Quote:
Originally Posted by aquablue
I wonder would there be enough ridership potential to support HSR between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with continuing service to NY/DC?
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Probably, given hourly service. Harrisburg-Pittsburgh achieves extremely high ridership for being a daily route.
Of course, the obvious problem is then the fact that you can do
maybe a 110 mph average in the current right-of-way, with high tilt and enough straight stretches to cancel out the worst slow spots (like the Susquehanna crossing), that further improvements require extensive cutoff construction, and that if you want a truly high-speed right-of-way (~150 mph+), you're going to need to carve a (very expensive) new ROW right through the heart of Appalachia.
All of this means that NYC-Buffalo, the Water Level Route alignment, is at least an order of magnitude less expensive to develop than Philly-Pittsburgh, the Broad Way alignment (because the Water Level, as its name suggests, is very flat, and the gap it runs through, the same one as the Erie Canal, is very straight).
Among other things, this means that while it's probable that (if our Legislature gets its act together) we can extend 90-100 mph service to Pittsburgh around the same time New York can extend 110 mph service to Buffalo, it's entirely possible to develop a 110 mph Buffalo-Pittsburgh corridor and ramp up Water Level service to a higher standard while the Philly-Pittsburgh market for such service is still being made. That is, unfortunately, technical reality.
By the way, I agree with Johnboy's assessment that if the daily train from Pittsburgh to points west wasn't a red-eye, more people would use it. Since Pittsburgh is where two different historic passenger alignments from Chicago to points east--the
Capitol Limited and
Broadway Limited--diverged, it's entirely possible to restore the NYC-Philly-Pittsburgh-Chicago daily train (most lately known as the
Three Rivers), schedule it in such a manner that it would leave Pittsburgh to points west midday instead of midnight, and run it in opposition to the
Daily Pennsylvanian, which would then become a section of the
Capitol Limited's midnight departure...prior, that is, to implementation of hourly or two-hour service on the corridor.