Can We Have the Southern Belle Back?

This legendary train only ran once a day and its consist from the 1950s and 1960s would include one locomotive, one or two baggage cars, two to five coaches and one observation car. Based on this information, I feel that it could be possible for Kansas City Southern to run one passenger train a day along the route of the Southern Belle with some of their office car special passenger equipment, or use old or unwanted Amtrak coaches for sale, with either stored passenger locomotives (maybe from Amtrak), or any freight diesels from KCS as power for the train. There could also be the option of an overnight service between Kansas City and New Orleans to be used as well.

Further information for the train itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_ ... KCS_train)

Based on the reasons which I stated in the last post on this topic, I feel that these would be attainable goals for KCS to achieve with the large number of fleet, including freight diesels, which could only pull a few cars needed, especially if some of those cars are used Amtrak or commuter cars for sale or soon to be retired.

Yeah, that's not going to happen.

eolesen wrote: ↑Fri Feb 21, 2020 4:05 am Yeah, that's not going to happen.

And why not? They could either use one of the many OCS cars they currently have stored, or buy one of the many used passenger cars for sale by Amtrak and other commuter railroads. They could use literally any locomotive they want to for passenger service ranging from sd40-2s to leased locomotives if they wanted to. It would only be one train each way a day over a medium distance line stopping at a few stops in the South which need rail service and serve as a connection to other existing train services offered by Amtrak.

Since there has to be a profitable business case in hand, and thus far, a profit motive is lacking from this idea. Even a quick market analysis based on solely the metrics of the historical Southern Belle don't bode well, and look very similar to the hurdles of "corridor-izing" the NYP-CHI or CHI-NOL intercity markets.

If the KCS management decides to start such a money-losing operation, there will be hell to pay the first weekend of May when the shareholders meet.



If we go down this path of fantasy for a minute ans assume that for any reason KCS decided to side-step from PSR, and focus some efforts on a Brightline real-estate business model to prop up passenger service, the passenger volume for intercity travel currently doesnt support a Kansas City to New Orleans routing.

Historical Speed is not on their side at 40-42mph over the Belle's schedule. Currently a system wide PSR metric of freight velocity of 13.5 mph for FY 2019, with hope of increasing it to a whooping 17 mph in FY 2020.

Passenger flows from airlines is not on your side either.

• Kansas City - New Orleans (KMCI-KMSY) doesn't even register on the top 10 parings from Kansas City, even though Southwest who handles approx 50% of passengers out of KMCI only advertises 11 roundtrips, and non-stop is 2hours VS 18 hours historical.
• New Orleans - Dallas is a neat market opportunity as 578,090 annual passengers annual passengers make that trek from KMSY to the two Dallas airports.
• Kansas City - Dallas also jumps out due to 497,110 annual passengers make that trek from KMCI to the two Dallas airports.
• Heck, even Shreveport to Dallas pulls in 96,560 annual passengers.
  (Note:Passenger counts are from Wikipedia pages, with the Referenced links attached for current data & graphs)

If you have to ask why this will never happen, well, I guess you need to do a little research on your own.