Yes but Woody mentions going farther north to Colo Springs. That presents a problem to turn the train, no? Splitting the train and going up to Denver seems the way to go, if anything,
Yes, I picked up the notion of going up to Colorado Springs from a local leader mentioning that possibility in one of the linked articles.
Pueblo is a nice little place, with 164,000 metro population. Then just 45 miles up the road, Colorado Springs metro has 700,000 people, plus Pike's Peak, the Garden of the Gods, and the Air Force Academy to draw visitors.
Together, Pueblo and Colorado Springs would fix one piece of the problem that keeps the
Southwest Chief underperforming. Today the route connects two of the nation's three largest urban areas -- Chicago and L.A. -- but in between it's almost empty, with Kansas City and Albuquerque the only two large metro areas served. Adding the nearly 800,000 residents of Pueblo and Colorado Springs would provide a third "tentpole" to support the route. (Wichita and Las Vegas are two other potential tentpoles, but that's another story.)
Of course, Denver, with 2.9 million people, seems a very attractive tentpole. But that gets to be a whole different train.
As it is, a detour to Colorado Springs would add at least 4 hours to the schedule. That would ruin Westbound arrival times in Flagstaff and Williams (Grand Canyon RR) by putting them post-midnight, and making the morning arrival in L.A. more like noon. Eastbound a 4-hour detour actually improves the time for the stop at Newton serving Wichita some miles away. But it pushes the morning departure from Kansas City to noonish, losing the convenient morning-out/ evening-return corridor-like schedule it has now. And an 8 p.m. arrival in Chicago loses all connections from the
Chief, ALL.
Someone with more skill than I have (Amtrak and BNSF, that is) might figure out how to tweak the scheduled run times to keep the current good timings at the stops. But it won't be easy. And making a quick turnaround at Colorado Springs would be essential.
Glad to know there's a wye at Pueblo already, because that could be as far as this proposed detour could afford to go.
