After the AutoTrain derailment a couple of years ago, Amtrak took the Superliner cars off of the Cardinal and replaced the sleepers with a Viewliner sleeper, which they took from one of the Silver trains serving Florida, I beleive the Silver Palm… Simply put, Amtrak does not have extra cars to serve new routes…
Whenever there is a Superliner derailment, it seems the City of New Orleans and the Texas Eagle suffer for smoking coaches and sightseeing lounges. Amtak has been able to keep a diner on both trains, but I fear one of these days they’ll grab a diner too…
Amtrak for the past thirty years has been underfunded… If we are going to fund Amtrak properly, its time to move on to TGV/ICE equipment. High Speed Rail is the future of railroad passenger trains…
To get back to the original point-What has happened to these routes? Some of them were planned new trains, while some were maybe thought of as possible re-routes. For years, pre-UP takeover-there was always talk of re-routing the CZ off BN through Iowa and putting it on the CNW, so that could be possible. But some of these too could have possibly been vacation packages offered through ticketing agreements with motor carriers such as Greyhound. At the time though, there was hope that new routes would pop up based on express freight service.
To clarify; I might be wrong but the Superliners came off the Cardinal to replace the Superliners damaged in the Capitol Limited wreck in 2001. I believe. I was working the night the Cardinal didn’t come through Indianapolis, because they had taken the equipment.
Here and Florida, service just keeps getting slimmer as time goes on, inspite of INCREASED demand.
The trains now no longer travel over the “Ocala” route. That’s handled by bus. Only the Silver Star services the Florida west coast.
Mean time, gridlock on the interstate system continues to worsen. You get to see plenty of Greyhound buses creeping along at 10 mph during rush hours near the larger towns.
That’s an idea. When people finally realize that gas prices won’t go down again (which they really havn’t), most people who don’t want to waste 30 grand on a Hybrid car will want another way to travel, and Amtrak, besides bus travel, will be the only major land transportation. Then when more people start riding the trains, there will HAVE to be more equipment and routes to make it more convienent for travelers.
The Crescent Star and the Skyline Connection were both intended to be primarily mail and express runs. The Skyline Connection would have complemented the Chicago-Philly Pennsylvanian (also a mail train) and was included in the line timetable with the Pennsylvanian and Three Rivers with “starting date to be announced”. Apparently, the negotiations with NS to operate this train did not go well.
The Chicago-Des Moines run also appears to have been based on mail and express and it may have gone by the board after the failure of the Lake Country Limited between Chicago and Janesville.
Amtrak did win a court battle with Union Pacific to run a Chicago to Portland express train which would have carried passengers. I’m not sure if this would have crossed Iowa through Des Moines or on the former Chicago and North Western.
I believe the Lake County Limited was aimed mostly at General Motors using Roadrailers. Amtrak’s express services were hit with late fees and high equipment rental charges and were not profitable.
Hopefully we won’t have to reach $4.00 before Amtrak is taken as seriously as it should have been all along. There is so much potential but nothing will happen until attitudes on the congressional level change.
THe Chicago to Des Moines route via the C&NW could have been a day train connecting with Iowa’s largest city. I can remember getting the mayors of all the towns along the route together. Bus service is very poor, an the Zephyr is an overnite run from Chicago to Denver. THe UP probably dosen’t want Amtrak holding up their coal trains. The C&NW ran a fleet of fast intermodal trains on the route connecting to UP west of Omaha.
THe Dallas-Meridian route would be a new one connecting some of the largest cities in the South. I still can’t see why a Dallas-Atlanta train may prove very popular. All these routes depended on Amtrak getting a large capital budget that would allow them to add service & build more cars. There may be a way to show by adding service, Amtrak’s ridership & revenue could grow. There is no shortage of new routes Amtrak could operate a train IF they got ANY money & the host freight railroad would make money by running Amtrak on time.
congress, as usual, heard the growth part but ignored the funding part. THen 9/11 happened, and any hope of “growth” was off.