mtuandrew wrote:I see what you mean about political value, but from my perspective the balance point is much further toward Viable Transportation Option and away from Pork-Barrel Express for most Amtrak trains. Where the corridors aren’t served well or at all by rail, it’s due to a vacuum of political willpower, rather than small-endpoint trains being solely a concession to political pressure - if that were the case, those trains would have much worse load factors than they do in reality.
I agree, the vast majority of Amtrak service leans far more towards being a real asset than just a vote seeker, I'm sorry if I made it seem like I was saying the majority of the corridor service was useless. As you hinted, load factors, from what I've read, are generally decent enough to show these routes have merit for the most part. Oddly enough, it seems the Hoosier State is probably the worst performing of all, approx 141 riders per day (365 days a year / 7 days a week = ~52 days x 4 operating days per week = ~208 operating days per year. 29,488 riders in 2016 / 208 operating days = ~141 daily riders). That's what, 2 cars max? Not sure what the ridership numbers on that portion of the route are for the 3 Cardinal Days though, but I can't imagine it will bring the daily number up dramatically. Yet the Carl Sandburg/Illinois Zephyr carried ~572 daily riders in 2015, so my methodology as to what corridors deserve service is definitely flawed. Any reason for Chi-Indy ridership sucking so bad?
In regards to right-of-way swaps, most railroads have very deliberately chosen which routes they occupy today. If Amtrak were to propose swapping the NS Chicago Line (ex-NYC Water Level Route) for both an upgraded Chicago, Ft Wayne & Eastern (ex-PRR) and upgraded ex-Nickel Plate across Indiana and Ohio, they’d get laughed out of Norfolk because the ex-NYC has a much more favorable grade profile. If they tried to negotiate for the ex-PRR mainline from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, they’d get laughed out because of the online traffic and shorter route, even though there is a lower-grade route via Sunbury, Williamsport, and DuBois.
My suggestion there is definitely an application that is far and few between, but in the event such a swap were a possibility to accomplish any valuable corridor, I don't see why it shouldn't be included as an option in that (those) unique case(s). I think we'd have to come up with a running list of corridors (and to do that, a running list of what makes a good corridor) before we can guess where this suggestion could possibly be applied.
We’ve recently seen agencies buy a permanent right-of-way easement next to a freight line for a passenger main, or build a second, third, or fourth main for mixed traffic, or agree to assume ownership/a lease over a secondary railroad that sees (could see) much more passenger traffic than freight, or take over custodial duties on a railbanked line with the intent of reactivating it. I don’t think you’ll ever get the really major extant routes under government ownership or control, except possibly in cases where a merger makes one line redundant. (For instance, if CP and UP merged, it’s conceivable that the FRA could insist that they lease the ex-Milwaukee Road or the ex-Omaha Road to the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin.)
As others have also mentioned, I think parallel tracks, either within the existing ROW or on an immediately adjacent easement, is the most likely solution (in the physical sense, not political) to getting a lot of good potential corridors up and running (and up to their maximum potential speed), but even this comes with objections. Didn't CSX have some major objections to NYS building tracks immediately adjacent for the NYS HSR through Central New York? A shame too because that's a corridor straight enough to really benefit from HSR and could possibly make an NYC-Toronto service time competitive. Being how big both cities are and the number of mid sized cities in between them, could probably support multiple trains a days, more than just the 1 to Toronto and 4 to Buffalo (although something about the border process might need to be changed, perhaps fewer stops in Canada each with immigration so the formalities are done off the train prior to boarding/upon disembarking so the train can just continue along).
Any links to studies that have been done as to what key elements would define a good corridor (and when we say corridor, how frequent are we talking, because I'm seeing a lot of proposals in this thread that seem to be one a day type of routes)? Off the metro area populations alone, using metro areas of 2 million or more people with 500 miles of each other as routed as the end points, the midwest has a pretty intense network, including routes like Indy-Ft Wayne-Toledo-Detroit, St Louis-Indy-Cinci, Cinci-Columbus-Toledo-Detroit, and Pitt-Cleveland-Toledo-Detroit, so as several of you noted, there's definitely got to be more to it. And then is 2 million people too high of a mark for endpoints? I'd like to at least share this map I created of all metro areas with at least 2 million people and lines connecting the ones within 350 miles of each other because it does at least show some interesting new candidates. How would I go about embedding that here?
What other factors do we think are important or have studies shown are important? Some have mentioned universities, which I agree, but with the footnote that they're really only good for Fridays/Sundays during Fall and Spring. Major medical facilities? What are some cities/towns of major tourist value other that would be along a potential corridor? We definitely should be looking to incorporate a lot more direct airport connections at large airports (high number of domestic and/or international destinations and schedules, not so much the podunk 2-3 route airports). Rail and air can certainly compliment each other and I'd argue is even more important here than in other countries because of the sheer size of our country. Instantly I'm seeing San Antonio, Phoenix Sky Harbor, SFO, O'Hare, Midway, Charlotte Douglas, Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson, just to name a few obvious ones. How about more international connections? I mentioned about limiting the number of stops on the other side of the border and having immigration formalities done at those stations in order to keep the trains moving rather than holding them at the border itself while everyone is checked simultaneously (likewise for bringing VIA services into the US). Prime candidates for this as part of a corridor service, in my opinion, would be Vancouver, Detroit, Toronto, Montreal, and Monterrey. Vancouver, if I'm not mistaken, already has formalities done in the station and I think Montreal is moving towards that as well, no? For Toronto, that would mean eliminating some stops since there's no way Canadian Immigration is going to set up shop at all 5 VIA stations. Pick 2, no more within Canada riders, and move on. Coordinate connecting VIA service for travel to local stops and for travel between Canadian points. Either that or figure out a way to shave down the 2 hour border stop (perhaps with more frequent service, anyone requiring extra checks could be removed and placed on the next available train. That's what we used to do at Greyhound on the NYC-Montreal runs when we had someone who needed an extended immigration process). Detroit would be a good point for a VIA service to terminate at. Handle all the formalities in MCS and then everyone going further into the US can catch whichever train that is coordinated with that Toronto trains arrival. That would be far easier than getting a Chicago-Toronto direct service going again. Monterrey is a HUGE junction for Mexican connections to/from the US, and the traffic between Texas and Monterrey is nuts (at least from my little personal experience and my insight into the US based Mexican bus carriers like Tornado/El Expreso, Adame, Turimex, and the handful of other smaller carriers). Feeding the Texas Triangle/T-Bone with that influx seems like a no-brainer, even if it is a political nightmare (though it shouldn't be given the existence of the aforementioned trans-border buses and, ya know, those things called airplanes). South of the border the only stops worth making anyway are Nuevo Laredo and Monterrey. That's easy enough to set up immigration formalities within the stations themselves.
