I recall being told at a MARP meeting many years ago that when the state was doing the planning for the Pere Marquette they originally were looking at Grand Rapids-Lansing-Detroit. However, when looking at the potential ridership they found that there was stronger demand for service to Chicago...
My personal opinion is that any future service going south from Detroit should be routed Pontiac-Detroit-Dearborn-Wayne Junction then south on CSX to Toledo. The CSX route is almost entirely double tracked with just a small section of single track around Romulus. This would require...
The county that Helena is in has almost twice the population of Butte. In fact I am surprised that back in the 70s they routed the North Coast Hiawatha via Butte instead of following the route of The Mainstreeter through Helena.
Years ago back in the 1990s Amtrak had a plan to implement Video ticket machines on the Pere Marquette route. The system was being developed by a company that made ATMs and would have had a video link to an agent at a manned station. IIRC the system would have also had control over station...
Just as price comparison, on my last trips on the Lake Shore and Capitol (before the downgrades) on a per night basis I was paying about the same for a roomette as I paid for my last transatlantic crossing on the Queen Mary 2. And that includes the 80% single supplement that Cunard charges. So...
Just a small correction, while the CAB did grant regional carriers more lucrative routes with the idea of weening them off federal support, much of the local service routes received direct federal subsidies as shown here in Frontier Airlines 1977 annual report...
You will see MCS as the Bus comes up I-75 from Toledo. If you don't have a car, take a taxi or the Q Line from the Amtrak station to the Renaissance Center and get the tunnel bus to Windsor...
In addition to the changes in the border crossings, the Canada Southern route that the Empire State Express/Niagara Rainbow used has been almost complete abandoned. Here is a link to the timetable for it.
http://www.timetables.org/full.php?group=19751130&item=0035