Siegmund
Lead Service Attendant
Kind of a weird and specific question here, but one I've been curious about for decades, and never stumbled across an answer to.
Amtrak's tendency has been to use pairs of consecutive numbers for each route. Normal enough, most railroads did. But the western long-distance routes use odd-then-even pairs, as do the Silvers and the Crescent (1-2 Sunset, 19-20 Crescent, 97-98 Silver Meteor)... while the other eastern long-distance routes use even-then-odd pairs (58-59 City of New Orleans, 40-41 for the old Broadway limited, 66-67 Night Owl, 52-53 for the Floridian and later Auto-Train despite the other florida trains doing it the other way around) as do almost all the short haul routes everywhere (downeaster 680 through 689; wolverines 350 to 355; capitol corridor starting from 520.)
Why would they do that? It offended my inner sense of order when I was a teen and it still does.
Perusing historical timetables, even-number-lower seems to be primarily a Pennsylvania-ism, though there are a handful of other example elsewhere in the country (there was a seaboard-L&N joint train from Miami to New Orleans that was 38/39 contrary to Seaboard's normal practice elsewhere, for instance.) It doesn't look like Penn Central inflicted the Pennsylvania method on the surviving NYC trains in 1968 or 1969.
Amtrak used it in the northeast as soon as it assigned its own numbers (including the Empire Service), but only gradually moved to it in the midwest. The early timetables show it used for Milwaukee and Detroit trains but not for St. Louis, Carbondale, or Quincy. I had a hypothesis that it mattered whether the inbound or outbound train departed earlier in the morning - but that doesn't seem to work either. By the sometime in the late 70s it seems to have become systematized.
Anybody have any insight into the history behind it?
Amtrak's tendency has been to use pairs of consecutive numbers for each route. Normal enough, most railroads did. But the western long-distance routes use odd-then-even pairs, as do the Silvers and the Crescent (1-2 Sunset, 19-20 Crescent, 97-98 Silver Meteor)... while the other eastern long-distance routes use even-then-odd pairs (58-59 City of New Orleans, 40-41 for the old Broadway limited, 66-67 Night Owl, 52-53 for the Floridian and later Auto-Train despite the other florida trains doing it the other way around) as do almost all the short haul routes everywhere (downeaster 680 through 689; wolverines 350 to 355; capitol corridor starting from 520.)
Why would they do that? It offended my inner sense of order when I was a teen and it still does.
Perusing historical timetables, even-number-lower seems to be primarily a Pennsylvania-ism, though there are a handful of other example elsewhere in the country (there was a seaboard-L&N joint train from Miami to New Orleans that was 38/39 contrary to Seaboard's normal practice elsewhere, for instance.) It doesn't look like Penn Central inflicted the Pennsylvania method on the surviving NYC trains in 1968 or 1969.
Amtrak used it in the northeast as soon as it assigned its own numbers (including the Empire Service), but only gradually moved to it in the midwest. The early timetables show it used for Milwaukee and Detroit trains but not for St. Louis, Carbondale, or Quincy. I had a hypothesis that it mattered whether the inbound or outbound train departed earlier in the morning - but that doesn't seem to work either. By the sometime in the late 70s it seems to have become systematized.
Anybody have any insight into the history behind it?
