[banghead] The “News Wire” article wasn’t clear as to how long the operation would be - it sounds as if the may be just one day due to the cumulative effect of delays. Anyone have details?
Why don’t they just put it out of its misery?
The first paragraph of the article seems to answer part of your question:
“EL PASO, Texas - Due to flooding, severe weather conditions, and freight congestion on Union Pacific at El Paso, Texas, and west to Tucson, Ariz., Amtrak’s three-times-a-week Sunset Limited has been temporarily suspended.”
Since we know how accurately weather is predicted, they can’t really make a committment as to when service will resume. Following that same line of thinking, the city of New Orleans (the city, not the train) should be abandoned after the hurricane.
And since we all know Union Pacific doesn’t care about anything but themselves, we may as well just ditch the train all together. Or reroute it permanetly down another railroads’ tracks (now that’s an idea!). The Sunsed Limited has been a failure from the beginning, and I don’t think it’s Amtrak’s fault.
The postwar history of the “Sunset Ltd./Sunset” has been a checkered one. It was the last of SP’s routes to get the streamliner treatment (in 1950) and SP went whole-hog with a really first-rate train. The results of that re-equipping may well have been the root cause of SP’s eventual disillusionment with passenger service. It could be argued that it should have been discontinued even prior to May 1, 1971 but the ICC was never very consistent in its decisions in train-off petitions. SP was long villified for its anti-passenger stance but one could argue that the bare-bones “Sunset” that SP operated was more appropriate for the clientele it actually had since it was stuck with running a train that hardly anybody rode. Outright discontinuance of the train by Amtrak is probably not a bad idea.
News is reporting that a dam in El Paso is in jeopardy of breeching & if that occurs the town will be flooded which I am sure will affect all RR traffice into & out of El Paso for some days
This will likely be it for the “Sunset”, UP will try to kill it while the opportunity exists! If they can prove that the “public” can do without it…[:(]
There are no dams in El Paso. There are dams on the Rio Grand North of El Paso, but those are not in jeperdy. What news wire are we talking about here?