My father writes to point out that I have confused Detroit and Cleveland. This is a very common mistake, at least among those of us who have never been to either city. Please open your textbooks and cross out "Detroit", substituting "Cleveland". That is all.
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But it actually makes sense to have high-speed train stop in Cleveland between NYC and Chi. It's directly on the way, and it would be a good location to pick up or deposit riders who might be going to/from Detroit, Columbus, etc.
A Buffalo routing would be continue to be pointless, but the Detoit->Cleveland substitution actually strengthens the case for rail.
So, do you like, get up earlier on Thursday or something? Does that mean the posting will end earlier tonight?
There's actually two routes Amtrak uses for Chicago-New York:
The Lake Shore Limited runs along the Great Lakes. As pointed out, Chicago-Cleveland is okay, but the Cleveland-Buffalo-along I-90 portion makes sense for the trains that are going to Boston, but are crazy for going to NYC from Chicago.
The Cardinal runs Chicago-Indianapolis-Cincinnati-Charleston,WV-DC-NYC. It's obviously pretty far out of the way as well.
The currently discontinued Three Rivers ran NYC-Philly-Harrisburg-Pittsburgh (which was pretty good, though the Harrisburg-Pittsburgh line is still too slow), but then 9 hours to Chicago with not that many big cities on the way. (Youngstown and Akron being the biggest).
There's actually still a lot of room on many routes to upgrade speed without building new track. Grade separate, install traffic control systems, bank more, curve less, etc. Lots of routes have very long stretches of slow speed, 49 or 59 mph instead of the 89 or 110 mph that can be achieved even without electrification.
The Raleigh-Charlotte portion of the proposed SEHSR has seen about 35 minutes cut off its time due to incremental improvements since 2001. (They can do those without the full EIS since it's not substantial new track.)
Oh, though you can still take the Pennsylvanian NYC-Philly-Pittsburgh and transfer to the "Capitol Limited" that goes up to Cleveland and then to Chicago. (It's a DC-Chicago train.)
That particular combination would probably be the best route for a high speed train. However, even given all that it still makes sense to grow organically. There are lots of effective under 500 mile journeys that could be improved first. (Go ahead and start the necessary environmental studies for a 200mph train, though.)
Who goes to Detroit or Cleveland?
Why? There are more people in the Buffalo/Niagara region than there are in the Cleveland Metropolitan area. And more of them are likely to have business in state than someone from Ohio.
Or is this just another case of mindless Buffalo bashing?
How can you confuse that dump, Detroit with The Cleve? Everyone knows that if the whole world moved to their favorite vacation spots, then the whole world would live in Hawaii and Italy and Cleveland.
Me, I just want them to open the Lyons, NY, passenger station...then I can catch the slow train to NYC or Chicago only 15 miles from my front door!
Why? There are more people in the Buffalo/Niagara region than there are in the Cleveland Metropolitan area. And more of them are likely to have business in state than someone from Ohio. Or is this just another case of mindless Buffalo bashing?
I mean it's considerably out of the way for an NYC-Chicago route. A spur from Buffalo to the main line (in say, Pittsburgh) would be much better than forcing everyone way out of their way through upstate NY to get to/from NYC.
John,
You're dangerously close to "It All Happened on the 11:20 from Hainault", territory.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTVDOx35FNg
Damn coastal urban elites. I was born in Detroit. Thank god my parents moved before I was old enough to be scarred by the experience.
The currently discontinued Three Rivers ran NYC-Philly-Harrisburg-Pittsburgh (which was pretty good, though the Harrisburg-Pittsburgh line is still too slow)
Hbg-Phi drive time, 1:45, rail time 1:40
Hbg-Pit drive time, 3:15, rail time 5:30
I take the train to Philly from here a lot. Pittsburgh, not so much.
I have no expertise on the subject (though that's never stopped me before), but it seems like you could have a profitable express train system in the midwest between Minneapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cleveland. You've got one big city pretty much smack in the middle of a bunch of mid-sized cities, all on stunningly flat terrain. I deliberately left out Indianapolis and Milwaukee because they're close enough to Chicago that I'm unsure as to whether a high-speed rail really makes much sense. I imagine a national line would extend from CCleveland to Pittsburgh to NYC, bypassing Philadelphia (even though it's bigger than Cleveland & Pittsburgh) because it's too close to NYC to make it worth a stop on an express train.
