Amtrak Cascades Service discussion

[MARC Rider]

I think chopping the 3 major east-west long distance Amtrak trains would be terrible for people in small towns along those routes. Especially with long driving distances and hazardous roads during the winter. I'm not a Richard Anderson person.

Yeah, but most of the people from the small towns along the route are probably not traveling end-to-end, so chopped up service might work for them, and maybe at a better schedule than the current Chicago to the coast trains.

And the long-distance trains aren't really that reliable in hazardous weather anymore, as Amtrak will cancel them whenever there's a heavy winter weather warning. And I don't blame them. Wouldn't want to have a hungry trainload of passengers stuck in the Donner Pass by heavy snow.

 

[railiner]

I don't know about other cities in the NEC, but one of the features of our local TV coverage about the holiday travel rush is a reporter standing outside Penn Station in Baltimore talking about how busy the trains are going to be.

Same at NYP…

 

[Harmon Shay]

You aren’t given enough equipment because your state is unwilling to contract for it. What I’m trying to convey is that it isn’t Amtrak’s job to maximally equip the Cascades. It’s up to Oregon and Washington to contract for an appropriate amount of “rented” cars or buy their own. Amtrak is responsible to Congress (its boss) to operate the NECSL and the LDSL. They are the mandated priority services. Amtrak is a contractor to states for the operation of trains in the SSSL. States get what they pay for. If you were Amtrak, why would you move a coach that can easily pull $10,000 a day to a place where it might pull half that? The NEC is given coaches to meet demand regardless, provided Amtrak has fulfilled its equipment commitments to contracted state partners. (By the way it isn’t meeting demand regardless.) They’d love to pull the fifth coach off the Keystones and string together another NER set, but Pennsylvania has a contractual right to them.

As to the David Gunn comment, I adore the man. He built the Keystone into (I think) the most effective SSSL train in the country. But 20 years ago, NEC ridership was almost half of today. I don’t think it is sound to say the LDSL and NECSL trains are on the same financial footing today. LDSL numbers are much worse and NECSL numbers are much better.

We seem to be authorized for 28 Horizon coaches on the Cascades now, but two of those are now at Beech Grove and they haven't been replaced, so we're short two. It's true that they've just sent us two more Horizon club-dinettes, apparently to provide for a seventh Cascades Horizon set soon to stand in for the damaged Talgo and to and finally give us a spare food service car. There's no move yet, despite rumors, to shorten some of the six existing Horizon sets to provide coaches for a seventh. I think one trainset is now one coach short, but only because more coaches than usual are now laid up at Seattle maintenance.

 

[trimetbusfan]

Well, it looks like most train sets are now running without the 4th coach.

Also, the one remaining Talgo set appears to now be assigned to 503/508, at least for now.