Nice article from Omaha World Herald wrt rerouting Amtrak's California Zephyr for the Chicago - Omaha segment and/or expanding service in this corridor. Good to see my home state taking a step in the right direction on this one; no matter how small it may seem.
http://www.omaha.com/article/20120213/NEWS01/702139949
We have to eliminate "high speed rail" as a consideration. A somewhat moderate top speed of 90-110 MPH is more realistic and attainable on the existing freight routes. Based on intermediate cities served, I would think that either the IAIS or UP routes would be the best bet.
Yep....Would agree with that. Would have to think 79 mph would work; perhaps 90 if we're lucky.
You would have to think that, with IAIS serving both Des Moines and Iowa City, that it would be the natural choice among many. Iowa City and my alma mater are only a half hour away from Cedar Rapids and Des Moines is just a short drive down I-35 from Ames and Moo U. I guess what bothers me still is the money that will have to be sunk into IAIS for trackwork and signaling. Who really benefits here? Which is why I think you have to keep the UP option open at least even though you know they'd demand a king's ransom (perhaps rightfully so) to let new Amtrak service operate on the "Overland Route".
I think I-DOT could be better employed.
While I'm sure IAIS would welcome federally funded upgrades for passenger with open arms, I-80 finished off the Rock Island passenger trade 50 years ago -- I was there -- and I'm afraid a revival would be a real loser and "horrible example" for critics of passenger rail to point to.
The Milwaukee and CGW are gone. The CN is too indirect, and UP is a chimera. BNSF would probably be as welcoming as UP to an expansion of the passenger it presently hosts.
I don't know what's with I-DOT. They're not even able to get Moline-Iowa City.
It's hard to believe they are considering the old MILW route. The map in the article even shows that it is much abandoned. I would guess the IAIS route has the most potential. It has the biggest cities. I don't think that because I-80 parallels it, that it's a deal killer. Interstates parallel many Amtrak corridors and have the most potential to remove cars.
MidlandMike It's hard to believe they are considering the old MILW route. The map in the article even shows that it is much abandoned. I would guess the IAIS route has the most potential. It has the biggest cities. I don't think that because I-80 parallels it, that it's a deal killer. Interstates parallel many Amtrak corridors and have the most potential to remove cars.
True, Mike, but how about that proven potential of interstates to remove passenger trains?
dakotafred MidlandMike: It's hard to believe they are considering the old MILW route. The map in the article even shows that it is much abandoned. I would guess the IAIS route has the most potential. It has the biggest cities. I don't think that because I-80 parallels it, that it's a deal killer. Interstates parallel many Amtrak corridors and have the most potential to remove cars. True, Mike, but how about that proven potential of interstates to remove passenger trains?
MidlandMike: It's hard to believe they are considering the old MILW route. The map in the article even shows that it is much abandoned. I would guess the IAIS route has the most potential. It has the biggest cities. I don't think that because I-80 parallels it, that it's a deal killer. Interstates parallel many Amtrak corridors and have the most potential to remove cars.
The interstates might very well have killed off the passenger train had not Amtrak been created. However, as people become weary of crowded highways, some are drifting back to the rails. I'm from Michigan, the car state, and all three of our corridors parallel interstates (two of the routes were created sometime after the start of Amtrak.)
I'm glad for your success in Michigan, Mike; and maybe I'm too pessimistic about Iowa's prospects. I'd love to be proved wrong there, and to ride a train into Iowa City again!
Michigan will be tested in a couple of years when the state will have to pick up the support costs for our one legacy corridor (CHI-DET) from Amtrak.
dakotafred I think I-DOT could be better employed. While I'm sure IAIS would welcome federally funded upgrades for passenger with open arms, I-80 finished off the Rock Island passenger trade 50 years ago -- I was there -- and I'm afraid a revival would be a real loser and "horrible example" for critics of passenger rail to point to. The Milwaukee and CGW are gone. The CN is too indirect, and UP is a chimera. BNSF would probably be as welcoming as UP to an expansion of the passenger it presently hosts. I don't know what's with I-DOT. They're not even able to get Moline-Iowa City.
I'd like to think that things have changed enough since those dark days back in the late 60's and early 70's that this would work well. IMHO, choosing the (now) BNSF route through southern Iowa for today's California Zephyr over either the MILW or CNW was a flawed decision back in 1970. Granted, the article's map that featured the erstwhile MILW main was a gaffe, I can't help but wonder if things would have been different had the MILW's Chicago - Omaha segment been the chosen route.
I think the bigger question becomes, should an extra lane of service (via either IAIS or UP) be added OR do we simply want to reroute the CZ for the Chicago - Omaha segment? While the CN's mainline between these two points is a bit indirect, the bigger obstacle is the "dark" territory between Tara and Council Bluffs which hasn't seen regular passenger service since the Truman administration. I would, however, strongly advocate an extension of the future Chicago - Dubuque service to Waterloo.
dakotafred I think I-DOT could be better employed. (a portion of the post omitted) The Milwaukee and CGW are gone. The CN is too indirect, and UP is a chimera. BNSF would probably be as welcoming as UP to an expansion of the passenger it presently hosts. I don't know what's with I-DOT. They're not even able to get Moline-Iowa City.
