Regarding Sunset & Gulf Coast Route east: there should be service twice per day each way. Two trains per day over the route, with all stations along the route having at least two departures in each direction every day. I am also starting to think that we should institute additional trains on each route, with better timekeeping and higher speeds, before instituting any new routes.
[This continually comes up for some reason. It's amazing how little research or how little people know about this route. It is 617 miles from New Orleans to Jacksonville by rail and another 147 miles to Orlando, the main destination for passengers on the Sunset Limited. This route has always been slooooow even before Amtrak and sparsley served. The main traffic is for Florida, not the cities in between. The pre-Katrina schedule called for 17+ hours to transit the 617 miles and another 3 1/2 hours to get to Orlando. This is not one of your mid-west style corridors. No train can make this run without some overnight travel and none can serve all the cities on it in daylight. So how do you do two trains a day and why would you????????? There might be corridor trains someday between Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Mobile but that is about it. The route cannot be speeded up without spending millions of dollars and that for a train that only runs three times a week. Interstate 10 crosses Mobile Bay for a straight shot along the coast. The CSX detours north to Flomaton going completely around Mobile Bay and adding miles to the route. You would have to build a railroad bridge accross the bay along side I10. The only people using this agonizingly slow route are on the train just for the experience. Anyone else would drive it in 10 hours or fly. From Houston it's an additional 9 hours on the train to go only 360 miles plus the layover in NOL making it a 30+ hour trip. I think I will just fly there in a couple of hours on Southwest. Amtrak does not want to restore the Sunset east of NOL for good economical and operational reasons. The emphasis should be on making the Sunset daily and setting up a separate train east of NOL or just make it a bus connection with separate busses for Orlando and Jacksonville.]
I made 4-5 trips per year on the Sunset Limited between Jacksonville and New Orleans and points in between. I always was in the Sleeping Car so I spent 7-8 hours of the 17 hours sleeping and had dinner and breakfast on the train. I know a number of people in the Jacksonville area who did the same thing. These are people who would not ride a intercity bus. Yes, you can fly, but it means a connection through Atlanta or somewhere else and delays in Atlanta happen. Southwest did have a non stop to New Orleans at one time, but that was discontinued prior to Katrina. The Sunset between Jacksonville and New Orleans was usually fairly well patronized considering it was a 3 day per week operation. There were lots of passengers connecting in Jacksonville and New Orleans. I did not ride the Sunset for the experience, but the fact that is was (when it ran on schedule) convenient and made economic sense. I have driven I-10 to Tallahassee and Pensacola and it is long boring drive. Having 2 trains per day from JAX to Tally would make sense, but Florida would need to come up with some fung.
Or I could board Southwest in PVD and take a non-stop flight and be in Phoenix within a few hours - not days later! (Hey - Amtrak doesn't even go to Phoenix, at least directly.)
