I find it particularly ironic that as the city is about to celebrate its 100th birthday, having been founded as railroad stop, it has no such service, despite being one of the world's most popular tourist destinations.
I last travelled through LV in '96, when the Amtrak service was still running. I understand that Amtrak is going through a constant struggle to get funding, but as McCarran gets busier and busier, would a case develop for a rail link at least to southern California, where a lot of the city's inbound migrants seem to be coming from?
In North America, it is Mexico, DF
Naturally, I am presuming that when you note "station", you mean "service". Both Vegas and Mexico have standing station strucutres.
Are you saying Mexico city, the largest in the world (by some measurements) has no rail station either?
And yes, I mean serviced station, a building by rail tracks without trains stopping there is not a station!
With very few exceptions, such as scattered tourist trains, the passenger train, intercity and commuter, in Mexico(country) is extinct. That was "part of the deal' when the government "privitaized' the railroads (or should I say railways, as I "sense" Mr. JABird is from overseas). Much of the capital to do so came from US railroad interests. Need more be said?
Tokyo, the First, of course has plenty of rail service.
[This message has been edited by Gilbert B Norman (edited 11-29-2004).]
The Sunset formerly came into downtown Phoenix where it stopped at Union Station.
For several years it has been rerouted and now stops for Phoenix passengers at MARICOPA, a very small town about 32 miles south of the Union Depot in downtown Phoenix.
I recently purchased a 1972 Amtrak Timetable as a collectible...if we could only have the 'Floridian' (nee: Southwind) and the 'National Limited' again......and yes, I recognize that portions of their respective routes have been abandoned so.....
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David Pressley
Of course Phoenix is larger than Vegas both by measurement within its corporate (city) limits and by its MSA.
I considered but excluded Phoenix simply because Maricopa in all likelihood is within the Phoenix-Mesa MSA.
However the point of whether six trains a week that 'show up when they show up' constitutes 'service' is indeed open to controversy.
[This message has been edited by Gilbert B Norman (edited 11-29-2004).]
Granted, it has a monorail, if they can fix the bugs, but I was thinking in terms of inter-city service.
I did look at tables of largest US cities, and Columbus was the largest stand alone city. I discounted Phoenix for the reasons mentioned above.
Yes, I am from the UK, but am very interested in travel to and within the USA. I usually take in a train trip when I go somewhere, but this was not possible from Vegas, except for the "tram" between Mandalay Bay and Excalibur, and the shuttle to/from the gates at McCarran. Driving in Vegas is a nightmare too, the road signs are terrible!
Numerous potential Corridors in the Southwest such as LA-Vegas, LA-Phoenix/Tucson, Dallas-Houston, et magna alia. go undeveloped - and the chance they ever will be developed is slim to none. There is simply no initiative whatever, either at our Federal (WashDC) or State levels of Government.
If Vegas-LA were to be developed, I'd sooner lay my money on that being a success rather than doubling down my 10 count with the dealer having a 7 up.
But the chance of having it happen is about the same as 'putting it all on one number' at the Roulette table - and hitting it!!!.
[This message has been edited by Gilbert B Norman (edited 11-29-2004).]
Vegas is only city in the top 30 US mainland tourist destinations not to have a fixed rail link, and I would imagine the only one in the world top 30, although I can't find a source of those stats.
wake up folks for i dont know how long san joaqin corridor trains have had connecting
bus service to yosimite national park.
why not have service from sherdian wy
via bus to yellow stone thats a selling point me if i ever saw one....
has anybody ever happened to look at the state amtrak california bus are registered
in i am talk about the licence plates
their wyoming tags folks how hard would it be to arange for coach usa to serve amtrak out of sheridan wy.....
This was during July 1957.
But the possibility of restored passenger service over that line I would say is nil - the track capacity is needed to keep the NE Wyoming coal a rollin'so when I reach for the light switch something happens.
every day i see less than 20 trains pass
the mustang motel that i am manager of.
even if you go east 12 miles to the juction
where trains coming from the south you
will not see more than 40 trains leaveing the all coal line between gillette wy &
orin jucntion wy 11 miles south of douglas wy. here in gillette you see that approx
3/4 of the trains are coal the rest are manefest, auto , grain, intermodal.
and were double tracked trhough here.
nothing against the sunset ltd but i rode it from ATL,GA my home to los angeles CA
and was late 1 hr turned around a week later and went from los angeles back to atlanta. (denote the delay was only between
NOL ,La and L.A.,Ca) was 7 hrs 22 min late.
so why not put a amtrak train where it could make money buy influncing the traveling public that amtrak can be on time
with a long distant train. on double track
i say again
note there are noticeable portions of the
sunset ltd that are single track and C.T.C.
coverager at all.
I also find the lack of a choo-choo to Chattanooga to be just horrible. As Vinnie the Cannon D'Amati says in The Big Easy, "Nobody has any respect for monuments any more!"
Mexico City has no long distance trains - but does have a metro. The largest city with no type of train service at all is I think Lagos, Nigeria, though there ARE, possibly, trains still running in Nigeria so this information may be incorrect. If not Lagos, then it's Bogota, Colombia. I am fairly sure no passenger trains run in Colombia, unless someone else can put me right on that.
In England the largest urban area without trains is Corby, population 59,000.
Mansfield, 160,000, lost its train service in the 1960s but now has trains again.
The irregular terrain of Colombia makes the construction of roads and railroads costly. Colombia has 3,154 km (1,960 mi) of operated railroad track. Most of the national railroads are feeder lines to the Magdalena River, the main transport artery of the country, which with the Cauca River is navigable for about 1,500 km (about 900 mi). Colombia has no regular passenger rail service.
Chris
Nigeria does indeed have a (sort of) functioning rail system, and one with passenger service to boot (just don't expect on-time performance).
Nigeria has a Cape-gauge (3' 6") network of about 2,000 route miles. There is even limited commuter rail service out of Lagos on the (formerly) double track main line.
Two members of my firm are actually in Nigeria right now, inspecting the line from Port Harcourt out toward Lake Chad.
The railroad is very run down. The signal system (British style semaphores) is non-functional and the equipment is in terrible condition, but the track on much of the network was rehabbed by the Chinese a few years ago.
So Lagos does have rail service.
Wouldn't it be cool to travel all the way down to Argentina by train!!!!
Glad someone put me right about Lagos - so it looks like Bogota wins the grand prize.
Interesting though - Bogota USED to have trains and indeed has (or had) a pretty impressive passenger terminal - I wonder which is the largest city NEVER to have seen a train?
My own candidate - Jiddah (which includes Makkah (ie Mecca)) - which has never had trains for religious reasons (the nearest the railway ever got was Medinah, on the Turkish Hedjaz Railway, destroyed by the Arab forces in World War I).
Also Kabul - though I think the British certainly PLANNED to build a railroad to there I don't think it was ever completed.
Union Pacific Railroad Company--also known as UP---and to Amtrak as UP-yours.
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Patrick