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Amtrak would say that it did reduce the size of its onboard staff, roughly in half, and eliminated the Chief on Onboard Services when it did so. In the 1980s, there was a dedicated attendant for every coach, who often slept in his seat in the middle of the car, not in the dorm, as well as for...

I would take two miles of restricted speed in Boston, over a 25-mile-long detour farther west, even if the detour were upgraded to passenger speeds. Grand Junction isn't suited to be a commuter line with every-15-minutes service... but I can't see any problem with a few trains a day (either...

They very nearly did. Last year's rail passes were $299, and I don't remember ever seeing those lower than $250 (though I was probably too young to pay close attention to the price before the early 80s.)

This is likely a picture from before the Desert Wind and Pioneer were cancelled. The usual consist in those times was transdorm, 2 Oakland sleepers, diner, lounge, 2 Oakland coaches, Seattle sleeper, Seattle coach, Los Angeles sleeper, Los Angeles coach, and some times a Los Angeles diner (11...

Just one more confirmation of the same general timeframe: they were not included when I rode in May 1986, were in June 1988 (and the change was accompanied by a sizable increase in ticket price.)

It is Whitefish. Good luck getting that many trees to grow east of the mountains :)

Oh, that is VIA's model too. 40 years ago, they had enough 1950s-era equipment to run the Canadian, and the Super Continental, and the Ocean, and the Atlantic, every day, plus the Skeena, Hudson Bay, and other remote services 3 times a week. A quick peek at an early 80s schedule shows these...

One big thing that has changed since 1980 is the popularity of big freight cars. Double-stack containers and auto racks have become much more common on the major freight routes. Those routes are now prepared to handle 20-foot-tall cars. Superliners were held to being only 16 feet tall, so...

It may well be too low if the 2nd CZ and SWC sleepers are only missing from one or two sets not from all of them. My quick estimate was "how many does it take to put 1 sleeper on every Superliner train except CS and CL?" and came up with 6(7/8)+6(27/28)+6(5/6)+6(3/4)+3(1/2)+4(21/22)+3(58/59) +...

This means, if I am counting correctly, that fewer than 50 Superliner sleepers are in non-Auto-Train service, out of 119 built and about 100 still on the roster.

Sorry, but no. The Alaska Railroad has been a cruise train for upwards of 30 years now. (In part because that is what makes money, not providing basic transportation, and they are in business to make money.) I rode it between Fairbanks and Denali a number of times while I lived in Alaska. The...

I think a good part of that is caused by the Tampa backtrack rather than having two sections: service to Miami is 3+ hours slower than it should be, and has created a sizable incentive for passengers to/from southern FL to get off in the Orlando area rather than waiting, and probably driven away...

That will vary by city... but for plastic, probably not. In the places I spend the most time (all in the northwest), it's still possible to recycle metal and cardboard, though harder to find places to accept them than it was a few decades ago; paper and glass recycling has scaled back; and...

Attached is a scan of the Iowa map from the 1948 railroad atlas (available as a reprint in the 1990s, and possibly still now, from rail-oriented book places.) I have highlighted the ex-C&NW route through Ames and Cedar Rapids that was considered for a CZ reroute in the late 80s in Green; the...

Yes, they are shortstaffed, playing catchup, cancelling flights, and sometimes dropping cities from their map, as we saw in the SkyWest thread this past weekend. But none of them cancelled half their flights for several months.

It isn't. There wasn't any particular pressure to find interesting vs. boring results, or good vs. bad news. But you have to perform the work you promised to do, and submit a report at the end of the year describing what you did. If you get a grant to study coral reefs, and you spend all your...

Frankly, I find it hard to blame Congress for wanting to do so right now. They provided a ton of extra money to ensure the return of service to pre-pandemic levels and the railroad did not fulfill its contract, re-cutting service when there was no shortage of riders. If Amtrak was funded on the...

I've often mused about whether it'd be possible to get 'essential air service' modified to 'essential transportation.' Collecting the EAS subsidies for places like Jamestown and Miles City would make a big contribution to the operating costs of a restored North Coast Hiawatha.

IMO, no, it's quite sound. The point isn't just taking your own car, but taking a carload of stuff with you (sometimes everything you need for months at your second home in Florida) that you don't have to carry, don't have to pack into carrier-approved luggage, don't have to check, don't have to...

The Alaska Railroad has been using SD70MACs in passenger service for more than 20 years. But that wasn't because they needed 6-axle passenger power, a simple matter of ordering only one new model of power. The essential point made earlier in the thread --- that you use 6 axles when you need...