Beaten track
Pew’s Subsidyscope.com has a neat interactive map of Amtrak routes and how much money they lost in 2008, as most of them did.
The single most profitable Amtrak route is the highly-traveled Acela Express, which pulled in $486 million in fares, earning about $64 per passenger before allowing for depreciation and other expenses Amtrak thinks should not be part of the calculation. All the really long-distance routes dropped a bundle, the worst being the New Orleans-to-Los Angeles Sunset Limited, which managed to lose $31 million on $9 million in revenue.
As for the Heartland Flyer, it’s officially just about breaking even: revenue of $5.7 million, expenses of $5.9 million. (The Flyer, incidentally, has about 10 percent more passengers than the Sunset.)
And this may or may not speak for itself:
In August 2009, the Congressional Budget Office considered the option of reducing Amtrak’s federal subsidy by about $200 million a year for five years. Amtrak officials and passenger rail advocates say this is impractical, noting that no passenger rail service in the world is profitable and arguing that Amtrak would cease to exist without the federal money.
Not one? Anywhere?
