Allentown Service

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The Amtrak excursion makes it obvious that NS will happily allow trains to run to Allentown along its right-of-way... for the right price.

I therefore assume Allentown simply wasn't offering the right price. (The right price for regular service is probably a lot of double and triple track, maybe even quad track.)

NS seems on the whole more reasonable than CSX, which has been acting like a dirt path is more valuable than a railroad track. Honestly, I don't think NS would turn down an offer to quad-track the Allentown route with two tracks for freight and two for passengers. (Something which the nutcase morons at CSX were hostile to on the Empire Corridor, because they're deranged.)
 
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The Amtrak Excursion trip seems to be back on... and now will be two of them. Passenger train from New York to Allentown is on – sort of

Less than a month after a Norfolk Southern official crushed the hopes of rail fans by flatly saying no to any chance that Amtrak could use its freight tracks for a commuter train from the Lehigh Valley to New York, Amtrak has scheduled two daylong excursion trains from New York into the Lehigh Valley, Oct. 29 and Oct. 30.
... From Newark, the train heads west along the former Lehigh Valley Railroad, through the Musconetcong Tunnel just east of Phillipsburg. From there it will cross the Delaware River into Easton, continuing on through Freemansburg and south Bethlehem before rumbling past the rail yards in east Allentown and continuing along Basin Street, onto Emmaus and to Harrisburg
 
This is not the same as a dog and pony show to notionally begin work on service to Allentown, which is still not happening. This is an excursion with no additional political baggage. makes a huge difference in these things. NS has in the past agreed to run all sorts of such excursions and this is no different. However once you throw in th nuance of "starting to work on service to XYZ" it becomes a totally different story.

So no, this is no indication that we are anywhere closer to starting anything to Allentown. Thinking that it is, is just being delusional.
 
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I still say that the excursion run demonstrates that NS is not actually fundamentally hostile to Allentown Service along the *route*, they just don't want it on their *existing capacity* tracks because they're running at capacity most of the time. Which has been their attitude in other places anyway and is a perfectly reasonable attitude. (I'm absolutely supportive of having separate passenger and freight tracks. When I get mad at CSX it's for obstructing *that*, which I think is just malicious.)

A number of the Allentown articles indicated that the localilties simply weren't willing to pay the cost of an extra set of tracks (quoted at $685 million dollars in 2010), which may account for the very negative reactions of the NS spokesperson Hubbard in various other articles. Scranton, by contrast, knows that they have to pay around $551 million for new tracks.

I believe that this article gives the most accurate balanced perspective:

http://crossroads.newsworks.org/index.php/local/keystone-crossroads/89197-for-expanding-passenger-rail-in-pa-theres-high-demand-but-no-high-speed-options-
 
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