Again, the tri-weekly helped to contribute to its lateness. Dispatchers needs to see it daily to be able dispatch it ontime. Also the UP double trackThats not the big factor. the big factor is that in running coast to coast the Sunset requires 12 hours of padding to give it 30% on time performance! It also had one of the highest average lateness in minutes of any Amtrak run this year, and thats excluding the NOL-ORL section! If your train runs that late, its not a viable run. Its simply a bad run, with boring scenery (a lot of LD EB traffic are people riding it for scenery, keep in mind) and awful OTP. Ridership would improve if it went daily, but its too expensive a run for it to make money on that increase.
will solve a lot of lateness. In the last 2 weeks, the east bound train was on time all but 1 time. The old Sunset east bound use to be late nearly
all the time. Sunset needs to be daily and I know Amtrak understands this.