If you could restore a defunct Amtrak route

Sisko24 wrote:How about extending one Chicago-Michigan train to Toronto/New York? I envision a Chicago-Detroit-Hamilton(Ontario) route with a split at Hamilton(?) with one section continuing onward to Toronto, the other continuing onward to Buffalo and New York City. Of course, I'm assuming VIA's partnership with this route so they could market this as additional service for southern Ontario as well as a restoration of an international route to Chicago.

I think with Canada you run into border issues. I'd be all in favor of Detroit to New York but I think via Toledo/Cleveland would be better.

S24:

I like the idea of bringing back the International (Chicago and Toronto) which was a equal partnership between
Amtrak and VIA Rail Canada. What would have to be worked out is the Customs/Immigration problems that ended
this service back in the 2000s. Sarnia-London is now down to only one train each way per day and with Canada's
current government pro rail transport this restoration could be a good move for both carriers.

Everyone:

This has been a interesting topic with a lot of interesting routes that could be restored. I agree with the thought
of bringing back the Broadway Limited (New York-Chicago via Pittsburgh) which is a favorite route of mine.
The problem is how the train would run across Ohio and Indiana with the old PRR route via Fort Wayne (the largest
city on that route between Pittsburgh and Chicago) less practical since it was downgraded during the 1980s to a
single track secondary line. The former B&O route used during the 1990s is another possibility as well as routing
the train via Alliance and Cleveland to Toledo and Chicago which would be only if either of the other two routes is
not useable. Harrisburg-Pittsburgh gets a second train and a third route to Chicago from the east becomes restored.

MACTRAXX

Full disclosure:
I've trimmed . . . , abbreviated, inserted the names of current LD trains, and put in a very few words to clarify.

electricron wrote:It's about time to add to the discussion changing it slightly.
Let's assume there are no existing LD trains, and Amtrak had to start providing the service . . .

... run LD trains from California to Texas Sunset Limited presumably daily (1) and Illinois Southwest Chief OR the Zephyr (2). Then LD trains from Texas to Illinois Texas Eagle (3) and Florida City of New Orleans extension by another name (4). Then run LD trains from New York to Illinois Lake Shore Ltd (5) and Florida Silver Meteor OR the Silver Star (6).

... not so sure LD trains from Illinois to Florida Capitol Ltd connecting to the surviving Silver (7), and Texas to New York Sunset Ltd connecting to Crescent (8) would be needed, but I wouldn't object to them.

... seriously consider running LD trains, either or both, from California to Washington State Coast Starlight (9) and Illinois to Washington Empire Builder (10) to interconnect the Cascades trains to a national grid. . . .

... drop at least four existing LD trains . . . to reinvent Amtrak's long distance services.

That's how I see your "reinvention": Maintain the current national system. Drop the California Zephyr, the Palmetto, one of the Silvers, and the Cardinal. Keep the unmentioned Auto Train, sui generis.

Nah. That's not a reinvention. It's just a repackaged argument to cut back. Aside from the big-loser Zephyr, you'd cut 3 of the best-performing trains in the system, with real operating losses of $0 to $10 million a year. Lose half a million riders to save $20 million? Really? Well, I grant you, this cutting thing ain't so easy.

But Amtrak doesn't need any amputations. Amtrak needs to grow.

MACTRAXX wrote:S24:

Everyone:

This has been a interesting topic with a lot of interesting routes that could be restored. I agree with the thought
of bringing back the Broadway Limited (New York-Chicago via Pittsburgh) which is a favorite route of mine.
The problem is how the train would run across Ohio and Indiana with the old PRR route via Fort Wayne (the largest
city on that route between Pittsburgh and Chicago) less practical since it was downgraded during the 1980s to a
single track secondary route. The former B&O route used during the 1990s is another possibility as well as routing
the train via Alliance and Cleveland to Toledo and Chicago which would be only if either of the other two routes is
not useable. Harrisburg-Pittsburgh gets a second train and a third route to Chicago from the east becomes restored.

