How High-Speed and Regional Rail are Intertwined
The Transit Costs Project will wrap up soon with the report on construction cost differences, and we’re already looking at a report on high-speed rail. This post should be read as some early scoping on how this can be designed for the Northeast Corridor. In particular, integration of planning with regional rail is obligatory due to the extensive track sharing at both ends of the corridor as well as in the middle. This means that the project has to include some vision of what regional rail should look like in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. This vision is not a full crayon, but should have different options for different likely investment levels and how they fit into an intercity vision, within the existing budget, which is tens of billions thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework.
Boston
In Boston, commuter rail and intercity rail interact via the Providence Line, which is double-track. The Providence Line shares the same trunk line into Boston with the Franklin Line and the Stoughton Line, and eventually with South Coast Rail services.
The good news is that the MBTA is seriously looking at electrifying the trains to a substantial if insufficient extent. The Providence Line is already wired, except for a few siding and yard tracks, and the MBTA is currently planning to complete electrification and purchase EMUs on the main line, and possibly also on the Stoughton Line; South Coast Rail is required to be electrified when it is connected to this system anyway, for environmental reasons. If there is no further electrification, then it signals severe incompetence in Massachusetts but is still workable to a large extent.
Options for scheduling depend on how much further the state invests. The timetables I’ve written in the past (for an aggressive example, see here) assume electrification of everything that needs to be electrified but no North-South Rail Link tunnel. An NSRL timetable requires planning high-speed rail in conjunction with the entirety of the regional rail system; this is true even though intercity trains should terminate on the surface and not use the NSRL tunnel.
Philadelphia
Philadelphia is the easiest case. Trenton-Philadelphia is four-track, and has sufficiently little commuter traffic that the commuter trains can be put on the local tracks permanently. In the presence of high-speed rail, there is no need for express commuter trains – passengers can buy standing tickets on Trenton-Philadelphia, and those are not going to create a capacity crunch because train volumes need to be sized for the larger peak market into New York anyway.
On the Wilmington side, the outer end of the line is only triple-track. But it’s a short segment, largely peripheral to the network – the line is four-track from Philadelphia almost all the way to Wilmington, and beyond Wilmington ridership is very low. Moreover, Wilmington itself is so slow that it may be valuable to bypass it roughly along I-95 anyway.
The railway junctions are a more serious interface. Zoo Interlocking controls everything heading into Philadelphia from points north, and needs some facelifts (mainly, more modern turnouts) speeding up trains of all classes. Thankfully, there is no regional-intercity rail conflict here.
Washington
In some ways, the Washington-Baltimore Penn Line is a lot like the Boston-Providence line. It connects two historic city centers, but one is much larger than the other and so commuter demand is asymmetric. It has a tail behind the secondary city with very low ridership. It runs diesel under catenary, thanks to MARC’s recent choice to deelectrify service (it used to run electric locomotives).
But the Penn Line has significant sections of triple- and quad-track, courtesy of a bad investment plan that adds tracks without any schedule coordination. The quad-track segment can be used to simplify the interface; the triple-track segment, consisting of most of the line’s length, is unfortunately not useful for a symmetric timetable and requires some strategic quad-track overtakes. The Penn Line must be reelectrified, with high-performance EMUs minimizing the speed difference between regional and intercity trains. There are only five stations on the double- and triple-track narrows – BWI, Odenton, Bowie State, Seabrook, New Carrollton – and even figuring differences in average speed, this looks like a trip time difference between 160 km/h regional rail and 360 km/h HSR of about 15 minutes, which is doable with a single overtake.
New York
New York is the real pain point. Unlike in Boston and Washington, it’s difficult to isolate different parts of the commuter rail network from one another. Boston can more or less treat the Worcester, Providence+Stoughton, Fairmount, and Old Colony Lines as four different, non-interacting systems, and then slot Franklin into either Providence or Fairmount, whichever it prefers. New York can, with current and under-construction infrastructure, plausibly separate out some LIRR lines, but this is the part of the system with the least interaction with intercity rail.
