Quote Originally Posted by catch22 View Post
It’s the easiest path forward in a state hell-bent on not expanding rail service and barely supporting the current train.

The BNSF mainline into Kansas is a well maintained, modern route capable of 60-70 mph timetable speeds. The current rail line to Tulsa is a 25-30mph line that is in rough shape and needs significant technology upgrades in regards to signaling. The price tag to get to Tulsa may be too much to stomach for an already skeptical legislative body and executive branch.

Newton can theoretically get started tomorrow if there was a train ready to go. All that really needs to be done is final coordination and negotiation with BNSF (which honestly is a battle in its own, but not foreign territory as Amtrak already runs on BNSF all over the western countryside) as well as investing in stations and sidings along the way.
Basically, this. Amtrak wants this expansion badly enough that they're willing to use federal infrastructure money to pay for the startup costs and the extra operational costs for a few years; it's important to Amtrak because the expanded train's schedule will perfectly slot in with scheduled stops in Newton for the Southwest Chief and in Fort Worth for the Texas Eagle, enabling connecting traffic without requiring an extreme detour. Also, as unfundedrick mentioned, it brings Wichita, KS back into the national passenger rail network, which various parties in Kansas have been working towards for years - they lost passenger service in 1979 when Amtrak discontinued the Lone Star. It's been estimated that this service extension could more than double the Heartland Flyer's pre-pandemic yearly ridership. And as catch22 mentioned, BNSF maintains the line that the expanded service will use to a high state of repair; if my memory serves me correctly, with some exceptions in Kansas, much of the planned route is currently maintained to Class 4 standards. That should allow for a maximum permissible speed of 79mph for passenger traffic, so aside from perhaps some capacity improvements (new or lengthened sidings) hopefully it shouldn't be a huge lift to get the service going.

The line to Tulsa, on the other hand - known as the Sooner Sub - is maintained only to Class 3 standards (60mph max), and also contains many curves, both of which require trains to operate more slowly. This isn't an outright roadblock to service - the line once hosted 2 different passenger trains from OKC to St Louis when it was owned by the Frisco (aka the St Louis-San Francisco Railroad) - but it may mean that such a service today might not meet modern expectations. A Frisco timetable from 1959 shows that at best, the Meteor - an express service with only 2 intermediate stops in Bristow and Chandler - could make the trip in as little as 2 hours 20 minutes; on the other hand, the Will Rogers - a local service along the same route that served 13 intermediate stops - took just about 3 hours. Today, driving from downtown to downtown via I-44 takes approximately 1 hour 30 minutes. Because of that speed limitation and the resulting longer travel times that could potentially impact regular ridership, the route just isn't as sure a bet as the extension to Newton.