Intermountain Rail

In previous editions of integrating our rail services, I talked about the history plus went over how the airlines are doing things this year. Today, I am going to fantasize a little to show you my ideas on how the system should be working.

Let’s start off by saying I want to travel from Palmdale, California where my sister lives to Plymouth, Massachusetts. Today I would look at the Amtrak website would say I could take a bus from Palmdale to Los Angeles then take trains to Boston and then I would have to find my own way to Plymouth.

While I guess the bus would work and it is a dedicated Amtrak bus, how about the computer showing train number 10000 from Palmdale to Los Angeles (strange think the train would actually say Metrolink), then train 4 to Chicago, train 49 and 449 to Boston and finally train number 50000 from Boston to Plymouth. Once again I would be boarding a train that says “T” on it instead of Amtrak but it gets me to my destination.

Here is another example with the help of Paul Dyson President of RailPAC, say a person is traveling from Montauk, New York to Escondido, California next summer. The computer would tell me I would board train number 60000 from Montauk to Penn Station, then whatever Amtrak trains to Oceanside California, and finally Amtrak train number 70000 from Oceanside to Escondido but in actuality train 60000 would be Long Island/MTA colors and the route form Oceanside to Escondido would have North County colors however, to the customer, they just have to catch their connecting trains, they don’t care what the trains looks like so long as it would get them to their destinations.

There is things keeping us from this dream but I will discuss that in Part 7. Next week I will go over the integration of schedules.

Part 1: Poor Integration History

Part 2: The Airlines-Code Sharing

Part 3: The Airlines-The Regional Carriers

Part 4: How it can be applied to rail passenger service

Part 5: Integration of Schedules

Part 6: The California Thruway: It Can Work

Part 7: The Politics that holds us back

John Dornoff is a principal in the Dornoff Consulting Group.