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Re: The "Desert Wind" never quite came close to the City of Los Angeles.
Author: BOB2
Date: 11-05-2024 - 21:12
The saddest thing about the long history of services from LA to LV and Utah, is that the City of Los Angeles was often full and running a dozen cars, as late as discontinuance in 1971.
And I could never figure out why it was not included in the original Amtrak network that was kept as it had the kind of ridership that the Super Chief/El Cap had back then. With better ridership than the run-down crappy "automat" SP Coast Daylight did at the "end".
The Desert Wind, like the Coast Ghost, never seemed to be serious efforts by Amtrak (and the neglect by Amtrak of the Capitols, SJV's, and LOSSAN is why these corridors are now run by the locals). The Desert Wind even started for a while to develop a pretty good ridership and passenger miles again.
But fortune did not favor the DW, as it always seemed like a train that Amtrak was running grudgingly, as a temporary afterthought, despite both the actual ridership potential and previous ridership history, until it would just "go away". Which it finally did, leaving a lot of folks complaining about it ever since, but to no avail with Amtrak.
The fact that Brightline is now building HSR today and plans to run Miami Orlando style rail passenger service levels at a profit, is the greatest proof of Amtrak's own lackluster performance and failed opportunity. It is a testament to the history of what I used to call the "Philadelphia" syndrome at Amtrak, where from the narrow and myopic view at Amtrak Headquarters, for the first forty years of its existence, that there was no real passenger railroading to be done anywhere west of 30th Street...
When the 2008 Rail Act was passed which gave locals control of the short distance corridors, and when folks started to actually take away Amtrak's neglected short distance routes and put them under the local corridor operators, Amtrak mostly whined and held back equipment that could have been filled with actual happy "Amtrak" customers. Thus, as a result of that long history of neglect and even an attitude of disdain by Amtrak management, the new Connecticut Valley corridor services are now not run by Amtrak, either.
Amtrak, sadly or maybe ironically, has always been an amazingly popular "brand" with the general public, without much of a marketing vision to match it. We've done all kinds of travel behavior surveys on why people would take trains, and one thing that comes back over and over, is that folks would definitely take more trains, if we would only bother to actually run more real "trains", a lot more often, to more places that people wanted to go.
And I could never figure out why it was not included in the original Amtrak network that was kept as it had the kind of ridership that the Super Chief/El Cap had back then. With better ridership than the run-down crappy "automat" SP Coast Daylight did at the "end".
The Desert Wind, like the Coast Ghost, never seemed to be serious efforts by Amtrak (and the neglect by Amtrak of the Capitols, SJV's, and LOSSAN is why these corridors are now run by the locals). The Desert Wind even started for a while to develop a pretty good ridership and passenger miles again.
But fortune did not favor the DW, as it always seemed like a train that Amtrak was running grudgingly, as a temporary afterthought, despite both the actual ridership potential and previous ridership history, until it would just "go away". Which it finally did, leaving a lot of folks complaining about it ever since, but to no avail with Amtrak.
The fact that Brightline is now building HSR today and plans to run Miami Orlando style rail passenger service levels at a profit, is the greatest proof of Amtrak's own lackluster performance and failed opportunity. It is a testament to the history of what I used to call the "Philadelphia" syndrome at Amtrak, where from the narrow and myopic view at Amtrak Headquarters, for the first forty years of its existence, that there was no real passenger railroading to be done anywhere west of 30th Street...
When the 2008 Rail Act was passed which gave locals control of the short distance corridors, and when folks started to actually take away Amtrak's neglected short distance routes and put them under the local corridor operators, Amtrak mostly whined and held back equipment that could have been filled with actual happy "Amtrak" customers. Thus, as a result of that long history of neglect and even an attitude of disdain by Amtrak management, the new Connecticut Valley corridor services are now not run by Amtrak, either.
Amtrak, sadly or maybe ironically, has always been an amazingly popular "brand" with the general public, without much of a marketing vision to match it. We've done all kinds of travel behavior surveys on why people would take trains, and one thing that comes back over and over, is that folks would definitely take more trains, if we would only bother to actually run more real "trains", a lot more often, to more places that people wanted to go.
