new Thruway Bus connections a way to gather rail support?

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NE933

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Two new Amtrak bus connection routes were created this week: Montana, and Gulf Coast destinations once served by the Sunset Limited, are now curiously back on the map, albeit by bus. How much nicer if it were an actual train, and I know to not be the only one who thought that. Just wondering if Massachusetts Ave. has a strategy to give in to public pressure and at least get something started. Or if this is just something to pacify the lions.
 
Who operates the old SL route by bus? Greyhound? I hope it's Greyhound since they upgraded that route and got rid of overbooking. But they run Houston-Orlando sometimes bypassing New Orleans.

Did you know Greyhound doesn't even run Chicago-Omaha-Denver? Aw man......
 
The increased bus codesharing should help some, certainly. This does seem to be part of an aggressive expansion of interlining; the Montana route is Jefferson Lines, the Tuscaloosa-Mobile route is Capital Trailways, the Jackson-Mobile and NOLA-Mobile-Montgomery routes are Greyhound. I haven't spotted who's providing the Columbus-Pittsburgh service.
 
Jackson-Mobile? Wow, that was always a weird route on the Greyhound timetable, no Maintenance Center on either end. New Orleans-Montgomery is part of Houston-Atlanta based from Atlanta Maintenance Center, one of Greyhound's biggest.

Columbus-Pittsburgh could be part of Greyhound's Denver-New York City or Los Angeles-New York City, which are apparently based from Denver and Los Angeles respectively because Greyhound has no Maintenance Center in New York City.

Montana route is Jefferson? Aw, ought to be Intermountain, too bad Intermountain is dead. JL's base at Minneapolis is FAR away. They could've used SLE which is based from Salt Lake City.

Or Greyhound could actually get back into Montana properly again (instead of nipping at Missoula going west to Seattle), and they have zero in North Dakota, South Dakota, or Nebraska.
 
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Montana route is Jefferson? Aw, ought to be Intermountain, too bad Intermountain is dead. JL's base at Minneapolis is FAR away. They could've used SLE which is based from Salt Lake City.
The route actually starts in Minneapolis. It's JL's 933/938 schedule, just making the connection in Williston.

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In general, I think this is a good idea and should continue to be expanded. If a connection can be reasonably made to a bus, Amtrak should find a way to put it on their schedule and ticket it. The biggest problem is that it does currently require paper tickets. Hopefully at some point Amtrak can mitigate this some by interfacing with each bus company's e-ticketing system as they come available. Until then, it'd be nice to find a way to split the rail portion and the bus portion so that the rail part can be e-ticketed with just the bus portion requiring a paper ticket (maybe even having customers just pick them up, when possible, at the station when making their connection. This would work at least some of the time when people are starting at an Amtrak station and transferring from Amtrak to a bus.)
 
To respond to the OP's question about whether these connections are a way to gather rail support...unfortunately, in these

specific cases, I think it's a poor strategy. The number of passengers booking these connections is going to be minimal.

IMO, the best way to use buses to build rail support is to offer dedicated bus service, not piggy-backing onto an existing

bus route. Make it a seamless integrated network...not a haphazard codeshare. There are plenty of stories of passengers

on a late Amtrak train missing their "Thruway" connection because their Greyhound driver understandably did not see the

value in holding up his other 30 passengers for the sake of the lone Amtrak ticket holder who didn't bother to show up time

(albeit through no fault of their own). In some cases this makes for a very lengthy wait until the next bus, and generally without

accommodation.

You don't have those problems with a dedicated service, though admittedly the cost to Amtrak for providing it is much greater.

Obviously Amtrak sees codeshares as a cheap way to extend its network. But as a way of building support for rail...I doubt it's

a sound strategy.
 
Yeah, on second thought, Amtrak should probably be using shuttle services for themselves instead of using Greyhound, especially since Greyhound seems uninterred in working with Amtrak right now due to their own fleet shortage.
 
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