Old (pre-Amtrak) passenger routes

[had8ley]

Bill - Wouldn't that have been a great trip. The Southwestern Ltd (as the IC called it) took a leisurely 10 hours for the 300 mile trip from Meridian to Shreveport. No diner, but with half hour station stops in great towns like Monroe, Jackson, and Vicksburg there would be plenty of time to eat in the station restaurants. No doubt having a drawing room on the sleeper would be appropriate. In Shreveport you could connect with T&P's Louisiana Daylight to Dallas, Ft Worth and El Paso.
With the NS/KCS upgrade of this line, it does seem like a good option. I am sure Senator Lott would approve, especially if a Crescent connection continued on to New Orleans. Meridian could be a real terminal again.

I'm guessing but I think the IC made long stops because of all the mail and express that was handled. I don't think Amtrak is going to be invited to use the new "Speedway" after the NS has soaked so many dollars into the pot. You'd be amazed at the number of trains that run over this track that was an almost abandoned 10 mph branch 20 years ago.

 

[Neal Alhadeff]

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!

My brother works for Amtrack near Union Station in Los Angeles. He started as a "coach cleaner" years ago and then passed an aptitude test and was sent to Indianapolis to learn electricity and is now an electrician with Amtrack. Anyway, when various railroads had passenger service before being taken over by Amtrack, the Acheson, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad had a route that went from Los Angeles to Chicago sort of following the old U. S. highway 66. It was either the "El Capitan" or the "Super Chief". Amtrack still has a similar route with a similar name but a lot of stops are gone. My main topic now is local light rail commuter trains. For some years now the Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and Ventura counties have been served by Metrolink which uses Amtrack size larger and heavier double decker trains to go from downtown to cities of San Bernardino, Riverside, Fullerton, Anaheim, Santa Ana, the San Fernando Valley, Simi Valley, Moorpark, Valencia, and Santa Clarita (near 6 flags Magic Mountain). Over about the past 15 years the Southern California Metropolitan Transit Authority (known as MTA or Metro) has built two subways and 2 mostly above ground routes using lighter trains that use right-of-way tracks and overhead power lines like we had until around 1960. They first built an underground route from the Union Station Amtrack station through downtown and out Wilshire Blvd a few miles That used to be a branch of the red line but wa renamed the purple line. A couple of miles east of the west end of the purple line the longer red line turns north for a few miles then goes west through Hollywood with a stop near the famous corner of Hollywood Blvd and Vine Stree (near the Chineese Theatre with it's movie star footprints). It then continues past Universal Studios a couple of miles to North Hollywood. There is a bus on a seperate right-of-way called the orange line that starts at the end of the red line subway and goes west accros the San Fernando valley to Canoga Park and Woodland Hills. The next route starts underground at the 3rd stop of the red and purple lines after leaving Union Station. The three routes share that stop. The blue line comes up to ground level near the first stop which is a block east of Staples Center (where the Lakers play) and goes a mile south of thre and goes east a couple of miles and goes south through Watts to downtown Long Beach. The next two lines are the green which goes down the middle of the freeway that goes east from LAX and the gold line that goes from downtown to Pasadena. They recently opened an extention to a few miles east of downtown and the Little Tokyo Japaneese area just east of downtown to about five miles east to the towns of Montery Park and Montebello (near East Los Angeles College). They also recently had groundbraking about 8 miles east of Pasadena in the Azusa and Glendora foothill communities at the end of the next phase of the gold line. There are long-term plans to extend the other end from east Los Angeles and Monterey Park eventually about 10 or 12 miles to Whittier. They are also getting ready to open the pink line that will use the old freight train tracks along Exposition Blvd. that runs between the USC campus and the football stadium where they play. These are called metrorail routes. Between the metrolikk trains and the metrorail routes they are trying to cover many parts of the metropolitan area.

The problem is they are trying to reinvent the wheel and recreate something we had until about 50 years ago. Mr. Huntinton (the street Huntington Drive, the towns of of Huntington Beach and Huntington Park, and Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena are all named for him) began the Pacific Electric Rail Lines around 1915. The red cars with yellow trim were afectionately called "the red cars". It had routes going from Los Angeles to Pasadena, Long Beach, Glendale and the San Fernando Valley, Santa Monica, Redondio Beach, and maybe a far east as El Monte. I don't know if it went as far east or south as San Bernardino, Riverside, and orange county (which was more rural with orange groves and dairy farms until the mid and late 1950s). The was even a route to Mt. Lowell and Mt. Wison (where tthe radio and TV broadcast towers are overlooking L. A. and which were threated by a brush fire a year ago). There were also many electric trolley lines with cars on rails and they had poles that contacted overhead power lines. These were on most major streets in town. I rode one with my father in the mid 1950s (he died in 1957) and my wife rode one in her area a few miles east of downtown. The bus now almost imitates the old route. In the mid 1950s the auto manufacturers (ford, General Moters, and Chrysler Corp. and the oil/gasoline companies (Shell, Texico, Union Oil, Standard/Chevron) and rubber and tire companies (Goodyear, Firestone, etc.) were all pushing freeways and automobiles and being able to get up and go in your own car where and when you wanted to. This eventually lead to a decine in ridership except in the areas populated by poorer neighborhoods and among minority people and youths who had no cars. Instead of maintaining (or even improving) the red car and trolley routes they were eleminated one by one and by the end of 1959 they were completly gone. Now tey are tying to create something similar but up to date.