Posted on 08/05/2010 8:56:08 AM PDT by george76
A new luxury train service with ties to Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz has stopped operating before taking its first trip.
American Railway Explorer ... "operations have ceased," and it told contractors refurbishing its vintage rail cars to stop.
(Excerpt) Read more at vaildaily.com ...
you gonna ping Willie?
Liberals think denial is a river in Africa
easiest way to make a million bucks in passenger rail is to start with a billion...
Anshutz is da shizzle.
At least it sounds like a private Choo Choo twain!
I’d suggest that when all costs are apportioned to each rider/trip, all passenger rail travel is a luxury.
The basic problem is the purpose of the train and its route. If it is to convey people from point to point quickly, it has a very different business model than if its purpose is the trip itself. The same rule applies to passenger and luxury cruise ships.
Here is the national map they had planned for their routes:
http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site36/2010/0529/20100529_051354_Untitled-4.png
You can see that there are only two, concentrated clusters where luxury train travel would have been optimal. The Montana-Wyoming cluster and the California cluster. The longer trips, almost by definition, would be far less profitable.
If they would have looked at existing models of successful non-commute railroads, even within Colorado are both the gorgeous Durango-Silverton line, and the Pike’s Peak RR. And other places in the West, such as the Grand Canyon RR, the Anchorage-Seward RR, and others, all show successful business models.
successful business models ?
Only by using money from non-users and only temporarily
He is one of the primary funders of the Discovery Institute(creationism)
He owns all the Examiner websites that date back to 2004 when he bought the San Fran Examiner
He owns the Weekly Standard(neocon) that he bought from Murdoch last year.
A similar luxury railroad, American Orient Express, went bankrupt 2 years ago:
http://american-orient-express-train.com/
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