wayman
Engineer
Over on the Presidential Candidates thread, a tangent sprang up discussing possible route changes in the Southeast, and similar discussion has been happening in the Crescent Through Birmingham thread (and months ago, in the thread I started where we talked more about the Pioneer and Desert Wind out west). This led me to look into more exactly where the Pelican ran (since it sounds like it went through or terminated in Lynchburg, my home town, and that's pretty exciting Though I did grow up knowing about the Powhatan Arrow Norfolk to Cincinnati, my youth being the heyday of the 611 Steam Program). But TSOR (thirty seconds of research, popular and useful acronym on another mailing list) hasn't turned up any information about the Pelican. And there aren't any additional Southeast routes on the Amtrak System Map from 1980 which someone kindly posted here a while back.
I did find a category page at Wikipedia on Named Passenger Trains of the United States which includes links to the Tennessean (discontinued 1968) and Royal Palm (discontinued in stages between 1955 and 1970?), but even these pages are short, don't include full enough route descriptions to give me a good sense of what cities they connected, and don't have any maps. (Though this photo is a pretty awesome format for a city list, though I'm guessing it doesn't list every station? And that's on this fine tribute page for the Tennessean.)
So, anyone know of a comprehensive online resource for discontinued-before-Amtrak passenger trains, either as a full national (all railroads) list/map from the 1930s (?) heyday? or the 1960s, into which I gather some number of these trains still ran? or at least separate resources for various railroads? Obviously (from other discussion threads here) many of the tracks these former routes used are in disrepair (or ripped up), such as the pipe-dream Chicago-Miami connection, but it would be nice to see "what used to be" as a reference for "what might be again", especially with regards to historical names which might be re-used or are at least useful shorthand for discussion. (And yes, I've also got a copy of NARP's pipe dream of eventual routes for Amtrak, but for one none of those are named, and for two there's no indication which ones were formerly routes and which are new ideas. Well, and it's got plenty of other logistical problems, but they aren't relevant to this particular question!) Thanks!
I did find a category page at Wikipedia on Named Passenger Trains of the United States which includes links to the Tennessean (discontinued 1968) and Royal Palm (discontinued in stages between 1955 and 1970?), but even these pages are short, don't include full enough route descriptions to give me a good sense of what cities they connected, and don't have any maps. (Though this photo is a pretty awesome format for a city list, though I'm guessing it doesn't list every station? And that's on this fine tribute page for the Tennessean.)
So, anyone know of a comprehensive online resource for discontinued-before-Amtrak passenger trains, either as a full national (all railroads) list/map from the 1930s (?) heyday? or the 1960s, into which I gather some number of these trains still ran? or at least separate resources for various railroads? Obviously (from other discussion threads here) many of the tracks these former routes used are in disrepair (or ripped up), such as the pipe-dream Chicago-Miami connection, but it would be nice to see "what used to be" as a reference for "what might be again", especially with regards to historical names which might be re-used or are at least useful shorthand for discussion. (And yes, I've also got a copy of NARP's pipe dream of eventual routes for Amtrak, but for one none of those are named, and for two there's no indication which ones were formerly routes and which are new ideas. Well, and it's got plenty of other logistical problems, but they aren't relevant to this particular question!) Thanks!
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