What would you add?

[Siegmund]

Each time I make a long distance run I love to make it to the last car to take some phots out the back window.
I wish I could do the same from the Engineers viewpoint.

P42s are so short compared to the F40s that you almost can! You need a Superliner train with no baggage car - the Portland section of the Empire Builder fills the bill, but not sure what others do (Texas Eagle maybe?)

Standing on tiptoe at the front of the lounge car in Train 27, it was easy to see ahead to upcoming signals - not quite an engineer's-eye view, but sort of like the view from the rear of a big steam loco where you can only see along the boiler, not a 'windshield' view.

 

[neroden]

Very often you can do better offsetting 8 hours rather than 12.

Agreed!

\In the case of a NY-Chicago train, for instance, you can do NY late evening-Pittsburgh early morning - Chicago early afternoon, or NY early afternoon - Pittsburgh late evening - Chicago morning.

My TWO A DAY speculative schedule for NY-Chicago via upstate NY was
Chicago midday -> NY early morning (Syracuse late night)
Chicago early evening -> NY midday (Syracuse early morning)
NY midday -> Chicago early morning (Syracuse early night)
NY late evening -> Chicago midday (Syracuse very early morning)

I think it ends up being about 8 hours offset between each pair of trains. It ends up with good timing for a very, very large number of intermediate markets. I'd also reroute at least one of the two trains each way via Detroit.

In my dream world, we'd have a fleet of these, such that from Chicago, there'd be both a day train and an overnight train to Minneapolis, Kansas City, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Cleveland/Buffalo.

Yep. We could have a good core network with two-a-day out of Chicago in each major direction. Running on time.