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On the St. Louis railcam, you'll definitely see more than one Lincoln Service and one River Runner consist with Ventures.

I would go to RTE on a weekday if that's convenient to see the present situation before precluding the convenience of driving yourself to the station at a decent hour. From my experience (Metra in the Chicago suburbs), commuter station parking isn't empty but it isn't pre-covid full either. I...

At least one of the trainsets being used right now for the Hiawatha has Horizon or Amfleet coaches and an Amfleet cafe-business car, though the Hiawatha has neither business class nor food service. Since it's always been said the new service would be an extended Hiawatha (not a new MKE-CHI...

I'm no railroader by any means. But I would presume there would have to be: 1) a heat detector for each and every axle, or maybe even one on each wheel if the bearings can heat up on one side and not the other, and 2) a reliable method of relaying the signal from each of those sensors to the...

I'm not sure it makes sense to have the SW Chief serve the Quad Cities, but a Cal Zephyr routed to Moline would presumably continue on to Iowa City, Des Moines (as someone already posted) and Omaha rather than resuming its course across lightly-populated southern Iowa. If Ottumwa & company still...

Sorry, I reacted first and googled second. I see the peak-only service would be for that one new line. I had read that as a study of system-wide peak-only service. [Emily Litella]Nevermind![/EL]

o_O To show how absurd it is? Or because some budget-focused politician ordered it? Because otherwise I can't see why a transit agency would contemplate such an obviously fatal leap from a cliff into utter irrelevancy and ever-decreasing budgets. Does downtown Denver not have theaters, sports...

It wouldn't be cheap, and would require electrification, but Metra could have a Loop tunnel linking all the lines for through service. The plan for a tunnel north-south under Clinton Street has been around for years. The Metra Electric and NICTD run below grade and essentially in a tunnel under...

Both. ;) Just like people fly sometimes and drive other times depending on the trip and how much time they can spare, I'd like to have the options of: a sleek electric train running hourly or better at triple-digit speeds when I want to get somewhere in a relative hurry, without the pollution &...

As far as I know, commuter railroads have been counting the post-midnight departure from the city terminal as the last departure of the previous day, rather than the first of that day, because riders use that train that way. Ditto a corridor train like the last Lincoln Service into St. Louis or...

Or, while they certainly don't have to, the owners of the Old Post Office could consider direct rail access to their building a valuable feature and cooperate with Amtrak to provide access from the mail platforms right into the building the mail platforms used to serve. It would still be a...

Lake Shore Ltd., as much to bring daytime service to Toledo & Cleveland as to better connect the major hubs of NYC and Chicago.

1) The same is nearly true (85 years) about the **big** leap of over $4 billion in capital between 90A and 90B. Cost is relevant, but the focus should be on more bang for the buck, not just spending fewer bucks. Opponents would say the fewest bucks would be spent by doing nothing. 2)...

🤔 By the numbers given, 110 looks the best. For less than a billion more than 90B, you'd get 200k more riders a year on the same number of trains, a smaller deficit/subsidy, and a higher operating ratio.

What's "shunt augmentation"? I really hope it has something to do with eliminating the need on some lines for deadhead cars to "trip" the crossing gates. Watching the webcams on the lines serving St. Louis, it's heartening to see the new engines and some Venture cars in service but very odd to...

And when Amtrak was -- and still IS -- short of personnel, which impairs the ability to turn on a dime when Congress finally comes up with decent funding. A lot of the complaints seem to come down to "why are there fewer cars now that Amtrak is fully funded? Why won't they put all non-totaled...

That's why I posted a serenity prayer for rail supporters upthread. 🙂 We haven't  had an Amtrak with proper funding and a new fleet of cars in that time. We  still don't have a fully staffed Amtrak. Or one with a modern reservation system.* I would suggest we can't yet tell the difference...

Mind that there's a couple of ClubQuarters in Chicago: one on Adams St. a few blocks east of Union Station as described, and another on Wacker Dr. just west of Michigan Ave. The latter isn't really far from Union Station, a pleasant walk along Wacker Drive -- or part of the way by the Riverwalk...

The Ventures running now aren't in semi-permanent coupled sets. So far today on webcams I saw three trains with one Venture car each, one train with two, and another with three Ventures. All of those trains also had non-Venture cars, and at least one had non-Venture cars both in front of and...

From what I can see on the Midwest cameras, it's a mixed bag. I've seen trains at St. Louis (I want to say 318 & 319) with four Venture coaches and an Amfleet cafe/business. I've seen trains at St. Louis and elsewhere (Galesburg on the IL Zephyr/Carl Sandburg, Bangor MI on the Pere Marquette)...