Cardinal discussion

CComMack wrote: Given what the present schedule is, one of the few incentives to take Amtrak to/from Cincinnati is a connection in Chicago. So, I'm less interested in speculation, and more interested in hard data about how many people would need a hotel stay in Chicago (not cheap) if we broke the Cardinal's connections. If we want to speculate, the raw boardings in Chicago are not strong evidence that the Cardinal has less transferring passengers than the Lake Shore or Capitol Limited. This way lies madness, and is not worth pursuing without data.

Given my connecting experience last May from the California Zephyr to the Cardinal, there's more people than expected that connect to LD trains from the West. We were running 4-5 hours late due to a rock slide in Colorado that damaged the track (BNSF was there to fix it in about an hour!), it was decided to get us off at Galesburg and bus us to Indianapolis to meet it. In all, there were about 20 people on that overgrown airport shuttle bus with comfortable seats...and that was in the non-peak pre-summer time of the year!

CComMack wrote:

Philly Amtrak Fan wrote:

CComMack wrote:A lot of the discussion around the timing of the Cardinal has to do with the trade-off between being able to make connections in Chicago to/from the western trains, and the ability to serve Cincinnati at a reasonable hour. Question for those in a position to know: how much of the Cardinal's ridership is connecting in Chicago to once-daily trains?

Well ridership in and out of Chicago for...

LSL: 164,470
CL: 143,411
Cardinal:45,495

The most popular city pair on the LSL is CHI-NYP and the most popular on the CL is CHI-WAS (second is CHI-PGH). The three most popular city pairs on the Cardinal are CHI-IND, CHI-Lafayette, and CHI-CIN, nowhere near the full distance. So the LSL and CL are more likely to attract the LD passenger who is more likely to make the cross country trip than the Cardinal (and even if the people of Indiana want to transfer west just have the Hoosier State stay in the Cardinal slot). People in Cincinnati would probably rather a train at a good hour than the ability to transfer west. And NYP and WAS have other trains if they want to transfer.

Given what the present schedule is, one of the few incentives to take Amtrak to/from Cincinnati is a connection in Chicago. So, I'm less interested in speculation, and more interested in hard data about how many people would need a hotel stay in Chicago (not cheap) if we broke the Cardinal's connections. If we want to speculate, the raw boardings in Chicago are not strong evidence that the Cardinal has less transferring passengers than the Lake Shore or Capitol Limited. This way lies madness, and is not worth pursuing without data.

OK.

This report uses FY 2014 data (NARP is FY 2015)

https://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/873/180/Ch ... Report.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

63,195 passengers that passed through Chicago Union Station transferred. That's more than the entire FY 2015 ridership in and out of Chicago on the Cardinal. If you assume the same % of LSL passengers transferred that would be even higher. If even 30% of LSL passengers transfer (the CL has more than 40% transferring) that is still higher than the entire ridership of the Cardinal.

Philly Amtrak Fan wrote:Why do I pick on the Cardinal? Every other LD train serves a specific purpose.

For 15 cities the Cardinal is their only Amtrak. Five cities have the Hoosier State, but would that survive without the Cardinal?

The secondary purpose of the Cardinal is to connect Beech Grove to Chicago. Theoretically Amtrak could drop the Cardinal and use the Hoosier State as the hospital train, but anything less than 750mi must be state supported and (per the State of Indiana and IP's contract) Amtrak would need to pay for cars towed.

Philly Amtrak Fan wrote:This report uses FY 2014 data (NARP is FY 2015)
https://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/873/180/Ch ... Report.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

63,195 passengers that passed through Chicago Union Station transferred. That's more than the entire FY 2015 ridership in and out of Chicago on the Cardinal. If you assume the same % of LSL passengers transferred that would be even higher. If even 30% of LSL passengers transfer (the CL has more than 40% transferring) that is still higher than the entire ridership of the Cardinal.

if we're both reading the illustration on page 35, the 63,195 were only drawn from the Capitol Ltd's 153,397 in 2014. So let's pull up NARP's 2014 report: https://www.narprail.org/site/assets/fi ... s_2014.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The CL's connections included 11k to state service (which I'm going to assume are easier to connect to), so only 52k were to other LDs. That's 30% of CL pax going to other LDs via CHI in 2014.

If the Cardinal is also getting 30% LD connections at CHI, that's .3 x 49,224 (2014 Cardinal ridership at CHI) = 17k.
Given that the Cardinal is the slow train, to WAS&NEC, might we assume that its connecting power is lower?

Meanwhile, recall that CIN does 14k today. Let's say that 8k go to CHI, and that 6k connect there.

If CIN performed as well as CHW, it would add 30k to 60k riders, but then "lose" the 6k who connect (the 30k reflects losses from people not being able to see the New River Gorge in daylight and other more pessimistic things)

So today, there's something like 2 to 3 trips being "not taken" at CIN for every 1 LD trip being taken on the Cardinal for the sake of LD connections at CHI.

