exvalley wrote: ↑Mon Jul 13, 2020 1:29 pm
As a newbie, can someone explain the logic behind breaking up a long distance route? Let's take Chicago to Emeryville, for example. What would be the benefit of breaking up route at Denver and having the passenger take one train from CHI-DEN and then another DEN-EMY? A passenger is not going to want to sit in Denver for more than an hour or two, which means that the connecting trains will have to be scheduled fairly close to each other. So if that's the case, why not just have one train running the CHI-EMY route?
And that’s the $64,000 question
Proponents of LD trains think like you. One train can serve a lot of corridors (a concatenated corridor) - the
California Zephyr provides nonstop service CHI-DEN, OMA-SLC, DEN-SAC, and SLC-EMY with the same trainset, as well as the full CHI-EMY. LD trains tend to have more amenities, which passengers enjoy, and can be quite competitive with cross-country driving on some routes.
Detractors of LD service and proponents of corridor service argue that One Big Train will never serve all areas equally or equitably. That’s why Cleveland gets stuck with stops in the wee hours from the
Capitol Limited and
Lake Shore Limited for instance, even though it could be a huge ridership generator with a daytime train. Corridor trains also avoid the “late and getting later” issue common to LDs, where a train delayed in Spokane can keep missing its assigned slots and fighting through a flood of westbound freights all the way through to St. Paul and interchange with another railroad. With corridor trains, when one is delayed the next one still leaves on time (possibly held for connections for a little while.) Corridor service also generally offers fewer amenities, which Amtrak likes as they lose money on amenities, and states generally have to pick up the tab for a high proportion of service costs. Finally, they can size their trains for the expected load per segment - there will never be as many people riding the
Crescent from ATL to NOL as from NYP to ATL, but Amtrak still hauls all the cars along. (Which is a related matter of not having a place or way to stash them in Atlanta.)