Passenger Trains > A couple from Cary

Was in Cary, NC yesterday and caught a couple of Amtrak trains on the way to work.  In the first shot, Piedmont train 73 is seen at a private crossing off Chapel Hill Road a few miles west of Cary Station.  In the second sequence, train 92, the Silver Star, makes a double stop at the Cary Station, which is located at the point where the Piedmont and Silver Star routes split.

Dave

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Thank you for the video.

Amtrak has ruined this good train (Silver Star).  It was 18 cars full of people as recently as the late 90s.

MEKoch Wrote:
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> Thank you for the video.
>
> Amtrak has ruined this good train (Silver Star). 
> It was 18 cars full of people as recently as the
> late 90s.

Interesting video! Does seem like a short in-season Florida train. Silver Star needs a handful of mail and express cars! ;-)

Well the proliferation of low fare airlines flying from all major northeast markets to all over Florida as well as some markets in The Carolinas also has a lot to do with the consists shrinking since the 90s.

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The double stop seems stupid & inefficient.  For a brief time, when the new baggage cars were "brand new," they were operated on the head end & only a single stop was required.  Now, for whatever reason(s) the new baggage is back on the rear.  The heritage bags were handled on the rear.

nsrlink Wrote:
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> The double stop seems stupid & inefficient. 

Yes, it clearly illustrates why LD trains are slow and why RRs don't like them on main lines.  92's stop took about seven minutes, even though only a few passengers boarded and detrained.  I don't think the S line is that busy, but last month I watched #2 take a full 20 minutes to triple-stop at Maricopa on the busy Sunset route, all to board and retrain less than 20 passengers.  Probably makes Amtrak pretty unpopular with drivers stuck at grade crossings during morning rush hour.

Dave

An 18-car Silver Star would probably have to make three spots at Cary. The pre-Amtrak Silver Star didn't stop at Cary, which had a population of 8,000 in 1970. Today its population is 160,000. There isn't a good site to relocate the station to, and there's no way to build a long platform where the station is. 

The Silver Star, the Silver Meteor, and for that matter the Crescent are much shorter compared to the 1980s. Of course some of the Florida passengers are on the Auto Train which has more capacity with Superliners than it ever had in the 1970s. But overall, the expansion of Southwest Airlines into the Florida-northeast market has had a huge effect. Last I saw, there were about 10,000 seats a day on nonstop flights between the northeast and Florida. On most of those city-pairs, Southwest or JetBlue sets the price for all airlines. This was not the case in the 1980s. If Amtrak ran an 18-car Silver Star today, it would run largely empty unless Amtrak lowered the fares to ridiculous levels. Meanwhile Amtrak's cost to run the trains would increase, and I suspect the bottom line would get worse even if they could fill the additional cars with $75 fares between the northeast and Florida.