Amtrak's Acela Express beyond the Northeast Corridor

Screvier20

What would it take have Acela Express service along the Keystone Corridor by 2002 and along the Empire Corridor by 2004.
 

Æsir

There are a lot of potential problems. West of Harrisburg and northwest of Poughkeepsie the tracks are owned by freight railroads, which have been the bane of Amtrak's existence. A lot of Amtrak's problems are due to most of their services (The Northeast Corridor is pretty much the only exception) being at the mercy of the freight railroads, which own the rails. West of Harrisburg and north of New York aren't electrified. The Acela trainsets themselves were extremely troubled, such as being four inches wider than originally designed, restricting how much they could tilt, and because of that how fast they could travel.
 

Riain

Banned
A more successful 125mph turbotrain service making money the way the 125mph Metroliner did before Acela.
 

THE OBSERVER

If you want to do HSR on the Empire Corridor, then you are gonna have to do it on a greenfield alignment, I-90 Thruway Alignment, or a combination of both from Buffalo to Albany. After Albany, you can either run the line along I-87, or run it parallel to the existing tracks that the Empire Service, freight trains, and MetroNorth currently use. I prefer the latter option, as I believe it makes sense for trains to stop at Poughkeepsie, as it's located in the geographic center of the Hudson Valley, and is the largest city too. If that was chosen, a lot of new construction and upgrades would have to be done before service could commence. As for HSR between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh... what can I say?
 

Screvier20

THE OBSERVER said:
If you want to do HSR on the Empire Corridor, then you are gonna have to do it on a greenfield alignment, I-90 Thruway Alignment, or a combination of both from Buffalo to Albany. After Albany, you can either run the line along I-87, or run it parallel to the existing tracks that the Empire Service, freight trains, and MetroNorth currently use. I prefer the latter option, as I believe it makes sense for trains to stop at Poughkeepsie, as it's located in the geographic center of the Hudson Valley, and is the largest city too. If that was chosen, a lot of new construction and upgrades would have to be done before service could commence. As for HSR between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh... what can I say?
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Like the idea that Acela would run parallel existing tracks with stops in Poughkeepsie, Albany-Rensselaer, Utica(maybe), Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo. In Buffalo the beautiful old Central Terminal would be restored with Buffalo Metro Rail service from downtown to the Terminal.

Riain said:
A more successful 125mph turbotrain service making money the way the 125mph Metroliner did before Acela.
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Think this was the way get HSR along both corridor by slow gradually upgrade to the corridors with UAC TurboTrain running between 1968 and 1978 than begin replace by the Metroliner and later the EMD AEM-7 after the corridors are electrified. The upgrades would happen slowly over time so the early 2000's Acela service would be added along both corridors.
 

Catmo

Gotta get the existing Acela to Atlanta.

And maybe have an imported TGV hook up the urban Texas Triangle. Houston to Dallas, Houston to San Antonio, San Antonio to Austin an Ft Worth, Dallas to Ft Worth, and Ft Worth to Austin, Makes total sense with the pop density of this potential east Texas megacity.
 

Screvier20

Catmo said:
Gotta get the existing Acela to Atlanta.

And maybe have an imported TGV hook up the urban Texas Triangle. Houston to Dallas, Houston to San Antonio, San Antonio to Austin an Ft Worth, Dallas to Ft Worth, and Ft Worth to Austin, Makes total sense with the pop density of this potential east Texas megacity.
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America's entire passenger train system is joke. For example it's easier and cheaper for me to drive down to Poughkeepsie and taking the MetroNorth into New York City than it is to take Amtrak here in Schenectady.

Would love to see America build a HSR system on par with Europe and improve basis service. I can see Acela across the Eastern United States and faster service like the TGV in Texas and California were there is more room for faster trains.
 

phoenix7846

Keystone Corridor is a Pennsylvania route, runs Philly to Pittsburgh. Empire Corrdior heads through upstate New York, getting at least to Albany, and where else I'm not sure.

A better (well, at least tougher) challenge with the rails is to figure out how to get actual HSR on the Northeast Corridor at all period. In reality, that HSR is only for a short segment near Boston. I would want to see how one could get HSR along the NEC that averages a good 100+ mph. Obviously one of the hard parts about that is seeing how built up the entire NEC already is, thus making it hard to insanely difficult to find a straight enough corridor to build a high speed line on. Right now, the Acela between say, Philadelphia's 30th St station and Penn Station just isn't that much faster than the regular trains (I think it averages a speed of about 65mph tops on that segment).

Catmo said:
Gotta get the existing Acela to Atlanta.

And maybe have an imported TGV hook up the urban Texas Triangle. Houston to Dallas, Houston to San Antonio, San Antonio to Austin an Ft Worth, Dallas to Ft Worth, and Ft Worth to Austin, Makes total sense with the pop density of this potential east Texas megacity.
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That would make several possible routes viable. Any particular cities to go through? Assuming we start at Union in DC, we could keep the route currently in place, maybe adding Richmond along there, so DC-Richmond-Greensboro-Charlotte-Atlanta. Maybe have a branch to get to Savannah? That would also be easier than cutting through the NEC, less people in more space, hopefully it would be easier to built that corridor.

Also, that would work some interesting effects on air travel between different cities. Obviously you wouldn't see a huge drop off in any flights from say Washington to Atlanta, but maybe Charlotte to Atlanta might become dominated by HSR. Generally speaking, every time a country gets HSR, the air routes between two cities plummet if they're within say, a good two or three hours of each other by HSR, after that, Air travel starts becoming more economical and quicker again. Example is back here in Korea, we put up the main Seoul-Busan route, just finished the Ulsan-Busan segment last year. Already, air travel to Daegu and Daejon has absolutely plummeted, a lot of people who commute domestically choose to just take the HSR. Same thing will happen with Busan in a few years (6 hour car ride or two hour flight plus check in versus a two hour-ish train ride). Same thing is happening with international visitors. They just fly in and its faster to take the trains out of the airport.

Texas, you could easily eliminate a large portion of those intercity flights if you got the whole triangle built.
 
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