Cardinal discussion

Thurmond's 5 residents took 295 trips in 2015, if you transpose that to CIN, we need HSR.
My point is , you ted to need a reason to travel , as well as population. Tourist attractions, major or specialized health care, major sporting event , conventions, all generate more traffic than a city without such attractions.
I imagine Las Vegas has a lot more air traffic than other cities its size, for example.

As probably the only registered user on this board to have used the Thurmond station. 3 times. It's an interesting experience for sure.
I got the impression that most that use it are the self sufficient hiker type.

I figured out that there was a way that you could ride from Indianapolis. Get dropped off. Hang out all day and watch trains. And get picked up and go home. Packed in food with us.
The other time I just wanted to do it again and was down there and had someone drop me off there.

Westbound can be an eerie experience as the area can be deserted when it comes thru. Quiet, darkness having just fallen. Just the river and the remote quiet.

I had heard stories of the crew forgetting to stop there as it is a flag stop, and they don't stop very often. So I took my lantern and literally made sure to FLAG the with the proper signal. Got the proper two hoots in response both times. Engineer called out to the conductor on the radio "Flag at Thurmomd"

Costs Amtrak nothing to stop there. NPS maintains everything. So why not.

Arlington wrote: Hmm: One stated reason for keeping the WAS-NYP segment of the Cardinal was that it was PHL's only one seat ride to CHI.

But it's around six hours longer than going to WAS, NYP, or PGH and connecting with either the LSL or CL for PHL-CHI travel. When I last went to Chicago, I took the LSL to NYP going west and the CL to WAS going east. I'd probably add 1-2 hours to my trip to avoid a transfer but 6 hours is a lot. You can make the same argument for Newark, Trenton, Wilmington, and Baltimore.

All four of these cities had much faster one seat rides on Amtrak before. PHL and New Jersey had the Broadway/Three Rivers. Wilmington and Baltimore were once served by a Washington through car branch off the Broadway Limited splitting in Philly before they changed the split to Pittsburgh (when they started the Capitol Limited). I don't see the Cardinal as a benefit for any of these cities, especially Newark which is so close to New York and Baltimore which is pretty close to Washington and in both those cases they have other mass transit options connecting them to the nearest cities. Philly is stuck in the middle between the two and doesn't have other trains other than Amtrak to NYP/WAS. Luckily I'm closer to Trenton than Philly and Trenton has NJ Transit to Penn Station which is much cheaper than Amtrak and their tickets are not reserved meaning if you miss a connection you don't have to have your ticket changed. Last time I missed my connection in WAS by close to four hours and then had to wait in a really long line in Union Station to take a later train. And I still got to Trenton before the Cardinal was scheduled to make it there (and the Capitol leaves CHI one hour later).

If Amtrak cared at all about PHL-CHI (and NJ-CHI) travel you know what they can always do.

Forgive me for asking, but isn't the Subway still open at Zoo? And if it is, why can't people in the Phildelphia area go to the North Philadelphia station to get a through long-distance train as in days of yore? All of the PRR's through trains skipped 30th St. AFAICR.

David Benton wrote:Thurmond's 5 residents took 295 trips in 2015, if you transpose that to CIN, we need HSR.
My point is , you ted to need a reason to travel , as well as population. Tourist attractions, major or specialized health care, major sporting event , conventions, all generate more traffic than a city without such attractions.
I imagine Las Vegas has a lot more air traffic than other cities its size, for example.

For teeny cities you should probably, just assume that 1 or 2 trips per day will essentially get off there as random noise. Even then a forecast of zero for Thurmond would be economically correct--- 295 trips *is* basically zero.

The more people a city has-, the more valid it is to assume they make trips like "people". By the time you have 220k and no particular attraction, like CHW, a ratio is valid

And then at the far extreme there are known Leisure destinations like Las Vegas and Orlando that generate and demand for more trips than their population would suggest. As far as I know this is not true for Charleston or Cincinnati both of which are ordinary American towns needing travel at about the same rate per capita as any other American town except that Cincinnati service happens in the dead of the night when ordinary Americans do not demand travel.

Las Vegas is again an outlier on time of day it happens to be the one place where Airlines have found it possible to have a hub that operates at 1 a.m. that this is true suggests nothing for travel forecasting in West Virginia or Ohio.

The forecast for riders at a station might be:

1 passenger per daily train
5k passengers per 220k in population
.01 passenger per local hotel-rooms squared

Most places overall riders will be by population (and normal hotels per pop numbers)

Tiny places will get riders just because the train stops. Thurmond gets 0.3% of the Cardinals riders for a reason not much stronger than "the train stopped".

