Congress has until September 30, 2026, to reauthorize the federal surface transportation programs that keep the nation’s railroads running[s], and when it does, the most predictable line in Amtrak’s books will be back on the table: the Amtrak long-distance deficit. The railroad’s long-distance network lost $622.7 million on an adjusted operating basis in fiscal 2025, barely better than the $635.1 million it lost the year before[s]. That gap is not a management error or a bad year. It was engineered into the company at birth by the Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970.
In the 55 years since Amtrak began running trains in 1971, it has never posted an overall profit, despite more than $100 billion in federal support[s]. Critics read that record as a failure of execution. But the law’s own designers never expected the long-distance trains to pay for themselves, and several of them said so at the time.
A Rescue Dressed as a Business
By the late 1960s, America’s private railroads were losing fortunes on passenger service they were legally required to operate. Those losses reached $200 million in 1969, roughly $1.4 billion in 2019 dollars, equal to 40% of the net operating income of the entire railroad industry[s]. In 1970 the largest carrier, Penn Central, collapsed into what was then the biggest corporate bankruptcy in American history. It was also the country’s largest passenger railroad.
The Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970, Public Law 91-518, was Washington’s answer, and its core was a trade. The freight railroads were relieved of any duty to provide passenger service in exchange for making their tracks available to Amtrak at incremental cost[s]. A 1980 federal court named the transfer plainly: “By subsidizing Amtrak, Congress shifted the loss from the railroads to the public.”[s]
Saving the freight system, not building a profitable passenger one, was the point. Jim McClellan, who sat on the Federal Railroad Administration policy team that designed the corporation, later wrote that “almost no one had any belief that long-haul passenger trains were needed, or, indeed, would ever be needed.”[s] The overriding concern, he recalled, “was to find a solution that removed the passenger burden from the back of the Penn Central and the other freight railroads. The collapse of passenger railroading was acceptable; the collapse of freight railroading was not.”[s]
The long-haul routes survived for a political reason. An entity built to lose money forever was impossible to sell to Congress, so the draft bill described a corporation run “for profit,” a label the planners doubted but accepted because neither the White House nor congressional conservatives would fund a permanent ward of the state. The structure let the new corporation begin pruning unprofitable routes in 1974, but only where no state, regional, or local authority would cover the losses[s]. The for-profit promise was political theater staged over an operating reality nobody on the planning team believed in.
The Anatomy of the Amtrak Long-Distance Deficit
Five decades on, the skeptics look right. Amtrak’s long-distance trains lose money on nearly every mile they run. Across the long-distance network in fiscal 2025 the company lost about 27 cents for every passenger-mile, and on the worst routes far more: costs on the Sunset Limited and the Capitol Limited approach $1.00 per passenger-mile, against an airline average near 18 cents[s]. The loss alone on the Sunset Limited, roughly 75 cents a mile, runs more than four times what an airline spends to carry a passenger the same distance.
The reason is geometric, not managerial. A long-distance train is a hotel on wheels: sleeper cars, dining cars, crews working multi-day shifts, all stretched across thousands of miles of track Amtrak does not own. To break even on tickets alone, the average Sunset Limited passenger would have to pay about $662; the actual average ticket is $146[s]. That is the Amtrak long-distance deficit in miniature: a breakeven fare more than four times what travelers will pay.
Higher ridership does not close it, because each passenger loses money, so more riders simply means more loss. Nor do the trains work the way their route maps imply. The Southwest Chief runs 2,256 miles from Los Angeles to Chicago, yet the average rider travels only 855 miles, about 38% of the way[s]. The long-haul network is really a chain of overlapping regional trips priced as if it were a national air system it cannot match. Traveling New York to Chicago takes nearly 20 hours by train against a roughly three-hour flight[s].
The distribution of the pain is the sharpest part of the Amtrak long-distance deficit. In 2018, long-distance routes generated just 20% of Amtrak’s passenger revenue but accounted for 86% of its federally subsidized operating losses[s]. By the Taxpayers Protection Alliance’s count, the public covers at least $140 per long-distance trip on average, and roughly $362 for every passenger riding the Sunset Limited[s].
An Accounting Trap, Too
How Amtrak reports the damage deepens the confusion around the Amtrak long-distance deficit. The company asks Congress for money against an “adjusted” operating loss, which for fiscal 2025 came to $607.8 million[s]. That number sets aside about a billion dollars of annual depreciation and other costs. On a GAAP basis the same year produced a net loss of $1.76 billion[s]. The headline the public sees and the figure auditors sign are nearly three times apart.
A Funding Structure Built to Wobble
The Amtrak long-distance deficit would be a manageable political problem if the money to cover it were stable. It is not, and here the 1970 settlement left a second flaw. Highways and transit draw on the Highway Trust Fund, which gives them multi-year contract authority. Rail gets nothing of the kind: rail programs do not receive contract authority from the trust fund and instead lean on the annual appropriations process[s]. Every dollar Amtrak spends must survive a yearly budget fight, exposed to rescission or reprogramming, leaving it “vulnerable in ways that highway programs are not.”[s]
That makes the subsidy behave like a one-way ratchet: easy to question every year, hard to retire, and never allowed to settle into the predictable, dedicated funding that roads enjoy. The 2021 infrastructure law tried to smooth the ride, authorizing $19.2 billion for Amtrak over five years plus $22 billion in advance appropriations[s]. That money runs out in 2026, which is what brings the whole arrangement back to Congress now.
The 2026 Reckoning
The House’s draft BUILD America 250 Act would authorize about $63.9 billion for rail over five years, a 38% cut from the infrastructure law[s]. More telling than the headline number: unlike its predecessor, none of the rail money is guaranteed, and all of it would be subject to annual appropriations[s]. The Rail Passengers Association read the bill’s message bluntly, that “highways and roads are a core Federal priority and intercity rail is a State-level vanity project.”[s]
The fight runs straight back to the founding fiction. In September 2025, Representative French Hill handed Amtrak his “Golden Fleece Award,” noting that the 1970 Act “directed Amtrak to be operated and managed as a for-profit corporation” and had failed that mandate for 55 years[s]. Yet Amtrak’s defenders, and the company itself, observe that its current statutory “mission and goals make no mention of profitability.”[s] Both claims hold, about different moments. The for-profit framing dates to 1970; the mission Congress actually codified later leaves profit out. The original political label has outlived the statute that softened it, and it remains the stick used to beat the railroad.
That is the structural trap behind the Amtrak long-distance deficit. The long-haul routes were kept over the doubts of the people who built Amtrak, financed through the least secure mechanism in federal transportation, and then judged against a profit standard their own designers called a fiction. Rural lawmakers whose constituents have no other intercity rail will fight to keep the trains[s]; fiscal conservatives will keep invoking the 1970 mandate to cut them. The Amtrak long-distance deficit is the predictable result of asking one network to be a profitable business, a public service, and a freight-railroad bailout all at once.
