tablets in airplane flight decks provide pilots with weather alerts and other advisories.

Yet one locomotive engineer quoted by the WSJ who opposes the idea underscored the challenge facing Anderson in trying to change railroad safety culture. “A cow can’t walk in front of you at 30,000 feet,” he said.

RPA Hits Amtrak Accounting Practices

A rail passenger advocacy group is trying to put Amtrak’s accounting practices back into the spotlight.

The Rail Passengers Association released a white paper last week that concludes that how Amtrak measures and allocates its revenues and costs is “catastrophically flawed” and does the American public a disservice.

RPA is hardly the first critic of Amtrak’s accounting, which has come under fire for years by critics and policy makers.

In the RPA white paper, Amtrak’s bookkeeping practices are said to have four major flaws.

Amtrak is described as allocating costs in a way that inaccurately portrays the economics affecting each part of the system without reporting avoidable costs, as required by law.

It also omits all costs of capital consumption and uses imprecise or inadequate data.

“The upshot is that APT exaggerates the cost of operating the national passenger train system, overstates the costs of expanding it, and trivializes the effects of killing it, because it fails to consider the benefits accruing to the communities it serves,” the report concludes. “In short, it radically undercuts the ability of Congress and Amtrak to plan wisely.”

One practice singled out is allocation of track maintenance costs to routes that do not use the given tracks.

The report also said that some Acela equipment maintenance costs are allocated to non-Acela routes.

Amtrak is said to fail to determine each route’s fuel costs and to report reliable station cost data for stations that the carrier owns or maintains.

The carrier fails to accurately count commuter rail passengers using Amtrak-owned stations, thus overcharging the Amtrak trains that use them.

RPA said Amtrak’s accounting practices make the Northeast Corridor system appear less costly than it is while making long-distance trains appear to cost more than they do.

The funding needs of the Northeast Corridor greatly overshadow those of the rest of the system, where the majority of infrastructure costs are underwritten by Amtrak’s host railroads

This results in the false assumption that eliminating long-distance routes would substantially cut Amtrak’s public funding needs.

Amtrak Seeking $1.7B for FY 2019

Amtrak is seeking $1.7 billion in federal funding for fiscal year 2019, which is considerably more than the Trump Administration has proposed that it receive.

The passenger carrier’s budget request is similar to what Congress authorized for it in the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act of 2015.

The funding request includes a long list of proposed capital improvement needs, including $6.272 billion for the proposed new Hudson River tunnels, and seeks changes to federal law that the carrier said will improve its cost recovery and operations.

The administration has proposed slashing Amtrak funding by almost two-thirds, from $1.5 billion to $538 million.

Amtrak usually does not receive all of what it requests from Congress. Due to the inability of lawmakers to approve an appropriations bill, Amtrak’s current funding is based on its fiscal year 2017 allocation because FY 2018 spending has been handled in a series of continuing resolutions. The federal fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.

The Fiscal Year 2019 General and Legislative Annual Report to Congress projects that Amtrak’s funding needs will increase to $2.1 billion by fiscal 2023.

Northeast Corridor funding will rise from $543 million in FY 2018 to $966 million in 2023. The National Network, which includes long-distance and state-supported corridor trains, is expected to see its funding needs drop from $1.157 million to $1.134 million.