Judging Amtrak by its balance sheet is not very useful unless you have an agenda of not promoting transportation by train in this country(in favor of automobiles and airplanes, for example).
In fact, if you believe that travel by train is useful and efficient for society, then Amtrak should be considered public transportation that needs to be subsidized by the government. If its balance sheet isn't looking good, then it needs more incentivization and subsidy from the federal and state governments. Both automobile and airplane travel are subsidized much more heavily than Amtrak, and I would make the argument that train travel has been neglected here, especially compared with most every other developed nation.
For example, I'm travelling with my wife 750 miles for Thanksgiving and evaluated the travel options. It turns out that renting a car and driving those 750 miles is by far the cheapest way to travel, and as a bonus we'll have a car to use at our destination. Why should this be? It's sort of backwards that obtaining use of a personal transportation vehicle should be so much cheaper than travelling in one vehicle with 100 other people and being dropped off at a station/airport.
To keep it on topic, the premise you're offering is different from the one I'm offering. You look at Amtrak as a failure because of non-solvency in its current state(conservative perspective). I look at Amtrak as the path to a more efficient national transportation system that should be funded as such because it burns less fossil fuel and uses less resources per person per mile(liberal perspective).
Given our different premises, both our logics work out, but our different premises lead us to different conclusions.
