Re: [DL] Passenger Train Economics (Shane, if you've got time...)

[Marguerite Frey <natasha_corey@yahoo.com>]

You guys should have seen him last night...  Census
data, pulling books off the shelves...  he's really
into this train thing.  As a mere lowly member of the
posse, I'm getting really, REALLY worried...

With that said, more from Marshal Black:

To Roy Spence,
Hmm interesting, could you tell me where you got those
figures? I would be very interested in seeing it for
myself. Oh and yes it was a factor of 50, I'm sorry I
forgot to put that in there. I didn't have any real
numbers to work with except the Deadlands rules when I
wrote this.

To frempath,
First off thank you for reminding me about the land
grab issue with the railroads, I had forgotten about
that. It does explain some of the discrepency in the
fuel issue, but I feel it doesn't do enough. With a
10,000$ fuel bill for a hundred miles of travel and
only making enough on the actual train ride to pay off
5760$ of that debt (a freight car as calculated
previously generating 7.2$ per mile of revenue, and
the largest frieght train I have seen in Deadlands
having 7 freight/passenger cars) that leaves
you with a loss of 4240$ per train. Lets assume 10
trains, that's 42,400$ dollars of loss, lets say they
go 500 miles in a trip (which on a flat run would only
use up 12 1/2 hours worth of travel time in a given
day, not counting stops) 212,000$ of lost profits per
day. 

Now given that a competent cowpoke can makes
something like 15$ a month or roughly .50$ a day that
means it takes 424,000 people paying 100% of their
wages into a railroad running 10 trains on ghost rock.
This does not count the cost of those additional
services that the railroad is providing, but we'll
just be generous and say the railroad has free food
and farm supplies available to them which they can
sell for that profit. 

These 400,000 people cannot ride the trains because
they have no money, the food and supplies that are
being transported to them do not constitute revenue
because the rail road company is not paying for them
so they must get their paying customers on top of
that. It all seems a little extreme just to break even
and not even turn a profit.

As for safety features I did not count them, all they
do is make the cost per mile more expensive if I
include them, they cannot drop the price. So far since
the figures are quite high on their own, I haven't
felt the need to figure out their price in the
operating costs. I am curious why you would point this
out.

In regards to cutting out middlemen, that's a valid
point, and the reason I put the prices at 100$ instead
of at 120$ for a fuel core, and I pointed this out in
the previous message as well. As of River o' Blood
they are charging as much as 150$ a fuel core in some
parts of the country so I felt that mark down for
profit was reasonable estimation. 

The reason why it is efficient had nothing to do with
physics, it was entirely economic. Because I assigned
an arbitrary price of 2 cents per person load (I have
yet to find cargo prices for trains in Deadlands) as
cargo instead of the 1 cent that river boats charge
(pg. 9 in my copy of River o' Blood) it means that it
is cheaper to send the same poundage of cargo down the
river then by a train going to the same destination.
Hence my use of the word "efficient" was to indicate
less waste of money. Thus my argument is NOT defeated
before it starts.

As to your physics, I hate to disagree with you but I
must. We are dealing with friction, not structural
integrity. While a boat must push through water, a
train does not similarly push through steel, it rides
on top of said steel and pushes through the
surrounding air. Water is actually very difficult to
move a large bulk through, hence the excessive stream
lining of most boats when compared to your average
automobile. Hence also a dolphin is far more
streamlined then a cheeta and yet the cheeta stil goes
faster because air provides less friction then water,
therfore less drag. A steamboat by the way does not
rest on top of the water (p.5 River o' Blood) it rests
about 5 feet or less in the water and that makes a
sizable difference.

Finally I am aware that I can change my campaign as I
see fit, that wasn't the point. I found a discrepancy
in the rules that seemed so glaring I was wondering if
I was not in fact looking at an outright error or
misprint and wanted to ask the powers that be if that
was the case. A fuel bill of 10,000$ every 100 miles
seems a bit excessive doesn't it? Travel 500 miles,
which doesn't even make it from Dodge to New Orleans,
and you have paid so much for fuel that you could use
that same money to buy a new train outright. 

In case anyone is wondering a modern day comparison is
to take an 8000$ car that gets 32 miles per gallon,
with that you pay 512$ per gallon of gasoline when you
are at the pump.  Doesn't it seem odd to you that
either of the two steam ships on the Missisipi
(sternwheeler or sidewheeler) use 3 pounds of ghost
rock to transport 325 passengers where a train takes
100 pounds to transport 210 (once again using the same
7 freight/passenger train to make my estimate) the
same
distance? That means that to equal the fuel to
passenger ratio of a river boat a train must carry...
100 x 325 / 3 = 10834 passangers, which in turn
translates into...  10834 / 30 = 362 passenger cars.

With that kind of fuel efficiency it seems like Grant
would have been better off offering land to make a
really long channel! We could have The Great Canal
Wars box set, Crimson Canal's computer game - just
imagine for a second an automoton's wearing water
wings
and Mina Devlin in a combat bikini (insert steam boat
whistle here).

Anyway, what I am hoping is that someone from the
staff of Pinnacle can give me an answer when they have
the time.  Until then, I will leave you with a quoted
bit of flavor text from S&R...  "It (the locomotive)
has a high capacity Ghost Rock boiler which allows it
to travel hundreds of miles on a few shovels of ghost
rock."

A couple hundred miles minimum requires a couple
hundred pounds of ghost rock, which in my humble
estimation is more then "a few shovels" full.

Marshal Black

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