Subsidyscope used publicly available information to perform its analysis of Amtrak profits and losses by route. The analysis, prompted by a Government Accountability Office report, goes two steps beyond Amtrak’s own assessment of its performance. First, Subsidyscope calculated each route’s per passenger costs by dividing the overall profit or loss for that route by the number of riders it had. This, in our view, gives a more complete picture of the resources each route requires. Amtrak doesn’t do this calculation; as a result, some routes appear to be less of a drain on the railroad’s resources.

To carry out the next step in our analysis, we looked at Amtrak’s total net losses for the year, which includes items like depreciation, ancillary businesses and overhead costs. Amtrak omits these items in its own analysis of route performance. Subsidyscope took the additional $697 million in net losses that Amtrak does not include to calculate route performance and divided it by the total number of riders—nearly 29 million in 2008—resulting in an additional loss of $24.29 per passenger. We then applied $24.29 in losses to the average per passenger loss or profit for each line. (The actual calculation can be found below.) The GAO has said that omissions, such as depreciation, “substantially [understate] operating expenses in reports that managers use to assess performance.”

Click here to read Analysis Shows Amtrak Lost $32 Per Passenger in 2008.