Amtrak Service at North Philadelphia

[TomDiehl]

If someone in the marketing department were really smart about it, North Philadelphia would have been set up as a stop for the long-distance trains with corridor trains only stopping there if a passenger needed a transfer to a city not served by the LD routes. North Philly set up as the long-distance station and 30th Street being the commuter’s station would have made perfect marketing sense.

You must be looking at a track map and not the surrounding area of the stations. 30th Street is closer to the current Center City and has a direct connection to Suburban Station which is right across the street from Old City Hall. As I said earlier, North Philly is in what was formerly a working class/rowhouse neighborhood, which has, unfortunately, devolved into a part of town I certainly wouldn’t want to get on or off a train at any time of day. While the way you suggest may work well on a model railroad, the real ones, such as Amtrak, have to take the potential clientele into consideration.

[Deggesty]

For east/west passenger traffic that stopped at North Philadelphia Station only, most of those trains also saw sections join or split off at Harrisburg for traffic from/to Philadelphia and/or Baltimore and Washington, DC.

Hmm, in all the PRR timetables that I saw I never did see a schedule that indicated that the trains that went through to NYC from the west had a section from Harrisburg to the 30th Street Station. Many did have a section that came off at Harrisburg and traveled over the Northern Central down to Baltimore and thence (after reversing direction) went on to Washington. As I recall, the standard procedure was that after detraining at North Philadelphia, you would board a train that would take you to 30th Street or into Philadelphia after you gave the stub of your ticket to the conductor. Westbound, you would show your ticket to the conductor of the train that took you up to North Philadelphia.

For a time, Amtrak took the Washington section of the Broadway Limited off the New York section in Harrisburg, added a diner lounge, and ran it via 30th Street (my experience in 1978).

Johnny