Soooo, seeing the "top five stations in each state" portion of the press release I attempted to create a list of "busiest non-NEC" stations based on the state-by-state information, by focusing on stations with numbers over 100,000.
And then promptly failed, because the top five stations in California, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia are all over 100,000, so I'm missing several of the over-100,000 in each state.
Anyway, the results show that there are at least two cities generating strong traffic (>100,000) on nearly every corridor, as well as the NEC.
There seem to be a few weaker corridors or segments of corridors:
- Detroit-Pontiac
- Grand Rapids-Chicago
- East Lansing-Kalamazoo
- Vermonter north of Springfield
- Heartland Flyer
(It's also hard to tell from these numbers about most trains north of Albany or the Quincy trains or the Norfolk train, for the reason noted above; the stations are mostly below the "top five" for the state. However, Syracuse is #5 in NY with 154,903, so Empire Corridor West is doing fine.)
It also popped out at me that Exeter, NH has ridership of 101,543. I really wish New Hampshire would chip in for the Downeaster.
But my actual goal here was to attempt to spot which stations which are getting high ridership *without* well-connected corridor service. And this is a short list:
- The Auto Train terminals are busy, which should be no surprise, at 265,274 each.
- Orlando at 160,442
- Tampa at 139,412
Note that Miami does not make my cutoff.
- New Orleans at 212,426
- Fort Worth at 129,389 (top station in Texas, ahead of Dallas! This surprises me)
- St. Paul/Minneapolis at 116,991
- Denver at 108,124
There are a couple of ways of looking at this. One is to see these cities as great opportunities for improved service. Another is to see the cities which *didn't* make this list as great opportunities for improved service.
Unfortunately, corridor service from Amtrak currently requires state support (even if it pays for itself, the state has to agree to pay for *potential* costs). We all know that lack of Wisconsin support hurt plans which would have eventually sped up service to St. Paul, lack of Iowa support hurt plans which would have eventually sped up service to Denver, lack of Louisiana and neighboring states' support has prevented any improvement in service to New Orleans, lack of Florida support prevented high-speed rail from Tampa to Orlando, and Texas has been unable to come to terms even on planned minor improvements between Fort Worth and Dallas...
So with no committed plans for service improvement, we may be watching this short list of cities "punch above their weight", with good ridership but minimal service, for some time to come. It will be interesting to see if other cities join them.
