Resumption of this route is important.. If and when the Gulf states line is resumed it will offer Florida residents a more direct cross country route to Los Angeles. Traveling North to WAS then-CHI-LAX is a very long indirect and inconvenient route.
Other than hard-core rail fans, I don't know anyone who would ride a train for something like 72 hours to get from Jacksonville to Los Angeles. That's the equivalent to riding a train from Madrid to Moscow.
As already and correctly pointed out, it really wouldn't matter even if
absolutely no one rides a long-distance train endpoint-to-endpoint. The real business is to and from intermediate points. Potentially, a train could be sold out along several segments of the route, nearly empty near the final destination, and again with nobody traveling the entire distance. However, at least a handful of people do travel the whole route, sometimes connecting to yet another train to complete their journey. They aren't all hardcore railfans. People travel everyday across the nation by bus or private automobile, and nobody questions it. Why then, do some people find it so incomprehensible that passengers would take a train to make the same journey?
One of the biggest misconceptions of, for example, the current
Sunset Limited is that it is a New Orleans to Los Angeles service. Oh, the train does cover that entire route and Amtrak will be glad to sell you a ticket, but most passengers are only travelling shorter distances along the line. Critics of passenger rail harp over and over and over again about how trains only make sense for trips of maybe 350-500 miles (or so), blissfully unaware that is exactly how Amtrak's long-distance routes are typically being used. .
Finally, it should also be pointed out there are no plans to resume the
Sunset Limited to Florida. The restored service will not involve anyone travelling coast to coast anyway. It is the C
ity of New Orleans which is proposed to be extended to Orlando.