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[QUOTE]Originally posted by MargaretSPfan: [QB] Did some Googling about SoftBank, and learned, to my surprise, that it is the third largest public company in Japan! Only Toyota and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial are bigger. I had never heard of SoftBank until Gil mentioned it. And I also learned that SoftBank is into telecommunications and computers, and almost nothing else. Buying AAF is thus, to me, really, rally odd. And, as I have said many times here and on other forums, no one can ever really "make money" operating passenger trains, because we passengers -- NOT "customers", please! -- are very expensive to transport, because we need a lot of things that freight never needs: Air Water Food BATHROOMS! Seats Windows HVAC Smooth ride On-board crew Dependable schedules Stations with everything passenger railcars have All of the above costs a lot of money. And it is wrong to count only operating costs and to ignore capital costs when stating what passenger trains cost to operate. To me, AAF would only make sense if it is a commuter operation, serving people who need to go between their homes and their jobs as their "anchor tenants" if you will. What I do not know is where the present-day demand is for transit that AAF could serve quite well, if the services went where people needed to go. And it is not rocket science to learn where that demand is. In thinking about this today, I compared AAF to the Northern California Capital Corridor service, which runs between San Jose and Auburn now, but at first ran only between Oakland and Sacramento. That service is very successful. But! Unlike AAF, the Capitol Corridor trains operate on a line that is owned by a Class 1 railroad and has been operating for more than 100 years, and has been double-track for a long time. And Oakland and Sacramento are only around 70 miles apart by air and 90 miles apart by rail. But Miami and Orlando are almost 3 times as far apart by air as are Oakland and Sacramento, and around 2-1/2 times as far apart by rail as are Oakland and Sacramento. So -- doing the math shows me that it really makes no economic sense at all to try to run a passenger train service between Miami and Orlando, at least not unless there is profitable freight business between Miami and Orlando. (This could conceivably include a reborn RPO service, but that would have to happen nationally first. And would that really be a bad idea? ) Yes, I know -- AAF is only intended to run between Miami and West Palm Beach, which are about 65 miles apart by rail, which is a quite practical distance for a commuter rail service, but Orlando did get talked about here as a destination that some people think is the best end-point for AAF. That is why I wrote about Orlando as the true intended end point for AAF. Trains run on private rights of way -- which are just about worth their weight in gold, when it comes to being able to get places without having to drive and sometimes getting stuck in traffic. Rail transport is also a lot more efficient than road, and is a lot more practical and fairer to people economically. I am very interesting in what happens next with AAF. Thanks, everyone, for all your fascinating comments! And thanks, Gil, for keeping these TrainWeb forums alive and interesting. I always look forward to whatever info you have found. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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