Most likely, this new car order is NOT going to give Amtrak any new service starts. At best, it will allow Amtrak to retire the last of its Heritage cars they got from the railroads in 1971, and that will leave only the 5 Pacific Parlour cars for the Coast Starlight and their last remaining dome car "Ocean View" as the only ones left.
The car order will allow for split operations of Silver service trains in Florida, south of either Jacksonville or Orlando, and then run separately to/from both Miami and Tampa; no more silly dog leg runs on the Silver Star between Auburndale and Tampa.Also, it should allow for a daily Cardinal, restoration of Sleeper car service on the overnight Northeast Regional between Boston and Newport News, and through car service on the Capitol Limited and Pennsylvanian (Chicago-Pittsburgh-New York).
Anything else is a pipedream.But where will the Florida trains be split and what routes they will take is yet unknown. If no new routes are the case, then you can bank on an Orlando split.
Obectively speaking, I feel that the current form of the Silver Star is no more or less a New York-Tampa only train, that has had its schedule dovetailed into a phony version of the former ORIGINAL Silver Palm that was run by the state of Florida briefly in the mid 1980's.
Yes, we do need a local train Tampa-Miami, and Amtrak has proved alone that there is a market there. That was one blessing that this "dogleg" version of the Silver Star has done. However, once the Florida Silver service trains go back to split operations, we need to convince Amtrak to designate one or two sets of push-pull Amfleet equipment to be brought down to Florida to be used for a Miami-Tampa corridor service.This would also fulfill the proposal of making Lakeland an in-state transfer point, the original purpose of which it was built for. How about a bid on those Wisconsin Talgos?