https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/01/tech/amtrak-speed-trains/index.html
Say on a normal day that your able to miss all the rush hour traffic and there is no road construction encountered. Has anyone here ever driven from Chicago's Loop to downtown St. Paul in less than 6 hours? Just curious. I think that is impossible without a George Jetson Astrocar......maybe I am wrong though.
Also, London School of Economics has already found with its HSR studies that train schedules only need to be car competitive, not necessarily significantly faster than a car but car competitive with frequent and convienent departures that puts the train on an equal basis with the car more or less in the consumers mind.
Also, the Amtrak schedules we all know are padded. Remove some padding, Reduce maybe 1-2 stops as well as 10 mph train speed increase and you have a pretty car competitive schedule on some routes. Not a large bar to meet.
Last, a chunk of rail corridor traffic does not ride from origin to destination but gets on the train after orgin and departs before destination especially now with suburban stations such as in the Chicago -Milwaukee case the Mitchell Field Airport Station. Which says the speed and frequency between intermediate points has to be competitive as well or possibly could be more competitive than between origin and destination.
Speaking of CHI-MILW (which I happen to ride last week during a free day at NRHS convention) is that the next to go 110 mph, now that Detroit and St. Louis lines have HrSR ?
MidlandMikeSpeaking of CHI-MILW (which I happen to ride last week during a free day at NRHS convention) is that the next to go 110 mph, now that Detroit and St. Louis lines have HrSR ?
The question was asked of Amtrak's Mark Maliquari in a YouTube video somewhere I came across. His answer on it was potentially the highest they will go is 90 mph but if they did go to 110 mph you would not see much of a time improvement because it would be likely they would add another stop.
He stated on Chicago to Milwaukee the distance is too small to spend the money on a 150-200 mph speed with the implication they are getting enough ridership to be viable at the lower speeds. He seemed really iffy on 110 mph but very confident on 90 mph.
As far as my personal knowledge there is a city in Northern Illinois North of Glenview trying to get added to the Chicago to Milwaukee run. The name escapes me, I read about it recently and so far their lobbying hasn't been acted on. WisDOT hinted that once they go to 10 frequencies they would experiment with limited stop or no stop service with one of the trains on the corridor to see if they could get away with a higher ticket price. When you think about that, would someone pay more for 10-15 min difference in travel time and if so.....how much more.
My guess is once they get around to flipping to 90 mph operation they will probably add another stop in Northern Illinois that will eat up that speed improvement. They seem to be more interested in ridership volume at slower speeds then they do a significantly faster trip.
Note also that the 110 mph speeds on Chicago-Detroit and Chicago-St Louis are not intended to be the final upper limit. They were initially planned as a milestone type goal with a future further increase in speed planned once they had a 110 mph network of sorts in the Midwest.
Also the expanded CTC through Intermodal Station should add to either a cost reduction in corridor service or slight speed up or both. Currently the CTC ends I believe just across the river which lowers passenger train speed almost down to yard limit speed. Not a big impact on Chicago bound trains but definitely a 5-10 min impact on the Westbound Twin Cities trains as the CTC does not resume until just after cutoff Tower.
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.