Train to Boise, ID to Salt Lake City, UT (Partial Pioneer)

It would be great to see passenger service pdx-bosie but that would end up being a dead end to nowhere route.

Lets consider some tweaks.

1. Reroute the pdx section of the Empire Builder at Pasco or Wallula to the UP line to Hinkle and PDX. Combine the PDX-Hinkle section with the Bosie Special. This would save about 350 miles of engine service round trip. EB service to Vancouver WA could be served by the Cascades.

2. Continue service through to Barstow and connect with the SW Chief, again saving a couple hundred engine miles round trip. This would provide a good alternative for SEA/PDX traffic to LAX if the Starlight is full plus service to Vegas. Transfer to the CZ could occur then at Salt Lake or Provo.

3. Ante up the connections idea. Make the Western terminus of the Sunset Ltd Bakersfield (or Oakland via...) routing from Tuscon though Phoenix, Parker, connect with SWChief for LAX at Barstow, then Bakersifeld. Sure it is slow track on the spinoff through Parker but who rides long distance Amtrak because its fast?

4. Fund Amtrak to own/operate a Blue Mountain tunnel. A relationship with UP of we let you play in our tunnel if you let us play on your track might just be healthy for Amtrak. Plus cutting the 8 hours Pendleton to LaGrande to about 2 hours would go a long way to helping the time issue in this spot. Still, who rides Amtrak because its fast?

Problems... Sure, lots of them. But maybe Amtrak can say this is the MINIMUM we need to make this route sustainable, an let the political type make the decision if it is in the public intrest to fund it.

Fun to think about, but I think we know the answers.

icgsteve wrote:However, 1.7 million passengers did use the airport last year

According to the City of Boise's website, the passenger count for the first 10 months of CY2007 is 2,811,263.

That puts the daily count at roughly 9,370 passengers a day through the Boise Airport (both arrivals and departures).

5% of that, to use the prior example, is 469 passengers per day.

Equally divided between westbound and eastbound trains, arrivals and departures, is 117 passengers.

Keep in mind that this train would be competing with an airport that has nonstop service to Portland and Salt Lake City, as well as Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles (both LAX and Ontario), Minneapolis, Oakland, Phoenix, Reno, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle and Spokane. Much of BOI's traffic is due to several large employers (namely Hewlett Packard and Micron) that depend on the routes in/out of California.

karl1459 wrote:Fund Amtrak to own/operate a Blue Mountain tunnel. A relationship with UP of we let you play in our tunnel if you let us play on your track might just be healthy for Amtrak. Plus cutting the 8 hours Pendleton to LaGrande to about 2 hours would go a long way to helping the time issue in this spot.

Union Pacific seriously considered tunnelling under the Blue Mountains a few years ago.

Cost was prohibitive, for a company that runs some 30-40 loaded freight trains a day over the mountain and would certainly get a return-on-investment rather quickly (i.e. reduced fuel consumption/locomotives needed, fewer crews, less maintenance expense, less snowfighting expense).

Unless there is a massive population growth spurt along the I-84 corridor so that Amtrak can start running even five trains a day in each direction, I don't think the feds are going to build a tunnel and stick Amtrak's name on it.

wigwagfan wrote:
According to the City of Boise's website, the passenger count for the first 10 months of CY2007 is 2,811,263.

The FAA is the superior authority so their data must be considered superior to all others. Any claim that the habits of air passengers has changed that much in one year would need to come with FAA documentation as well as an explanation before it should be believed.

icgsteve wrote:

wigwagfan wrote:
According to the City of Boise's website, the passenger count for the first 10 months of CY2007 is 2,811,263.

The FAA is the superior authority so their data must be considered superior to all others. Any claim that the habits of air passengers has changed that much in one year would need to come with FAA documentation as well as an explanation before it should be believed.

You are both right. The FAA data is enplanements only: passengers boarding. The airport data is passenger count: passengers arriving and departing. Per the DOT BTS, Boise Air Terminal handled 3.3 million passengers in the 12 months ending September 2007: 1.66 million arrivals and departures.

Interesting to note that Boise Air Terminal, not exactly a major airport by any definition, handled more passengers than any Amtrak station other than New York, Washington, and Philadelphia.

prr60 wrote:You are both right. The FAA data is enplanements only: passengers boarding. The airport data is passenger count: passengers arriving and departing. .

There is a reason FAA uses the enplanement number....almost everyone is going to get on a plane once in Boise and get off a plane once. In the case of the airport being used as a hub this will take place with-in a few hours, if a local flys out and then back, or a visitor comes to town this will probably happen over a day or a few weeks. In any case enplanements is the number of journeys that use the airport, the passenger number is double that.

A lot of people use the passenger number because they want to sell something, it is so much more impressive to say 3.4 million passengers than to say 1.7 million passengers used the airport. It is also purposefully misleading. When I go through an airport hub to transfer planes and I am told that I am two passengers that day I know someone is trying to cook the books. I am one person passing though, lets be real about it.

icgsteve wrote:There is a reason FAA uses the enplanement number....

In that case, you MUST take any Amtrak station ridership number and divide it by two, because Amtrak counts both boardings and alightings.

Let's stick to apples-to-apples comparisons; you can't force airports to state only half the passengers (only those that get on) while counting Amtrak passengers who get off the train as well as on.

<cough, dust, cough>

https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/n ... lley-depot

While this topic is OLD, and mainly discusses the resumption of the former Pioneer Route, it does discuss Boise, so I have decided to adapt it to this potential service.

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Somedays, it’s good to be cautious. But Bre Brush, chief advisor on transportation at Boise City Hall, says there are other days when it’s “full steam ahead” in the effort to bring Amtrak service back to Southern Idaho and link it to Salt Lake City.

“If we're selected, we get $500,000 to develop a service development plan for the corridor,” she said. “And that piece will help us answer so many of the questions that we've been getting, like how much it will cost the economic benefit, where stops will be, the frequency, station improvements that we need, things like that.”
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PRENTICE: Okay. Let me see if I remember this right. There's something called the Corridor ID program. And in particular, we're talking about the corridor between Boise and Salt Lake City. And then there's this unique joint effort between Boise and Salt Lake to push or pull Amtrak to consider returning service to our region. Is that it in a nutshell?

BRUSH: Yes, that's exactly right. So, this is an effort we've been working on since early last year. Mayor McLean, at a mayor's conference, had the opportunity to get together with the CEO of Amtrak, and he let her know that this new program was coming out related to passenger rail service and that he had heard interest from Salt Lake City on a connection between Salt Lake and Boise. So, the mayor took that and she met with the mayor of Salt Lake and sat down with her to just figure out ways our two communities can connect and passenger rail service being among them. The new opportunity through the corridor ID program that was established in the bipartisan infrastructure law is perfect for that. It's going to help create a pipeline of projects for rail for the Federal Rail Administration. So, we get this funding opportunity to look into it and see what the viability of this route would be.
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