I have rounded up the realistic schedules from the other thread (a fantasy land thread), and involves rescheduling the Cardinal, and putting an Indianapolis IN - St Louis MO Cardinal to Texas Eagle connection. Maybe I'll talk about extending this new train through Ohio to connect with another Chicago-East Coast train, or something like that. I won't be talking about the Hoosier State
Philly, I will use your idea of using spreadsheets (Matt Parker anyone?) to organize the train schedules. Here we go.
CardinalSchedule.pdf
Thanks for reading!
Start with the "changed schedule, works with connections to West Coast". *Extend it all the way to Boston*. Move the westbound back one hour so it arrives DC at 7 AM. It's now in the slot for #66/67. The consolidation of the two could be highly valuable to Amtrak in terms of equipment usage, although that's one long run.
So with this scheme, we're just handing the Chicago-Indianapolis, Chicago-Lafayette, and Chicago-Crawfordsville traffic to the daily Hoosier State (just to be clear).
Looking at the remaining top ridership & revenue pairs from the NARP datasheet, your times are good for Cincy-Chicago (very important) and Charlottesville-DC, Chicago-DC, Charlottesville-Chicago
But not Charlottesville-NY (they can take the Crescent or Lynchburger anyway).
And not for Charleston-Chicago, or Chicago-NY or Chicago-PHL (but we know anyone doing Chicago-NY is sightseeing, or they'd take the LSL).
And not for Cincy-NY, which is more problematic, though staying overnight in DC is always an option.
Let me try to count the consists:
#1 departs Chicago at 9:45 PM
#2 departs Chicago at 9:45 PM, while #1 is between DC and Baltimore
Meanwhile #1 arrives Boston at 8 AM and gets serviced
#1 departs Boston in the evening at 9:30 PM
An hour and 45 minutes later (remember time change) #3 departs Chicago at 9:45 PM, #1 is around Kingston RI
#4 departs Chicago at 9:45 PM, #1 is between Charlottesville and Staunton VA
#5 departs Chicago at 9:45 AM, #1 is between Cincy and Connersville IN
#1 arrives Chicago at 6:05 AM with plenty of time for cleaning.
So, five trainsets. As compared to 3 for a daily Cardinal and 2 for #66/67. Compared to a baseline of a daily Cardinal with a dining car and one sleeper, and #66/67 with one sleeper, Amtrak would need 2 more dining cars.
I'm not entirely convinced, but this is a very interesting concept schedule. An interesting alternative would be to terminate it at DC with cross-platform transfer to #66/67 and a through sleeper but that would require time for switching at DC.
Some other train could replace #66/67 for the Newport News-DC run.... or better, that run could be dropped and replaced with a Norfolk-DC run, since Newport News and Williamsburg seem to have awful ridership.
The state of Virginia might go for this schedule change.