My doodle for CIN retiming ridership now looks like this:
102k current ridership of Cardinal
- 8k losses at CHW as CHW gets graveyard shift
- 8k losses in WVx as rest of WV gets graveyard shift
- 17k losses of 100% of CHI LD connection connectivity including those who can't see the NRG
- 4k in Cardinal local (no LD via CHI) passengers who ride solely and exclusively to gaze into the NRG in daylight
+80k gains at CIN
-------------------
145k ridership (a net gain of 43k, aka a 40%+ gain in ridership)

[EDIT/ADD] Revenue and overall profitability is an interesting question. It really depends on how expensive food on the western LDs is, and what share of CHI-WAS could actually be reaccommodated on the LSL or CL--and make those trains *better* performing if LD connections were squeezed off the Cardinal and onto LSL & CL running fuller, kind of like chasing the diner-fans from the Star to the Meteor, they need not be lost as customers, so add this row:

+5k of ridership spilled off of Cardinal connections that'd be recaptured on LSL or CL

These numbers look about right to me. I don't know that there's a lot of slack capacity on the LSL and CL to pick up displaced NEC-CHI passengers, or at least there won't be until the V-IIs are accepted and the V-I overhauls are done.

Actually, it occurs to me that if the new OXF station gets service at a reasonable hour, a retimed Cardinal could lose *100%* of its current ridership and still make it up from new passengers at CIN, OXF, and IND. And as a counter to those who think the Cardinal is better off as two day corridors CHI-CIN and CVS-NYP with no overnight bridge between them: Southwest Ohio has surprisingly strong connections to the Northeast. A lot of that new CIN/OXF ridership will be going east. I might finally use the train to visit my parents, or vice-versa, for example.

^ I am hoping that we see added capacity utilization once all Single Level LD consists are free of heritage equipment (neither bags nor diners) to turn faster and be ready to go back out sooner. (See the V-II topic). Basically reliable diners should yield more deployable sleeper capacity.

In reply to a couple of comments above: I think that the Cardinal goes to New York not to handle passengers between there and Chicago but because New York is Amtrak's biggest market, and a lot of the passengers from Virginia and West Virginia would be traveling to New York and other Northeast Corridor points north of Washington. A guaranteed connection at Washington might work well enough if the Cardinal reliably ran on time. At one time it was a Superliner train with end points in Chicago and Washington.

North Philadelphia, both the neighborhood and the station, are bad. People in Philadelphia and its suburbs don't want to get off at North Philly or go there to board a train. Most Amtrak passengers at North Philly are, I understand, connecting to and from Chestnut Hill locals. Yes, through trains used to stop there rather than 30th Street to save time between New York and points west. I once boarded Amtrak's National Limited at North Philly. Nowadays I would think more than twice before using that station. I believe that Amtrak found that 30th Street was a much better place, with better local transit access, to serve Philadelphia. I agree. It would be nice if a train between New York and points west didn't have to change ends there, but North Philadelphia is not an acceptable substitute to serve the market. Back in the Pennsylvania Railroad days, through trains skipped 30th Street and called only at North Philly, but I believe there were other trains you could ride directly between 30th Street and Chicago.

As for the Cardinal schedule, yes, it should be daily, and, yes, the train is trying to be too many things. Amtrak President Paul Reistrup said that every route should have service at least twice daily. Two trains a day on the Cardinal route could, between them, serve every station at a reasonable time, offering better schedules for travel to and from Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Charleston, New York, and Chicago.

Literalman wrote:In reply to a couple of comments above: I think that the Cardinal goes to New York not to handle passengers between there and Chicago but because New York is Amtrak's biggest market, and a lot of the passengers from Virginia and West Virginia would be traveling to New York and other Northeast Corridor points north of Washington. A guaranteed connection at Washington might work well enough if the Cardinal reliably ran on time. At one time it was a Superliner train with end points in Chicago and Washington.

The Cardinal goes to NYP because people in Charlottesville want to go to NYP. CVS-NYP is the #1 city pair by revenue for the Cardinal! (and #5 by ridership).

This goes back to a point made by ThirdRail7: the Cardinal is two corridor trains, CHI-CIN and CVS-NYP, that happens to roll overnight between CIN and CVS (and, to my mind, can't quite get the timing at CIN right, but makes a decent CVS-CHI), much the same way that the Silver Star is two corridor trains: MIA-JAX and Pinehurst SC to NYP, that happens to roll overnight between JAX and Pinehurst.

The middle can only be as strong as:
1) If end-to-end makes sense (on the Cardinal it doesn't on the Crescent and Star its somewhat better and the Meteor and AT seem to do well)
2) If the 9p to 12m and 5a to 7a can hit decent sized midpoint markets
3) If the 1am to 4am doesn't miss big cities (something the Crescent misses (CLT) and Star misses (SAV and CLB))
4) If the midsection doesn't last too long (ideally, a big market at 11pm and big one at 7am, on the Star, Pinehurst and JAX hit these times exactly)

If Virginia was paying for a state overlay (for a second daily frequency) they could be counted on to be interested in the train as far as Clifton Forge (Homestead resort/Hot Springs VA) - Staunton (Midway between VMI/W&L & JMU) -Charlottesville. (There's a danger that since they can only turn a train at either ROA or LYH that they'll never invest in a good turning station anyplace else)

The Greenbrier would then want it extended to White Sulfur Springs, just 35miles and 50 minutes further, and maybe they or WV would pay in the name of tourism (and daily tourism at that). That's got to work about the same way that other lines like MARC into WV and MBTA into RI get done: a short extension is cheap and if ridership is good it makes sense.
After that the corridor--and the need to get to/from NYC-- ends real fast, and you see this in the ridership numbers.

