Talk:Michigan Executive

Clarification

This short page needs some major clarification. First, I'd suggest seperating out pre-Amtrak service into a seperate category, maybe something titled "history." After that, we need some major rewritting to distinguish whatever train serviced Chicago from the commuter service. As everything reads now, it's incredibly muddled. --Criticalthinker (talk) 16:56, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

I guess what's confusing is the different truncations as the route started to fail. For instance, the article seems to imply that the westbound train was cut out, entirely, meaning no one was going from Detroit westbound, which seems strange. The eastbound truncation also seems strange. Are we saying the eastbound from Jackson only went to Ann Arbor, or rather than the line only operated eastbound from Ann Arbor into Detroit? If that's the case, we're talking a service that literally went in only one direction, which I imagine is incredibly rare. --Criticalthinker (talk) 17:02, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Rare, but more common in the pre-Amtrak era. My understanding is that the other corridor trains covered the westbound service. You can see here on the 1982 timetable that the Michigan Executive was eastbound only. Probably the Twilight Limited equipment (train 354) deadheaded to Ann Arbor, ran to Detroit the next day as the Michigan Executive, then turned as the Wolverine. Mackensen (talk) 22:51, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

After finding another source, I was able to work this out in my mind a bit better. Still, I think I'll make the structural changes to the article to try and make it read more smoothly, pre-Amtrak stuff in a "History" section and Amtrak history in a "Description" section. Anyway, from the source I read to sum this all up, the Michigan Executive was started by the state in 1975 (operated by Amtrak) and for a short time, they were actually able to booster ridership over the former Penn Central commuter service. However, by the early 80's as downtown Detroit as an employment base began to collapse, ridership started dropping sharply, and westbound service was eliminated in 1982 leaving whatever was left of commuters trying to commute from Detroit to the suburbs to find service on existing westbound intercity Amtrak service in the morning. Cutting Jackson off also seemed to have happened around this time, but that's not made specifically clear. So, by 1982, this basically left a single eastbound morning train into Detroit from Ann Arbor. Along with westbound commuters being left to intercity service, those who did end up making this trip outbound from Detroit on intercity trains then had to return on intercity trains in the evening. Crazy, crazy, schedule, I'm sure. --Criticalthinker (talk) 15:02, 17 November 2015 (UTC)