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Comment by jeffasinger | Hacker News Reader

I think Amtrak could see the most success by building out to support the cash cow that is the Northeast corridor. That would mean improving service on the Northeast corridor, to improve speeds for Acela, and adding additional higher speed service to connecting cities.

Two good targets for this would be Upstate NY, where you could reduce travel time to Buffalo from 8 hours to 5 hours, and make travel to Chicago and Toronto much less painful. Improving the Philadelphia -- Pittsburgh route would also make a lot of sense too.

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Philly to Pittsburgh is longer than DC to NYC, or most of the ridership of the Acela put together, wouldn't serve all that many people, and would be at least a 4.5 hour trip even with the unlikely assumption that you'd get Acela's average speed for the whole trip.

I'm also not sure what building out NE service does to make Chicago more accessible. Chicago is prohibitively far from all of the east coast cities to make NE rail meaningful.

I think you may have misread, improving service along the NYC-Buffalo route, which is part of the route to Chicago, would speed up the trip to Chicago. Shaving off 3 hours, means that someone could get on a train in New York at 6PM, and arrive in Chicago at 9AM, which while for most people isn't competitive with flying, it is a reasonable and comfortable way to make the trip.

No, I understood the subtext; I just don't think a 10+ figure capital expenditure that leaves us with a best-case 15 hour trip from NYC to Chicago is a good use of funds. The person who suggested a high-speed post-security rail route from Penn Station to LaGuardia and JFK had a better idea. The person who called Amtrak SF-LA 12 hour service a "tourist attraction" had the right idea, too: under any imaginable scenario, that's what NYC-Chicago rail would be.

Would that it were otherwise! I live in Chicago and have lots of friends and business associates in NYC. :|

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