Cardinal discussion

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Literalman said:
"there may be something going on with your App/Browser. Are you sure you are not looking for it on a day that it does not run?" Were you asking me? Concerning two years ago? (Your post was right after mine.) I mentioned that I knew which days the Cardinal runs. I've ridden it a few times, and I was living in Alexandria, Va., and before the pandemic I sometimes timed my walks in the park to see it go by. I was generally using Microsoft Edge, and I reserved and made trips to New York, Lancaster, and Harrisburg. Maybe Edge had a hidden default to block information about the Cardinal, or more likely CSX hacked my computer and installed Cardinal-blocking software. ;-)
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Glad you have got it all under control. :D
 
Plug in CVS (Charlottesville) as your starting point south and see what comes up. Many people get off there. Amtrak res also has a problem many people including myself have found, if you search a city it shows all kinds of places that aren't the station. They've improved it, so non-stations are more clearly marked, but still the first result for "New York" on the website is NYF, New York State Fair. The phone app is better, with NYP first and no locations other than stations.

Another funny thing about the Cardinal is sometimes you can take the earlier Northeast regional to CVS, go to lunch (with your luggage), then get on the Cardinal, at about the same cost or less. The NER's are more subsidized I think.
 
jis said:
It is showing up fine when I look for it. So there may be something going on with your App/Browser. Are you sure you are not looking for it on a day that it does not run? Afterall it runs just three days a week.
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Thanks to all for the help. I figured out what I was missing (and I figured it was me). The Cardinals shows up as the last option, but you have to click to a second page of results to see it. It didn't occur to me that Chicago to NYP, which has only three through options per day, would run more than one page. Seems odd the system would give you all these different options -- including some kooky ones, like switching trains in Albany -- before it gives you the Cardinal.
 
JamesWhitcombRiley said:
Another funny thing about the Cardinal is sometimes you can take the earlier Northeast regional to CVS, go to lunch (with your luggage), then get on the Cardinal, at about the same cost or less. The NER's are more subsidized I think.
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I have to correct myself, the NER's are said to run at a profit. In any case, the coach fares seem lower than on the LD's on the same route. Even so, the Cardinal is not very expensive booked ahead. The slow sections are not just west of CVS, there's an impressively pokey section just northeast of CVS, which only the Cardinal uses, while the Crescent and NER go on better rail, to Culpeper northward. It's necessary due to an incomplete junction between the Norfolk Southern N-S tracks and the CSX/BB E-W tracks at CVS.
 
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JamesWhitcombRiley said:
The slow sections are not just west of CVS, there's an impressively pokey section just northeast of CVS, which only the Cardinal uses, while the Crescent and NER go on better rail, to Culpeper northward. It's necessary due to an incomplete junction between the Norfolk Southern N-S tracks and the CSX/BB E-W tracks at CVS.
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If you look at the map of the railroad lines between Orange and Charlottesville, it looks like all were originally intended to go somewhere other than the direction of their current main traffic flows. The original Southern Railroad main north of Orange VA was the Alexandria and Orange, which did exactly that. The current Buckingham Branch, ex C&O main used by the Cardinal is essentially a straight extension of that line going south to Gordonsville, and then apparently intending to go somewhere south from there, but it became incorporated into the Richmond direction of the C&O passenger line between Richmond and Charlottesville. At Gordonsville, to go west toward Charlottesville, the current line makes a hard right turn carrying on to Charlottesville, to its stop just short of the diamond with the ex Southern double track main. Going back to Orange: It looks like the Southern took off from the original A&O line in Orange with a hard right turn to take a more direct route to Charlottesville, and from there, I have no idea of their original target, it ultimately became the Southern Railroad mainline to Atlanta. The Alexandria and Orange became part of the Southern Railway system with C&O having traffic rights over the Southern between Orange and Alexandria, hence the Cardinal is running on the historical route of the C&O's Geoge Washington. Whether these traffic rights were extinguished after the merger of C&O/B&O into SCL, I don't know.

It looks like it could be possible to put a wye track in the northwest quadrant between the west side of the Southern line and the north side of the C&O line with a platform adjacent to it for the Cardinal. However, this would mean a pedestrian crossing of the Southern Railroad main tracks.
 
To add one more thing to the Cardinal through Charlottesville thoughts above: The following information comes from employee timetables from 2008, at which time these things were generally publicly available.
Route of the Cardinal Orange to the Southern Railway Crossing in Charlottesville:
31.3 miles, but about 12 of this is at 30 mph or less, and none over 60 mph.
Route of the Crescent Orange to the C&O (now Buckingham Branch) crossing in Charlottesville:
27.5 miles. Although the nominal maximum speed is 79 mph, for the most part speed is limited to the range of 50 to 65 mph due to curves.
 
On the off chance this is interesting to someone, the Cardinal from Chicago to Indy tonight ran thusly: two engines (I think it’s two, I didn’t go all the way forward), baggage, some kind of Superliner (photo shows front 4 cars after disconnect), engine, two coaches, cafe, sleeper, bag-dorm (my home for the next 23 hours).
 

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glensfallsse said:
On the off chance this is interesting to someone, the Cardinal from Chicago to Indy tonight ran thusly: two engines (I think it’s two, I didn’t go all the way forward), baggage, some kind of Superliner (photo shows front 4 cars after disconnect), engine, two coaches, cafe, sleeper, bag-dorm (my home for the next 23 hours).
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Yep. Cardinal gets some interesting consists thanks to equipment moves to/from Beech Grove.
 
Interesting that Hamilton (not that far from Oxford) was dropped as a stop in the 2000s. There've been some rumbling about bringing it back as a stop.
 

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