[DL] Passenger Train Economics

[Marguerite Frey <natasha_corey@yahoo.com>]

A note from the Marshall...

NOTE-For those who would like to go right to my
question and avoid the lengthy note on why I am asking
it please skip to the bottom of the letter.

Recently I was trying to figure out how much ghost
rock a typical ghost rock powered train ought to have
on hand at any given point in time. I went to my
trusty Smith & Robards and looked up the fuel rating
for a locomotive on pg. 39 and was rather shocked by
what I saw.

Because a locomotive is a vehicle I assume the fuel
price is listed as per a vehicle, which is to say X
number of pounds of ghost rock will fuel the vehicle
for 100 miles. The locomotive in the book lists 100
under fuel which means 100 pounds of ghost rock gets a
train 100 miles, or a mile per pound.  That seemed
rather pricy to me, so I did a little
math.

Given standard S&R pricing for ghost rock I based my
figures on raw nuggets which are 20$ less per pound
then a fuel core which trains are supposed to use.
This way if the railroads were getting their ghost
rock at a bulk discount from a distributor, some
aproximation of that would be taken into account by
the cheaper price.

For a hundred mile trip, a little bit more then the
distance between Chicago and Milwauke the train costs
100$ x 100 miles = 10,000$ or 100$ a mile. This is for
fuel alone, not counting repairs, costs of the
engineer, crew, guards, ticketmasters etc. Because
railroads are run as businesses they must make at
least break even to stay afloat thus that 100$ a mile
cost must be equaled by the money brought in by it
traveling that mile. So as we have no freight charges
avilable to us we will use the human passenger cost as
an example. A single passenger brings the train a
revenue of 5 cents a mile, therefore to break even a
train must maintain an average number of passengers
traveling in a given mile so that their revenue per
mile equal to 100$. 

A quick bit of math give us the following...
2000 Passengers x .05$ = 100$, just enough to break
even. Thus every ghost rock powered train must be
transporting an average of 2000 people (or their
equivalent revenue in cargo) on every single mile of
it's journey. Non-human cargo tends to be less
expensive per pound then human cargo. It doesn't
require comfort or as much protection from the
elements as vocal human passengers do. So it seems
fair, for the moment, to assume that human cargo
represents the highest monetary turn around per full
car of a railroad (since they doubtless charge more
for a human then a cow in a cattle car).

Now we turn back to S&R and see how these people are
going to ride. Page 39 of S&R also gives the number of
people who can fit in a typical train car as 30. Thus
in order to find the number of train cars necessary to
fullfill the train task of breaking even we have
mearly to do a little division and round up...
2000 people / 30 per car = 67 cars.

The passenger rules state that you can up to double
the number of passengers of a vehicle in an emergency.
Since financial ruin is a fair emergency, lets try
that and see how many cars we need.  2000 people / 60
per car = 34 cars.  So we need 34 passanger cars full
to the brim with people in order to break even with
fuel costs on a given rail line.

A quick observation, I went through all the books I
owned and looked over the descriptions of all the
trains I could find. The largest number of cars on a
train I could find were 8 cars (not counting
locomotive, or coal car which do not generate revenue)
of which only 7 carried passengers or frieght (the 8th
car was a caboose). Most trains averaged around 3-4
passenger/freight cars. Neither the average nor the
maximum number of cars comes close to footing the bill
for a trains enormous fuel requirements.

--If you skipped, here's the QUESTION.--

This leads me finally to my question. Is the 100
pounds of ghost rock per 100 miles of travel for a
locomotive accurate? If not what is it and what does
that "100" under the fuel for a locomotive mean?
Is it...
     A)The amount of hours of operation a train
maintains on a single pound of ghost rock? (meaning a
train could travel 4000 miles on a single pound)
     B)The amount of coal fuel necessary for running a
train 100 miles? (equivalent to 2 pounds of ghost rock
fuel cores)
     C)Some other number I cannot for the life of me
figure out?  The excellent accumulated rulings offered
no further clues.

Thanks in advance, 
Marshal_Black of EMGB

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