3 replies to this topic

[KevinKorell]

Pleasant View, UT is a city in itself, and is also considered to be a suburb of the city of Ogden. It is currently the northern terminus of FrontRunner commuter rail. So why doesn't the itinerary have us going there?

When both the original FrontRunner North and the new FrontRunner South were built, they received their own exclusive right-of-way next to the UP freight tracks. This eliminates intererence between the two modes. However, north of Ogden, the exclusive track merges into the freight track, thus passenger trains must coexist with freights. UP is only allowing two morning southbound trips that originate in Pleasant View, and in the evening, two northbound trips terminate in Pleasant View, and then return south to Salt Lake City. Thus a "railfan" type round trip such as we would take is only possible using one of these two evening trips.

The earlier of these trips would leave Salt Lake City at 5:20 PM, getting to Pleasant View at 6:39 PM. The return trip would leave Pleasant View at 6:54 PM and get back to Salt Lake City at 8:41 PM. The later trip is exactly one hour later than those times. Now consider that much of the return trips, particularly the later run, would be in darkness. The issue I have is dinner. If we took the earlier trip, it would mean a 4 PM start for dinner, something not at all strange to me but too early for many. And it would mean a rush since we would still have to be at Central Station before the 5:20 PM departure. An hour later would mean something a little more leisurely, but again it's going to be dark well before we get back at 9:41 PM. If we do the FrontRunner on the same day as our late night Amtrak departure towards Reno, it only leaves us about 2 hours in case some need to go back to hotels to pickup luggage.

Without Pleasant View, trains operate on headways of either 30 or 60 minutes between Ogden, Salt Lake City, and Provo. We would have no problems covering the majority of the system... just not the northernmost 6 miles beyond the Ogden station. An extension further north to Brigham City is well into the future, and upon our return to the area to ride that, we would then see Pleasant View.


You can see the very sparse service at Pleasant View on this timetable.

So the question here is, just how much is total coverage important to everybody? Are we sufficient with riding 82 of the 88 miles of FrontRunner, or are you willing to endure a very early rushed dinner or riding in darkness to achieve the new trackage?

[steve4031]

I lime the spaghetti factory. That's worked well in the past. I did a quick routing check on my app and it looks to be 30 minutes from central station so doing spaghetti factory makes the pleasant view trip impossible. I don't think there is any kind of food near central station. So eating nicely and doing this appears difficult.

[KevinKorell]

Steve, the reason it's 30 minutes is probably because the light rail system is currently oriented towards the south, so that to go from Central Station (on TRAX Blue Line) to Trolley Square (on TRAX Red Line) you have to change trains at the Courthouse station just south of where they meet.

[steve4031]

I saw that. There is a 15 minute wait at courthouse on a random timing that I pulled up for today. Perhaps this was a Sunday schedule with longer head ways.