Second frequency on the LSL route...

[Just-Thinking-51]

If your not replacing a train, and have a early morning arrival then selling coach tickets is a slight difference issues. My thoughts are don't replace a short with a long. That said if you can limited to a single "shorts" coach, and leave the sleeping pax a quiet coach. Let's do it.

The current LSL is the street sweeper going west. Try riding it on a Sunday. Upstate needs a early train going west, and later train going east. You could make the case of a later than the LSL train going west.

Albany to Chicago is about 16 hours. Could a train running from just Albany to Chicago (all coach + food service) be workable?

Albany 0800 hrs to Chicago 2340 hrs.

Chicago 0700 hrs to Albany 2320 hrs.

At risk of hijacking the topic.

 

[ParanoidAndroid]

Neroden, that's a great pitch! Very informative!

About the ALB to CHI train though, I think you forgot about time zones. Westbound would be 8:00am to 10:40pm, and eastbound would be 7:00am to 12:25am.

Then, why would you want to be in Chicago at 10:40pm, or worse, in Albany at 12:25am? You wouldn't connect to anything, maybe except in Chicago for a few metras.

And we all know what happened to the Pennsylvanian when it decided to be a day train PHL-CHI:

When it got instated in 1998: http://www.timetables.org/full.php?group=19990516n&item=0028

When it got canceled in 2003: http://www.timetables.org/full.php?group=20021027n&item=0028

It was canceled due to low ridership.

But I wish they brang back the Three Rivers though with sleepers and a diner . . . (there's a thread for that already)

 

[ParanoidAndroid]

And about the "first commuter train" problem, I agree with Anderson (I'm having problems with quotations again, sorry). Just make it a bit more expensive, maybe separate the passengers so there's a "commuter coach" in the back, and the "LD coaches" and sleepers up front. Maybe add a Boston section too?

ALB (arrive) 3:25am

Boston section departs 4:00am, SPG 6:23am/6:28am, arrives BOS 8:56am (If it's cross-platform, then ALB 3:35am, SPG 5:58am/6:03am, BOS 8:31am)

NYC section departs 4:15am, arrives 6:53am.

ES #230 departs ALB at 5:30am as usual?

Edit: OK, now I'm derailing the thread too, but why not bring the diner to BOS instead of NYP? The NYP section is shorter than the BOS section, and I think that on both schedules, BOS would benefit more from the diner than NYP would do. Or perhaps the diner is switched from #48 to #49 at ALB instead of NYP already?

 

[Anderson]

A "day train" NYP-CHI is problematic at best. It might work if you were willing to "sandbag" one end or the other (or do something wacky like run through from NYP to BOS) but even that has its drawbacks. Most "day train" schedules end up with decent midpoint times but lousy times at the ends, as noted above. The closest to a balance we can usually come seems to be having one end suck (e.g. "This train is really only running through for operational reasons"). Witness the trouble getting trains to connect on both ends (CHI and WAS/NYP).

Running an overnight train with an enhanced cafe is the closest we can come to properly "splitting the baby".

As to the diner, the real reason there has to do with crew basing at this point. However, this indirectly does raise the question of running each section with a half-and-half cafe with a Cardinal-style menu.

 

[neroden]

My trick here was as follows. The existing LSL is overnight in Ohio and daytime in New York, basically. The Great Lakes Express was designed to be daytime in Ohio and overnight in New York. What surprised me is that (a) you can get "daytime" for certain definitions of daytime as far as western NY, and (b) even when running overnight in NY, you can actually get value out of it for upstate NY as a "redeye" to avoid hotel bills in NYC. I think that gives some synergies which I wasn't expecting, which is when I went, "no, this train would really work wouldn't it"

 

[Ryan]

That is a really great pitch, for what would be a really great train.

Would almost certainly help the bottom line and help eat away at Amtrak's massive overhead.