I guess that once a line is gone, it is very unlikely to ever come back. So normally railroads don't abandon trackage unless they're pretty secure that traffic on that line is permanently dead and extremely unlikely to ever return. As long as there is some prospect of revival, however distant, railroads prefer to keep such lines nominally open even if it means slashing maintenance to the point that it isn't really useful.
That I believe is also true of Homestake Pass near Butte MT, on the old route of the Amtrak North Coast Hiawatha and before that NP's North Coast Limited. Montana Railink uses the other ex NP route through Helena and Mullan Pass at present and Homestake Pass is "embargoed" AFAICT.
It is really not that useful as-is. It would cost so much to get the passenger train down to near the road time that you might as well be thinking High Speed Railroad or nothing:
I also think the flooding/trackbed problems BNSF had with the KO sub in 2011 helped move the Devil's Lake agreement along.
Expenditures which Colorado is likely to have to make anyway if it wants passenger service to Pueblo, or even Colorado Springs.
In most of the "directional pairs" cases, the freight railroads don't use the two lines *entirely* directionally. There's generally some local, on-line traffic on both.
While the rail time would be more, there's penty of similar cases with Amtrak. Look at the CS, it runs much slower than road time but still gets decent pax. And the Greyhound doesn't really count here because it's an Americanos bus and most people don't use it unless they speak Spanish. Spanish-seakers mainly use it because their drivers speak Spanish well, and often speak no English.
No, if the line really is long and crooked, Colorado would have to build a new line, essentially, to match road speeds. If so, they might as well build HSR. And I don't understand the part about the houses.
The current operating "contract" expires in January 2016, so I would guess maybe up until then or sometime in 2015
Not Topeka to LA, Fort Madison to LA.
Yes the BNSF still uses the line from La Junta to Newton.
What is the difference between east and west of Fort Madison?
Ah, now I see that the Transcon actually goes south of Topeka paralleling I-35. Then it turns south and takes a dive towards Amarillo/Clovis, the proposed re-route.
Right. That's why I was wondering why the other poster has mentioned Fort Madison (and Topeka).
BNSF may now be touting additional lines as spurs of the Transcon. However, as Zephyr17 mentioned, the Transcon has traditionally been understood to mean just the Chicago-Los Angeles ex-ATSF mainline. When people refer to the Transcon, they are almost always referring to CHI-LAX, or some segment thereof. (The second CHI-KCY line is the ex-BN/CB&Q line.)
Note that they refer to it as the "Transcon" instead of "Southern Transcon". So they may simply mean the transcotinental lines in general, I guess.
I believe BNSF puts the fast intermodals on the BN line and the slower manifest and unit trains on the Santa Fe line, IIRC. That was what I heard years ago, anyway.
What frieghts use the old BN all the way to KCY?
What? Doesn't the SWC cross over from old ex-CB&Q to ex Santa Fe just outside of Galesburg? Fort Madison is far afar away from where it joins the ex-ATSF.
