Revisiting Boston-Florida service/NEC to FL via Charlotte

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It's great having a new forum to bounce off ideas for new or expanded service.

Since the old thread is buried several months ago, I would like to revisit it. Those of you who can find the old post(s) feel free to link.

I know that a huge majority of train travel is short distance but I think there is a market for LD service. I have certainly used Amtrak LD service to see other parts of the country. I imagine quite a few of you have as well. When I have proposed LD expansion, I for the most part have said expanding routes or connecting routes that Amtrak already uses or has previously. Once in a while I mention a route I am not sure of but those usually are long shots to me. Usually when I say why not expand route X to city Y, I am usually met with "it will add delays to a route". Of course you look at it from both sides but I still think more connections is a positive. I still would love to one day see a transcontinental route although the CHI transfer point seems to work fine for the most part (although gridlock is clearly an issue that hopefully the project in CHI will lessen).

One of my expansion ideas way back when I first started at Amtrak Unlimited was an extension of a Florida train north from NYP to BOS. Boston is currently served by one LD train but I believe they currently have to transfer at Albany to go to CHI. New Haven is the 10th largest Amtrak market and currently has no LD train service at all. Providence is also high on the list and they have no LD train service. They do have several trains to NYP which has many LD trains but could we see a market for an LD train to Connecticut?

Top Amtrak markets: http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?c=Page&pagename=am%2FLayout&cid=1246041980246

I remember hearing that slots from NYP to BOS are limited and if expanded Amtrak will surely want to add more profitable Acela service. So the only way a BOS to Florida service will happen is to combine either the Silver Meteor or Silver Star with a route that currently serves NYP to BOS.

Right now we have:
Star: Depart NYP 11:00am, Arrive NYP 6:50pm
Meteor: Depart NYP 3:15pm, Arrive NYP 11:00am

The Meteor certainly is the better choice to expand north as a Star would have to leave BOS really early in the morning and not get back until late at night.

So we'd have to find a BOS-NYP train that arrives in NYP before 2pm and leaves NYP around noon. I am going to rule out any Acelas (no way I am going to mess with them) so only NER's are considered.

Proposal: Merge 93/83/161 to the Meteor going south. Merge 86/164 to the Meteor going north.

South: 161 terminates in WAS. 93 terminates in Richmond (Staples Mill Road) which is served by the Meteor. 83 terminates in Newport News so you would lose that service on Fridays.

North: 86/164 terminate in Richmond.

Unless you add the Va stops between WAS and RVR onto the Meteor, those markets would lose a train. The 95 would serve those passengers as well as the BOS to Newport News on Fridays. A compromise could also be made to run 93/83 and 86/164 as Virginia to NYP trains. Is there a large market for BOS to Virginia travel that cannot be satisfied by the 95/99? Maybe 95 could be moved back an hour or two if it's too early (leaves BOS at 6:10am). I'm sure there's a reason for the 83 to Newport News on Friday at that time, could that be moved to another train (expand 133 which is only a Friday train between NYP and WAS to Newport News to at least give NYP-Newport News)?

Certainly there will be some creative juggling necessary but I feel the New England to Florida direct service is something to strive for.
 
Honestly, it should be OK for Boston-Florida passengers to transfer at NYP.

The problem is that right now NYP absolutely stinks to transfer at. Very unpleasant environment compared to nearly any other station nationwide.

So arguably that should be addressed as a priority.
 
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Boston is currently served by one LD train but I believe they currently have to transfer at Albany to go to CHI.

.....

I remember hearing that slots from NYP to BOS are limited and if expanded Amtrak will surely want to add more profitable Acela service. So the only way a BOS to Florida service will happen is to combine either the Silver Meteor or Silver Star with a route that currently serves NYP to BOS.


So we'd have to find a BOS-NYP train that arrives in NYP before 2pm and leaves NYP around noon. I am going to rule out any Acelas (no way I am going to mess with them) so only NER's are considered.
The transfer at Albany for the Lake Shore Limited for BOS & SPG passengers is temporary. Once the Albany track reconfiguration and upgrade work is done, the Boston section will be split off and run to/from BOS.

The slots between NYP and BOS are not just limited, they are very limited. Amtrak can only run 39 trains a day total over the Shore Line East route which means there are only 19 trains each way between NYP <-> BOS on weekdays. If Amtrak could run 25 weekday NYP<->BOS trains, they could fill a lot of those additional seats.

