Decades ago, my town was served by beautiful passenger trains. It has two active freight lines, but they are not extremely active as they see about 1 train each per hour. There are four cities in each cardinal direction (north, east, south, and west) that I think would be awesome to reestablish passenger rail service between. So, how would someone go about doing that?
Start with Bill Gates fortune, 1st buy politicians to support your viewpoints. 2nd kiss the rest of your fortune goodbye.
This post is deleted.
After you’ve gotten ahold of Bill Gates’ fortune…
Establish need. The railroad may sound like a great idea, but you need people to ride it. Many new transit operations have been pleasantly surprised when ridership has exceeded expectation, but not all.
Were will your riders go to and from? Where will your riders “interchange” with other trains or modes of travel? Freight usage notwithstanding, will you be able to offer trips that make sense?
Read up on break-even mileages for various modes of transportation. Will you be able to leverage that for your operation?
How many passengers will be required to simply break even - include track rental, insurance, depreciation, fuel, labor costs (including the janitor) and anything else you can think of that will cost money.
Consider local support - will your politicians and residents be on board with the idea? Will you have to build anything? Read up on Brightline (Florida)
Good Luck!
The trains would go to one city with a population of 2 million, a city with a population of 1 million and two cities each with a population of 500k.
One train per hour per line is pretty darn busy by freight railroad standards. If that is the case you will almost certainly have to build additional track capacity.
What is the population of each city in this area, and does any transit/public transportation service already exist between them? If so, what are it’s ridership figures?
For some stupid reason, a reply I tried did not show up. So, here goes another one. One city I would like to service has 2 million people. Another city has 1 million and two others each have 500k people.
I’ll give you a non-sarcastic answer. You first have to form a group of like minded people that agree with you. Then you have to come up with a source of funds to fund a DOT study, either via lobbying your local officials to get them to vote for that via the state (quickest option). You have to make a business case on why you think this service would be better than bus service and/or leaving things as they are in order to persuade legislators to stick their neck out.
A good test case and one that will put pressure on the legislature is the approach that was used in Milwaukee to intervene and improve the Milwaukee to Chicago service. Start with a group of businessmen that meets regularly like Rotary or Chamber of Congress group. Present a persuasive case in front of them and ask for their support or active endorsement and build from there. Why a business group? Because it tells Democrats they are not going to get lambasted during the next political campaign for supporting the passenger train proposal as well as encourages Republicans to stick their neck out as well. Always go to local busines groups first. Additionally, most business groups are made up of independent business people and as such are highly skeptical of such proposals so the old NEW YORK, NEW YORK parable applies if you can convince them, you can pretty much convince anyone. So going to a business group first will tell you what kind of persuasion work effort your looking at to achieve you
Alternative here is there are two routes you can get one railroad to shift some of their trains to another route. I got a good chuckle at CP insisting they need to add more rail capacity for adding just one additional Amtrak frequency on Chicago to Twin Cities. At the time CP had two mostly seperate underutilized Twin City to Chicago routes…they can’t shift traffic to another route? Yeah right.
CP still has two Chicago to Twin Cities routes they converge between La Crosse and St. Paul but is that such a huge distance for one additional passenger train? I find it difficult to believe but maybe they have a case…beats me.
Milwaukee to Chicago proposal for train frequency increase (beyond 10 roundtrips) has the CP moving some of their trains over to one of the Milwaukee to Chicago ex-C&NW mains. As it is for the 3 additional round trips to get to 10 the plan is to pay for CTC through the Milwaukee passenger depot (remote dispatching?) and develop a route via Muskego Yard for freight trains to bypass the depot area all together using a route via the Yard that the DOT would pay to add CTC too.
That last improvement in my mind HAS to be faster than routing freights through the extremely sharp curve into the Amtrak depot, one wonders why the CP didn’t develope and pay for it on their own…my feeling is they want to sell that Muskego Yard real estate for big bucks instead and keeping tracks that run through the center of it would lower the price they
I’m shocked! Just shocked by your assertion that our fine politicians can be bought. Collude with a foreign power, lie when they speak, ignore the wishes of the people, yes; but be bought?!? No way!
[%-)][:D][%-)][:D][%-)][:D][%-)][:D][%-)][:D][%-)][:D][%-)][:D][%-)][:D]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlVDGmjz7eM
Just sub trains in for anything factory related and you will be pretty close.
[quote user=“BaltACD”]
zardoz
BaltACD…1st buy politicians to support your viewpoints…
I’m shocked! Just shocked by your assertion that our fine politicians can be bought. Collude with a foreign power, lie when they speak, ignore the wishes of the people, yes; but be bought?!? No way!
Of course you can’t buy politicians. But you can rent them.
Jeff
I don’t know, Al Capone once said “An honest politician is one who when he’s bought, STAYS bought!”
Well the fun just starts with the politicians… there are the inspectors, the permit people, the unions, the waste disposal guys (and you know who runs those guys), various contractors and opportunists that sue you because they slipped and fell and their modelling career was ruined.
Then you need the politicians again to make some of this go away.
Firelock,
To the best of my knowledge this statement was first uttered by either Commodore Vanderbilt or Jay Gould after they had both plied most of the legislators of New York state with cash.
Mac
To reestablish passenger service because it’s “Awsome”?
I’ll suggest three things you’ll need to start with. Lawyers, guns, and money.
And here all along I thought modeling was just a hobby![:-^]
OK then, how about a quote from John Dillinger?
“Never trust an automatic or a D.A.'s deal!”
And I’ll give the last word to Sam Giancana. Sitting in a seafood restaurant he pointed to a stuffed swordfish hanging on the wall and said…
“You see that fish? If he’d kept his mouth shut he wouldn’t have got caught!”