(a portion of the post omitted)
Fred has it right. Somebody at IDOT just didn't get the memo after the last Iowa election, which isn't unusual for that group. The extension of Chicago/Moline service to Iowa City is dead unless some local group from Johnson County wants to underwrite that service. It is not realistic to believe any state money will be available for a rail project.
This summer delays of more than a couple of hours for the Zephyr between Omaha and Burlington were very common due to freight congestion resulting from the Missouri River flooding. The delays are now more in the one hour zone but still pretty common. On a positive note, BNSF has announced two new crossovers will be built in Iowa, which should help the situation.
Iowa is starting to recognize the combination of high property taxes and high income taxes make it an extremely undesirable location for business. Just this week Sioux City lost a greenfield factory and 200 jobs to South Dakota over those issues. All sides seem to recognize reform must be made, although the specifics remain elusive.
For all of those reasons there is not going to be any money available for Chicago/Omaha service on any of the routes.
I thought Michigan passenger rail would take the back seat after Republicans swept the elections a year ago, (gaining governor, both legislative houses and supreme court) on a pro-business platform. And yet the governor just agreed to buy 140 miles of line between Kalamazoo and the Detroit area from NS, with the intent of extending 110 mph running on the corridor. Go figure.
An additional thought on the BNSF for the Zephyr:
When Amtrak came into being, there was a prejudice in favor of existing service -- that is, service that at least had been able to stagger into 1971. While the original CZ was gone, BN was still strong Chicago to Denver, and to me it made sense to put the CZ there, where the local communities had a track record of supporting the trains.
Chicago-Denver passenger service on the Rock Island was long gone, never mind Iowa City and Des Moines. Ditto on the North Western, with Clinton, Cedar Rapids and Ames; U.P. had switched its streamliners to the Milwaukee way back in 1955.
On the U.P., where I worked at the time in mail and baggage, we were just sure Amtrak would tap our "City of Everywhere," which still called on Denver (with a stub from North Platte) and split into three sections on down the line to serve Portland, San Francisco and LA.
We know what happened to that -- probably because, even tho Amtrak was interested in linking "city pairs," there would have been a terrific howl if a line like UP had got it all and smaller on-line cities, on roads like BN, Santa Fe and the former Great Northern, had got nothing.
I guess what I am trying to say is: If you weren't going to give the CZ to the Milwaukee (plus UP-SP) -- politically difficult, in my scenario -- the only other good candidate was BN, which became BNSF, which hosts the CZ across Iowa to this day.
When you peel away the layers, there are always reasons -- good and bad -- for these business decisions, no matter how puzzling they appear today.
The other big deal, as I reflect on it (you folks have really got me reaching back):
The transition to Amtrak was very abrupt; as I recall, the final routes were decided only shortly before May 1. So, what was Amtrak to do? It had to look at not just the passenger service that had survived until 1971, and the railroads that had signed up, but the infrastructure.
It couldn't start running trains into boarded-up stations. In Iowa, the passenger infrastructure had lapsed on the CNW. The Rock Island had quit passenger service there and not joined Amtrak anyway. That left the Milwaukee and the BN.
Anyone acquainted with the old Q in Iowa knows what a superior job it did in building its stations new and generally keeping up the properties. (I give you Ottumwa, Iowa.)
I would say the pressure of time, plus the history of the Q's faithful attention to the passenger side of the business, plus the necessity of Amtrak making hard choices -- it couldn't have both the Milwaukee and the Q -- made the choice of the Q in Iowa an easy one.
That choice -- being a government choice, arrived at for whatever reason -- has become locked in. In this case, I can't fault it. What are we going to do, in these constrained budget times? Build new passenger stations all along the old CNW, even if we could get the UP to go along? Pardon me for doubting it.
But if the point is to build a service from CHI to Omaha through Iowa, there would be a need to serve the main cities in Iowa, which the old CB&Q route mostly does not serve. That leaves the UP/CNW as the only line that serves some Iowa cities with decent track, but which doesn't want to share with passenger trains. That is understandable, given its heavy traffic. The CN/IC has so-so track, but serves fewer cities. The IAIS track serves the most cities, but the track is even worse. Given the costs of upgrading the IAIS, perhaps Iowa had best wait.