Gateway could make things easier, but it would require consciously treating it as total separation between the Northeast Corridor and Morris and Essex systems, which would be a big mismatch in demand. (NEC demand is around twice M&E demand, but intercity trains would be sharing tracks with the NEC commuter trains, not the M&E ones; improving urban commuter rail service reduces this mismatch by loading the trains more within Newark but does not eliminate it.)
It’s so intertwined that the schedules have to be done de novo on both systems – intercity and regional – combined. This isn’t as in Boston and Washington, where the entire timetable can be done to fit one or two overtakes. This isn’t impossible – there are big gains to be had from train speedups all over and there. But it requires cutting-edge systems for timetabling and a lot of infrastructure investment, often in places that were left for later on official plans.
Pedestrian Observations 
If the JR Central backed NEMaglev project succeeded, and they use completely new tracks (due to being maglev) as well as having station location completely separated from current regional rail (As can be seen from design choice of Chuo Shinkansen in Japan, Texas Central, as well as the initial Baltimore to DC segment of the maglev proposal), how much would they impact the regional rail operation along the area?
Apologies for asking a silly question, but if the HSR station location is completely separated from regional rail, how do people get to/from the HSR trains?
(This being America, I am afraid that the answer would be “NYC HSR station is now in Secaucus, NJ, so we can fit a nice big parking lot”)
They get on the suburban trains on the same platform(s) as the intercity trains now. If they are silly enough to build a totally separate system it could be across the platform. Or perhaps up and down between platforms at the busier stations.
Metro or buses
But JR Central is actually planning large car parks for all intermediate station of Chuo Shinkansen, all three planned Texas Central stations, as well as the Baltimore station of the NE Maglev. The BWI station of NE Maglev will co-locate with the airport terminal and share the airport’s car park, while the Washington DC station will be a few metro stations away from Amtrak’s station.
For Chuo Shinkansen project, they have specifically opted to place the Yamanashi station near a highway exit instead of near existing train line, saying that it would improve access to city center through buses or cars. The local government there tried to overturn the decision but failed to come up with an analysis that can persuade them to, as most people in Yamanashi travel by car so the report have it that convenient highway access can benefit more, and even building the station near the old train line would still take a relatively long walk to nearby train station that people won’t find it convenient to walk, and the site near train line seems to have less development potential, according to my memory.
…..NE Maglev…..
If you think they are going to carve new ROW through a hundred miles or so of some of the richest suburbs on on the planet. I want your dealer’s number.
I mean HS2 goes through some of the richest suburbs on the planet and while it is controversial it hasn’t been cancelled. If you build some stations for those suburbs where appropriate and give them some money to spend on community improvements that you could get a railway through those areas.
It’s not maglev either.
Fair.
The published DC to Baltimore section route alignment, seems to pass through many green lands and few built up area.
@adirondacker12800 Why do you think them being Maglev matter, most of the route would be tunnel anyway, and if the Chuo Shinkansen project proposal is of any indicates, then any above ground sections near any settlements are likely wrapped inside noise barriers either.
There’s some farmland between the northern suburbs of Baltimore and the southern suburbs of Philadelphia. It’s suburban from the southern suburbs of Philadelphia to New Haven.
I never looked at it closely because it’s “deep cavern station” followed by “deep cavern station” with some more deep cavern stations. It doesn’t send trains to the rest of the Southeast or to New England, Upstate New York and Canada, or Pittsburgh/Ohio/Detroit, The only thing that would be faster than 90 minutes, using conventional rail, would be Marine One departing a Manhattan heliport and landing on the White House Lawn.
Someday far far in the future Manhattan might need another pair of tunnels between New Jersey and Queens. They can avoid a deep cavern station in Manhattan by double decking tracks 7 through 14 at the existing station. They have to begin that the moment Gateway opens, before demand increases and they can’t do it because they don’t have the capacity.
“From southern suburb of Philadelphia to New Haven” is just ~100 miles long. Not to mention their plan for now is until NYC only.
