Once again, Philly, trading one route for another is not the way to go. The Gulf Coast service will be restored without having to sacrifice any other route. And some day your beloved Broadway will return, without having to cancel the Lake Shore or the Ethan Allen or some mixed train in Manitoba. Each service can stand on its own, without horsetrading. Besides, CSX isn't going to lower its price for the Gulf Coast by abandoning the Cardinal. They'll just say, fine, cancel the Cardinal, we still want a zillion dollars to restore the Gulf Coast route.
Gilbert B Norman wrote:Mr. Nas, on the Continent, why OBB is promoting Sleeper services when every other European system is dropping them escapes me. I somehow think that the Sleeper trains I remember from 1960 (my first trip over) where there were cars stretching out of sight in the UK (and a steam engine up front), will not return. Likewise, I can recall a 1971 "marathon" after A-Day where again Wagon-Lits on the Paris/Nord-Nice "Blue Train" stretched out of sight. By 1990, a Madrid-Sevilla journey found me in a 4 man Couchette (First Class) when my Wagon-Lit reservation simply "wasn't". It was bare bone; and I doubt if the CIWL&GEE offered any more in the way of amenities. A Paris/Est-Frankfurt found one Wagon Lit on that train.What ÖBB is up to seems plain enough to me. DB and SNCF's core sleeper routes are now no longer 8-9 hour conventional routes, but 3-5 hour HSR routes, and the business case and, more importantly, the political case for sleepers on those routes has collapsed. The strongest ex-DB CityNightLine routes remaining are those that barely serve Germany at all, and mostly go clear across the country serving UK/Benelux-Switzerland/Austria, and it's not really a stretch to see why ÖBB might see an opportunity to pay a little bit of money to the piper to call the tunes. (Picking up 2005-2006 vintage rolling stock from DB for a song might go down as the greatest train robbery since the Great one.) And the future of the services on the ÖBB balance sheet is probably pretty good. http://www.railjournal.com/index.php/fi ... rawal.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
So what the OBB is up to, I know not.
DB cited losses of €31m annually when announcing the withdrawal. However, leaked figures from DB's confidential monthly "Night Train Monitor" dated December 2 showed that by the end of September, profitability for the year had improved by €5.9m above forecast and losses were much lower at €13.5m on turnover of €69m (losses representing 19% of turnover).Not the profitability you see on TGV or ICE, but ÖBB doesn't run true HSR, and has a better political case for subsidizing passengers to/from Vienna and Salzburg than DB did.
(Eventually Europe will come to the same realization that China has, specifically that its continental-scale HSR network has popular travel markets in the 9+ hour range, and will invest in dedicated HSR sleepers, but it hasn't happened yet, and probably won't anytime soon.)
The parallel to this is why the NYP-WAS or NYP-BOS Executive Sleeper is just not coming back. Upgrades to the NEC over the decades mean that there's no reason to reinstate sleeper service in preference to just extending the service day on Acela.
To return to the topic of expanding Amtrak sleeper service, I'm also in favor of starting to utilize additional sleepers by extending existing trains on the schedule, especially the Silver Meteor and Lake Shore Limited. As someone who lives in Philadelphia and travels to Boston regularly, and knowing many who make that journey in either direction, I'm also very impatient to get sleepers back on 65/66/67. The inconvenience of getting to or from Boston from points beyond NYP has been extensively litigated in other threads, and I've taken 66 in coach before as an alternative to more poorly-timed options. I'm getting a little old for that these days.
If we really need to look for a new sleeper route beyond 65/66/67, we can do that. If we start at Amtrak's best single-city market (New York), and specifically look for destinations in the 8-11 rail hour range. I can count no fewer than five that can work, all of which have existing daylight service that an overnight would complement nicely. For the curious, those are: Portland/Brunswick, Montreal/Burlington (Essex Jct.), Buffalo/Niagara Falls, Pittsburgh, and Raleigh. The last three can extended to further destinations (Chicago, Chicago, Charlotte or Florida, respectively) with a third trainset, as desired. There's plenty of station capacity at NYP for late-evening (~22:30) departures and arrivals scheduled before 07:00 (with the possibility of up to an hour's delay, but schedule pad in addition wouldn't be a bad thing). London manages to tie up two tracks at Euston for the Caledonian Sleeper every morning, with the "everyone off" deadline at 08:00. Euston is not a quiet station in the rush hour! It helps that the Sleepers are 16-car trains, having been joined up in either Edinburgh or Carlisle. Also, Network Rail delivers the Sleeper with high punctuality, especially by American standards. The Lowland Sleeper is also clearly sandbagging its time; Edinburgh Waverley-London King's Cross in only a shade over four hours.
If Amtrak had exercised the option for additional sleepers, or somehow reactivates that at a future date (it's not as though CAF can yet claim that it's too late to source long lead time materials, given how slowly the base order is coming out), there are actually good reasons to run *all five* of the routes I identified in the previous paragraph, running a bank of departures in a small window from NYP, and using these trains to help fill connecting trains on the NEC and Empire Corridor, arriving at NYP 21:00-21:30. Leverage the hub-spoke nature of the network at New York...
I would further argue that extending a 22:30 NYP departure to Raleigh down to Florida, is a superior third sleeper train to extending the Palmetto as the Silver Palm, since it allows for a 21:30 arrival in Orlando (instead of calling in the 03:00 hour), and even a midnight arrival in Tampa, with the tradeoff of arriving at Miami Intermodal Center in the small hours and needing to sit until dawn. Intra-Florida travelers are taking the existing Silver Service trains and will hopefully take Brightline, but likely not either of these new trains.
The downside of NYP-centric timing on a train south is, of course, bad timings at PHL and worse timings at WAS, but speaking as a Philadelphian, we can deal. WAS actually enjoys much better timings on existing trains than NYP, and I don't see any third Florida train drawing much ridership from WAS. (True story: the last sleeper train to depart NYP every day is 49, at 15:40. That's only a half-day at work...)