C&NW, CA&E, MILW, CGW and IC fan
Useful to remember, too, is that the old IC didn't even run its passenger trains into Omaha, but only to Sioux City. Which is telling about the route, given that even the CGW ran into Omaha.
dakotafred An additional thought on the BNSF for the Zephyr: When Amtrak came into being, there was a prejudice in favor of existing service -- that is, service that at least had been able to stagger into 1971. While the original CZ was gone, BN was still strong Chicago to Denver, and to me it made sense to put the CZ there, where the local communities had a track record of supporting the trains. Chicago-Denver passenger service on the Rock Island was long gone, never mind Iowa City and Des Moines. Ditto on the North Western, with Clinton, Cedar Rapids and Ames; U.P. had switched its streamliners to the Milwaukee way back in 1955. On the U.P., where I worked at the time in mail and baggage, we were just sure Amtrak would tap our "City of Everywhere," which still called on Denver (with a stub from North Platte) and split into three sections on down the line to serve Portland, San Francisco and LA. We know what happened to that -- probably because, even tho Amtrak was interested in linking "city pairs," there would have been a terrific howl if a line like UP had got it all and smaller on-line cities, on roads like BN, Santa Fe and the former Great Northern, had got nothing. I guess what I am trying to say is: If you weren't going to give the CZ to the Milwaukee (plus UP-SP) -- politically difficult, in my scenario -- the only other good candidate was BN, which became BNSF, which hosts the CZ across Iowa to this day. When you peel away the layers, there are always reasons -- good and bad -- for these business decisions, no matter how puzzling they appear today.
At the time Amtrak became operational (1971), C&NW, not UP, operated the historic "overland route" between Chicago and Omaha. However, as noted in one fo the other posts, the transcontinental UP-CNW trains had been removed from this route (in favor of MILW) in 1955. By 1971, the only remnant of this service on CNW was a daily round trip of a train between Chicago and western IL or eastern IA (I think, by 1971, it had been cut back to Sterling-Dixon, IL, but I'm not sure of that - it may have gone as far west as Clinton, IA).
C&NW had absolutely no interest in handling AMTRAK trains when AMTRAK was formed and spent a lot of effort in successfully preventing this from happening. Undoubtedly, this effort was helped by the fact that the transcontinental trains hadn't operated over CNW since the 1950's and the CNW passenger services on other CNW routes could not readily be routed into Chicago Union Station. I would expect that UP today would be even less interested in AMTRAK service over the former CNW Chicago-Omaha line than CNW was in 1971. At the very least, given the amount of freight now being handled over the route, UP would certainly require AMTRAK to pay for extensive (and expensive) capacity improvments to handle any passenger service.
You mention that AMTRAK, in 1971, had a prejudice in favor of existing services. That's certainly true, and it makes a lot of sense. The "existing services" that AMTRAK preserved still had somewhat of a passenger base, not only between end points but at intermediate points. From a business standpoint, rerouting the "existing" services to new routes would mean that AMTRAK would be kissing away their existing traffic base on these routes and trying to build a new traffic base from scratch the new route. And, from a public policy standpoint, the objective in 1971 would have been to preserve service for existing rail users as much as reasonably possible, not to throw exisitng users overboard to reinstitute services that had been discontinued many years earlier. As it was, AMTRAK discontinued a lot of passenger services in 1971, because the existing nework was unsustainable. Had they discontinued more existing services in order to institute new services over lines that no longer had passenger service, Congress woudl have handed them their heads on a platter.
All right on the money, Falcon.
One either has to have been there and old enough to read a newspaper -- which means at least 50 -- or well-read in the history.
The short answer to anyone who asks, "Why did Amtrak do it this way?", is usually, "Because the railroads were doing it that way."
May 1, 1971 was still a bloodbath: BN (old Q) to Denver, but not MILW-UP. Old GN to Portland-Seattle, but not (until later) old NP. Etcetera -- all over the country. Not only were whole routes sacrificed but train frequencies on the routes that survived. The conventional shorthand is that two-thirds of all schedules were axed, but I think it was worse than that.
It was one hard day, in any case.
schlimm The IAIS track serves the most cities, but the track is even worse. Given the costs of upgrading the IAIS, perhaps Iowa had best wait.
The IAIS track serves the most cities, but the track is even worse. Given the costs of upgrading the IAIS, perhaps Iowa had best wait.
Why Schlimm, I didn't know that you are an expert on IAIS track conditions.
IAIS has been upgrading over the past few years and is a 40 mph railroad over most of it. Much to the lament of local railfans on the IAIS yahoo group who can't easily get ahead of the trains anymore to get to the next photo location. It would still need work to bring it up to the higher speeds, but maybe not as much as some think.
Jeff
jeffhergert schlimm: The IAIS track serves the most cities, but the track is even worse. Given the costs of upgrading the IAIS, perhaps Iowa had best wait. Why Schlimm, I didn't know that you are an expert on IAIS track conditions. IAIS has been upgrading over the past few years and is a 40 mph railroad over most of it. Much to the lament of local railfans on the IAIS yahoo group who can't easily get ahead of the trains anymore to get to the next photo location. It would still need work to bring it up to the higher speeds, but maybe not as much as some think. Jeff
schlimm: The IAIS track serves the most cities, but the track is even worse. Given the costs of upgrading the IAIS, perhaps Iowa had best wait.
No expert. Never claimed to be. I had read that most IAIS track is at best 40mph, hardly suitable for any serious passenger service. To upgrade even to 79mph would be expensive. Not likely to be worth the expense, given the limited number of passengers the route would attract.
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