One of the things that makes it a relatively cheap service to operate is running it essentially as an extension of an Albany-terminating NY Empire Service schedule - and that gets NY to pay the subsidy for the NY portion of the run, not VT.

The problem with that is, you can only get away with doing that cheaply with timeslots that work for NY + operational considerations.

What they're currently doing is taking advantage of the overnight to reduce the amount of additional equipment/crew that has to be dedicated to make the service happen.

If you wanted an earlier northbound train, there are two problems:

• There's not much in the schedule to work with - the only Albany-terminating train that's earlier is 3hrs earlier. Still not much of a day trip if you get in at 5pm. The earlier trains are heading West after Albany.

• It'd likely be sitting idle for more hours that a train is usually operating. If the Northbound train pulls into Burlington at 5pm, now it's stuck there for the night given the >7hr running time to NYC.

If the train had spent the same amount of time as a Southbound to NYC from Albany and pulls into NYC at 5pm, it'd likely be headed out for at least one more service that night.

The current time-slot with a 10PM Burlington arrival + 10AM departure allows pretty full utilization of the "normal" travel hours with minimal down-time. 12hrs off probably also means they've only got a single crew to have to lodge overnight/pay.

If the service got faster, more possibilities would potentially open up for better scheduling.

The other point is that all or most of the existing service is really tailored towards longer-distance travel. This makes sense for a very infrequent train - you're more likely to tailor your schedule to the train when it's already going to be a "big trip" occupying much of the day, and timings on the NYC end of the train are pretty ideal for maximum traveler appeal with a 2:19PM NB departure/5:46PM SB arrival.