That, of course, brings us right back to the question of local politics. Would it be politically feasible to cut out the likes of Philadelphia? What about a national line connecting our four largest cities - NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston - while skipping everything else in between?
Independent George:
The problem with a national line connecting those four cities is that the other ~85% of the country that doesn't live in them would not particularly care to pay for it.
If only Megan had been around to tell that pork-barrel legislator Cornelius Vanderbilt that it doesn't make any sense to go from New York to Chicago via Buffalo and Cleveland! (All those dummies who later rode the 20th Century Limited would have benefited from the warning as well.)
Okay, so then here's a puzzle on Rail vs Air: Why isn't there a good high-speed passenger rail line, private or government, between Dallas and Houston? It's one of the most highly trafficked air routes in the country (I believe it compares to NYC-DC), and there is nothing in the way of places in between that two that would have the political clout to make unreasonable diversions, it's basically flat, it's basically empty. (In contrast to, say, LA-SF, where you'd have fights about Oakland and San Jose and Bakersfield and Fresno and Santa Barbara, you have mountains, etc.)
Instead, Southwest Airlines got its start in the 70s flying the Dallas-Houston-San Antonio triangle, all on private money, and never looked back. (And as long as they flew only in-state, they were no subject to Federal regulation.)
On top of that, everything is all in one state, so the Federal government wouldn't need to be involved at all.
Is there a private company right now that thinks it can make money competing against Southwest building one? Or is flying still more efficient?
Who goes to Detroit or Cleveland?
I grew up around Chicago and now live in Ann Arbor (about 40 miles west of Detroit). If you compare the two cities themselves, Chicago wins by a mile. But outside the core cities, I prefer the Detroit area by a pretty wide margin. The Chicago region is pancake flat and the rivers and lakes are opaque and either mud brown (the Des Plaines River) or bright algae green (the Fox River and Chain of Lakes). The terrain of the Detroit area is not dramatic, but there are many excellent parks and countless non-opaque lakes (hundreds in Oakland County alone). Some nice hiking and mountain bike trails, too. Live in Chicago and want to go mountain biking and you're probably talking about a drive to either Wisconsin or Michigan.
Traffic seems much worse around Chicago, too, and the whole area feels less green and more paved over. I still love the city, but you couldn't get me to move back to the Chicago 'burbs.
Ichiro Suzuki has the final word on Cleveland:
“To tell the truth, I’m not excited to go to Cleveland, but we have to,” Ichiro said through an interpreter. “If I ever saw myself saying I’m excited going to Cleveland, I’d punch myself in the face, because I’m lying.”
To what extent is intercity rail ridership dependent upon the quality of local transit on either end of the trip? Am I going to take the train if I can't get around my destination city without a car?
Vanderbilt built his railroads in a differnt time era with different needs.
NYC to Buffalo was a reliable route for the honeymooners going to Niagara Falls.
NYC to Albany & the Adirondacks was necessary to bring the ice down from the mountains to feed all the refrigerators in NYC.
The problem with going east-west is crossing over the mountains and rivers. Drive along Route 17/I-86 from NYC to Binghamton & Jamestown some time--that would be rough going for a railroad. That's why the New York Central went up the Hudson to Albany and then along the Mohawk River and Barge Canal (Erie Canal) to Buffalo. Much more level.
Today, what with the stagnant (relatively) populations of the major Upstate NY cities (except for Albany, which used to be much smaller than Syracuse and now is much larger, due to the "growth industry" of state government), going 2.5 hours up to Albany and 2 hours down from Buffalo might not be the best way to go.
I suspect that a route that mirrors I-80 would be the best nowadays, with feeders up from Philly and Pittsburgh and down from Buffalo (if traffic warranted).
Before you question why railroad routes run the way they do, take a look at a map that shows the terrain. And keep in mind that trains suck at climbing mountains, or even small hills. The main line from NYC to Chicago starts by going north to near Albany and then follows the Mohawk valley to Buffalo for the same reason the Erie Canal was built along that route - it's relatively flat. In fact, it's the only break in the Appalachians in a thousand miles.
