Arborway - Thanks to your post I found some interesting material about the attempted discontinuance of 448/449 during the spring of '97. MA negotiated a deal with Amtrak that kept the train, and a main offering by the state was the construction of a new mail/express facility just east of the station to service the train. Of course, Amtrak has not been handling mail/express since Gunn discontinued it circa 2001, so this did not turn out to be much of an incentive to keeping the train in the long term.
Andy
Andy
Arborwayfan wrote:That was in winter or spring 1997. They got so far as to sell tickets on the buses for a while.
A kind of funny story:
Sometime in the spring of 1997 I made a reservation Champaign-Chi on the CONO, Chi-NYP on the Three Rivers (via Pittsburgh and Philly, lots of mail cars), NYP-BOS unreserved or reserved on the night train, and then back BOS-NYP-CHI-CHM via the Lakeshore Ltd. When the plan to bustitute was cancelled, Amtrak helpfully changed my reservation to Lakeshore in both directions. So kind, really, to think about that. But I wanted to ride the Three Rivers and I had dinner plans with a friend in New York. I did get that part of the reservation put back, but they had to override the software that wanted to charge me a lot extra to "change" my reservation back to what I'd asked for. But they did change it to what I'd wanted, and in 99% of cases what they did initially would have been right.