If one looks at the simple picture, Amtrak does indeed make money off of both the Acela Express trains and the Metroliner service. Acela earned 7 million in Sept '04 and the Metroliner earned 300K for the same month. YTD for fiscal '04 (Oct 03 – Sept 04) the numbers were 65.9M and 5.2M respectively. Regional service however lost 60.5M YTD, wiping out most of the above profit.

This info is based upon the latest numbers, available from Amtrak here. Flip to pages 78 & 79 of the report. Note: You'll need Adobe Acrobat 5.0 or higher to view the report.

Now to further clarify those numbers, by simple picture, I mean operating expenses directly attributed to those respective services. Things like crew costs, maintenance of trains, food services onboard, power to run the trains, and such.

Those profit numbers however don't include capital expenses, things like depreciation expenses on the trains, interest on the loans to buy the trains, station personnel & building repairs and costs, track repairs, catenary repairs, signal repairs, and general overhead expenses like the reservation system and the executive offices.