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My point is, that to the management of the Rock Island and Milwaukee Road, any merger wouldn’t do, only a merger with the Union Pacific would do (although the Milwaukee would have accepted BN). They were blinded to any other possibility that would have made some business sense. The Rock Island...

One thing I don't really understand is why a Rock Island/Milwaukee Road merger would have made sense or even been seen as viable by either companies management. Both companies wanted to merge with a larger system and even though the Rock Island *might* have been in a better position than the...

My overall point is that there is a difference between having to make a transfer within the airport complex and having to make one several miles away and that transfer only being convenient for one agency. SFO is what would be considered a poorly designed airport based on best design practices...

I guess cutting service is "modernization" these days. My question is how doing this would actually improve the usefulness of Amtrak as a form of transportation? On some routes, there aren't good places to terminate a train overnight. Not to mention what happens to people who need to make a trip...

I very much have a love/hate relationship with Oakland Airport. My 2 most recent flights were out of it, I drove once and took transit the other time. I personally dislike taking transit to Oakland, transit's only saving grace is I'm too cheap to pay for parking. Having done the transit...

The problem with South Dakota is that it's rail network is sparse to begin with. So there aren't that many routes to run local trains on and not a lot of people to serve. As it is, the one line I would suggest which would connect Sioux Falls to Sturgis over the old Milwaukee Road would require a...

The way things are done now aren't even done equitably. A better question is should we be expecting funding and services proportionally or of equal value or reasonably useful to the applicable population? Whether or not farmers get corn subsidies has no barring on if anyone gets funding for...

I've posted these maps before, this is what I would advocate for network expansion. As for which ones would be more "important", I personally think playing that game is a fools errand. Amtrak's leadership wants to grow the system, advocates want the system to grow, we want the system to grow...

I would also like to make the point of what do any of us mean by hub? Does hub mean equal to Chicago's present level of service and nothing less or just a major city's downtown station where 4+ routes intersect and a convenient enough connection can be made? If we are going by the first...

Amtrak wouldn't need twice the service to make St Louis into a hub. If the National Limited was revived, and through cars to the City of New Orleans from Kansas City, a route to Oklahoma City and a route to Denver were on the table it would be a hub, but a bare bones hub. With this much service...

To combine the thought between these two points, subsidizing Amtrak is subsidizing leisure and preserving our environment in the same activity. A train is going to burn less fuel and thus lower CO2 emissions over a similar distance compared to a car or flying. Which is helping the environment...

I think they could make an all sleeper train work, but it would take some planning. All sleeper trains did run in the days before Amtrak, The Super Chief was an all Pullman train and it was successful. While technically combined with the El Capitan, it was still "technically" separate despite...

I’m not even talking about a just full meal. At least 2 of the trains I rode in Poland ended up having a delay and I ran out of water with nowhere to buy another bottle. On one of those trips I was going to a national park. It was a 4 hour trip and there were 4 direct trains per day. A lot of...

Another reason why this is bad is dealing with starting and ending points. As mentioned, Salt Lake City has really bad arrival times as it is (mostly to maximize day light hours in the Rockies). How would the schedule in Emeryville be changed so that there is a better than dark o’clock arrival...

One long point(s) I would like to make is people keeping focus on the “how” of increasing Amtrak ridership and less on The who, what, when, where and why of how to increase ridership. The Ws are just as important as the H in that type of analysis. This won’t be an exhaustive list, but it’s more...

This seems very similar (at least to me) the argument of “we can cram more people into a train if the seat pitch in coach was the same as on Southwest”. How many people would be put off from riding Amtrak over another alternative of food service was eliminated on regional and state trains system...

I've been on the "modern" trains in Europe and no their seats are not particularly comfortable. They work pretty much like cheap office chairs and if that's your thing, than you will be fine. But if you want or expect something as comfortable as what is on Amtrak trains presently, you will be...

1) I did not say that people with a mobility disability should be excluded from the trains, if anything I would want the capacity rule with more of a solid definition of what "accessible" means with respects to transportation than just assuming someone somewhere will ask the question of when an...

One way to solve this would be to have the ADA requirements be based on a percentage of capacity rather than how it works now. About an eighth of the population has a mobility disability, setting the ADA rule to be a minimum of one eighth of capacity be "accessible" would make it so Amtrak or...

I know people keep saying we can't have new Superliners because of ADA laws, but what with respects to ADA laws, what has significantly changed enough since the California Cars were built that would categorically mean non single level equipment would be illegal to operate? NJ Transit, MARC...