Philly Amtrak Fan
Engineer
The question then becomes if you assume minimal or no traffic to/from NYP is there enough traffic on the rest of the route to make it worthwhile financially?
If you run a 17 hour train as a "day train" it puts the beginning of the train very early and the end of the train very late. So the train will be less attractive to those markets if scheduled that way. Any train that long will require someone to be stuck with a "bad" time. The question is who? I'm saying you find your target markets and schedule the train around them. If your target markets for a DET-NYP train are really BUF and ALB, then schedule it so they have good times. But if your target markets are DET and NYP, then schedule it so they have good times. That is what I feel is the largest fundamental problem with the Cardinal and the point of this whole thread in the first place. Your largest unique markets of the Cardinal are IND and CIN. IND's times are early morning and late night and CIN's times are in the middle of the night.
There is a lot of ridership along upstate New York but how many trains go through Syracuse or Rochester that don't go to New York? Only one I can think of is the Boston section of the LSL. I question whether upstate New York (ALB, SYR, ROC, BUF) can support a train without New York. I'm not even sure CHI to BUF or CHI to ALB would work without NYP or another large market like BOS or PHL and I really think you will get low ridership for CIN to BUF and/or ALB and DET to BUF and/or ALB. I think 3-C on its own will work and certainly will see traffic between the three cities. But if you extend it just to BUF or just to ALB, do you gain more ridership? And if the departure/arrival times in CIN then have to be bad, I think that hurts ridership there.
The Pennsylvanian between CHI and PHL failed. It gave better times to CLE and TOL but where did they want to travel to? CHI and PHL? Then they have to depart/arrive at bad times so it really wasn't much better than leaving home at 3 in the morning. And I think cutting NYP out of the Pennsylvanian was terrible. Once they made it PGH to NYP as opposed to CHI to PHL, ridership increased. How will these other trains that either leave on both ends close to or in the graveyard shift and/or do not serve NYP be able to do what the Pennsylvanian CHI-PHL didn't?
In terms of Amtrak finances, you can look at it in three ways:
1. The propose anything and hypothetically Amtrak will one day be able to fund it philosophy.
2. The Amtrak has no spare money and all of these are pointless philosophy.
3. It will come down to Amtrak can afford some new trains but not others and the question is which trains do you pay for? philosophy.
I have always looked at Amtrak from the last philosophy. As much as we want to have Amtrak have hundreds of routes Amtrak will never have enough money. They have to pick and choose which trains run and which don't.
I'd be upset if Amtrak started another train if I thought the money it spent could be used on a Liberty Limited/Broadway Limited train and the other train was less financially successful than the LL/BL would be (if it was more financially successful I would not object). I'm mad at the Cardinal now because I feel they stole the BL's spot. If Amtrak wasn't forced to restart the Cardinal after canceling it, I think the Broadway would've never been canceled.
Theoretically we shouldn't be competing for trains but realistically we are.
