Amtrak: Long-distance trains

[Tom H.]

Don't know if this belongs here or in its own thread, but the FRA has been working on a long-distance passenger rail study and just released a new presentation.

https://fralongdistancerailstudy.org/
Link to February 2024 presentation (preferred route map on page 53)

I think this is just a list of recommendations for further study, but 4 of the routes go through the Twin Cities (3 as terminus):

• Chicago - Seattle (via Twin Cities / Bismarck / Billings / Helena)
• Twin Cities - Denver (via Sioux Falls)
• Twin Cities - Phoenix (via Omaha / KC / ABQ)
• Twin Cities - San Antonio (via Des Moines / KC / DFW)

No idea if Amtrak will ever consider any of these recommendations seriously or implement them, but I'm intrigued the prospect of 2 of these routes passing through Sioux Falls, as I grew up there and think there's a decent amount of demand between there and MSP. (South Dakota is also the only of the lower 48 states to never have had Amtrak service.)

[angrysuburbanite]

Exciting to see more and more support for better regional rail! Stupid question: How does the FRA and Amtrak link together? Are they both working on separate things or are they both cooperating to create an enhanced system?

Amusing to me that the United States has gone to the moon (multiple times!), but we don't have a way to get to our *neighboring state* via rail...

[Silophant]

This is the FRA running a study for recommended long-distance train routes, which theoretically could be operated by any entity, but Amtrak is the only passenger rail organization in the US that can (relatively) easily operate on the various host railroads' tracks, and also the only one that's run any long-haul trains since the 70s.

Basically, Amtrak doesn't actually plan any service outside the Northeast Corridor (NEC) between DC and Boston, which is the only place in the US where they actually own the tracks. Everything else is either the long-distance network (routes longer than 750mi), which hasn't really had any planning until this FRA study, since it's only shrunk since the formation of Amtrak in 1971, or state-supported routes, which are planned and subsidized by the relevant state DOTs. Hence why states like California and Illinois have reasonable (for North America) Amtrak networks, and why the TCMC train has languished for (checks the date on page 1 of this thread) well over a decade waiting for MN and WI to get government support lined up.

[Silophant]

As for the study, I'd been waiting for it to come out, but I was surprised to see three separate MSP-points south trains in addition to the restored Chicago-Seattle North Coast Hiawatha, which is in a little more advanced stage of planning - it got a $500k FRA grant from the BIL a couple months ago. I'd have expected (and preferred, my family is in Mankato) an Omaha-bound train to go down the Minnesota River through Mankato and Sioux City on its way there instead of two frequencies via Willmar/Marshall/Sioux Falls, but I guess the Omaha/Sioux Falls connection is important too.

[mulad]

This is also related to the FRA-led Corridor ID Program (ID = "Identification and Development"), which has actually been able to distribute some money for studying new routes and implementing a bit of service. Corridor ID aggregated together a bunch of routes that had been studied by states and the feds, and has tried to put together a more unified vision of how to tie everything together, while this is specifically focused on the long-distance (>750 mile) routes -- I think the results of this are supposed to feed into Corridor ID, but I'm not totally sure.

Amtrak has historically never really had the authority or mandate to look into adding new routes on its own -- they've basically had to just respond to what states and the feds tell them to do. That's changed with recent legislation, which has allowed them to work on that "Amtrak Connects US" plan and work with the FRA on broader plans. That's about all I know, though -- the details of how Amtrak's plan, Corridor ID, and this long-distance study all fit together is vague to me, but at least we now have these two primary entities who are able to be points of contact working with all of the state and regional groups that have been advocating for things piecemeal over the past several decades.

Long-distance routes are federally-funded, while shorter ones have been required to be funded by states in recent years (after a 2008 law fully went into effect, I think?) -- something that might sound okay at first glance, but pretty silly when you consider how many states can fit within a 750-mile distance, and all the squabbling that they can do between them to torpedo doing effective work on shorter corridors.

Yeah, I'm definitely surprised by how many routes were suggested to go to the Twin Cities. Sounds like the group All Aboard Northwest has claimed some credit for getting ones along the northern tier added. I kind of feel like the Phoenix – Twin Cities one in particular was done to create something that met the >750 mile requirement, since it kind of looks like 2 or 3 routes standing on top of each other in a trenchcoat.

Nonetheless, with the relative sparseness of population in the western US, a lot of these routes probably make the most sense staying long-distance and being federally-funded (assuming it ever gets off the ground), while a lot of shorter routes should mesh together in tighter webs in the eastern part of the country and other denser spots.

[angrysuburbanite]

Ah, thanks for the clarification!

[mattaudio]

South Dakota Senate votes down Amtrak resolution
https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews ... esolution/

[Bakken2016]

South Dakota Senate votes down Amtrak resolution
https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews ... esolution/

Wow that is a bummer it failed by one vote.

[BikesOnFilm]

I get that hooking up South Dakota and Wyoming is designed to give the four US Senators without a stake in long distance Amtrak a reason to fight it being cut, but even with the current services covering 46 out of 50 states (and 92 out of 100 US Senators), that likely wouldn't be enough if the demagogue powers that be decide that Amtrak is the villain of the week and set out to destroy or defund long distance service.

