Arborwayfan wrote: ↑
Thu Oct 01, 2020 10:52 am
Denver-Ogden via Wyoming. Stop at Cheyene and Laramie; dunno about Rawlins, Green River, and Evanston.
What is the traffic demand? Any studies?
No studies I know of, Col. Perkowski, at least not of the market for a Den-Ogden express or overnight express. I just think there's two big metro areas with a fast enough railroad in between and I think a study would be interesting.
I was guessing at the post covid price of a DEN-SLC plane ticket and calculating the revenue for 3 sleepers with carrying two pax per bedroom and avg 1.5 pax per roomette and paying the same as the airfare. Less than a year ago? More than a year ago? I don't even know what was typical a year ago. At $300/person rt, which seems kind of high for a 550-mile plane trip, such a train would take in about $27,000 for each rt. That's much less than what 3 Superliner sleepers currently take in for a typical night, but there would be no meals and therefore no diner costs, no need for a lounge car with its costs, just the beds. (And maybe a coach or two.) But what does it cost to run a 3-car train of sleepers with no food service on an 1,100-mile round trip -- total cost, above and below the rail? Or 1 coach and three sleepers with no food service? Or whatever consist you want to think about? And what would a class I (UP specifically) be likely to charge for such a slot if it were to run at the average speed of their fastest intermodals, running as essentially a second section of one such intermodal to minimize disruption to other trains, with no or very few intermediates so that there would be no problem having the train's speed over any given part of the route vary with the traffic as long as it made the endpoints on time? Amtrak calculated a total direct cost of ~$40/mile for a train of two coaches, one sleeper, and one lounge over this route in 2014 when they studied restoring the Pioneer
https://transitzac.files.wordpress.com/ ... estudy.pdf. That's about $44,000 rt Den-Ogden, raise it a little for inflation, make it $46,000 rt, but I'm thinking of a train without the diner-lounge and its obs crew, and I don't have the numbers to figure out how much that would save...
These rough numbers are not looking like breaking even even if there were 90-100 people a day wanting to pay $300 rt over Ogden-DEN. That's not surprising. Probably pie-in-the-sky -- but how far in the sky?