October 2019 Amtrak Financial Report

These are the   items that I noticed in the report that were interesting to me:

• The report was dated December 2, 2019 and not posted on December 4, 2019. This is a tad later than in the previous months with the exception of the report for September.

• The NEC generated for the first month a cash operating surplus of $65.564 million (at least by their idea of a fully allocated accounting system) and the remainder of the system had a fully allocated cash loss of $42.1 million. Combined the entire system has a cash operating surplus of $23.4 million. October 2018 also had a cash operating surplus but was smaller. For the fiscal year to date, the NEC made debt service payments of $0.9 million and capital expenditures of $62.7 million. Having received Federal Grants of $4.5 million it has a remaining carryover balance of $27.5 million (plus the money from FY2018 and FY2019). The National Network Account made debt service of $0.05 million and capital investments of $52.3 million and received from the Federal Government $3.5 million; thus has for the current year has a deficit of $79.5 million. However, there is offsetting this the carryover balances from FY2018 and FY2019. Note the capital spending on the National System which is usually more than the NEC was significantly less. If this trend continues, it is obvious that Anderson/Gardner are not spending sufficient funds on equipment maintenance in order to shrink the size of the long distance fleet.

• Capital Spending so far has been: infrastructure $47.6 million, Stations & Real Estate $3.8 million, Fleet Maintenance $24.1 million, Fleet Acquisition $9.3 million, Information Technology $9.8 million, ADA $6.1 million, Support $0.6 million, Gateway $1.4 million, and Acela 21 $7.6 million for total capital expenditures of $115.0 million ($17.0 million more than the comparable period for FY2018). The Fleet Acquisition would include the down payments for the new locomotives plus the purchase of some more Viewliner Equipment from CAF.

• The GAAP loss for the first month appears to be $11.8 million which is $48.0 million better than October 2018. The adjusted operating earnings were $15.5 million better than the first month of FY2019 .

• The number of product lines showing a measurable operating surplus for the period zoomed up to 16 with 3 others breaking even. Those with surpluses over $1 million were:

  • Acela $39.8 million

  • Northeast Regionals $28.0 million        

  • The four Virginia product lines generated a total of $2.1 million in operating surpluses.

  • The Silver Star actually lost more money in October than the Silver Meteor. It may be that the loss of the dining car has finally caught up with it.

• Ridership for the first month was more than 45,200 greater than the comparable period in FY2019. So far for the year, Amtrak has carried 2,900,200 (Amtrak rounds to the nearest hundred). While total ridership on the combined long distance trains was up by about 1%, most of the long distance trains had reduced ridership . The gains were mostly confined to the Cardinal up 20.7%, Lake Shore Ltd up 4.7% and the Crescent up 2.7%. The Sunset was the biggest loser with a drop off of 12.8%. The Palmetto is still shedding passengers with a loss of 9.9% from October of 2020.

• Congress should be passing some or all of the 12 budget bills, but with December 20th fast approaching, nothing has been revealed yet. The probability of a vote to impeach President Trump occurring next week is not likely to speed up the process.

Steve Musen

Representative to NARP’s Council of Representatives from the state of Rhode Island