Mr Halstead doesn't make things up, he's just picks his numbers to paint as bad a picture as possible. The numbers he states are likely referring to the average loads of all four trains on reaching or departing from Eugene (this includes the 500 leaving at 5:30am and the 509 arriving at 11:45pm). Yes, I've ridden both of those and they do really, really badly (these times should be covered by buses). ODOT was on a kick of actually posting these for a while, but seems to have stopped again. 2008 - June 2009 numbers are up at
http://www.oregon.gov/ODOT/RAIL/Passenger_Rail.shtml Note that this June the morning trains were canceled for most of the month, so the ridership figures are skewed down (oh my, but I thought they would all switch to the bus replacements? huh). Again, from my experience this probably skews heavily to the 504/507 combination. The average of total passengers for all four trains varies between about 65-110 depending on the month. No, it's not great, but it doesn't sound nearly as bad when it's effectively a single frequency trip with 90-150 riders with seasonal variation (and I firmly believe that the splits are close to this). One of the biggest mistakes Oregon has made is to give people ammunition by running a mostly empty roundtrip just because that's when the trainset happen to be available. If 500/509 were replaced by a bus, and instead there were a roundtrip train connection from 501 to 508 (which could probably happen now that Oregon owns some trainsets), and all of the sudden, you can get to and from Eugene during the afternoon. University students getting out of town after morning classes on a Friday and people taking off half a day before a holliday or summer weekend have an option to use the train. Evening football games in the fall and basketball games in Eugene become practically accessible from the regular service. There's more than one train a day with bus connections (and for the first time something on Sunday has bus connections) You can add extra service at Thanksgiving if need be (Oregon sent 4 full buses north to meet the 514 extra this year--I was on one of them and I definitely was not spread out--unfortunately none of us made it up to catch the train after spending more than four hours trying to get through I-5 traffic jam the entire way between Eugene and Portland-- they must have imported all those cars from somewhere, since the population is a joke. Even on non-peak weekends, I've had close calls on the buses before. None of us complained about the additional bus-ride though, because nobody but railfan crazies cares about the difference.)
The biggest problem in switching one roundtrip to the afternoon is likely passenger train meets, since midday trains would typically meet 11 and 14 (this was already a common problem for 507 when 14 was constantly late before the current lull in traffic)
Here's Mr Halsteads rules for passenger train subsidies, as near as one can tell from reading his postings:
1. If it goes somewhere you want to go, whether that's northwest Montana or Seattle, for the most part look the other way at the massive amount of money it loses to serve tiny portions of the travel market and enjoy using it, and plot out schemes for additional frequency, etc.
2. If it goes somewhere I don't want to ride it, like the Southern valley, it needs to be a bus, and you need to yell and scream and rant about how much you hate it, how awful it is, and berate anyone personally who expresses anything positive about it, whether that be that the scenery is pretty or the destination is desirable, or whatever else they can find.