Amtrak's pricing structure is totally not connected to mileage; for that matter, neither is any other transportation mode: you complained that BWI-PIT is $400 while IAD-PIT is $79. OAK-JFK is $179 on JetBlue. Etc.
Go figure.
> Q: What justifies the $100+ difference in fare for roughly
> similar distance?
> A: The skin color and class of the travelers - to keep the
> dark skinned riff raff out of the Acela trains used mainly by
> corporate functionaries and politicos.
What about the light skinned riff raff? Does it keep them out too?
The Pennsylvanian (one train per day in either direction, PGH-NYP) is probably being kept alive by someone in Congress. It got expanded to Cleveland in the 90s (shrunken later), has had on-again-off-again "sleeper service" (the route gets called "Three Rivers" and was last suspended October 1, 2004), and [IMHO] should be cancelled altogether. It's a silly route, takes forever (goes through the Horseshoe Curve at Altoona), and probably doesn't serve that many people -- white or black, rich or poor (current estimate for 2005 is a total of about 250k). With an $83 one-way walkup fare on Southwest 4-5 times per day ($49 with some advance notice), there's no reason to take that train.
> I am pretty sure Jordan will come with an alternative explanation,
> such as the state of PA partially subsidizing travel on the Keystone
> line.
Note that the Keystone terminates in Harrisburg. It's more of a commuter service than the Pennsylvanian, as it runs several times per day and goes 104 miles in a respectible 2:10. It has about 1.5M passengers per year, and is, as you say, probably subsidized rather well. It's the kind of train that I think Amtrak should be doing more of; it has strong ridership levels (along with similar service in Northern California ["Capitols"] and Southern California ["Surfliner"]) and serves a good, core transportation need.
> But that only begs the question why is not the service on the NE
> corridor subsidized in the same way (because it is subsidized)?
I think the NEC pricing has more to do with the fact that they are genuinely competing (unlike any other route in the Amtrak system) with the airlines. It's arguably their most important route. Note that they have really taken a beating on this Acela brake issue: they lost a good chunk of the riders who flew instead of taking the slower Metroliner service.
The financial details of Amtrak's operations are too complex for me to fully understand (and I'm usually pretty good about stuff like that); the "state contributions" are around 10% of ticket revenues, but there are other "state" impacts related to capital spending (i.e., balance sheet items) that confuse the mix. Compounding this, Amtrak is exempt from State and Local taxes, so there might be a wash in there somewhere. Getting rid of Amtrak would serve at least one useful purpose: it would expose the economics better :-)
But: on page 77 of http://www.amtrak.com/pdf/0506monthly.pdf we can find that NEC operations "added" about $17M to Amtrak's bottom line so far this year, whereas the Pennsylvanian "subtracted" about $12M -- yes, this train almost erased the net contribution of the only part of Amtrak that "makes money" this year.
-----
I've enjoyed your position about "transportation apartheid" and would urge you to look for more examples. I'm not sure that this example was a good one, but I don't doubt that the feeling you have about the general situation is correct. My pet issue about the "racism proxy" in the US is the so-called "higher-education" market, but this looks like a juicy one too.
/jordan