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Amtrak Wish List - Dreaming of 5 new routes
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by mr williams: [QB] I am a Brit who has been contributing to this forum for nearly five years but I never take part in threads of a "political" nature and rarely into those with even a tenous quasi-political link (because how you choose to run your country is none of my business)so I hope you'll forgive me if I have my two cents worth on this occasion. We all look back with rose-tinted glasses at former days and convince ourselves how wonderful they were - it is human nature. In the UK we lost over a third of our passenger railways in little more than a decade and now we look at gridlocked roads, high gas prices and urban smog and say "why ever did they shut the railways" but the truth is that they cost a fortune to run and the stark fact is that nobody was using them. Only last week I saw a documentary in which a railway worker from the 1960s admitted that the trains were empty. 20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing. You have just had a change of government and possibly the new electees will have a diffent view to the outgoing legislators. But just be warned that this is not always the case - the plan to axe so many of the railways in the UK was brought in by a Convervative government. Within eighteen months Labour were re-elected and the rail lobby said "hooray" as the plans were still being opposed and fought locally and many of the lines were still open but apart from saving one or two politically sensitive routes that passed through marginal wards they did nothing to reverse the legislation and far more railways closed under the new Labour government who had opposed the legislation than under the Conservatives who had proposed it! The cuts of 1979, and the demise of the Desert Wind and The Pioneer came under Democratic Presidents, remember. It is very easy to forget that the Desert Wind, which you would think would have been a cast-iron safe strategic route (LA to Chicago via Denver) was axed because passenger numbers had fallen to absolutely ridiculously low numbers. On the Sunset Ltd I talked to the cafe car attendant, a 20-year Amtrak veteran, who used to work the Desert Wind, and he said that on one trip there were just ELEVEN passengers on board when the train left LA. If it was restored as a branch just as far as Las Vegas then yes, I think it could generate sustainable and justifiable numbers, especially if it was a high-speed route of some sort. But what makes you think it would be any more successful now between LVS and SLC then it was before? I've always believed that Any Amtrak expansion should be based on enhancing its credilility. I think medium distance "city pairs" are the immediate way forward. I know we are looking at separate issues when you look at things like distances and densities of population but in the UK it would be unthinkable for there to be no train service between major cities like Manchester and Birmingham or if cities the size of Sheffield or Bristol had no trains at all or just one train a day. My local branch line halt gets more trains in a day than Houston gets in a month! Therefore my short-term Top 5 wishlist would be two trains a day each way between: 1. Los Angeles and San Francisco 2. Los Angeles and Phoenix 3. Los Angeles and Las Vegas 4. Dallas and Houston 5. Houston and New Orleans If you looked at changing/extending existing routes on a best-coverage-for-minimum-cost basis then I would consider: 1. Re-routing the Zephyr through Des Moines and extending it from Emeryville to Los Angeles 2. Re-routing the SW Chief through Wichita and Amarillo 3. Re-routing the Sunset from Houston through Dallas and west Texas (part of the Meridian Crescent plan, I think it was called) and if any long distance routes were to be developed or re-instated, I think that Chicago to Florida or Denver to Texas should take priority. You then have to look at issues such as Columbus, Tulsa and Nashville and other major conurbations without passenger rail. Make no mistake that the outlook for ALL forms of public transport is stronger and more positive at the moment than it has been for decades, but money will be limited and will have to be spent wisely and for the best return. If that means building a short-distance commuter line instead of restoring The Pioneer then I'm afraid that's the choice you'll have to make, because if you really want to make a difference your officials have to change their entire mindset as to the rail industry. Amtrak gets along on around $1 billion dollars a year. You need probably 10 times that to replace and improve the rolling stock and 50 or 100 times that to put the infrastructure right but what a wonderful carrot to offer the freight railroads - we will give you a massive capital injection of Federal money to update/improve/double track whatever you need, but there's one condition: you must allow Amtrak full, unfettered and priority access to your routes. If I was a freight stockholder I might think that an excellent offer! [/QB][/QUOTE]
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