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Amtrak ‘Crescent’ to be canceled on select dates this winter
How can Amtrak expect to retain any customer loyalty with nonsense like this ? Suppose a passenger calls and wants to travel on x day, imagine the response when Amtrak says, no, we’re not running that day, but, maybe we will have service next month. Can you call back then ? If they’re that much at the mercy of carrier instigated track work, they just need to quit !
Southern only ran the Crescent south of Atlanta three days a week pre-Amtrak.
The line is single track. You can’t do program track work at night. The Crescent schedule is daylight south of Atlanta. If you delay the train for the trackwork, you can’t turn the equipment for the next day and you can’t get your crews rested. There are no spare crews and sets of equipment.
A bus is the only alternative, and there just aren’t enough weekday passengers on this part of this route. It’s too slow and runs through mostly rural territory. It’s not even worth “bustitution”.
This is standard practice every year.
Why not explain the planned disruption. In this case Norfolk Southern is doing track work.
So much for Amtrak being critical transportation. I bet the freight rerouting is well planned in advance. If Amtrak gets shut down, does anybody notice, outside of the Amtrak fans?
IF there are not enough passengers to run a bus, why do they normally run a train? Seriously, if they have rail service scheduled, they should honor their commitments by running a bus, especially since this part of the route is covered in daylight.
Trolls don’t know how to make relevant comments or ask interesting questions regarding the story. It doesn’t matter what the article is about because they’re using this (and who knows how many other forums) to give us an indication of their attention span.
Did all the PRR “Red Team” go to work for NS? The “School-of-Snarl” lives on! Damn! My “Green Team” (NYC) allowed it to happen!
You would be surprised how many people would notice if Amtrak gets shut down. There would be a lot of pissed off customers. Just because YOU hate Amtrak, that doesn’t mean other do, TROLL!
A bus is not a logical alternative. Logical is the approach they have taken.
Landon - you are asking an excellent question. The corollary is “if there are much fewer people along the route in AL and MS than there are in SC and NC, why does the train run in the dead of night through SC and NC?”
Landon - you are right about the number of buses - two or three would do it. A bus can handle about 50 passengers. You can hire contract charter buses to handle this easily. Bus timing on the route would likely be faster than the Crescent, too. The route is parallel to 65/70 mph I-20 and I-59. People can usually drive from Atlanta to NOL in 8 hours. The train takes 12.
Frank of Germany - There is no other route on NS between Atlanta and New Orleans. NS just delays their daylight train schedules until night. There is a route on CSX - but it would miss most every stop except New Orleans. Arranging detours is very difficult. CSX may not have enough crews to cover. Amtrak may not have budget to cover CSX pilot crews on their trains. There are no stations on the CSX route. The timing maybe much slower, etc.
Wouldn´t there be a way to run the train on a different route around the work area, like they did with the Eagle between SL and Chicago?
All the best for the New Year for everyone
Paul,
The Crescent will still be running between New York and Atlanta. Busses would only be needed between Atlanta and New Orleans, which is nowhere near 2000 miles. If ridership on this segment is light, which some have suggested, 2 or 3 busses should be enough. If not, reroute the train and use a couple of busses to serve any missed stops.
@LANDON ROWELL - The Crescent runs over 2,000 miles. Over that distance:
- Buses are uneconomic, requiring a driver for every 30 passengers
- Buses are slower
- Passengers are highly unlikely to want to board them - an economy flight will cost the same and be similarly cramped and nasty, but at least it’ll be three or four hours long, not days.
And before you ask the obvious - no, Amtrak can’t substitute a bus for merely the affected part of the track, because there needs to be a train on either side, and Amtrak doesn’t have lots of spare rolling stock to run twice as many trains.
So no, buses aren’t going to work with this.
I am pro AMTRAK, but it appears to me that cancelling service between Atlanta and New Orleans due to track work is either short sighted or just taking the easy way out for cost purposes. I am sure of two things, 1) there was adequate notification from NS to AMTRAK of the line disruption for AMTRAK to make alternative plans, and 2) there are alternative routes that could be used between these two cities, even if some of the intermediary stops are temporarily bypassed. To me, it would have made sense to determine where on the original route the track work was taking place and then rerouting around those areas as required. If the ridership is light between those cities then have the full consist of sleepers, coaches, and the dining car run between Atlanta and New York, and run a connecting train consisting of 1 coach and 1 cafe car run between Atlanta and New Orleans on the necessary dates. If it takes a few extra crew members to handle the additional operations, then so be it. Where possible and if practicle, run connecting van or bus service between stops on the original route and the temporary route as required. The fix for problems such as these is relatively easy, i.e. not rocket scientist stuff; it just takes some initiative, and coordination between AMTRAK and the freight railroads in the area effected.
This interruption happens too much. There may well be alot of reasons pro and con for doing this or that but the plain truth is that somehow some way needs to be fopund to avoid leaving people with no alternate transportation between Atlanta and New Orleans. Amtrak, NS and CSX need to get together so that there’s always service regardless of the need for trackwork.
Can one assume that on the days that the Cresent is not
scheduled that, likewise, no freight movements on the same
route ?