by BobLI
I passed through Burlington VT. and noticed the Union Station by the lake. What railroads served that station and just how busy was it?
Railroad Forums
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Rockingham Racer wrote:Opinion question: how much do you think the U of Vermont kids and St. Michael's College kids will bump the ridership on the train?As regards UVM students v. future Burlington Amtrak service, Megabus runs daily buses from the UVM Campus to Boston (4.0 hrs @ $19), Hartford (4:45 @ $39), and NYC (7:45 @ $59). And similarly, Greyhound departs the UVM campus for Boston and Montreal.
johnpbarlow wrote:F-Line - appreciate your opinions but I wonder if you're not staking a lot on Amtrak quality of service / superior punctuality v. low priced bus? After investing $$ in NECR Conn River route to improve Vermonter performance, I understand from an Amtrak person familiar with the operation that NECR maintenance is not what it should be (perhaps similar to PAR's well documented lack of diligence on the Downeaster route a couple years back) and the Vermonter now takes regular schedule hits.Vermonter performance today is entirely impacted by the Springfield Line upgrades and the Metro North catenary replacement work on the New Haven Line shutting down 2 tracks at a time in the work zone. The route is still carrying sizeable artificial schedule padding through the duration of those two Connecticut projects. The cat replacement project ends for good in less than a year. Springfield Line (for now...as of latest projected schedule) and Springfield Union Station platform upgrades end early-2018. The Vermonter schedule will see a more dramatic revision at that point than any of the timetable adjustments it's seen to-date. All of this was known from the day the upgrade project was funded; it's not news or disappointment to anyone. What you see today is transitional...wholly-planned transitional.
Certainly in the heavily traveled/populated NE Corridor there has proven to be demand for both bus and Amtrak service. I'm decades out of college but I did recently enjoy a $20 4 hour ride on Gobus from Riverside (Newton) to the NYP area in Manhattan that Amtrak could not come close to matching on price and I'd do it again if I wasn't going to drive the route to LI as I usually do.That's exactly my point: room for two. 20 years ago the buses had a hands-down advantage on the I-95 corridor between Boston and NYC for the cost-conscious set. Very few students rode Amtrak. Now? Bus fares are even lower, but Amtrak's share of the market has increased a lot. Why? They can offer schedule certainty for their price, while the bus is less able than ever to project arrival times. The buses, with the arrivals of the super-discount carriers like Megabus, in fact no longer emphasize their travel times as anything other than a reference point...instead using even lower pricing to bargain with the escalating variability. The market's fragmenting along those lines. It's fragmenting within the bus mode in ways that didn't exist 20 years ago when it was one flavor of Greyhound/Peter Pan dominating. So, really, it's the fact that there's market fragmentation within a formerly unified mode of intercity travel that's giving the trains a bigger share of the pie than simply the trains forcing the issue.
ExCon90 wrote:A 1937 Official Guide shows bus service by April 27--I'll see if I can find anything earlier that would narrow it down. I tend to agree with Ridgefielder that the train service ended quite a bit earlier--very likely when the Depression began to bite.Could even be earlier. The New Haven started bustituting some operations as early as the 1920's-- the Branchville-Ridgefield Center shuttle train, for instance, stopped running in the summer of 1926.