It doesn’t send trains to places with less demand because they focus on demand of large cities, just like other JR Central projects. I don’t think they have announced where to build their NYC station yet, but I suspect development potential will play an important role in decision making process. Existing stations are unlikely to provide such opportunity hence it’s unlikely they would use Amtrak stations.
No it’s not. Off the top of my head in nice round numbers it’s 75 railroad miles between New Haven and Manhattan and 90 between Manhattan and Philadelphia and another 25 to Wilmington. The Great Circle distance between the New Haven Airport (HVN) and Wilmington (ILG) is 180 miles. It goes over Long Island Sound and through Brooklyn.
http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=ilg-hvn
…or 290 kilometers. http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=ilg-hvn&MS=wls&DU=km
Looking at the satellite footage there’s a fair amount of non built up land close to the 295 road which is their chosen route – https://www.bwmaglev.info/index.php/project-documents/maps
The Baltimore-Washington Parkway?
The highway mostly maintained by the National Park Service? It is a park.
It’s undeveloped so that the passenger-car-only traffic has scenic vistas to view on their trip. It also puts the traffic noise behind a lot of trees on the residential side. Digging a tunnel along the whole thing so the trees can regrow in artful arrangement with something not-seedlings, approved by National Park Service landscape architects, sounds pricey to me.
Why would trees need to be regrow if they are using tunnel boring machines?
If they are using tunnel boring machines why do they need to go under the highway?
Balimore’s only maglev station being at the airport sucks. Unless you happen to live in a suburb near the airport. Or have a business conference scheduled at an airport hotel.
It takes a half hour for the light rail to get from the airport into downtown Baltimore. I’m not going to spend half a day attempting to find proposed schedules. 60 minutes between Washington D.C. and New York City implies 50 between BWI and NYC. 90 minutes between DC and NYC, on conventional high speed rail implies 75 between Baltimore Penn Station and NYC Penn Station. I’m sure Congressional aides from the hinterlands would love it. They won’t have to deal with the perimeter rule at DCA. That’s not a big market. Nor is the one for conferences at airport hotels.
There are enormous garages at the BWI train station. It’s not as busy as Penn Station Baltimore. It’s never going to get built. While the Northeast Corridor has a resemblance to the Tokaido Corridor it’s not. I don’t see there ever being enough demand to have two ways to get between Union Station in D.C. to Penn Station in New York.
The Baltimore station will be at Cherry Hill. The airport station is for the airport.
And I guess a reason why they still choose to tunnel along highway despite having TBM, is that in the US, tunneling still require obtaining right from surface land owner?
It wouldn’t, but then it would be a completely unaffordable project. (Shinagawa is a compromise location, because it would have been too expensive to get to Tokyo or Shinjuku.)
I thought they picked Shinagawa was due to them having their own land in the area, as well as ease of airport acceds?
Shinjuku should not cost more, because there’re already reserved space for Joetsu Shinkansen extension/Kei’yo Line extension.
Tokyo station is also just a few more kilometers of tunnel boring with tunnel boring machines away anyway, main difficulty and cost of building station there most likely come from the structure of Tokyo station itself?
I think cost was the major factor of not extending it to Tokyo station. The tunnel would have to dive under the already very deep Keiyō Line platforms meaning even more cost for the Station. JR Central is already having major cost blowouts for the Chuo Shinkansen stations under construction at Shinagawa and Nagoya. The JR Central owned land at Shinagawa could still be developed if the line was extended to Tokyo. The Maglev stations are much larger, 60m wide vs 42m wide for conventional Shinkansen due to wide track center spacing.
There are still a lot of issues that JR Central has to worry about like the line capacity limitation to 10tph, tight substation spacing of 25km vs 60km for conventional Shinkansen, air-craft style boarding using telescopic gates at each door, the list goes on. This Japanese blog goes over it in more detail. With so many unresolved issues, it’s highly unlikely JR Central would be able to export this technology to any market let alone Baltimore – DC.
Wouldn’t it be possible to avoid that by building a station through west of Keiyo line’s end point, aka the proposed New Tokyo station site for Tsukuba Express Southern Extension, or the New Tokyo station for Keikyu-Keisei through service line?