As for schedule reliability, that is a big deal northbound. If a Regional is combined with the Meteor, what happens when the Meteor is 3, 4, 6 hours late because it got stuck in Florida or in grade crossing collision in the Carolinas? Then there is also the issue of equipment turnaround and schedule time. An extension to BOS would add 4+ hours each way to the Meteor trip. Even if Boston were to provide full servicing for the Meteor, the extension to BOS would cut into schedule recovery time when the Meteor is really late.

As Neroden points out, the transfers in NYP are not easy. But I don't see how that ever truly gets fixed, although an expanded West End Concourse and Moynihan station improvements should help.
 
I see one additional problem with it that I'm surprised no one else caught the Silvers going north are drop off only, and pick up only going south. That way people doing shorts NYP-BAL aren't taking seats away from longs NYP-SAV. So somehow there would have to be a block on local traffic. And that wouldn't bode well for an expansion. Plus the discharge only helps late trains make up some time and on time trains arrive major early. I took the Meteor once and arrived about an hour early into Penn
 
In theory, BOS/New England passengers should also be able to connect to/from NER to the Silver Meteor at any common point (PHL, BAL, WAS, even RVR). Maybe Amtrak could advertise those connections as opposed to the NYP connection.
 
The slots between NYP and BOS are not just limited, they are very limited. Amtrak can only run 39 trains a day total over the Shore Line East route which means there are only 19 trains each way between NYP <-> BOS on weekdays. If Amtrak could run 25 weekday NYP<->BOS trains, they could fill a lot of those additional seats.

As for schedule reliability, that is a big deal northbound. If a Regional is combined with the Meteor, what happens when the Meteor is 3, 4, 6 hours late because it got stuck in Florida or in grade crossing collision in the Carolinas? Then there is also the issue of equipment turnaround and schedule time. An extension to BOS would add 4+ hours each way to the Meteor trip. Even if Boston were to provide full servicing for the Meteor, the extension to BOS would cut into schedule recovery time when the Meteor is really late.

As Neroden points out, the transfers in NYP are not easy. But I don't see how that ever truly gets fixed, although an expanded West End Concourse and Moynihan station improvements should help.
I think a lot of areas would love 19 trains each way.

Would terminating 93/83/161 and 86/164 at NYP be too big a loss? It would seem like a decent compromise and you get the slot(s) back for Florida.
 
I see one additional problem with it that I'm surprised no one else caught the Silvers going north are drop off only, and pick up only going south. That way people doing shorts NYP-BAL aren't taking seats away from longs NYP-SAV. So somehow there would have to be a block on local traffic. And that wouldn't bode well for an expansion. Plus the discharge only helps late trains make up some time and on time trains arrive major early. I took the Meteor once and arrived about an hour early into Penn
This has been a bugaboo of mine for a long time. Basically, I've long held that Amtrak should allow space to be sold on the daily LD trains, at least to/from WAS, both ways, but under space controls in all cases (e.g. sell no more than 50-60 seats north of WAS) and with an alert notice northbound about possible delays given that the trains originate almost 24 hours to the south.

I highlight WAS because you could generously schedule the notional departure time (e.g. theoretically only allow for 5 minutes at WAS so that if the train is running early you don't block up the station for too long) and dump all the padding presently found in the published timetable RVR-ALX-WAS(a)-WAS(d) into WAS(d)-BAL. I know Amtrak sells a lot of space between WAS and points south on all of those trains, so allowing restricted (and high-bucket-locked) sales NYP-WAS wouldn't hurt (they'd need to better manage prices on that leg, but I can definitely see passengers shelling out for the Meteor NYP-WAS so they can either crash or have a sit-down dinner; the same goes for the Star and Crescent, albeit without the dinner point (lunch on the Star was always a winner). Of particular note is that a canny passenger can do so in effect right now by "over-booking" to ALX and just hopping off early...but Amtrak shoots themselves in the foot with this since doing so can turn around and block out a WAS-ORL passenger.
 
The slots between NYP and BOS are not just limited, they are very limited. Amtrak can only run 39 trains a day total over the Shore Line East route which means there are only 19 trains each way between NYP <-> BOS on weekdays. If Amtrak could run 25 weekday NYP<->BOS trains, they could fill a lot of those additional seats.