Confusing Detroit and Cleveland is not that common and it is pretty ridiculous. Detroit is twice the size of Cleveland and occupies a much greater role in our culture than Cleveland, with it being the world center of the automotive industry, the birthplace of Motown and American Electronica, and being the busiest international crossing point in North America. Cleveland is a rinky dink city by Lake Erie. If it's just your faulty knowledge of geography or of Amtrak lines, that's not as bad, but confusing two cities of vastly different importance is inexcusable.
Surely Cornelius Vanderbilt had no interest in honeymooners - it was all about Great Lakes shipping, wasn't it?
Just like I have no interest in all you people and your petty notions of efficiency. *I* want to get to NYC and Chicago by rail from Lyons, NY. To Hell with you!
Perhaps I should run for Senate, now that Hillary! has pretty much shown her cards?
There was an attempt to build such a system in the early 90's connecting the "Texas Triangle" (San Antonio-Dallas/Fort Worth-Houston) It failed because the investors were unable to get state-guaranteed loans, due to Southwest's lobbying. Southwest, it seems, was somewhat reluctant to let the Lege subsidize a competitor.
Now, however, there's a new coalition trying to build the routes, and presumably they expect to overcome Southwest's opposition or otherwise placate them. Here's hoping.
The above commenters who advocate rail lines that bypass large, on-the-way cities to be "more direct" seem to have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to the economics of trains. When a train makes stops in several cities along a line, it provides equal service to each of them. A plane can only serve the cities it lands at, but a train can serve every city along the line, replacing many planes; n(n-1)/2 possible origin/destination pairs for a train serving n cities. The amount of business you can do increases very fast, and it's very efficient as you sell the same physical seat several times along the trip.
Now, this imposes costs on endpoint-endpoint service if you make the line very un-straight to go through out of the way cities (Megan's original point about Buffalo), and time costs to slow down, stop, board passengers, and accelerate again (5-10 minutes per stop, at the very least). But shaving a few minutes off of the trip from NYC to Harrisburg by bypassing Philadelphia is financial madness.
Now, that said, the person who brought up Cornelius Vanderbilt was on the right track; Cleveland and Buffalo were much bigger deals in the Commodore's day (7th and 8th largest cities in the US in the 1900 Census), so it made more sense then to try and pick up their traffic, and not having to double up steam locomotives to get over the mountains also helped a lot. But even when the locomotive tech improved, the Erie Railroad, which had a much more direct route, was never able to come close to matching the traffic counts of the New York Central Railroad, which built the route that Our Hostess complains about.
I agree with John Thacker above, that the most sensible route for NY-Chicago HSR would hit Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland.
Oh, note to Aaron Pollock; the new coalition trying to get Texas to build HSR from Dallas to Houston thinks it can beat Southwest's lobbyists in Austin because it includes American (based at DFW) and Continental (hub at Houston-Intercontinental), and all of their lobbyists. I'm guessing that they don't see a future where either one can profitably fly such a short distance.
You big city sophisticates all seem to forget one of the biggest potential advantages for routing via Buffalo would be, apart from the topographical considerations already discussed, connecting with trains to/from Toronto (metro pop 6.7 million) and the Canadian VIA Ont-Que corridor trains. Tremendous unfulfilled potential here...
Independent George: "I have no expertise on the subject (though that's never stopped me before), but it seems like you could have a profitable express train system in the midwest between Minneapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cleveland. You've got one big city pretty much smack in the middle of a bunch of mid-sized cities, all on stunningly flat terrain. I deliberately left out Indianapolis and Milwaukee because they're close enough to Chicago that I'm unsure as to whether a high-speed rail really makes much sense."
The analysis you're looking for is here: .
To a great extent Amtrak inherited the midwestern rail network of 1970, which meant little or no service east of Chicago (the first Detroit service was two late-night trains westbound, left over from the New York Central's coastal service).
Indianapolis would be a logical candidate for high speed service, and Milwaukee is a success story, even with four-stop 89 minute trains (best timing for a nonstopper was 75 minutes, that from 1935 to 1957).