battalion51 said:
The K-Card has been a large money drain for Amtrak, and was created for express routes which Amtrak no longer carries, making the train more of a financial drag.
Actually early on the train wasn't doing quite as bad as it currently is doing. As I mentioned once before in another post, the real problems here are the schedule, a divided market, and the lack of a sleeper.
When the K-Card first started and carried a sleeper, it was doing much better. Then Amtrak started pulling the sleeper off during the summer so they could add a sleeper to the Zephyr. Next came the disastrous summer last year, which saw both an Auto Train consist and a Capital Limited consist end up on the ground.
After that they permanently pulled the sleeper from the K-Card. By and large that really killed ridership on the K-Card. I still think that the K-Card could be a viable service if Amtrak were to handle it properly.
The first problem to fix is the schedule. It takes the train 12 hours to get from Chicago to Louisville. Amtrak's Thruway connection only takes 7 hours to cover the same distance. Yes the train makes a few more stops than does the bus, but that shouldn't add 5 hours to the ride.
Second, unless enough sleeper cars can be found to permanently guarantee that 2 will always be assigned to the K-Card, then they must be abandon the overnight schedule. That schedule was mainly set for two reasons. One to take advantage of combining with the Cardinal on the days it runs. Secondly and the bigger of the two reasons, was to accommodate the express shipping.
So either there needs to be a permanent sleeper assigned, or preferably they would need to schedule the train to run during daylight hours.
The third problem here that Amtrak needs to fix is also the reason that I believe that a daylight version of this train can work. That is the fact that Amtrak is dividing its market here. In addition to the train, there are two Thruway Connecting buses in each direction between Chicago and Louisville.
If Amtrak has enough passengers to run two buses and one train in each direction every day, then there must be enough passengers to fill a daylight running train. They simply need to drop the buses, switch to a daylight running train, and speed up the schedule some.
Additionally as noted in another article posted by Steve4031, if Indiana does move ahead with their part of a high-speed network, this would further improve the train’s performance.
Once again I realize that at present, I'm probably off in dreamland again. However the simple fact is that if handled properly, the K-Card is a viable train. Plus it also represented the future connection to Nashville, Tennessee. That, coupled with the above changes could make this train a success.