This Week At Amtrak 2007-03-08
March 8th, 2007
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- Amtrak has started its winter/spring leisure travel advertising campaign for 2007 by placing ads in 12 top markets. Target marketing, of course, is very important, and getting the biggest bang for every marketing buck is critical, too. However, Amtrak does serve over 500 destinations in the continental United States, plus some locations in Canada. It’s kind of tough to expect many results from just advertising in the top 12 markets …
- Here’s a fascinating bon mot turned up by one of URPA’s numbers crunchers, derived directly from Amtrak data: Revenue and ridership are up, but during the last fiscal year (2006), passenger miles dropped once again to 5,361,517,000. In FY 05 the figure was 5,419,720,000, and a decade or more ago, it was around 6.5 billion revenue passenger miles per year.This means even though the false measurements of increased ridership and revenues may be climbing, the actual number of revenue passenger miles – the only true measurement used in the real world of common carriers – has declined.The most likely cause of this is an increase in short haul trains (which are the most expensive to operate and can’t cover their costs with true accounting numbers that include all appropriate allocated expenses) and small increases or decreases in long distance train travel, most likely due to the alarmingly short consists of most long haul trains as compared to a decade ago when much more of Amtrak’s long distance fleet was roadworthy.
- A regular commuter rider on Amtrak’s Empire Service in and out of New York City provided this fascinating use of an Amtrak diesel locomotive: Read more…
Categories: This Week
