BNSF and UP testing longer schedules for Southwest Chief, California Zephyr, and Texas Eagle

Once upon a time, the Union Pacific, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, and the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy competed on time and luxury for their elite trains.

Today, Amtrak operates trains that don’t even meet the comfort standard of the California Limited (after the Chief and Super Chief were daily) or the Los Angeles Limited (after the City of Los Angeles was daily), and now the timeliness of these trains is slipping into pre Northern steam locomotive days.

Click on the bold to get the article from Trains Magazine: BNSF and UP testing longer schedules for Southwest Chief, California Zephyr, and Texas Eagle

CN did this with the Canadian and everybody (buffs) lost their minds. Turns out they still sell plenty of $10,000 prestige tickets. Its' a land cruise with 20 cars of sleepers and 2-3 coaches for necessary travelers. The same is true with our western trains. If you're taking the train, you are not time sensitive. I can't believe this didn't happen decades ago.

It's certainly a more pragmatic approach than trying to sue the host road over what may turn out to be unrealistic scheduling.

Tadman's right about people taking the train for long trips not being time-sensitive. An extra hour to two from Chicago to Denver or whatever would not make much difference to those people.

Shorter-distance passengers may be time-sensitive, but if slowing down the schedules a little made the trains run on time, that could make more people willing to take the LD trains for short trips (Hastings to Omaha, that kind of thing) that really don't make sense now when there's a big chance that the train could be so late that you don't get on until after you were supposed to get off.

I can't get the article to load, so I'm guessing about some stuff here.

Two problems I see with moving to longer schedules:
1. I bet a lot of us and a lot of people at Amtrak assume that if the schedule on train X were 2 hours slower, the host railroad would still have it's dispatcher make train X just as late, because Amtrak's main experience with host railroads is that they don't let Amtrak trains stay on schedule.
2. How are the schedules to be longer? Do the host railroads actually need a couple more minutes between each station, or do they need the ability to delay any given train for an hour or two at varying places along its route according to how the freight traffic is running that day?

How will this affect crew schedules and staffing? I believe there is an agreement with the engineers that 6 hours or less only one engineer is required. Over that two engineers are required in the cab. Will that increase Amtrak's costs and possibly crew change locations?

dgvrengineer wrote: ↑Fri Sep 06, 2024 7:29 pm How will this affect crew schedules and staffing? I believe there is an agreement with the engineers that 6 hours or less only one engineer is required. Over that two engineers are required in the cab. Will that increase Amtrak's costs and possibly crew change locations?

First, you send two out, you have to bring two back.

Second, if the train dies on the law, it sits there until the replacement crew gets called, arrives, and takes over the train.