MACTRAXX

Considering I live in the Philly area (suburbs), I absolutely am in favor of restarting the Broadway. I think you have to go through Toledo/Cleveland. All Aboard Ohio has proposed going through Michigan (http://allaboardohio.org/2015/09/22/new ... nger-rail/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;). It does add miles to the route but you then also get service between Michigan (Detroit/Ann Arbor) and Philly/New York as well as Cleveland/Pittsburgh. Also, Amtrak owns a large portion of the tracks between Chicago and Detroit so they can go at a faster speed through that portion. You would need to get track access between Toledo and Detroit though.

If I could have only one such train, I'd actually use All Aboard Ohio's "Three Rivers" schedules so Ohio (and Michigan) can have non graveyard shift service. The eastbound train arrives in Pittsburgh before midnight and Philadelphia early in the morning. Likewise, the westbound train should leave Philly before midnight and arrive in Pittsburgh early in the morning. You would probably have to be push back the eastbound train so it doesn't arrive in Penn Station during the morning rush hour. These trains can also give you overnight between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh where you can leave one end late at night and arrive in the other early in the morning. Harrisburg and most of western PA would be in the graveyard shift both ways but they would get a direct train to Chicago without having to change trains in Pittsburgh (4 hr. nighttime wait westbound and eastbound in the wee hours of the morning). Also, these trains would not allow same day transfers to westbound trains but the Pennsylvanian/Capitol Limited option would still exist if passengers wanted to go west of Chicago. If the train arrives in Philadelphia early enough, you might be able to transfer there to the Carolinian and/or Silver Star.

Philly Amtrak Fan wrote:

Sisko24 wrote:How about extending one Chicago-Michigan train to Toronto/New York? I envision a Chicago-Detroit-Hamilton(Ontario) route with a split at Hamilton(?) with one section continuing onward to Toronto, the other continuing onward to Buffalo and New York City.

I'm assuming VIA's partnership with this route so they could market this as additional service for southern Ontario . . .

I think with Canada you run into border issues. I'd be all in favor of Detroit to New York but I think via Toledo/Cleveland would be better.

iiuc In the old days the trains from Buffalo to Detroit passed thru Canada as sealed trains. You couldn't get on or off, and not sure passports were required. Nowadays, folks imagine terrorists behind every beard or burka, and they picture pregnant illegal immigrants leaping onto the speeding train ready to drop anchor babies at the first U.S. train station. So even restoring the route would be difficult, no way with Canadians doing on/offs, and a split seems almost impossible.

I have to agree with Mr. O'Keefe on this: if you're really staring from a blank piece of paper, the California Zephyr is in serious trouble. So is the Sunset Limited; there's been no progress in over a decade in restoring direct access to Phoenix, El Paso I would much rather serve from a corridor connection from Albuquerque or Dallas, and after that your next biggest midpoint traffic generator between California and the Texas Triangle is Tucson. There's a decent case to be made that a second daily train on the Southwest Chief or the Empire Builder would be a superior use of Superliners.

I'm more likely to advocate for more Acela IIs and truncating LD trains to a transfer in WAS or PHL than extending to BOS, although I think the status quo is better than either, especially as equipment is replaced and LD trains can go faster than 79 on the NEC.

I think I'd shift the Southern hub gateway from New Orleans to Memphis, with additional frequencies to Chicago, and new connections to Dallas via Little Rock (either supplementing or replacing the via-STL routing of the Texas Eagle) and Atlanta, possibly continuing to Florida depending on equipment. The Crescent is going to need a new name, because ATL-NOL becomes a connecting day train. I'm now leaving southern Texas well and truly high and dry, but I'm anticipating a successful HSR/corridor hub in the DFW area, and while Houston is a lot of people, it's far from everyone else. So I'm going to go where the better corridors are, and rely on Texas Central to bring Houston into the National Network. I might try the Lone Star as another Texas-Chicago frequency, but now we're hitting the limits of equipment really hard.

