I don't know where they got their information, but I'll tell you that it's very difficult, first, to get good financial numbers from any other country. As part of our assessments we look at them. We compare VIA Rail and benchmark that to Amtrak because Amtrak tends to be the one with the best publicly available information. We have tried to get data from Japan, from the U.K., from France, from Germany, from Sweden, and for most of the numbers we are finding there is no system that covers its operating costs or its capital costs. In fact, we've only found one little railway--and I'll limit that to “little”. The only one that does cover its costs is the Heathrow Express, which is the dedicated rail line between downtown London and Heathrow Airport, which does basically a non-stop express service in that segment.
On November 16th, 2009. See this statement in context.