Amtrak’s Floridian line is temporarily coming back — just not through Nashville.
The rail service announced in September that the Floridian with service from Miami to Chicago was coming back starting Nov. 10.
But the new route takes passengers north through Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia and Washington, D.C. before heading northwest toward Chicago.
The route does not follow the original path of the Floridian in the 1970s through Nashville and Louisville, a fact surely to bother longtime rail buffs in Music City.
The original Floridian ran through Nashville and into Alabama but Amtrak halted the service in October 1979 amid cost cutting measures recommended by the federal government. A legal battle to save the Floridian went all the way to U.S. Supreme Court.
The Tennessean in a September 1979 editorial called on the Floridian to be saved, noting an uptick in passengers amid rising gas prices. “With the price of gasoline going up and the supply still in doubt, the Floridian could help in the conservation effort the administration has been calling for,” the editorial read.