Passenger rail service coming to Roanoke by 2018

[NW Mailing List]

John,

I've ridden every regularly scheduled Norfolk Southern passenger train 
there is. ;)  More to the point, I'm an engineer for NS, and I know how 
they handle customers (especially small customers) and scheduling.  I 
also know what the attitude of most NS transportation employees is like, 
and I can tell you it wouldn't go over well with the public.  NS is 
fairly good at what the N&W was best at - moving unit trains 
efficiently.  LCL freight is more trouble than it's worth, and even 
single car spots seem to be treated more like annoying obligations that 
opportunities to excel at service and customer satisfaction.  Amtrak, on 
the other hand, understands that their entire business is built on 
efficiently moving individual passengers wherever they want to go.

I would sooner trust UPS to run passenger service than I would trust 
NS.  The steam program and heritage units are relatively minor 
inconveniences for the sake of good PR, but I just don't see NS being 
interested in running passenger service which would likely cost more 
than it makes.  If forced to do it, they would probably do what so many 
railroads have done in the past - make the service so bad and so 
inconvenient that nobody uses it and then use the low ridership as 
justification to kill the service completely.

Ken Rickman

On 12/5/2012 12:45 PM, NW Mailing List wrote:

> How many Norfolk Southern passenger trains have you ridden? Dates and 

> locations would be helpful.  John Katz


-- 
Kenneth Rickman
Salisbury, NC
Reality has a well known liberal bias - Stephen Colbert

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