The Cardinal goes to NYP because that is where the single level long distance equipment is based.

Alcochaser wrote:The Cardinal goes to NYP because that is where the single level long distance equipment is based.

Fallacy. The Cardinal did quite well, mechanically, as a CHI-WAS Superliner train, drawing on the Superliner base in the Greater Washington area (split between WAS for the Capitol Limited and Lorton for the Auto Train, of course). But the train does much better financially today, now that it can serve the CVS-NYP and CVS-PHL markets without a change of train.

If the Cardinal could be guaranteed excellent timekeeping over its route, the change of trains wouldn't matter, but that has never, ever been the case for Amtrak on a Class I's rails. I'm sure that Philly Amtrak Fan isn't the only person who's looked covetously at the Cardinal's Viewliners, thinking that they might make marginally more money on 65/66/67, or perhaps the Silver Meteor or Silver Star. But the meat and potatoes of the Cardinal is as a corridor day train, CHI-IND (for now) and CHW (for now)-NYP, and the Sleeper tail is wagged by the Coach dog.

That's an interesting point I've never thought of the Auto Train as part of the "pool" for that area but it clearly is. Combined with the Capitol Limited that makes Washington a unique terminal in terms of its ability to serve both single level and bi-level Amtrak fleets, along with electric and diesel-electric motive power.

CComMack wrote:

Alcochaser wrote:The Cardinal goes to NYP because that is where the single level long distance equipment is based.

Fallacy. The Cardinal did quite well, mechanically, as a CHI-WAS Superliner train, drawing on the Superliner base in the Greater Washington area (split between WAS for the Capitol Limited and Lorton for the Auto Train, of course). But the train does much better financially today, now that it can serve the CVS-NYP and CVS-PHL markets without a change of train.

Sorry, your wrong.

Look at when the Cardinal went to NYP. It was a about 1.5 years from when they changed from Superliners when they were pulled to put on the Autotrain.

Having the end point of the single level Cardinal at washington meant they would have to deadhead Cars on ether the LSL to Chicago or down the NEC from sunny side. It only took VERY short time before they just started running the train on to NYP. Ivy city normally doesn't deal with the single level long distance fleet. Sunny side is the "central" dispatch point for the single levels fleet. Chicago along with LA handles the Superliner Fleet.

The autotrain has its own pool of cars they generally are not mixed with the rest of the system, remember they had some superliners of a special config originally just for the Auto Train. (Lounges made from Diners and Deluxe Sleepers).

My answer that the extension of the Cardinal to NYP Having to do with the change to single level came right from someone at Amtrak. After 2 years of constantly having to deadhead stuff from NYP to CHI or WAS to put on the Cardinal, Amtrak just extended the train.

This is Amtrak we are talking about. YES, There are HUGE benefits to Cardinal Pax in going to NYP. But the first and foremost reason they did it was the ease operational hassles.

Alcochaser: so you're saying that the important part isn't running to NYP for passengers, but running there to bring equipment to/from Beech Grove? It makes a lot more sense to think of the Cardinal as a 3x/week equipment drag that happens to carry passengers than a passenger train that happens to deadhead equipment. Makes it easier to transfer equipment, since you don't have to find yard space at either CHI or WAS. That also explains the timetable - arrival time from the east is optimized to hit IND during the morning shift at Beech Grove. It's kind of an accident that the train hits WV during daylight.

It was a nice bonus. Has nothing to do with the grove though. The Cardinal rarely handles deadheads east of Indy unless it's a high priority move.

It has everything to do with the Single Level LD fleet being pretty much based out of Sunnyside. Washington isn't a terminal for trains that have LD single level cars used in 2003 and 2004. (Amfleet IIs, Heritage Diners and Dorms, and Viewliner Sleepers)

Don't forget that the original single level Cardinal was a FULL consist train. Heritage dorm, and Heritage diner included. Wasn't until the GREAT FREEZE UP, those were removed from the cardinal. Replaced with a Horizon Dinette set up for Diner Lite. Thats right the first Diner Lite used a Horizon Car.

So anytime for whatever reason a Car needed replaced on the Cardinal, Sunnyside had to dispatch it as a deadhead on the LSL or the NEC to the endpoints of the Cardinal.

Ivy City isn't the biggest place ether. The train sat there taking up yard space too, and used cars they couldn't use for anything else.

The fact that it helped Cardinal ridership is an ACCIDENT! I hate to be cynical here, but as I said this is AMTRAK we are talking about. This was all about operational efficiencies.