So sad. I’m sure everyone is tired of hearing about the streamliner era of the 50’s, 60’s but.. The Dixieland left Chicago at 9:10am and arrived at Miami 4:55pm next afternoon, about 31 hours.
It served the same major cities except Louisville and did use the FEC in FL. That was in the days before welded rail and modern signaling and much of the proposed route is on already well maintained railroad.
Why is it so hard, and expensive, to make improvements in any type of service. We can all probably make a long list of reasons but it is still discouraging.
Top speeds in the 50s and 60s were 79 most places, the same as now. Welded rail is no faster than well maintained stick rail. CTC and computerized track warrants do not inherently mean faster speeds than ABS and train orders.
The difference is railroad operating practice and philosophy, not infrastructure. Timetable and train order dispatching is long gone. Crack passenger trains were First Class, superior to everything except other First Class trains traveling in the superior direction. This could he overriden by train order but superiority seldom was. Railroads ran fast freights as well as passenger trains. They were generally more fluid, much more than under PSR.
Today the railroads are out of the rapid delivery business and have been for years. If you something there fast, you ship it by truck. Railroads now are oriented towards bulk commodities and TOFC/COFC. And only TOFC/COFC is anything resembling time critical.
The current "modern" infrastructure is deployed with a goal of cost containment, not speed. Welded rail reduces maintainence costs. It actually slows things down in temperature extremes, stick rail is more forgiving of wide temperature swings. PSR reduces crew starts and therefore labor costs and if it ties up the railroad, so be it. Grain doesn't care. While railroads have gotten spanked for egregious service failures, like the STB Directed Service Order to UP for Foster Farms, it hasn't changed much.
Finally, remember that Amtrak (or someone other than the railroad) is on the hook for avoidable costs for access. If capacity needs to be expanded in order to provide service, that's an "avoidable cost" and someone other than the railroad has to pay for it. That's the reason the Sunset no longer serves Phoenix, and why the Point Defiance Bypass was built. When Amtrak was formed, there was lots of excess capacity. Now, with loss of entire lines and single tracking, many freight corridors are at or near saturation.