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I live in Manhattan, Kansas and man, do I wish we had Amtrak service to Denver! It would be fantastic to board a train here in E. Kansas after dinner and wake

I live in Manhattan, Kansas and man, do I wish we had Amtrak service to Denver! It would be fantastic to board a train here in E. Kansas after dinner and wake up on the Front Range. We have a track--I'm nearly certain that it's BNSF-owned--that runs right through town. It doesn't seem heavily used, maybe 3-4 trains daily, but the trains run fast and are long. Most are made up of bulk grain cars but there are some mixed trains, too, with containers and boxcars and even the occasional wind turbine blade train. Surely this track is good enough for passenger service.

jessaustin 8y ago
Manhattan, as Kansas's most important college town, is perfectly emblematic of Kansas's screwed-up transport routes. Interstate 70 passes ten miles south of Manhattan, through barren prairie without a gas station for 25 miles in either direction. (ask me how I know!) It's not as though somebody decided there was something more important to visit at that particular latitude; they just decided not to go through Manhattan. When I must drive through Kansas I typically take US-54 instead. That road actually transits inhabited areas. The same moron who designed I-70 must have drawn up the Amtrak routes too. Traveling from Kansas City to Denver? Why the hell would anyone do that? If you're in Kansas City, you must want to go to La Junta CO, to smell those stockyards. (Literally, that's all the town has. Stockyards. Maybe two restaurants? Also tumbleweeds.) Kansas is sort of like Siberia, in that fifty years from now when the population has completely collapsed it will be recolonized by more visionary people from more visionary places. No I'm not talking about Johnson County.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  D'oh! Of course I meant longitude...