Silver Service/Palmetto I'd leave as-is for now, with an eye on an additional train at some point in the future.

CComMack wrote:I have to agree with Mr. O'Keefe on this: if you're really staring from a blank piece of paper, the California Zephyr is in serious trouble.

If it doesn't exist, how would you serve Denver and/or Salt Lake City? How can you travel out of state to/from San Francisco Bay Area/Sacramento?

CComMack wrote:
I'm now leaving southern Texas well and truly high and dry, but I'm anticipating a successful HSR/corridor hub in the DFW area, and while Houston is a lot of people, it's far from everyone else. So I'm going to go where the better corridors are, and rely on Texas Central to bring Houston into the National Network. I might try the Lone Star as another Texas-Chicago frequency, but now we're hitting the limits of equipment really hard.

I'd think the same way about Seattle/Portland in terms of being far away from everyone else. I know the Empire Builder is either #1 or #2 in terms of LD ridership but isn't a lot of that between Chicago and Minneapolis or between Seattle/Portland and Spokane? How many passengers travel between Spokane and Minneapolis? I thought I remember a national report about the train being fairly empty between there. That's a lot of miles for really little population (North Dakota? Montana?)

MACTRAXX wrote:. . . an interesting topic . . . I agree with bringing back the Broadway Limited (NY-Chicago via Pittsburgh) . . .

The problem is how the train would run across Ohio and Indiana with the old PRR route via Fort Wayne (the largest city on that route between Pittsburgh and Chicago) less practical since it was downgraded during the 1980s to a single track secondary line. The former B&O route used during the 1990s is another possibility as well as routing the train via Alliance and Cleveland to Toledo and Chicago, which would be only if either of the other two routes is not useable.

At one point, the favored 110-mph corridor route was Cleveland-Toledo-Ft Wayne-Chicago. Granted the segment Toledo-Ft Wayne would need a lot of work. But the freight traffic is so heavy Cleveland-CHI, that trying to put another 8 or 9 corridor trains on it would be more costly than fixing the line down to Ft Wayne. Not to mention the value of picking up more riders from that city.

Since then, Philly Amtrak Fan's friends at All Aboard Ohio started campaigning for a corridor CHI-Ft Wayne-Columbus. Building a 110-mph route CHI-Ft Wayne-Cleveland would cost $2 or $3 Billion over and above* but sharing part of the cost with a second set of corridor trains CHI-Ft Wayne-Columbus helps it pencil out.

*Any route chosen will have to get thru that thorny thicket South Of The Lake (that is, CHI Union Station to Porter, Indiana where Amtrak's 110-mph segment to Kalamazoo starts), a project that will cost $1 or $2 Billion all by itself. But SOTL is essential to cutting another 50 minutes or so out of the Wolverines trip times CHI-DET. If the cost of upgrading that stretch can be shared with a bunch of CHI-CLE and CHI-Columbus corridor trains, everyone wins. SOTL has to come first, then the others can piggyback.

I didn't wander too far from the Broadway Limited to talk about SOTL. Taking 50 minutes out of its run time could help a lot. Taking the whole 2 hours (saved by going up to 110 mph) out of the schedule Cleveland-Chicago would help a lot more.

+++++++++++++++++++
The info is from a report of the Midwestern Regional Rail Initiative, from 2004 iirc, and surely revised since.

Philly Amtrak Fan wrote:

CComMack wrote:I have to agree with Mr. O'Keefe on this: if you're really staring from a blank piece of paper, the California Zephyr is in serious trouble.

If it doesn't exist, how would you serve Denver and/or Salt Lake City? How can you travel out of state to/from San Francisco Bay Area/Sacramento?

the Denver zephyr might be a decent and reliable train. slc maybe keeps a connection to oakland but no through service

Philly Amtrak Fan wrote:

Sisko24 wrote:How about extending one Chicago-Michigan train to Toronto/New York? I envision a Chicago-Detroit-Hamilton(Ontario) route with a split at Hamilton(?) with one section continuing onward to Toronto, the other continuing onward to Buffalo and New York City. Of course, I'm assuming VIA's partnership with this route so they could market this as additional service for southern Ontario as well as a restoration of an international route to Chicago.

