njt/mnrrbuff wrote: ↑Sat Apr 25, 2020 11:12 pm
It's not just about traveling from a station Upstate to New York City, Yonkers, and Croton-Harmon. There might be people who are traveling from Albany west to other cities along the Water Level Route to travel on vacation to Niagara Falls, Ontario. You could have somebody traveling from Albany-Rensellaer Station or Schenectady Station to Syracuse for a business meeting. If the train ran on a little faster and more frequent schedule across Upstate NY along the Water Level Route, then that would make people very happy.
As for the Hampton Roads region, it's a very interesting scenario. You have a lot of water separating Newport News and Norfolk and that's probably why Virginia DOT never wanted to combine the route that ends in NPN with NFK. Ridership is fine on both the routes heading to NPN and NFK. The Hampton Roads doesn't only consist of Norfolk and Newport News. You have other cities like Suffolk, Portsmouth, and Virginia Beach. We also need to factor in driving time getting from a person's home to the station. Once you are in Newport News and Hampton, you might as well just catch the train at Newport News because if you head on over to Norfolk, you may be sitting in a lot of traffic. If you live in Virginia Beach or are heading there, then taking the train to and from Norfolk would be your best option. I know that in the past Virginia and Amtrak toyed with the idea of adding a station in Suffolk which I think would be a wonderful idea. I remember seeing plans to build the Suffolk Station in the downtown area.
Of course it's not just about travel to upstate from downstate, but if they're moving forward with this project, wouldn't it be wise to make it attractive to the busiest market on the entire route? That's assuming of course that downstate-upstate is the busiest market, but since actual city pair numbers aren't published, we have no way of knowing for sure. It should be relatively easy to get those numbers to find out what the busiest legs are.
Regarding the Norfolk/Newport News branches, I was all for both operating before, but I just looked at the trip times and what the actual f#@k!? 4hrs and 30mins from DC to Norfolk when it's a 3 hour drive? 4hrs 15min from DC to Newport News when it's only a 2hr 45min drive? Please tell me part of the improvements in VA include speeding up trip times. 45 minutes of that loss is on the DC to Richmond leg and another 30 mins is on the Richmond to Newport News leg (Norfolk is probably worse once those trains start going via Main St). If they need to spend money improving both legs to get them up to speeds where they're competitive with driving, I'd rather see a study on a tunnel connecting Norfolk to Newport News and just run it as one branch. It will be a much larger upfront cost doing one branch upgrade plus a tunnel rather than 2 branch upgrades, but operationally it would be cheaper both in terms of maintenance and actual train operation since instead of needing to 2 branches worth of trains it's just one. Besides, the branch to Newport News seems a lot more densely populated than the branch to Norfolk, and the only place worth having a station that would lose out would be Suffolk as Petersburg would still get a boost from all the additional service planned to NC via the S line.
For sleepers, I've said it before and I'll say it again. There is a much broader market for overnight service than what is currently being served, especially out of NYC, but also the NE in general, to the Carolinas and Georgia, but you are not going to get that market at the current sleeper price. There has to be some sort of communal sleeper car that can be sold at a much lower rate. Same for LA-SF and some other markets. Why has this never been considered in the US?