We agree about DC. I looked up Boston on Wiki again and it gave several population figures so I went to Information Please Almanac. It says the 2010 census shows Boston has about 617,000 people.
Frankly, I don’t understand your comment that “City population is almost a meaningless measure.” Certainly there are other factors to be considered but it seems to me population is not totally irrelevant.
What did strike me is that while Amtrak offers a number of “Getaway packages” which include train fare and lodging there are none for Pittsburgh even thought it is a good sized city with a number of cultural attractions. The attractions included several colleges and universities where parents might want to visit children. I wonder why Amtrak does not offer them. Is it because Amtrak has considered a Pittsburgh “Getaway” and rejected it? Or it is because it has never been considered? Intuitively it seems a reasonable idea to me but since I don’t know what Amtrac’s thinking is and since I’ve never been to Pittsburgh I’m not inclined to make a judgement about the issue.
I read Fred Frailey’s article about Amtrak and Joe Boardman twice. Frailey reports Amtrak is not pursuing a daily Sunset train from New Orleans to Los Angeles which would greatly improve service with a small saving in cost. I think that says a lot about Amtrak.
Metropolitan Statistical Area is the standard metric used in evaluating market potentials. While Pittsburgh ranks #22 with 2,359,746 people in 2011, Boston ranks #10 with 4,591,112 people, Philly #6 with 5,992,414, and Washington, DC #7 with 5,703,948. Additionally, DC, Philly and Boston have far more cultural and historical attractions than Pittsburgh. So there really isn’t any comparison with those other three cities. As far as air travel goes, Pittsburgh’s one airport ranks # 46 with just under 4 mil. passengers, while Philly ranks #18 with almost 15 mil., and DC’s three area airports have 30.8 mil. passengers combined.
“Rejected” and “never considered” are functionally the same for Pittsburgh. Its not a tourist destination. There’s no shortage of things to do there and its a hidden gem as far as cultural attractions go, but its not the sort of city that you take the train to.
MSAs are the best way to measure how large a city is. DC, for instance, cannot annex any more land. It has a cap on its absolute maximum population. But to say that it only has 600,000 people doesn’t really tell the story. There’s 350,000 people in Arlington and Alexandria, which used to be part of DC. No we don’t count in DC’s population, but guess where we work, what city we identify with, what media market we’re in, where we spend our entertainment money, and so on. Because of the peculiarities of geography, a lot of those people are actually closer to the National Mall and all the landmarks than actual DC residents. Then, there’s places like Fairfax County (1.1 million) and its enormous commuter population. And that’s not even going in to Maryland. That’s why city population doesn’t tell the whole story.
It may be worth considering that electric service ends at Harrisburg and this may be part of the reason that west-of-Harrisburg service is not so frequent or available.
The PRR never built cat west of H’berg. NS owns and operates the rails west of H’brg. It is therefore a freight railroad in the minds of the operators.