As for schedule reliability, that is a big deal northbound. If a Regional is combined with the Meteor, what happens when the Meteor is 3, 4, 6 hours late because it got stuck in Florida or in grade crossing collision in the Carolinas? Then there is also the issue of equipment turnaround and schedule time. An extension to BOS would add 4+ hours each way to the Meteor trip. Even if Boston were to provide full servicing for the Meteor, the extension to BOS would cut into schedule recovery time when the Meteor is really late.

As Neroden points out, the transfers in NYP are not easy. But I don't see how that ever truly gets fixed, although an expanded West End Concourse and Moynihan station improvements should help.
I think a lot of areas would love 19 trains each way.

Would terminating 93/83/161 and 86/164 at NYP be too big a loss? It would seem like a decent compromise and you get the slot(s) back for Florida.
You are out of your flipping mind.
 
I really don't think there is much to be gained by eating up slots sending a whole Florida train to Boston. At most a car or two that are transferred to/from a Boston Regional at Washington should suffice if one wants to go that far, and just leave it at that.
 
Or, you know, just have people transfer in New York or Washington DC or somewhere in between.

But there I go, using that "t" word again. :ph34r:
Well, you've got two issues:

(1) There's the "loss of traffic" argument (that the mere presence of a transfer costs traffic) though I suspect this is less of an issue in the NEC.

(2) There's also a question of classes of service (e.g. getting stuck in Regional Coach for 4 hours on top of the transfer...which is an annoying downgrade next to a meals-included sleeper).

I think running a through sleeper or two is probably your best bet here, absent an Inland Route routing for one of the trains (probably the Meteor).
 
I think that this would probably be more trouble than it would be worth. The NEC has so much service and so many ways to transfer. Transferring and layovers on trains are also different than for air travel. I personally have never been discouraged from taking a trip based on whether or not there was a transfer involved. I am sure there are those people out there, but I think it is overstated on this forum. I think that passengers would be more discouraged by the drop in reliability of having to run a northbound train an extra 3+ hours and in 92's case, getting into Boston after 10pm if it is ON TIME. Then having to turn the train around for it to depart between 6 and 7 am the next day.

Granted, you could change the schedule, but then you are losing some of the positive things that are in the intra-Florida schedules currently (leaving Jax around 7am, into MIA around 6pm). And for what reason? So people don't have to find another train on the busiest railroad in north america?
 
In theory, BOS/New England passengers should also be able to connect to/from NER to the Silver Meteor at any common point (PHL, BAL, WAS, even RVR). Maybe Amtrak could advertise those connections as opposed to the NYP connection.
That's an interesting and important point. If Amtrak promoted transfers from Boston to the Silver Service at Philadelphia rather than NYP (perhaps by making this the default when the website builds connections) it would vastly improve the transfer environment. Puts more people on Regionals in the congested NYP-PHL segment, unfortunately.
 
This has been a bugaboo of mine for a long time. Basically, I've long held that Amtrak should allow space to be sold on the daily LD trains, at least to/from WAS, both ways, but under space controls in all cases (e.g. sell no more than 50-60 seats north of WAS) and with an alert notice northbound about possible delays given that the trains originate almost 24 hours to the south.
OK. Let's suppose, first of all, that Amtrak replaces ARROW with a modern system written in a modern high-level programming language, rather than mainframe assembly language.
I realize this will take years. It's worth the money, though.

Anyway, you could then program the reservations system in a very intelligent way. Every time a seat is booked from WAS-(points south), it could open up a booking from WAS-(points north) the next day. Similarly, every time a TRE-(points south of WAS) seat is booked, it could open up a booking for a seat from TRE to points north.

To avoid people gaming the system, if a WAS-south seat is cancelled, the next one booked would not open up a seat from WAS-north; it would add up the total number of seats booked from WAS south to determine how many seats to open from WAS north.

To further avoid people gaming the system, if there were a whole bunch of seats from WAS-south booked by one person all at once, the system should release the WAS-north seats slowly, a few per day.

You could then write "limited seats available" on the timetable rather than "pickup only" or "dropoff only".

This would be even easier to program with a reserved-seat system; for each seat, bookings from WAS-NYP would only be opened after a booking which goes south of WAS is reserved.

But you simply can't program that with ARROW. So. Finish that IT project...
 
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I think that this would probably be more trouble than it would be worth. The NEC has so much service and so many ways to transfer. Transferring and layovers on trains are also different than for air travel. I personally have never been discouraged from taking a trip based on whether or not there was a transfer involved. I am sure there are those people out there, but I think it is overstated on this forum. I think that passengers would be more discouraged by the drop in reliability of having to run a northbound train an extra 3+ hours and in 92's case, getting into Boston after 10pm if it is ON TIME. Then having to turn the train around for it to depart between 6 and 7 am the next day.

