Ahhh - reminds me of ol' Kay Bailey Hutchinson's dream to start the Crescent Star! Yes - as mentioned in a previous post, it would probably not carry that name any more. LOL. The routing was similar - but the plan was to utilize the KCS route out of Dallas to pick up NE Dallas, Greenville, Sulphur Springs, then Shreveport, Monroe, Meridian, Birmingham.
South Dakota's last intercity passenger train was discontinued in 1969, two years before Amtrak ... I think among the 48 contiguous states, only South Dakota, New Hampshire, and Vermont were without intercity passenger trains immediately before the establishment of Amtrak.
As a compromise, it would be fine with me if they just used the remaining portions of the "Olympian" route across South Dakota, and then switched to the old "North Coast Limited" route the rest of the way to Seattle. Yes, and on to New York! The KCS ex ICRR route between Meridian and Shreveport could be much faster now than ever in the past. I believe that it now has signals throughout. Since it is near straight across Louisiana that would equal quite a bit of 79 mph running, although you would probably have to buy KCS a few long sidings with #20 turnouts both to make KCS happy and to give you reliability. Schedule should be either two nights one day, or two days one night, or better yet both. A train on the Crescent route that gave a reasonable morning arrival at Charlotte southbound and New York northbound would be nice to have with or without anything going west of Atlanta. This one is not really in the "When pigs fly" category. While doing this, it would also be doable to break out a Houston section at Shreveport, or maybe at Monroe from which it would go via Alexandria LA and Lake Charles.
Alas, this route is, at least west of Roanoke well into the "When pigs fly" category much as I would love to see it happen. The through route between Knoxville and Nashville no longer exists, and when it did it was slower than going between them via Chattanooga. That time was 6 hours at best, by the way. The former NC&StL route between Nashville and Memphis no longer exists, either, although a through line is still in place, but no longer via Jackson TN. Again slow. The best time was something like 5 to 5 1/2 hours and the "good" through day train dissapeared in 1957 at which time I-40 consisted only of about 12 miles of a dirt moving job. The best ever Knoxville - Memphis time was 10 hours via the current NS route across northern Alabama. If you want to go through nashville, then the best would be around 13 to 14 hours. You can drive it in about 7 hours without pushing at all.
Yup!
I think there's enough intermediate business to be had both NFK-RVR and RVR-LYH/ROA that you'd be hard-pressed to skip Richmond, even if you end up only hitting RVM or doing some otherwise-silly-looking push-pull move (i.e. running backwards NFK-RVR/RVM). This is one of those cases that the ideal train routing is likely to get overridden by the size of the involved markets surrounding Richmond.
However, the NS Crescent Corridor map shows a route from Memphis to Huntsville AL to Chattanooga to Knoxville to Roanoke. If NS has provided capital to fix up that route, it does over the possibility of someday using it for a passenger train. Huntsville AL is certainly a much bigger metro area population wise than it was in the 1970s. No idea what the trip times might be from Memphis to Knoxville over the NS tracks.
With the dome car that used to run frequently there for awhile!!
Having ridden almost all this route at various times in the past, I can say that the issue is not track condition, but alignment geometry. It might be possible to squeeze about 30 minutes out of Memphis to Chattanooga with a 79 mph speed limit, but for the rest of it, unless someone is paying for major realignments, the run times as they were in the late 1950's are as good as you are getting. Actually, not that good, as superelevation in curves has been reduced due to the high center of gravity in piggyback and doublestacks.
I'm not gonna lie...the TDX just /screams/ "bad train" in its currently proposed form.
I could be wrong, but I don't think the Crescent Star ever made it into a published timetable like the additional New York/Philadelphia - Chicago train did.
Last I heard the reanalysis of the entension of service beyond Roanoke to Bristol done by/for the state of Virginia showed it to be essentially hopeless. I think the idea is dead. it should be with things as they are. As said, it is not a track condition issue at all, and so far as I know, not a capacity issue, either.
Politically easy? Yes. The problem that I see, at least with listing that as #1 on any list, is bad connectivity...most notably, there's no good way to get from that train to/from CHI at present. The connectivity heading east is more workable (virtually any train on that run will connect to/from the Cap and the LSL with an eastern origination/destination in mind), but WB...there's a lot to be desired. Even EB isn't great because of the transfer times, but there's a difference between "inconvenient" and "awful".
I apologize, I forgot about the Milwaukee Road transcon from Minneapolis through Aberdeen to Seattle. Was the last train in 1969 the reiminant of the Olympian from Minneapolis to Aberdeen? I remember the Milwaukee also had a branch of the Arrow that ran from Chicago to Sioux City and Sioux Falls. The C&NW's Dakota 400 also ran across South Dakota but I think it ended in the early 1960s. I had a Great Uncle that lived near Huron. In the 1950s he used to travel to Omaha on a C&NW local that went across South Dakota.South Dakota's last intercity passenger train was discontinued in 1969, two years before Amtrak ... I think among the 48 contiguous states, only South Dakota, New Hampshire, and Vermont were without intercity passenger trains immediately before the establishment of Amtrak.
The state actually does have a couple of transcontinental routes running through it, though, including the former route of the Milwaukee Road's "Olympian Hiawatha." If I got to play king, that's the route I would resurrect ... though admittedly it would require re-laying a few hundred miles of now-abandoned track further west in Montana, Idaho, and Washington.
Politically easy?
What a shame........Politically easy?
Just over 2 years ago Ohio had an agreement with the Fed to fund most of the capital costs for a 3C's service. Today, we still have nothing being done towards implementing such a service; the money marked for Ohio has gone to other states; and at least for the foreseeable future the plan is dead.
And the most interesting and sad part about this failure is the fact that, the 3C's plan was written by Mr. James Seney, a Republican. The plan then went to the Republican controlled Ohio State Senate where it was approved 33-0 to seek Federal funding. But because it was a Democratic Governor who actually signed the funding agreement with the Fed, and a Democratic President who signed the check, it suddenly became a bad plan. So after seeing the success that a candidate in Wisconsin was having campaigning against the big bad train, the Republican candidate for Ohio decided to try the same tactic to boost his sagging campaign. And it worked!
Of course it never occurred to him to look up history and learn that the Republicans in that state had fought hard for the train and approved it. He even went so far as to pat himself on the back for stopping those crazy rail zealots are something like that, without realizing that he'd just insulted the members of his own party.
But I can't imagine anything that was more politically easy than simply standing by the plan written by a member of your own party and approved by every member of the State Senate which was controlled by your own party. And yet, today we still have no train and currently no hope of ever getting a train between the 3C's.
I would think that there is enough population on that corridor between those three principal cities, plus many more smaller ciies like Akron or Dayton, etc., that you could make an independent operation out of it, and not be too concerned with making connections with existing Amtrak trains. If connections could be made, all well and good, but the primary focus as I envision it would be to concentrate on convenient schedules serving that corridor. And not have to hold for long distance trains that could be hours late....
Connections were indeed a partial issue here, but the 3C's plan really didn't take connections into consideration. It was felt that some would suffer through sitting several hours in Cleveland to make a connection. But overall the numbers were really based upon riders simply wanting to go between the various cities along the route. It would not have been a money maker, at least until & unless it was converted to true high speed service. But it would have done pretty well for itself and equally important is that it would have improved freight train service within that corridor too, taking more trucks off the highways.
It was listed in the 2001 Travel Planner (along with a bunch of other stuff that didn't happen). See this thread: http://discuss.amtraktrains.com/index.php?/topic/45100-amtrak-proposed-new-routes-in-2001/.