I think this route tried to do too many things at once. MSP to Denver is good, Cheyenne to Denver makes sense, but they probably wouldn't have ever been considered goals that could be accomplished at the same time if they weren't also trying to figure out how to get South Dakota invested in long distance rail, a goal I don't necessarily think belongs in the top 20 priorities for Amtrak.

[Tom H.]

As a native South Dakotan, it's clear this plan was trying to thread a needle of state-wide support by connecting Sioux Falls & Rapid City, the major East River & West River population centers. (And Pierre I guess.) The problem there is that (1) that's a long distance with minimal population centers in between; (2) the trip generation between SF & Rapid is dwarfed by SF & Minneapolis, SF & Sioux City / Omaha, SF & Fargo, etc.; and (3) SD is just kind of a backwards one-party state that is happy to say "no" to stuff like this just to own the libs.

The party distributions in the state house and senate mirror each other at 64-6 and 32-3, respectively. It's hard to overstate the one-party nature of state politics there.

[mulad]

It's disappointing to me that it failed, but I feel it's a pretty remarkable result to have lost by only one vote in one chamber. This is one of those things that shouldn't be partisan, and there have been fairly conservative states that have put decent investment into rail.

Minneapolis to Denver is overall a high-demand travel market, and is one of the busiest city pairs for MSP airport, and we should have rail alternatives for it. Is this the best way to go? No, but in my mind it would make sense to have HSR service that either goes south to Des Moines and then west, or via Sioux Falls to Omaha and then west, and have something like the FRA long-distance proposal through the middle of South Dakota as a secondary/tertiary route.

Ideally, I'd say connect Denver to Rapid City and Minneapolis to Sioux Falls as independent routes first, and then eventually find a way to link through the middle of SD, but the FRA long-distance planning process required looking at 750-mile-plus corridors due to the legal split between short-distance and long-distance funding sources. (But the 750-mile cutoff is arbitrary and silly, almost certainly chosen with the intention to make it difficult to plan this stuff.)

[Tom H.]

Minneapolis to Denver is overall a high-demand travel market, and is one of the busiest city pairs for MSP airport, and we should have rail alternatives for it.

There is certainly air travel demand between MSP and DEN, but how much of that is due to their status as air hubs, and how much is due to true underlying travel demand originating in one city and ending in the other, and not just airline routing artifacts?

[BigIdeasGuy]

I would add that the distance between MSP & Denver, roughly 850 miles, is so great that it would almost be impossible for a HSR link to complete with air travel time wise or even cost wise. If everything was absolutely perfect you could possibly get an express train in about 4:45ish. Flights are around 2:15 and around $115, even with time penalties for air travel it would be take the most optimistic assumptions possible for it to be competitive for the rational traveler.

That's not to say there shouldn't be a rail service but trying to compete with air travel on a time or even money basis probably isn't possible with modern trains.

[mulad]

While I used MSP airport traffic as a guide there, it's important to remember that air travel is a tiny portion of the market compared to trips by car. In countries that actually support their rail networks, trains are an important alternative to driving in addition to however much they pull from the airline market, and they see rail passenger figures that vastly exceed their air passenger counts.

Airlines have pretty strong competition on their core routes, so it's relatively easy to find cheap fares like that. However, a big advantage of trains is that they can make multiple stops along the way, including in cities that currently have expensive and infrequent airline service. I see some one-way prices from MSP to Sioux Falls and Des Moines around $230, and considering they're about 240 miles away, that's nearly $1 per mile. Amtrak's average cost (including passenger fare plus subsidy) was $0.56 per passenger-mile in FY2024, and of course the passengers typically pay a lot less than that -- A Borealis-like base fare of $0.10 per mile would be $24, though even doubling or tripling that wouldn't be bad in comparison to the flight.

String along a few cities with poor or no air service along the way between the big endpoints, and the benefits become much clearer vs. just looking at direct MSP-DEN flights.

[mattaudio]

MSP to DEN via Sioux Falls or Omaha - mostly a boring drive across prairie - sounds perfect for a night train if it could make the trip in 12-14 hours.

[mulad]

Just to get the thoughts out of my head, I do think it's a really good idea to make sure that (at least among the lower 48) all states have passenger rail connections to and between their largest cities and their capital cities. With the shambolic system Amtrak has, we're lucky that St. Paul has service and that it's in Minnesota's main metro area -- many capitals don't have service, or have routes through their states that don't hit good population centers.

Whether they directly acknowledge it or not, I'm sure those SD lawmakers have experienced challenges getting in and out of Pierre, which just has a population of 14,000, and is the second-smallest state capital after Montpelier, VT (which actually does have Amtrak service). The Pierre airport is dependent on Essential Air Service funding, so I bet many of them think about how great it would be if they would only needed to travel to a station close to their home district to get to Pierre.

Pierre is probably the most geographically isolated state capital in the lower 48, which still makes it hard to justify, but at least it can be placed along a route or set of routes that connects more populated places.

[Mdcastle]

If you're going anywhere in the western half of the country on Southwest, you're probably going through Denver. Just like you're going through Midway if you're going east.