Raton Pass Route vs. Transcon

[printman2000]

Just to be clear, I am not saying a reroute is the best call. I am certainly not an informed enough person to know that. My dream, of course, is that the town I live in have Amtrak service. A reroute of the SWC is the "simplest" way that could ever happen (as opposed to a new route).

While I do think Amtrak might have to do it at a later time, I am certainly not holding my breath nor getting my hopes up. It just keeps coming up from many different places which of course gets my attention.

 

[GG-1]

My dream, of course, is that the town I live in have Amtrak service.

Aloha

My dream also, not that a train stopped here, but that I could book the entire trip at one time, and use the air mileage towards my Amtrak miles. I also wish the Air/rail package was back.

Mahalo

 

[the_traveler]

My dream also, not that a train stopped here

Why not dream! After all, If they could build the Chunnel to connect 2 countries - why not connect 2 states!

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

My dream also, not that a train stopped here

Why not dream! After all, If they could build the Chunnel to connect 2 countries - why not connect 2 states!

There's the whole problem of physical geography, which is probably a bit more difficult than the political geography in this case. Isn't Hawaii to California something like 2000 miles or a bit more?

I guess it would make a very reasonable sleeper trip at 200-300 MPH. But we need to figure out how to get America excited about the idea of building 200-300 MPH track for trips that can be done in 3 hours long before we're going to have track that's only useful for trips that are way longer than 3 hours.

 

[Kramerica]

The obvious solution to Raton Pass vs. Transcon is to simply add a second frequency to the SWC. Keep the current schedule as-is over Raton Pass, and add the second SWC over the transcon. The benefits are numerous. You add service to cities like Clovis, Amarillo, and Wichita. You add a second train to the rest of the route, which greatly improves options for travelers. And depending on the timing of the new train, it would allow for other trains being late into Chicago or LA and still being able to make a connection to a SWC. That could save Amtrak in hotel reimbursements or bussing.

Maybe with more equipment we'll be able to see an added frequency for some LD trains.

 

[sechs]

Write your congressman.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

The obvious solution to Raton Pass vs. Transcon is to simply add a second frequency to the SWC. Keep the current schedule as-is over Raton Pass, and add the second SWC over the transcon. The benefits are numerous. You add service to cities like Clovis, Amarillo, and Wichita. You add a second train to the rest of the route, which greatly improves options for travelers. And depending on the timing of the new train, it would allow for other trains being late into Chicago or LA and still being able to make a connection to a SWC. That could save Amtrak in hotel reimbursements or bussing.
Maybe with more equipment we'll be able to see an added frequency for some LD trains.

Go ahead and write to your Congresspeople anyway, like sechs suggested. Communicating the sentiment that more trainsets and more frequent trains and more destinations are desired is important.

But the other issue is track capacity, and I suspect adding passenger rail service on saturated freight tracks might actually be worse than having passengers taking airplanes. A single freight train with double stack intermodal freight can probably carry 250-300 intermodal shipping containers. To make enough room for an Amtrak train that might remove the need for maybe five airplane flights, you probably have to remove several freight trains from the daily schedule to give Amtrak reasonable priority. So now you have over a thousand extra trucks on the highways in order to save a few flights. (I think. Does anyone who actually works in the railroad industry have information to support or contradict this?)

The way to make passenger rail work in areas with any significant density is going to be to build more track, and we might as well separate the passenger track from the freight. If we're building passenger track anyway, it may turn out that constructing new rights of way with alignments that will support true high speed operation (I'm thinking 300 km/h (about 186 MPH) or better) will provide better return on investment by attracting lots of passengers than replacing tracks on abandonded conventional speed rights of way which will attract fewer passengers.