page_title: Lake Shore Limited
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Lake Shore Limited / History
caption_attribution_description: English: The westbound Lake Shore Limited at South Bend station in February 1976
context_page_description: The Lake Shore Limited is an overnight Amtrak passenger train service between Chicago and the Northeastern United States. The train uses the former main line of the New York Central Railroad, part of which is now the Empire Corridor. In Albany, New York, it divides with separate sections serving New York City and Boston. Amtrak began service in 1975; its Lake Shore service had operated over the same route in 1971–72. The train is named for the New York Central's Lake Shore Limited, which was discontinued in 1956.
  During fiscal year 2019, the Lake Shore Limited carried 357,682 passengers, an increase of 5.9% from FY2018. In FY2016, the train had a total revenue of $28,563,624, an increase of 0.2% over FY2015.
context_section_description: The Lake Shore Limited is named after one of its illustrious predecessors that ran on the famed Water Level Route of the New York Central. Like the present day Lake Shore Limited, the New York Central edition offered service between New York and Boston and Chicago, although the New York Central used LaSalle Street Station. The New York Central annulled the Lake Shore Limited in 1956, as part of a system-wide reorganization. Service over the Water Level Route continued until the formation of Amtrak, with the last route being the New England States and its unnamed Penn Central successor.
  Amtrak did not include service west of Buffalo over the New York Central's Water Level Route in its original route plan; Chicago–New York traffic would be handled by the Broadway Limited which operated over the Pennsylvania Railroad's main line via Pittsburgh. For the Albany - Boston section of the route, there would be no train service from 1971 to the 1975 inauguration of the Lake Shore Limited. Between May 1971 and January 1972 Amtrak operated the Lake Shore over the route with support from the state of Ohio. The modern Lake Shore Limited began running October 31, 1975 with both New York and Boston sections.
  The Lake Shore Limited was the last train to use the decaying Buffalo Central Terminal, departing on October 28, 1979. Since then it has used Buffalo–Depew.
  On the night of August 3, 1994, around 3:45 am, the westbound Lake Shore Limited, with two locomotives and fifteen cars, and carrying roughly 320 passengers, and nineteen crew members, derailed on Conrail-owned tracks (now owned by CSX) near Batavia, New York. The initial derailment of the wheels of the third car on the train, occurred at milepost 403.7, and the train traveled for another three miles, until the general derailment of the train, at milepost 406.7. In all, fourteen cars derailed, with some sliding down an embankment, and 118 passengers and crew members were injured. However, there were no fatalities. The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the probable cause were the wheels coming off a section of flattened rail.
  Service to Poughkeepsie began on November 8, 2010. In 2010–2011, Amtrak studied restoring the Hammond/Whiting stop (dropped in 2003) but rejected it because of difficulty of routing trains to the station's single platform.
  Due to planned repair work on the Freedom Tunnel, Spuyten Duyvil Bridge, and Track 19 in New York's Penn Station, the New York section was discontinued from May 26 to September 3, 2018, and the train only ran from Chicago to Boston.
caption: The Lake Shore Limited at South Bend in 1976
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