Leisure places (Vegas and Orlando and White Sulphur Springs) will get outlier numbers because their hotel rooms per capita are so high

Alcochaser wrote:I had heard stories of the crew forgetting to stop there as it is a flag stop, and they don't stop very often. So I took my lantern and literally made sure to FLAG the with the proper signal. Got the proper two hoots in response both times. Engineer called out to the conductor on the radio "Flag at Thurmomd"

Very cool. Thanks for sharing!

Arlington wrote:Let's begin by noting that the Cardinal takes 28 hours from NYP to CHI. Clearly it is not being operated for the convenience of New York to Chicago travel, which is better handled by either the Lake Shore Limited (19 hours), or even connections (Pennsylvanian + Capitol Ltd) or (NEC + Capitol Limited) which run in the 20 to 22 hour time range. In addition to being slow, it is "small", representing just 17% of Amtrak's capacity between New York and Chicago (3 out of 17 itineraries) and about 30% of capacity between Washington and Chicago (3 out of 10 trains).

The first thing, then, to conclude, is that the Cardinal is being operated for the convenience of all the people between Staunton VA (just beyond Charottesville) and Connersville IN (just before Indy) for whom it is, perhaps, their sole means of moving conveniently from "home" to "the Big City"

But also, given the really lousy timing at Cincinnati (1am westbound and 3am eastbound), you'd have to say that the Cardinal "works" for everyone along the way except Cincinnati (pop 2.2m), in the same way that the Pennsylvanian and Capitol Limited do a bad job of serving Pittsburgh (pop 2.6m) but serve everyone else pretty well.

I look at that and say the Hoosier State would probably do much better if it were extended to CIN, even without Ohio's help (same as the Downeaster depends on New Hampshire and Maryland's MARC trains go into West Virginia...the fare money pays for it, even though NH/WV "freeload"). Plenty of Indianans would benefit too: not just Connersville, but also the 3 counties in Indiana that are part of the CIN metro area.

There's got to be a better way to serve the Cardinal's route. Going daily seems to just repeat the flaws of the current route and schedule.

They need to desperately do another ridership analysis on the Cardinal. With it's meandering route it serves so many different markets. A separate corridor train from Indy to Chicago should be put in place - let IPH handle this. Cardinal still stops here, but I think the Cardinal should terminate in say Galesburg or the last station that it could intersect on a western journey from Indy.

Terminate the train in Washington DC. A split of the train to the Virginia Tidewater region makes sense - or a connecting train......

But this train needs to operate daily with Superliners between Washington DC and it's western terminus with markets defined. Right now it's all over the place. Cincy DEFINITELY needs to be served at a better hour. They could even do a current schedule adjustment - two hours later eastbound and a 9 am departure westbound from DC - to help with CINCY.

Want do you mean let Iowa Pacific take care of a Cincy train? You mean let Indiana DOT and Ohio DOT run a Chi-Cincy service. Iowa Pacific doesn't run the Hoosier State on its own account. It runs it under contract with InDOT. Iowa Pacific is not going to run its own trains without state assistance.
Terminate the Cardinal in Galesburg!!!! You want to establish a whole new maintenance base, food vendor and crew base in some little town in the middle of nowhere? Bypassing the second largest city in the U.S. for a place that isn't even the top 10 population centers of Illinois!!! All for the dozen or so folks who might want to transfer to the CZ or SWC on a given day.
As far as terminating the train in Washington, hasn't it been shown that ridership increased a lot when the Cardinal became a through train to New York?

Chicago - Indianapolis -Cincinnati should be a multi-train corridor just like the Chicago-St. Louis and Chicago-Detroit corridors, but good luck in getting Indiana and/or Ohio to cooperate in establishing such a corridor.

gokeefe wrote:The ridership numbers don't bear that out, see the earlier referenced fact sheets. The train's ridership bases are out of Cincinnati (to Chicago and points between) and Charlottesville (to Washington).

I'd go with Charlottesville if the train had to be split in two. Three out of the top seven city pairs include Charlottesville (with DC #4, with NY #5, with Chi #7). Only one of the top nine city pairs passes through Charliottesville (#6 Chicago and Washington).

If you did that, the Charlottesville-New York part would just be another Lynchburger.

