justalurker66 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 02, 2020 7:52 pmThe various Indy to Chicago rail links died for a reason. I don't see enough demand to spend billions on a revival.
Worth addressing this point. There were four main CHI-IND routes at first, the NYC-IC route via Kankakee, the PRR Panhandle route via Lafayette, the Nickel Plate route via Argos, and the Monon went via its namesake village, plus all sorts of other combinations of routes via NYC, PRR, Monon, Nickel Plate, Erie, C&O and other roads. All of those routes have been partially abandoned, not because there isn’t traffic potential between those two cities but because no single one of those four railroads survived to the modern day.
Conrail was tasked with creating a system out of a ball of rotten spaghetti. Since they didn’t have interchange partners at Indy, I-65 took away their fast freight opportunity between Indy and Chicago, and Indiana was so extremely overbuilt with railroads, they chose which routes would hit the most traffic sources instead of the fastest route. That meant they eliminated the entire Panhandle and sold off the Kankakee route (who wanted to use ICG trackage?) and eventually settled on routing CHI-IND freight the long way east to Warsaw, south to Anderson, and back west to Indy.
When Seaboard bought Monon prior to the CSX merger, they had the same math. Indianapolis was at the end of a stub; they could have chosen to interchange with Chessie at Indianapolis, but Chessie had its own CHI-CIN route through Muncie and Seaboard owned a CHI-Louisville route that also bypassed Indianapolis.
Finally, Indianapolis was also at the end of a NKP/N&W/NS branch with no interchange partner (Southern didn’t have its own line north to Indianapolis.) Instead of keeping their own branch intact at the Conrail breakup, they took over the Conrail route mentioned before.
None of these were abandoned because there isn’t traffic, they were abandoned because individual corporations made the choices that worked for them - and when the situations changed (CSX beginning to route freight via the L&I ex-PRR route), they had already cut away too much to change course. And Amtrak didn’t get its own route in 1976 because there were too many routes between those cities - until there just weren’t. It’s rather lucky that CSX got the ex-NYC Connellsville branch, because otherwise there would be nothing at all like a direct route between these cities.