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That might be the Boardman and Amtrak management excursion train with local government and railroad execs riding parts of the trip. They have been on a loop trip from Chicago on the SWC, then side trips to Pueblo, then from Allbuquerque to El Paso, then east on the Sunset Limited. Has been...

Overcrowding is not the worse problem to have for a new transit line. While riders may be frustrated, better than the negative publicity of low ridership for a new line which often take years to build ridership. Headlines about crowded trains may help with the sales tax ballot initiative this...

Bryan OH had 5,608 passengers either boarding or alighting in FY2015. How many of them traveled to & from Erie and the Empire corridor stops? If this indeed becomes a permanent shift of the LSL, trips to NY state become a problem from Bryan. Same goes, of course, for Waterloo, Elkhart. South...

Amtrak posted a news release on #670 entering revenue service this week with comments on reductions in delay incidents, completing the delivery of the ACS-64s to Amtrak: FINAL ACS-64 LOCOMOTIVE ENTERS REVENUE SERVICE. One would hope that as they tweak the software and maintenance procedures for...

Updates and interesting bits from the July 19 and draft August 2 meeting minutes of the NGEC Executive Board on the Nippon-Sharyo bi-level car contract. July 19 minutes excerpts: While the car frame is being redesigned, they have been life-cycle testing parts. Cycling the side door 500,000...

I saw a couple of days ago that the NGEC Executive Board had posted July 19 meeting minutes and was going to write about it, but they also just posted the August 2 draft minutes. There is actual news in the minutes on the testing of the 2 units at the Pueblo facility. Excerpts from the August 2...

IIRC, the bag-dorm cars will have 9 roomettes. (Been a while since the bag-dorm configuration was last discussed). There will only be 10 bag-dorm cars in the fleet, so it is likely that bag-dorms will be used only on the Cardinal and LSL. On the LSL, the on-board staff will occupy all the...

If I may get this thread back to something at least related to the topic of Boardman's departure and not discussions of the fine dining options on Amtrak or collecting AGR points, Fred Frailey of Trains Magazine has posted a short column on a "tidbit" he heard about who might serve as an acting...

US DOT has issued a news release on the 2016 TIGER grant awards: U.S. Transportation Secretary Foxx Announces TIGER Awards Nearly $500 Million in Grants to Projects Focused on Safety and Economic Opportunity. A link to the 2016 TIGER award fact sheet listing all the projects selected this year...

I would attribute the recent decline in Grand Forks and Minot to both the extended period of severe delays and the bust in the Bakken field oil drilling boom. The EB ridership in 2015 was below the levels of 2009 and 2010, before the Bakken field boom caused so much freight traffic congestion...

The NARP stats only show ranking of the top city pairs, they don't show by how much. The 2010 to 2012 Performance Improvement Reports provided city pair ridership stats in percentages and on a pie chart for most of the LD trains for the previous fiscal year. The percentages for the top city...

Found a summary of 2016 TIGER awards for California on Streetsblog: California Brings Home Four TIGER Grants, Three for Passenger Rail. The 4th grant award is for a road project. The grant most relevant to Amtrak is the $15 million towards a major $130 million grade separation project on tracks...

The 2016 TIGER grant awards are being announced. The announcements are earlier than the September to early October time frame of previous years. A google search turned up a $13.1 million award to Rhode Island for a Pawtucket - Central Falls commuter train station for MBTA service. Not involving...

The June 2016 monthly report is overall a fairly good one with Amtrak having close to a break-even month and ridership increases overall for the NEC, state supported corridors, and the LD trains. Revenue continues to be down a bit and well below budget projections. For the state supported...

The Transport Politic blog has posted a useful summary of the transportation and transit spending proposals in the Republican platform, the Democratic party platform, and Hillary Clinton's $275 billion infrastructure plan. Donald Trump has issued almost no policy papers, so all there is to go by...

This appears to be about a 2016 TIGER grant award, not the obligation of an earlier award. If so, US DOT is moving up the announcements of the winning applications from the September-October period of previous years to the end of July. Maybe trying to get the selections done before the...

You don't have to do that, the basic information on ownership of each station, the platforms, parking lot, and tracks is provided on the Great American Stations website. Just enter the city or station code for the station with the broken drinking fountain and look it up. Many stations are owned...

Senator Schumer's office posted a press release on the pending completion of the contract award. With a seriously wordy title: SCHUMER ANNOUNCES: FINAL HURDLES HAVE BEEN CLEARED, AMTRAK BOARD WILL AWARD HORNELL’S ALSTOM START OF $2.5 BILLION PROGRAM TO BUILD SAFER, NEXT-GENERATION HIGH-SPEED...

No, it does not work that way for Amtrak. The CEO of Amtrak is a not a political plum job by any means. With Boardman retiring in September, his successor will likely be selected by the Amtrak board soon and would start shortly after Boardman departs. Boardman gave the board and US DOT plenty of...

There will be an Open House at DC Union Station this Thursday, July 28 from 4 to 7 PM in the Starlight room. The open house will present information on the plans for the Concourse modernization project. The announcement of the Open House is on the NEC projects WAS webpage. Anyone passing through...