Good post, it all makes sense. The only point I wonder about is about the need to make the train faster than driving. If you look at the whole route, LA to FL, I don't know many people who could drive that by themselves faster than the trains runs. Not to mention, unbelievable as it seems, not every one of us owns a car.
Where the slower-than-driving hurts is the intermediate stops; at some point it's quicker to drive from Pensacola to New Orleans and catch the train there. And you can be pretty sure most people in those barely-any-public-transit wastelands do own cars, at least if they can afford train tickets.
For the local traffic, Amtrak does seem much more positive towards a restored "Gulf Coast Limited" from Mobile to New Orleans (which is direct and has modern signalling)... if the states are interested in paying for it.
For accomodating the through traffic to LA from most of Florida (sorry Talahassee), it would make more sense to pick a route which has solid potential for good service on the intermediate stops. Perhaps Jacksonville-Macon-Atlanta? Of course, the problem (again) is that the state governments have no interest in ponying up any money.
I don't take trains for the speed, I take them because I enjoy looking at the scenery and not having to work at driving.
Oh, and cost. I calculated the cost of fuel to drive my car from Maine to my daughter's place in CA, and it was more than the cost of the train INCLUDING a sleeper (low bucket). Not taking into account wear and tear on my car, and insurance. (That was two years ago). And I didn't have to do anything except sit there and ride. To me, that is way better than driving on interstate highways where the view NEVER changes.
Oh, I agree entirely. I cannot and will not do drives longer than 2 hours unless forced, due to the unpleasantness. And of course it's expensive to do so as well.
It does get back to money. If the federal government were willing to fund Amtrak like it funds highways, we'd have at least a daily train between New Orleans and Jacksonville, and on upgraded tracks with upgraded signals. If the state or local governments were interested, we'd have a daily train of some sort. But they aren't. Georgia's been *talking* about a downtown Atlanta station for Amtrak for decades now, and there's still no money, no construction, nothing. This is the same reason Phoenix's station is in Maricopa; neither the federal government, nor the state government, nor the city government, was willing to maintain the Phoenix line.
I do think a lot of the "long-distance" trains have much more state and local money and support going into them than most people realize; when you start adding up all the little projects which benefit them, it's very substantial. But this isn't true in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, or Panhandle Florida.
Recently a South Carolina town "didn't notice" (!) that its road construction project, as planned, would shut down the Amtrak station:
http://www.independentmail.com/news/2012/aug/18/passenger-train-puts-breaks-on-clemson-project/ . Can you believe this? This is not something which would ever happen in Pennsylvania, or North Dakota.
Along with the lower ridership south of Atlanta, this sort of *attitude problem* is probably a reason why Amtrak will cancel the Atlanta-New Orleans portion of the Crescent at the drop of a hat, but makes great efforts to keep the portion north of that (through the very supportive state of North Carolina) running.
