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Trains News Wire EXCLUSIVE: ‘Empire Builder’ still struggles with time-keeping after schedule change
Trains News Wire EXCLUSIVE: ‘Empire Builder’ still struggles with time-keeping after schedule change
Isn’t that what they did with the Canadian?
Adding a lot of time would destroy connections with the Coast Starlight, but would put more of the scenery between Glacier Park and the west coast in daylight. Hours of service to Glacier would be ruined, unless they added enough time to hit Glacier in the morning (westbound) and evening (eastbound), which would ruin hours of service to Seattle and Portland.
I really don’t want to see it come to this. Of course running hours late every day is no good either. Would the former Northern Pacific be any more reliable? Any alternatives to CP east of the twin cities?
The following gives the lie to Mr. Harrison’s claim he has introduced “precision railroading” to CP. The same is no doubt happening to all but the premier freights.
"Since the schedules were modified, the once-reliable Canadian Pacific between Chicago and St. Paul has delivered westbound No. 7 to the Twin Cities more than an hour late on 19 occasions when the train had left Chicago either on-time or less than 20 minutes late "
In all honesty I am not optimistic that the once on time reliability of this train will ever be the same unless you add 12 hours to the schedule in each direction.
The old saying: “what goes around comes around.” The Milw. was the only double track (excepting Tunnel City and the Mississippi bidges) road between Chi. and MSP. Soo/CP single-tracked it. Now with passenger train hating leadership and capacity issues, guess what?
I traveled on the Empire Builder in early May. There’s many a mile of new double track under construction west of Minot. The Devils Lake area is much improved. The problems seem to be related mostly to the lateness of spring weather more than anything. Most of the slow orders seem to be related to soggy roadbed. The construction of double track in Montana is not nearly as far along. That said, the improvement in infrastructure will surely help get the schedule back to its original timing by next season.
Anyone taking the Empire Builder this year should be aware of the vast expansion of traffic on the northern transcon of BNSF. In all of my travels to Montana in the last six years I can remember waiting in the siding for freight traffic only a handful of times and those few were not for long. I think that BNSF does its best to dispatch the EB.
By the way Mr. Foster
Moving the Empire Builder to the UP would completely bypass most of Minnesota, North Dakota, and Montana so it would only serve those who currently go all the way from Chicago to Seattle/Portland which is a very small percentage of the ridership on the present route. I ride from St Paul to Shelby, MT so the new route would have me drive to Des Moine IA ride to Cheyenne or Laramie and then Drive to Montana. NOT A VERY LIKELY SCENARIO!!
Why not run on the original route out of chicago threw Rochelle Illinois and Savannah IL it be on time more I bet?
The UP is taking intermodal customers off the BNSF and putting them on its Chicago-Portland-Seattle corridor. Maybe it could take the Empire Builder off the BNSF, too. See railsolution.org and steelinterstate.org The long-term solution is to rebuild to that standard. Robinson Foster Director, RAIL Solution
Mr. Solberg, besides the problem of missing a lot of population centers on the current route through (not threw) Wisconsin, the BNSF Aurora Sub through Rochelle is already running near capacity, especially when all the sidings are stuffed with trains CSX and NS won’t accept at Chicago. (Also, it would take a lot of money to raise the speeds for Amtrak to 79 MPH. BN removed the superelevation from the curves right after Amtrak started 40+ years ago.)
Well, this is disappointing but certainly no surprise. Mr. Poore, I hope you are correct and I am wrong, and the schedule will be back to it’s “original timing by next season,” which I presume means sometime in 2015, maybe. Of course, if oil production in North Dakota continues to increase as projected, BNSF will continue to delay the Builder even with this added track capacity, and they will continue to blame increased traffic or the weather or some other excuse. And after all, oil is way more important than people, right? Meanwhile, ridership will continue to decline and some new riders will never come back, and perhaps a few more long-time riders like me will give it up. As I stated in my comment of May 6th, I am done with Amtrak after 43 years of riding. I do want to say that this is not the fault of Amtrak employees. At least 95% of on-train and station employees that I have encountered have been good to excellent. The fault lies with Congress not properly funding passenger rail transportation and inept Amtrak management.
My mother and father met on the east coast during WWII, married and settled in Seattle. My father worked for SP and NP as we grew up, so trips east were always by train. It normally was just the Mainstreeter, but also rode the Western Star and City of Portland. Always an exciting adventure as we had to change trains in Chicago and Cincinnati.
Rode on Amtrak many times through the 80’s, 90’s and 00’s on the EB, CS and one I really miss, the Pioneer. And it wasn’t bad. Simply cannot justify it anymore. Last straw was a mechanical issue with a locomotive 30 minutes out of Chicago. Sat for hours; just glad it wasn’t 30 minutes out of Wolf Point.
As much as I would like to take a time machine back 50 years and ride the real EB (or the NCL!), we know that’s not going to happen. So, the question is, why are we trying to nickel and dime a 70 year old long distance passenger rail transportation system (lightweight streamliner) into present day? Nostalgia? Surely the U.S. 2 corridor in northern ND/MT/ID would be better served with a different model that does not need to deal with a recalcitrant host.
A COUPLE WEEKS AGO THE SOUTHBOUND WENT THRU
LAKE CITY AT 2:30 PM. FOLLOWED BY A 3:30 PM THE NEXT
DAY. WHY NOT BUILD A BUSINESS MODEL WITH AN EARLY
AM FROM CHICAGO WITH A SHORT CONSIST AND USE THE SAME SHORT CONSIST BACK TO CHICAGO THE NEXT DAY
AT 7 AM. I STOPPED TAKING THE EMPIRE BUILDER YEARS
AGO BETWEEN MPLS AND CHICAGO. IT IS A JOKE BETWEEN TWO MAJOR MARKETS AND MILWAUKEE.
I HAVE TAKEN THE TRAINS OF THE FORTIES THROUGH TO A
COUPLE YEARS AGO, BUT NOBODY IS LISTENING.
HUGH SWEENEY, MPLS, MN
Bottom line: Freight pays the way: pays for locomotives and cars, employees, and track capacity. The fact that other commentors are no longer using Amtrak because of the lengthy delays means there are alternatives. It’s therefore not a lack of federal spending but a lack of justification for the service. I agree that money from the farebox doesn’t necessarily have to cover all the costs, but if it did, the Builder would run pretty consistently on time. So where does the lacking money come from? If it is to come from the public treasury, there needs to be some kind of formula that determines how much money is available, such as comparing how much it would cost to maintain roads or airports if everyone drove or flew instead (including all the small city to small city traffic with small or no airports). But it’s not appropriate to arbitrarily decide we need to spend millions or billions of other people’s money, who derive little or no benefit from the service, to provide this service.