JR Central owned lands in Shinagawa can still develop in its own right without a Chuo Shinkansen station there, but it wouldn’t be as valuable, would it?
The capacity figure cited in your link, with 10 trains per hour, seems to refer to the capacity they target to offer at that time as of year 2010, instead of any actual technical limit? The table also cited Tokaido Shinkansen as having a max capacity of 13 trains per hours, but as we know the line is now running up to 18 trains per hours including non-operating trains.
And by “tight substation spacing of 25km vs 60km for conventional Shinkansen”, does that mean power substation? I cannot find any result saying “25km” on Google, but according to graph http://ictkofu.sblo.jp/article/187727043.html , the substation spacing between 境川 substation and 都留 substation appears to be longer than 25km by track distance.
Aircraft style boarding will probably match with their planned introduction of airlines style ticketing (fully reserved and they want to make the reservation process fully online, as well as having their own pricing system that will be detached from rest of the network).
The blog you linked by questioning JR Central’s decision to build the Chuo Shinkansen by citing different ways of making investment, but those examples being cited doesn’t make sense. Current schedule based on short turnaround time, and double deck trains will most likely need longer turnaround time thus making it necessary to reduce the number of trains, cancelling the benefit of introducing double deck trains (N700A can carry 1300 people while the double deck E4 Max can carry 1600 but only with 6-abreast seats, so the capacity increase from double decking would also be very limited). Reducing fare also doesn’t make sense when there are no additional capacity to absorb additional induced demand. Funding other JR companies also have no return of investment and is a nonsense decision as a private business. It also tried to say the Japanese society do not need a bypass for Tokaido Shinkansen but the ridership count of Tokaido Shinkansen speak otherwise. And the economic analysis it cited is also very short term, focusing on depreciation at the beginning, without considering that it’s something that will fund the company for century to come.
And, according to my understanding, the planned export of the trains to Northeast corridor is to provide economic of scale to the Chuo Shinkansen project, hence partially solving the problem of Chuo Shinkansen being one of its kind have limited commonality and cannot spread out the cost of investment, with the length of the first section from DC to Baltimore being a rather short line, which role can be said as similar to the current Yamanashi experimental line or Shanghai Pudong airport maglev line, thus can be said as demonstration in nature, but just that it will also carry revenue-generating passengers unlike the Yamanashi line.
I have wondered with high speed 2 about whether you could have got a lot of value by adding a further two tracks from Watford junction to Milton Keynes or perhaps to the Northampton branch junction and then using the DC line for the local trains from harrow and Wealdstone to Watford Junction and how much that would have cost? I presume it’d be a lot cheaper than HS2.
And assuming 125mph/200km/h running throughout and with Alon’s standard padding and speed you could do London-Milton Keynes-Preston-Glasgow slightly quicker than the London to Glasgow HS2 timing.
(I’m assuming you’d also have a Birmingham to Edinburgh train with a cross platform interchange at Preston for the other stops)
You can’t do 125mph running throughout because of curve radii, and you have to close lines for long periods of time to straighten out routes (indeed, a large part of the initial argument for HS2 was that, by building a new line, you only have to close existing lines for very short periods of time while you connect a junction, plausibly as little as a single weekend closure).
I’m sure the curves that don’t permit 125mph running can be straightened out!
Absolutely. The argument for HS2 was that the cost of the closures needed while straightening them out was greater than the cost of HS2.
This tended to involve lots of hands being waved in the general direction of WCRM, which was the previous set of straightenings.
The main bit that’s tricky is from harrow and Wealdstone to just north of Watford junction where the semi-fast trains from London to Milton Keynes are stopping. Most likely I would tunnel a pair of fast tracks from just south of harrow and Wealdstone to just north of Watford junction. Then I would expand the west coast mainline to 6 tracks to the junction with the line to Northampton. Most likely bypassing Leighton buzzard to the west but otherwise largely following the existing alignment. Most of the time there looks to be a decent amount of space for building another two tracks without too much disruption. On top of that in the south you might need to get a couple more tracks through rugby station.
