Sleeping Car Service Generates Incremental Profits

Attacks continue on Amtrak’s long distance services, with the focus now shifting to dining car and sleeping car service. My research indicates that that Sleeping car service on Amtrak’s long distance trains generates an incremental operating profit of at least $40 million (based on Fiscal 2004 data). Part of the basis for this is a recognition that elimination of dining cars would put substantial coach revenue at risk, since more coach passengers than sleeping-car passengers make very long trips.

Sleeping cars perform an important transportation function. They carried people over 630 million miles in each of the last two years—22% more than Amtrak’s premium high speed Acela Express & Metroliner services in the Northeast did in FY 2004.

People like to use the word “cost” and “subsidy to the rich” to describe sleeping car travel.  The federal cost of moving one person one mile in a sleeping car is less than in coach.  The federal cost of operating a national network of trains with just coaches and no food or other amenities would be far greater than the cost of continuing the current level of service.

Under any scenario, the goal of break-even food service is unrealistic and ignores the fact that, worldwide on all transportation, when food is provided it is to enhance overall revenues, not to serve as its own profit center. Reducing long distance trains to coach only service would dramatically reduce public utility, volume of use, and revenue while simultaneously increasing both cost per passenger mile and per passenger, making the service inefficient, irrelevant to the traveling public and unjustifiable.

Follow this link to our full analysis.

-George Chilson
NARP President