Granted, you could change the schedule, but then you are losing some of the positive things that are in the intra-Florida schedules currently (leaving Jax around 7am, into MIA around 6pm). And for what reason? So people don't have to find another train on the busiest railroad in north america?
I only proposed extending the Silver Meteor, not the Silver Star. I knew the Star would arrive in BOS too late and leave BOS too early. So we're looking around 3:30pm into BOS and leaving BOS around 10:30am.

OTP is a concern but it's already a concern for most if not all LD trains. I am basically asking to run a train an extra 4.5 hours when it currently runs 27 hours and the extra 4.5 hours does not have the freight train interference that the train south of WAS does. If BOS-NYP passengers are concerned about OTP, they can take one of the other 18 Acela/NER trains between the cities. I mean do they really lose much if they have one fewer train? I can tell you this, if Amtrak said to me we can give the Keystone route a train to Chicago but we have to take away one existing HAR-NYP train, I'd give it up in a second.

And if Amtrak really is concerned about OTP they would truncate BOS trains at WAS since running the train south of WAS is already going into CSX territory. BOS to MIA is 1620 miles (231 to NYP, 1389 from NYP to MIA). A train from BOS to RVR is 566 miles (457 to WAS and 109 from WAS to RVR), about 1/3 of the trip down to MIA already.

Or, you know, just have people transfer in New York or Washington DC or somewhere in between.

But there I go, using that "t" word again. :ph34r:
Ironically when the LD train is on time, the transfer probably is reasonable. But if we're talking about late trains the transfer becomes a horrible experience having to wait in line to change tickets. I ought to know, it just happened this past August. And there's a whole thread about transfer nightmares in CHI. You think late trains are the reason to force the transfer, I think late trains are the reason to get rid of it. If you're coming from Florida to New England, you probably have to expect delays already. But there's a big difference between missing a connection and having to rebook in a busy train station and getting "home" a few hours late. I feel all of the people who feel connections are no big deal have never missed one.

Clearly New England cities like Boston and New Haven have plenty of regional train service but have very limited (in the case of New Haven, no) LD service. To me, that is a big deal. I wonder if some of you think LD service is a thing of the past in this country or that LD service should only exist when there isn't any current regional service.

Well, you've got two issues:

(1) There's the "loss of traffic" argument (that the mere presence of a transfer costs traffic) though I suspect this is less of an issue in the NEC.

(2) There's also a question of classes of service (e.g. getting stuck in Regional Coach for 4 hours on top of the transfer...which is an annoying downgrade next to a meals-included sleeper).

I think running a through sleeper or two is probably your best bet here, absent an Inland Route routing for one of the trains (probably the Meteor).
If taking the 19th train away from Shore Line East is so horrible, then maybe the Inland Route is the way to go. You'd be trading Providence for Hartford and Springfield (New Haven would be covered either way).
 
Actually the Meteor should be returned to its previous timing so that it requires only three consists instead of four so that the released cars can be used to provide service on NYP - PHL - PGH - CHI route. Forget about extending to Boston.
 
I don't remember other stop times by heart and right now I am in Wales approaching Cardiff Central on the way to Crewe, and the onto Edinburgh Waverly, so I don't have the old timetables handy. It is only Amtrak that invented the current schedule which requires four consists.
 
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Actually the Meteor should be returned to its previous timing so that it requires only three consists instead of four so that the released cars can be used to provide service on NYP - PHL - PGH - CHI route. Forget about extending to Boston.
Talk about forcing me to choose sides. Well it's obvious which one I'd choose though.
 
... am in Wales approaching Cardiff Central on the way to Crewe, and then on to Edinburgh Waverly, so I don't have the old timetables handy. It is only Amtrak that invented the current schedule which requires four consists.
Hope your holiday trip is as good as it sounds!

We'll save some pixels here, so you can comment more fully when you get back to the States. ;)
 
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I don't remember other stop times by heart and right now I am in Wales approaching Cardiff Central on the way to Crewe, and the onto Edinburgh Waverly, so I don't have the old timetables handy. It is only Amtrak that invented the current schedule which requires four consists.
timetables.org.
Truth be told at present I have more interesting things to attend to than poking around in timetables.org. ;)
 
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