Recent content by delvyrails

Before the SP/UP freight congestion issue. the old Sunset Limited schedules (pre-8am Los Angeles westbound arrival, post-11pm eastbound depature) did connect in both directions with the Coast Starlight. Long before Amtrak's time when there were two or more daily trains in each direction on each...

When the train goes daily, the LA connection with the Coast Starlight needs to be restored in both directions. Currently the missed connection makes travel between the Bay Area and Southern Arizona inconvenient via Amtrak. That's one of Amtrak's largest currently-unserved LD travel markets...

The Viewliner trains will continue as Superliners cannot run on the NE corridor through NYC or Baltimore due to overhead clearance issues at the stations, tunnels and bridges. Therefore the LSL will always be a Viewliner train and because it originates in NYC , it will always be Expensive. The...

We get so many questions of this sort, or about what meals are served and when they are served. Why can't Amtrak put this necessary info in the timetables?

The most realistic course is for a rerouting of the Silver Meteor via the FEC route, while the Silver Star conntinues on its present route. According to my calculations, the FEC route would be about 48 miles shorter. This would reduce train operating costs, but additional station costs with the...

I think you are both right. The Lone Star was the faster route between Chicago and Fort Worth-Dallas. That route should have been kept, and it should have been extended to Austin and San Antonio. However, the railroad map shows a different, ideal purpose for the Texas Eagle: as a Chicago-St...

Demolishing the passenger station after the service ends may not be the spiteful thing that some believe. In many places, operating railroad property enjoys a property tax reduction; and when passenger operations cease, the tax rate goes up. So the building comes down.

Maybe the respondents have the "trees" correct, but what about the "forest"? The problem may be with the monopolistic, inward-looking, job-perpetuating, we've-always-done-it-that-way, customers-will-adapt-to-us railroad "culture". Good technology can do things better, faster, and with less hand...

Thanks, GoldenSpike. The recent trend is encouraging. The better measure would be passenger-miles over the years, if that measure is available.

When the demand increases. the immediate response should be to utilize the existing rolling stock more intensively by revising the service and schedules. There have been many discussions on how to accomplish this in this and other forums.

It should be clear that Amtrak has little interest in reviving the Florida extension of the Sunset Limited. This enterprise probably was a mistake. It sounded good on paper: a tourist train to connect Disneyland with River Walk, Vieux Carre, and Disney World. Probably it was popular with the...

Now that Texas supports the Heartland Flyer to an out-of-state destination, it would seem appropriate to extend it within state (after finding a second equipment set) down to Houston. Is incremental service improvement in the Texas Triangle being held back by concentration on HSR?

As a display of the general deterioration in train travel times, Haswell's 1998/pre-World War II comparisons are telling. If done today, some even longer Amtrak travel times would be cited. However, a more appropriate, realistic, and useful comparison would be between current Amtrak schedules...

Whatever Alan says, I wouldn't regard more passengers (and revenue) for Amtrak as any real kind of problem :) .

The south side of Chicago Union Station has 14 main station tracks. Between the peak commuting periods, Metra's commuter trains are taken out to the yards for maintenance. They're not in the station. Only a few off-peak trains per hour run in and out of the station, requiring only a few tracks...