I will be pretty bummed to lose sleeper service on the HOS-NOL route, a roomette works great on this stretch. 9 hours in coach with no diner does not sound like a nice way to kick off a vacation when we can drive it in 6 hours. ...
This is a
slow route, about 40 mph, and passenger totals could grow substantially if upgraded.
Anybody wanna guess which segment will have the highest % gain in riders from going daily, the desert SW route to L.A., or the "shuttle" to New Orleans?
In an alternate universe, if Texas and Louisiana had leaders like VA and NC, they'd be building a corridor here.
San Antonio and Houston are two of the fastest growing cities in the nation. (And if the train from Houston made a sharp right turn just past the Alamo, less than 90 miles away is Austin, another large n very fast growing city.)
The distance Houston-San Antonio is only 210 miles, but it's scheduled to take 5 hours. Five (5) hours!
I know there's congestion near the two big cities, but... I grew up in between, a mile from the tracks. I can assure you there's still plenty of room -- Texas-sized space, and wonderfully flat -- to put in more and longer sidings, and then double track most of the route.
If the train moved at 50 mph that would cut the trip to 4 hours. Make it 60 mph and it's 3 ½ hours. And at 70 mph average speed it would clock in at 3 hours even. That would get most people off the short-hop flights between those cities, and off the increasingly crowded I-10.
How hard would it be to go fast between H-town and ole San Antone? Lessee, St Louis-Chicago is 284 miles, and those trains do about 51 mph now. After the Billion of Stimulus being invested in the current Phase One of the upgrades, they should go about 63 mph. So a Billion on this somewhat shorter Texas segment could bring trip times down to about 4 hours, even better than the Illinois corridor will take after its Billion dollar Phase One. (Wonder who's ready to pay for Phase Two to get down to 4 hours in Illinois?)
Heading east, New Orleans draws more passengers than its population would ordinarily support, because of the large vacation/tourism/weekend/casino traffic. Beaumont is ready to send many riders to H'town and back, and could probably support 8 commuter type trains a day each way
if they moved fast. Then mid-way is Lafayette, with an 18,000+ university.
O.K., adding sidings, much less double tracking, could take serious money; there's plenty of empty here, but much of it is waterlogged. LOL. But if they could speed things up, from 40 mph to even 50 mph (wasn't a 55 mph figure once reported as the "
Amtrak average" speed? -- where they got that I don't know) and then add a second and a third frequency, this route could really boom.
Look hard at taking the corridor further east. Not big on taking the train all the way to Florida anytime soon. The Florida Panhandle portion of the route would need too much work. And too much of the run used to be in the dark of night, which is never good, just ask Cleveland.
But see the
Sunset Shuttle go east to Biloxi amid the strip of casinos along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and then on to Mobile. If they could get half an hour out of San Antonio-Houston, and an hour out of Houston-New Orleans, the train could get into Mobile before midnight. Then back into New Orleans early the next morning to keep that nice 6 p.m. arrival at Houston, and still get a little earlier before-midnight arrival in San Antonio. Need to add more frequencies to Mobile and to Houston, of course.
Much, much further down the line, the
Sunset Shuttle should be rerouted thru Baton Rouge, another city growing nicely, with a huge LSU student population. The two stops that would be bypassed, Schriever and New Iberia, aren't even real stops, only flag stops. Baton Rouge (urban area 600,000 pop) is a monster compared to them. The segment New Orleans-Baton Rouge has been studied and studied. It could support 8 trains a day corridor service, and sharing would cut costs for the
Sunset Shuttle. But no action, no money, no progress.
Then to get from Baton Rouge back down to Lafayette would require building a new connection -- almost a causeway thru swamps and spillway -- and a study will show the need for a lot of money.
Don't mention this in Louisiana, the state is like a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Oil, but that close-to-the-coast line may have to move anyway, due to alleged climate change and proven rising sea levels. (And in fact, isn't the Atchafalaya Basin actually sinking, due to massive extraction of underground petroleum, erosion along canals built to serve oil drilling sites, insufficient silt, etc.?)
If this
Sunset Shuttle route fed into Chicago, instead of Houston, it would be high on the multi-Billion To-Do list. But sadly, nobody is talking about it now at all.
I do welcome the daily service as our current plans for the next trip are to fly there and take the train back, simply because we want to go on a Thursday and right now the options are Tue or Fri.
This example is exactly why going daily would add 100,000 riders.
I will say this plan would probably keep me from taking the train to and from LAX again. The timing of the train changes in SAS would be pretty bad and that station is not a nice place to hang around.
Relax. They already made the bulk of the changes in San Antonio that were discussed in the 2010 PRIIA study, so there's no longer an overnight "connection" between the
Eagle and the
Sunset.
http://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/970/304/PRIIA-210-SunsetLtd-TexasEagle-PIP,0.pdf
Anyway, that plan was for
cross-platform changes from the
Sunset Shuttle to the
Sunset/Eagle. So
NO LOITERING in the area, please. LOL.
Of course, the station area would probably become less deserted if it served daily
Sunset Shuttles and not just 3
Sunset Limiteds every week. Some of those 100,000 new passengers would be using the San Antonio station, after all, and a lot more taxies would be stopping by. Already that side of San Antonio is getting the modern version of urban renewal (means "Negro removal"), and another couple or three new hotels could change the station area altogether.
