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FRA grant continues passenger service study on Sunset Route
It seems to be the Sunset Limited is being required to do a lot of tasks its not very good at, largely because everyone involved wants an excuse to run a transcontinental train.
Perhaps the solution, ultimately, is to break it up into more focussed trains, leaving the route transversable, but via trains that are more useful and likely to attract riders.
This project could be a step in that direction, if they do it the right way.
What is the frequency interval for the 140,000 trips referenced in the article? Daily, weekly, monthly, by fortnight???
It might be useful to run some demonstration trains over the route and then study the results.
Don’t discontinue the long distance Sunset Limited. It serves rural areas without good highway and air options that are not conducive to daytime corridor trains. Also, stringing together multiple corridors would require multiple overnight stays for long distance travelers.
However, portions of the Sunset Route do have potential as corridor services including this one. I would suggest that they extend it to Phoenix and Tucson. Also, San Antonio-Houston-New Orleans has potential.
Good idea…Wrong side of the nation.
@LANDON ROWELL - I’m not proposing removing service from any stops the train currently serves, just serving those stops with trains better suited to the environment. I’m pretty sure all of them would rather see at least two stops a day in each direction by a train that connects them to a couple of nearby major cities and the rest of their states, than a train that connects them to California/Louisiana every two days.
As for the Sunset Limited itself, perhaps if it was revamped as a premium sleeper only luxury train (think Iowa Pacific/Pullman here), ran from Orlando, avoided little used stops, and ran once a week, it might have be commercially viable, which would secure its future a little and help pay for the other trains that would replace its role as a lifeline service.
What about Los Angeles-Palm Springs-Yuma-Phoenix-(and eventually) Tuscon as a corridor. There is a lot of traffic thru there. Most if goes by highway some by air and bus. The Sunset with its triweekly schedule, inconvenient times, etc, is almost a nonentity along this corridor.
Change the Sunset to a daily schedule and get back into Phoenix one should be able start to have a viable operation.
It would be nice to have an alternative to the freeway to go to Palm Springs or Indio. Right now that won’t work on a three times a week. It might not rival the Surf Liner in volume, but at least there you have several choices a day.
The comments made by others to this article underscores one of the fundamental problems of passenger rail. A train that serves all people, with their mixed and varied schedules and origin and destination locations, no train is going to be ideally suited to all situations, even for the railfan that goes out of their way to ride trains. Point being that the long distance 3 day a week train is simply going to serve a different clientele than the corridor trains being considered, even though that clientele may be the same person depending on what kind of trip they’re making. So anyone suggesting a change to the Sunset Limited train (particularly a decrease in frequency) once this new corridor is in place needs to recognize this fact. The corridor trains may even increase ridership on the long distance Sunset Limited, just as the regional train to Lynchburg, VA increased ridership on the Crescent.
Should this service ever actually get going, I would hope that the Sunset Limited would also stop at the new stops being proposed. One thing they should do is that in addition to whatever daily trains that get started would be to start a four day a week frequency on the same schedule as the Sunset running as far as Indio with the hope that it might even get extended as far as Phoenix or maybe even Tucson.