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Been there/done that, catching the Empire Builder at Fargo, ND to get home from college in the 1970s. Not great, but better than no passenger rail connection at all.

Thanks for the link! I don't have a map in front of me, but I'm guessing that the proposed new northern terminus at Newton, KS would connect to the Southwest Chief?

It does connect with the Texas Eagle now (at Fort Worth), but I imagine what you're talking about is the route being extended to connect with additional routes (maybe the City of New Orleans to the East, or the Southwest Chief to the West or Northwest?).

Those sound like the berth sleepers I've seen in old movies, which might have been 3-tier at times!

Although the trees and shrubbery aren't on the business' property here; they're on the railroad's right-of-way (and the publicly-owned land adjacent to the power lines), and there are parking spaces on the street just N of the business parking lot which are nearly as close to the encroaching...

Someone should tell my local utility company (ComEd) that! Because the family business is next to the Lincoln Service/Texas Eagle tracks, utility trucks park in our parking lot on a regular basis to trim tree branches and other vegetation encroaching upon power lines and the railroad's...

We had some of that when IL "wanna be HSR when it grows up" was being implemented. Locally, it was complaints about the state of Illinois building a new station (using funds better spent on other things) when local ridership was quite adequately served by the existing historic station. Also...

Plenty of trains whiz past Dwight -- but most of them are freight trains. Or when I'm driving N to the next county through the next town N of me (Mazon), there are double freight tracks there, and I have sometimes had to wait for a good 15 minutes at least for not 1, but 2 freight trains to go...

I had wondered that, too, when I was booking our October trip to FTW on the Eaglette. Per Google Maps, there appear to be several restaurants within a few blocks of the station; have no personal knowledge of any of them, though. (And our hotel in FTW is only 2 blocks away!)

Now I'm having visions of the next Lincoln Service train arriving in my town, playing the jingle the ice cream trucks used to play when I was little, instead of sounding the engine's horn! ;)

If the Lincoln Service/Texas Eagle were to be moved to a different set of tracks, I suspect that my hometown (Dwight, IL) would lose passenger rail service entirely. And this would be after the state of Illinois subsidized the construction of a new (but still unmanned) Amtrak station along the...

Huevos rancheros, here we come! (eventually)

You'll probably enjoy your first night's sleep on the TE, then, as a good part of it will be during the layover at San Antonio while it connects to the westbound Sunset Limited.

The hubby and I will be riding the Texas Eagle from Pontiac, IL to Fort Worth in October, and the TE tracks run right past our workplace, so perhaps I can answer a few of your questions. You will be riding the Heartland Flyer (a regional train) to Fort Worth, then boarding the westbound TE to...

That's the typical consist for Chicago-St. Louis. However, the southbound TE consist yesterday (5/6/24) had 1 additional car, and I'm not sure what it was. ETA: 2 engines on the southbound TE today (5/7/24), and back to the usual 5-car consist behind the engines.

I saw the southbound TE go past my town (20 miles NE of the Pontiac, IL station stop) yesterday afternoon with 6 cars behind the 1 engine, which was 1 more than the usual consist Chicago-St. Louis (sleeper + CCC + 3 coaches). Since the Eaglette doesn't stop in my town, it was going by too fast...

True, there are still freight trains using the IL HSR tracks. The passenger trains are faster than they were pre-HSR, though, and one is reminded of that whenever approaching a railroad crossing, by the crossing gates which extend the full width of the street/road, plus crossing gates extending...

I haven't yet seen a map of the proposed Texas HSR route/routes; does this mean no intermediate stops?

Whether or not bridges & underpasses would work in a particular situation might depend on how close homes and businesses are to the existing crossings. In my town, there are businesses and local government buildings quite close to the tracks, so adjusting/splitting 1 of the streets at a 4-way...

When high-speed rail was being implemented in Illinois, the original plan was to eliminate all but 1 railroad crossing in each town the high-speed tracks went through. This idea got a LOT of pushback from all of those towns, especially the small towns like mine, as it would have caused major...