It seamed everything was ready to go but it never happened. Amtrak proposes new lines to new places but never builds them. Service on the Crescent star to Dallas, Las Vagas services, Service to Madison, WI, and the Florida coast lines are examples. Why is this?
Based on over 25 years experience in dealing with them:
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Wish list, but no $$
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Pacify passenger rail advocates in the short term by promising a route
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Short term political payoffs (and they can claim they tried and then blame someone else when they don’t get the$$ from whatever source)
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In a few extremely rare cases, railroad backs out or impedes, or local $$ dries up
They did sort of run to Madison, primarily to pacify Tommy Thompson, who was Board Chairman at the time. It was a disaster, as predicted by many informed advocates and professionals. One contributing factor was the very low speed limit on the short line RR and no direct access to the market (they never actually made it to Madison). Louisville is the same problem, but don’t expect them to be running to Congress at breakneck speed for a supplemental appropriation to fix that track to make the service viable, either, even though they’ve talked about it.
Unless there is a short term political advantage in it for them, ATK’s historical practice outside the NEC spine (where they have been more than happy to run empty express Metroliners, etc. and spend small fortunes on image advertising) has been to attempt to hold up the states for operating and capital subsidies, including on in most cases their ONE (count it) legitimate interstate train, some of which are on the Congressionally-mandated original national network. Taken to the most basic concepts, the TX Eagle, for example, still runs essentially for 2 reasons: (1) Kay Bailey Hutchinson (who is a friend to ATK and, coincidentally, through her Senate chairmanship has a lot of control over the $$) and (2) when they threatened to pull the train the last time and tried to hold up the State of TX for subsidies, which the state could not legally provide even if it had wanted to, they made the state loan them the money or the train was going to come off. This for a service that was Congressionally mandated and had
The one and probably top reason is because they dont have enough of the chi-ching$$$$