THE EVOLUTION OF THE NATIONAL NETWORK.

Here's a Small Beginning from a part of the country that Amtrak's Passenger Rail network forgot.  "'The state has submitted an identification application to the Federal Rail Administration (FRA) for service from Memphis east to Nashville, on to Chattanooga, and to Atlanta,' Amtrak CEO Stephen J. Gardner said." Tennessee's Passenger Rail advocates have been busy for some time.

The routing, however, is new.  Years ago, the main line of the Nashville Chattanooga & St. Louis ran Memphis to Nashville to Chattanooga to Atlanta, with the line into Atlanta being that of the Western and Atlantic, famously the line of the 1862 Great Locomotive Chase.  The railroad's Official Guide entry in fact provided one passenger service timetable for that main line, although no train ran through from Atlanta to Memphis, and passengers for or from Memphis had at best inconvenient connections with the Atlanta trains at Nashville.  (Go here and scroll for a 1952 Guide entry.)

At the time, the railroad was a subsidiary of the less ambitiously named Louisville and Nashville, which linked those cities, additionally extending as far northwest as St. Louis; northeast to Cincinnati, competing for passengers with Chesapeake and Ohio; southeast to Montgomery, Alabama; and southwest to New Orleans.  Trains from Chicago to Atlanta were on Chicago and Eastern Illinois to Evansville, Indiana; the Atlanta cars ran through from Chattanooga on the old Western and Atlantic, and a lot of car swapping took place at Evansville or Nashville.  The N. C. & S^t.L?  Got no closer to St. Louis than Metropolis, Illinois, across the river from Paducah, unless Superman picked up the trains.

Good.  From time to time, there are people hoping to push a German-style Neubaustrecke from Atlanta to Chattanooga.  A regional network linking Memphis with Atlanta, and connecting trains at Louisville for Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, as well as Indianapolis and Chicago, and, Superman willing, St. Louis, using conventional trains with dependable connections among frequent trains, no more of this one train a day stuff, strikes me as more cost-effective, particularly in a part of the country that lost interest in its regional passenger trains long before the Interstate Highways were run through all the way from Chicago or Detroit into Tennessee, let alone onward to Florida.