Of the three proposed Cardinal "splits" (at Cincinnati, at Huntington, at Charlottesville), the only one where there is precedence in Amtrak history is at Cincinnati (CHI-CIN was the James Whitcomb Riley, formerly Penn Central, and CIN-WAS (at the time) was the George Washington, formerly Chesapeake & Ohio). The problem with any of these splits is that sleepers would have to be stored and/or serviced at an intermediate location.

I'd rather just have one train CHI-CIN and one train CVS-NYP (both regular trains w/o sleepers), and screw West Virginia unless they want to pay for a train. Then we can use the sleepers for a faster CHI-PA(PGH-HAR-PHL)-NYP train.

I find these last few posts very interesting in that it has really brought to light the true fundamental issue at hand. The Cardinal simply should not run as a through train to Chicago. The route isn't competitive nor is the timing. Passengers originating in West Virginia and traveling towards Chicago would have a layover in Cincinnati but Union Terminal these days is really quite nice and there would be more than sufficient facilities present for a handful of "Moutaineers" (ok ... they probably are not all WVU alums ...) to pass the time while waiting for departure of the train to Chicago.

Some here are selling the Cardinal short. Here it is the dead of winter and its sold out tomorrow and most trips for rest of month have very few openings. For the needs of the Cardinal seems to be more rolling stock and maybe daily service. WASH <> CHI $100, BC 160, sleeper 500 - 600 / Don't let the POL s think that teir train ( not the Cardinal ) can get cancelled at just a whim.

Wow. No kidding. I never would have guessed that.

The idea that the Cardinal is selling out doesn't impress me. Correct me if I'm wrong but several trains sell out. I have heard LSL and SM at least selling out on occasion. I know when I tried checking prices between PHL and CHI the LSL often is much higher than the CL. All LD trains with additional coach capacity could improve revenue. That isn't unique to the Cardinal. And the Cardinal will never be able to compete with the LSL or CL for LD travel between CHI and NYP/WAS as long as it takes 6 hours longer. As stated before, the top five city pairs by ridership are all short distance.

Would daily service help? Absolutely. I still think it will be the third choice between CHI and the NEC. If the Hoosier State is canceled, then there is no increase in service between CHI and IND and considering the top two Cardinal city pairs are on that route, you would not expect net ridership to gain (in fact if passengers go from Iowa Pacific's nice cars and better food service to Amtrak's not as nice cars and food service I can see ridership dropping between the cities). And the Cardinal has "failed" as a daily train (if you consider the Floridian, National Limited, and Lone Star failures, the Cardinal's performance was worse than them), Amtrak did cancel the route and the 3x/week service was assumedly a compromise to Byrd.

But I think almost everyone would agree a 3x/week Cardinal is not effective and one of the worst if not the worst LD trains (lowest revenue of any train, second to Sunset Limited in lowest ridership) and most of the ridership along the route are between cities that already has daily service (CVS-NYP has 2 other daily trains, Lynchburger and Crescent). Let's say for sake of argument we can get a daily "Broadway Limited" of some sort before we can make the Cardinal daily. Tell me why we shouldn't replace a 3x/week Cardinal with a daily Broadway, using one more train set and easily doubling ridership (especially if Amtrak can use their own 110 mph track in Michigan to save on paying NS for a significant portion of the route and providing direct access from Michigan to PHL/NYP)? Now a daily Broadway probably requires some track negotiations and for the mess in Chicago to clear up. But which will Amtrak be able to do first, a daily Broadway or a daily Cardinal? I really think if we're discussing "when is the Cardinal be daily?" 5-10 years from now, Amtrak will still be in the red and the Cardinal will be one of the biggest money losers. Why waste 2 LD sets on a train that can only be used 3x/week if there is an obvious better option using 3 sets?

As for Congress, Byrd's dead. Hopefully the next time Amtrak's budget is cut, the Cardinal will be the one canceled and not some better train. If any better train gets canceled to save the Cardinal it will be as horrible as the decision to cut the Broadway to save the Cardinal.

east point wrote:Some here are selling the Cardinal short. Here it is the dead of winter and its sold out tomorrow and most trips for rest of month have very few openings. For the needs of the Cardinal seems to be more rolling stock and maybe daily service. WASH <> CHI $100, BC 160, sleeper 500 - 600 / Don't let the POL s think that teir train ( not the Cardinal ) can get cancelled at just a whim.

January has a spread travel season, at least at UVa where J-term runs Jan 3 to 15 and kids are free to travel as if it were an extended break.

And there isn't a "cancel" groundswell here so much as a "it is unsustainable as it is" and "CSX may hobble it" and "how is it a good thing to serve CIN so badly?"