I think with Canada you run into border issues. I'd be all in favor of Detroit to New York but I think via Toledo/Cleveland would be better.

Yes, there are border issues with any Canadian service. But if The Cascades and The Maple Leaf can solve them, I don't see why any other service should be so challenged. There is a bill in Congress which enjoys bipartisan support to enable US Border Patrol and customs/immigration agents to perform screening in Montreal for southbound Adirondack travellers. Presumably this will also enable Canadian border agents to have reciprocal permissions to carry out incoming searches and such before northbound passengers arrive at the US/Canadian border. With this kind of legal precedent in place, any border issues a restored International would have could be much more easily negotiated.

As for a Toledo/Cleveland route, maybe something that ran Cleveland-Toledo-Detroit would be possible. I think in New York Central times, there was such a train. It would've been long gone by Amtrak times.

Woody wrote:

Philly Amtrak Fan wrote:

Sisko24 wrote:How about extending one Chicago-Michigan train to Toronto/New York? I envision a Chicago-Detroit-Hamilton(Ontario) route with a split at Hamilton(?) with one section continuing onward to Toronto, the other continuing onward to Buffalo and New York City.

I'm assuming VIA's partnership with this route so they could market this as additional service for southern Ontario . . .

I think with Canada you run into border issues. I'd be all in favor of Detroit to New York but I think via Toledo/Cleveland would be better.

iiuc In the old days the trains from Buffalo to Detroit passed thru Canada as sealed trains. You couldn't get on or off, and not sure passports were required. Nowadays, folks imagine terrorists behind every beard or burka, and they picture pregnant illegal immigrants leaping onto the speeding train ready to drop anchor babies at the first U.S. train station. So even restoring the route would be difficult, no way with Canadians doing on/offs, and a split seems almost impossible.

That's interesting, sealed, huh? That sounds creepy to me. A bit too much like WWII Reichsbahn service.

The Maple Leaf runs as an Amtrak/VIA "codeshare" service. For example, Amtrak doesn't sell round trip tickets between two Canadian cities covered by The Maple Leaf, but VIA does. If something was reestablished between Chicago and Toronto, that type of sharing arrangement would probably be how it would happen and why it would get the support of the Canadian federal and provincial governments along with US federal and state governments.

As for beards and terrorists, I see beards on Metro-North each morning which would put bin Laden, Duck Dynasty and your favorite 1% outlaw biker gang to shame. Many of them are heading down to Wall Street (albeit to possibly commit terrorism of a different sort).

Depends on what you mean by 'solve' and I would argue that the Maple Leaf doesn't really solve them.

Vancouver service is 'solved' by running a non-stop service between Pacific Central Station and the Border, with passengers being screened prior to boarding and the train and it's passengers being held in a secure fenced area. The train is unable to stop at New Westminster or White Rock as was historically the practice, since US and Canadian customs agents refuse to do processing on the move. This procedure is being brought to Montreal, which is resulting in end of Amtrak service to Sainte-Lambert.

But that only works when your train is just a 40 mile hop over the border anchoring a US-based corridor. Getting to Toronto from Niagara, Port Huron, or Detroit with the cooperation of VIA rail is going to have VIA wanting to make stops in Sarnia, Windsor, London, Niagara Falls, Hamilton and so forth. The Maple Leaf is VIA's only service to the Niagara. So the 'Sealed train' to the border doesn't really work. Hence the painfully long dwell often seen at the border that customs requires to clear the whole train that contributed to the cancellation of the International in the first place

Sisko24 wrote:That's interesting, sealed, huh? That sounds creepy to me. A bit too much like WWII Reichsbahn service.

After the Berlin Wall went up and until it was torn down, I think sealed trains ran between West Germany and West Berlin. That must have been creepy for real. Sleeping thru Ontario, sweet dreams.

