Jesse added a couple of good points to Jason's excellent calculations and here are a few more to consider...If you look at this as a profitable venture and not just a nice little State subsidized living history show....
Considering every factor from fuel quality issues to water quality and foaming in the boiler, plus just age and metal fatigue, a regular schedule of four car trains would be a considerable effort for the #12 on these grades. Being the lone steam engine and working every run, keeping her at peak performance for any length of time is not likely and she needs to be pulled out of service regularly and the diesels run in her stead when they do boiler washes and inspections...Worked this hard, real preventative maintenance is a luxury and she will have the usual broken/sticking this and that on a regular basis and have to be take out of service til parts can be made, repaired or brought in. With her ASME boiler, there is the likelihood of leaking stays and busted out corners, especially on a road that works boilers. So maintenance costs on this little gem will be substantial - she will need lots of LOVE and Peter is just the guy for the job...
Now, for the business technicalities...with a four car train and one steamer with high maintenance costs...the fares on the four cars pay the overhead/operation costs and any additional fares make the profit...soooo...if Railstar is to make any money in addition to their management fee, they need to be running four plus fully loaded cars on a full schedule during the regular season...they could run less ridership into the winter in an extended season, but it might not pay to do so and the downtime in the off season is useful for "getting at" all those bigger maintenance issues that pile up when you are running like crazy....so the extra couple of cars worth of fares do not seem like much, until you figure out - that is your profit margin...
A similar situation applies to the businesses in the neighboring towns...I had sales today of something like $360...we do not actually break even until we hit $900 in sales per day...we can easily double that amount in the summer season with full trains running at the Loop and the accompanying tourist traffic. That way we can make up for days like today...with half the ridership next summer, I think you can see, we might be up the creek...more often than not it is just that one extra tourist with the extra $50 in disposable income that makes your profit margin...the thought of possibly having 50,000 less of those next year should be a bit chilling to most tourist dependent businesses in Clear Creek, not to mention all the businesses in general who benefit in a trickle down economy.
Karell
