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It's a start, but there are still some gaps to be plugged. It's criminal that there is no direct train from Chicago to Florida, connecting the Midwest's largest hub with some of the nation's most popular tourist destinations. All they need to do is plug the gap between the proposed stops in Louisville and Nashville, plus extend south from Macon via Valdosta and Gainesville to join the existing service in Orlando, then continue to Miami.
It would also be nice to see a train basically parallel I-40, following existing service from Los Angeles east to Albuquerque, then continuing via Amarillo, Oklahoma City, Little Rock, Memphis, and Nashville, then linking up at Christiansburg for service to Washington. There should be another line from Seattle to Chicago, paralleling I-90, with new service between Spokane and Minneapolis, including Bozeman, Billings, Rapid City, and Sioux Falls. And finally, they should extend service from Denver south to Albuquerque and El Paso, in order to provide better connectivity between lines and enable riders in the Mountain West to travel between lines without having to go to California or Chicago.
Two more things would help tremendously with travel speed and on-time performance. Those are, (1) double-track the lines, so that trains heading in opposite directions can pass each other without one of them having to wait; and (2) install high-level platforms so that people can board and alight the trains quicker and easier, and the station dwell times can be reduced.
We don't need high-speed rail crisscrossing the country. But for a relatively modest sum, we could greatly improve what exists now and make the train appealing to a lot more people.
New sections I don't understand:
Roanoke VA to Christianburg VA?
Eau Claire Wisconsin?
Scranton/Allentown PA definitely got services thanks to 2020 election and President's NE PA routes.
Missing Cities:
Lexington KY? Tulsa OK? Boise ID? Des Moine IA
Best ideas of plan. Many of these will capture weekend vacation travelers when highways are jam packed with people getting away.
LA to Vegas
PHX to Tucson
Colorado Front Range
Nashville to Atlanta
Cincinnati to Cleveland
Boston to Manchester NH
NYC to Long Island
ATL to Savannah
This one seems needlessly duplicative to me. The Long Island Rail Road already provides frequent service between New York and Ronkonkoma. Why would Amtrak be needed there?
New sections I don't understand:
Roanoke VA to Christianburg VA?
Eau Claire Wisconsin?
Scranton/Allentown PA definitely got services thanks to 2020 election and President's NE PA routes.
Missing Cities:
Lexington KY? Tulsa OK? Boise ID? Des Moine IA
Best ideas of plan. Many of these will capture weekend vacation travelers when highways are jam packed with people getting away.
LA to Vegas
PHX to Tucson
Colorado Front Range
Nashville to Atlanta
Cincinnati to Cleveland
Boston to Manchester NH
NYC to Long Island
ATL to Savannah
Not sure about the others, but there used to be an Amtrak train from LA to Las Vegas (and on to Salt Lake City).
Two more things would help tremendously with travel speed and on-time performance. Those are, (1) double-track the lines, so that trains heading in opposite directions can pass each other without one of them having to wait; and (2) install high-level platforms so that people can board and alight the trains quicker and easier, and the station dwell times can be reduced.
We don't need high-speed rail crisscrossing the country. But for a relatively modest sum, we could greatly improve what exists now and make the train appealing to a lot more people.
I agree that at this point we don't need cross-country high speed rail. Maybe some lines but not everything. Double-track is needed. Dedicated Amtrak lines are needed. More trains and better schedules are needed. Higher speed rather than high-speed would be possible if the road-bed and technology are upgraded on dedicated lines.
My experience on high speed Euro rail is that the trains are moving at 120-140 mph on dedicated and secure lines with banked turns and no grade crossings. States like Kansas with a grid road pattern would be a challenge requiring an over- or underpass every mile or so.
A rail line in the median of an interstate might work in some places. Our commuter train does that on I-25 heading into Santa Fe from Albuquerque.
...For the pre-Amtrak era before 1971, I'd check out this site at Streamliner Schedules - Historic timetables of the great trains of the past , if you want a good idea of passenger train routes that didn't make it into the Amtrak era. Sadly a lot of routes weren't preserved, such as train service (north of the existing Empire Builder Amtrak route) ran by The Milwaukee Road into northern WI cities and towns like Wausau, Green Bay, Oshkosh, etc. getting axed. And places like Kansas City used to have several passenger routes serve that city, that didn't make it into the Amtrak era. At times when you ride long distance trains, you sometimes can see telltale signs that certain stations once had quite a few tracks and platforms for passenger rail service. One example is Toledo, Ohio, where on the east part of that station(especially if you ever ride either the Capitol Limited, or Lake Shore Limited) you can see numerous abandoned platforms and former locations for passenger rail tracks that have been ripped out. You also notice this south of the main track serving Barstow, California's train station, on the Southwest Chief route....
If you have any more Amtrak related questions, do post them. I had been doing a lot of quiet research on my own, to better understand Antrak(and long distance passenger trains, that existed pre-Amtrak and before 1971) myself.
An even better eye-opening site into pre-Amtrak passenger trains is https://legacy.timetableworld.com/bo...section_id=265
It has the entire 1952 edition of the Official Guide of the Railways. It lists every railroad in the US, Canada, Mexico and Cuba, with each one's complete schedule of all of their passenger trains (Including freight trains where they'd sell you a ticket to ride in the caboose! How cool would that be.)
You get a real feel for how extensive the network was, offering regular passenger service to such isolated and remote areas as Eureka, CA, Douglas, AZ, Craig, CO, Everglades City, FL, North Creek, NY and Caribou, ME to name a few.
Someone speculated on this thread that there might've been as many as 10 trains daily between Pittsburgh and Chicago. I just looked it up in the Guide. There were actually a total of 24 westbound trains operated by 3 different railroads from Pittsburgh to Chicago in 1952, just 19 years before Amtrak was initiated!
Looking at the map, why wouldn’t they go ahead and connect Nashville, Louisville & Cincinnati together?
Any rail service through Columbus & central Ohio is a welcome addition still.
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