CComMack wrote:I have to agree with Mr. O'Keefe: if you're really staring at a blank piece of paper, the California Zephyr is in serious trouble.

How'd the thread derail like this? LOL. We were challenged to offer ideas for restoring [i.e., adding] routes. Now we have folks taking a machine saw to the current system.

OK, the Zephyr runs the biggest loss of any LD train, some $55 million by one account. But note that the Monthly Report said the Zephyr's ridership was up 18% and revenues up 11% over February 2015, "driven by the additional cutoff cars in Reno and an added sleeper". Looks like added revenue for the year could be $1.8 million, or more. Minus the added costs, well, every little bit helps.

Still, take Amtrak's sickest route, administer a couple of small doses of more equipment, and the vital signs all show solid improvement. Is the Zephyr just the most extreme example of the equipment shortages that plague all the rest of Amtrak?

Another post in this thread wants to overlay state-supported corridors on the LD system. Me too. We have a bit of that now, (Cascades/Coast Starlight, Lincoln Service/Texas Eagle, Lynchburger/Crescent etc,) but not nearly enuff. Meanwhile states working with Amtrak can equip more corridor trains out of the option orders for Chargers and bi-levels.

The poor Zephyr shares a segment Emeryville-Sacramento with the Capitol Corridor trains, and with the cutout cars it's emphasizing the whole Reno-Sacramento-Bay Area corridor. East of Reno is the empty Great Basin desert with no population until the Zephyr reaches Salt Lake City. One day Salt Lake-Denver might become a corridor, perhaps 20 years from now. Then flat and almost empty land Denver-Lincoln-Omaha-(lots of small towns in Iowa)-Galesburg-CHI.

A few years back the multi-state Midwest Regional Rail Initiative looked at that eastern end of the Zephyr's corridor. The unavoidable conclusion was that it has the wrong route thru Iowa. The proposal was to send trains from CHI thru the Quad Cities, rather than Galesburg. The new line would then use Iowa Interstate (former Rock Island tracks). That Class 2 freight operator was so desperate for help upgrading its trackage that it pledged to cooperate in every way.

When the Stimulus struck, the FRA grabbed those plans off the shelf and offered to fund the line to the Quad Cities and on to Iowa City. Of course, everyone expected that the next year or the next year, more money would extend the route to Des Moines and on to Omaha. The proposal was for like 8 trains a day CHI-Quad Cities, 6 a day to Des Moines, 4 a day to Omaha, and then 1 or 2 or 3 a day to Denver (and dream of a second frequency to Salt Lake). Well, that didn't happen. I'm not even sure the new route will make it to the Quad Cities by September 2017.

But it is still a good plan. It wasn't even aiming for 110-mph service like the StL-CHI corridor, 79 mph would be enuff, making the whole project fairly cheap. With the Zephyr as one of the frequencies on the Iowa corridor, it could share marketing & advertising costs, station expenses, and some administrative overhead. It would gain new riders from those Iowa cities. Like all of Amtrak needs to do, it would gain from more of what marketers call "mind share" as 6 or 8 trains a day rolled thru those cities on its new route.

The answer isn't to chop off the Zephyr. That would lose passengers connecting to the Coast Starlight and the San Joaquins at one end and to the dozen or more trains at Chicago. Chopping the Zephyr would leave all the other trains carrying more of the overhead that wouldn't go away -- the facilities at Beech Grove, the IT system, Joe Boardman's secretary's salary, and I don't know what. Oh, somebody has to make payments on the debt, so slice it up among 15 LD trains or among only 14?

The answer for what ails Amtrak is more Amtrak. The answer for what ails the Zephyr is more trains CHI-Quad Cities-Iowa City-Des Moines-Omaha-Lincoln-Denver-Glenwood Springs-Grand Junction-Provo-Salt Lake City, and maybe some more running Reno-Sacramento-Bay Area.

I believe that by discussing more trains CHI-Denver I've managed to keep on topic.