The so called "transcon" is totally plugged with freight traffic and would be a poor choice for the SWC. If you have ever been out there you are virtually never out of site of a headlight. It's basically nonstop action day and night. Back when the AT&SF ran all the passenger trains a section of the Grand Canyon and the San Francisco Chief both ran via the transcon via Amarillo and Belen bypassing Albuquerque. Timing for the SFC between Newton and Gallup was about 15 hours. The Chief, Super Chief and El Capitan via Raton took almost the same amount of time.....15 hours. So there would be no saving of time to reroute the SWC. And......if you took the SWC up to Albuquerque from Belen, something the San Francisco Chief did not do, it would actually lengthen the timing.
And none of what has been discussed so far deals with the issue and costs of building/refurbishing the train stations on the Transcon.
Elevation may be one reason. It is not as great an altitude to climb going that way.
Simply because the grades over Raton approach 3% and thus require helpers for most all freight trains going over the pass. In other words it's cheaper, much cheaper to route freight via the low gradient route through Amarillo and Belen. Passenger trains are able to tackle the Raton grade because they are lighter and don't require helpers. At times BNSF would try and route some trains over the pass, particularly when the transcon was blocked with a derailment or when they had major maintenance scheduled, but now they route nothing over Raton. Rerouting requires crews that know the route, etc. and they just don't have any stationed along that route anymore.
But you would serve Amarilo at the expense of (not) serving KC! I think there are less people in the Amarilo area than there are in the KC area!
I am pretty sure that a reroute through Amarillo would still include Kansas City.
The times I listed above came from the July 1956 Official Guide. I used Newton, KS because it is the last city that all the trains stopped at and Gallup, NM is the first city west of Belen and Albuquerque that all the trains stopped at. The times between those two cities of around 15hrs is more or less identical between trains within a few minutes. Amtrak by contrast now takes 16hrs42min westbound and 17hrs10min eastbound to go from Newton to Gallup. If you want to serve Amarillo then bring back the old Texas Zephyr Ft Worth/Dallas to Denver route via the BNSF and connect with the SWC at Trinidad or bring back the San Francisco Chief which made the run from Chicago to Oakland in 47 1/2 hours vs the current CZ which takes 54 hours or why not both. The SFC also served Bakersfield and the San Joaquin Valley.
Correct, KC would not be lost due to a reroute through Amarillo.
When I spoke with the Lamy station agent in October 2007, she was of the opinion that the SWC would be rerouted and Lamy no longer served as soon as the Railrunner expansion was initiated, because New Mexico will own all the tracks all the way to the Colorado border (BNSF forced NM to buy everything, not just ABQ-LMY, because BNSF doesn't use those tracks and this was an easy way for them to get rid of the need to maintain them almost exclusively for Amtrak); and New Mexico has no interest in the tracks from LMY to the Colorado border and will probably just let them rust rather than maintain them for Amtrak.
I'd hardly say that NM was forced to buy the tracks all the way to the Colorado border, since they got the tracks for a song and a dance. I don't recall the actual purchase price for that track, but it was so low that one could say that BNSF basically gave it away.
The contract with Amtrak will ensure that. Amtrak actually came very close to clubbing UP over the head with the contract two years ago and was prepared to take things to the FRA and get Justice involved. That prompted UP to start working harder to fix the slow orders that were plaguing the CZ and CS. on the new laser suits.