The other option would be to cut across from harrow and Wealdstone to Stanmore and have the express tracks coming round through the countryside and Leighton Buzzard to the east.
Then I guess if you wanted to run more local trains into London (but whether there’s the demand for that I don’t know) you might want to add another few platforms at Euston. This would be expensive but how much it would really cost I don’t know.
Frankly most of the improvements would be bringing the line north of Preston up to 125mph running where you should have pretty much free reign and can put people onto rail replacement busses on the M6/M74 for as long as it takes.
Alternatively the semi-fast trains and the goods trains could share the Watford DC line with the local trains and then use all 4 of the other tracks for express trains for the tricky bit in outer north London. And there’s space for another pair of tracks off the DC line for the short section where it goes through the middle of Watford – with only 3 stops between that and harrow and Wealdstone for mixed speed running.
@Matthew Hutton most of the route is so curvy that straightening for >200kph speeds is almost as expensive as building a new line. Unclear for example how you straighten this: https://www.openrailwaymap.org/?style=maxspeed&lat=52.78438852391397&lon=-2.0013999938964844&zoom=12
I think tilting trains can do 125mph on a fair chunk of the west coast main line – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Main_Line – presumably all of those 110mph bits. Still it looks like a fair chunk of the whole route is 110 which is surprising. That’s certainly an interesting map!
You mentioned the Zoo Interlocking in Philly. I’ve recently become a Philly -> Newark commuter and it’s really astonishing how slow Amtrak is from 30th through the zoo almost to North Philadelphia Station. Is this the same issue as the interlocking or a different maintenance/scheduling problem?
There’s easily 5-10 minutes added on trip time just here.
> Wilmington itself is so slow that it may be valuable to bypass it roughly along I-95 anyway.
This probably makes sense operationally, but it seems politically inadvisable to try to push Delaware’s nose out of the trough.
All the trains can go to all the platforms. With some minor exceptions, for instance the southernmost tracks at Penn Station New York don’t have third rail and the northernmost don’t have catenary. If, conceptually, there are four trains an hour from DC to New England, another two that terminate in New York and two that don’t go north of Philadelphia, two or three of them can stop in Wilmington. The rest of them can surf around Wilmington at 300, 350 kph without slowing down in Delaware. Or most of Maryland, Pennsylvania or New Jersey either.
… the express train that won’t be stopping at the station, doesn’t have to not-stop between the platforms.
In the presence of high-speed rail, there is no need for express commuter trains – passengers can buy standing tickets on Trenton-Philadelphia
The current SEPTA schedule looks pandemic-y to me. I seem to remember one express train in peak direction, weekdays. They don’t run to Trenton for the thundering herds of Trentonites who want to go to Philadelphia. Half of the ten stops between Trenton and 30th Street are in Philadelphia itself. People from Mercer County don’t go much of anywhere, to work. Which is why it’s own Metropolitan Statistical Area. In the New York Combined Statistical Area, not the Philadelphia CSA. The numbers might be a bit out of kilter because people who live in Pennsylvania and work in New York, or New Jersey, don’t have a Mercer County residential origin.
The express can leave on the hour and the local follow it two minutes later. Repeat a half hour later. The Harrisburg-New York, Kodama-like train, that stops at North Philadelphia if it stops in Philadelphia at all, can stop in Trenton at :15 and :45. Along with a twice an hour Temple to New York it would be eight trains an hour.
Zoo Interlocking controls everything heading into Philadelphia from points north
And points west. I think the Pittsburgh-New York Subway is part of Zoo. It controls trains between the west, to and from, the north too. Or could, they don’t do that often anymore. Anecdotal evidence is that the Keystones from Harrisburg empty out at 30th Street and fill up with Philadelphians going to New York. The Keystones can be split into three, Harrisburg-DC, Harrisburg-New York and Suburban or even Temple to New York…… Crayonista think spending tens of billions of dollars so the high speed trains stop at Philadelphia City Hall is a good idea. If there’s that much demand for City Hall they can use Suburban without spending any money. They did in the past, there were even trains from Suburban to the terminal in Jersey City at Exchange Place.
Moreover, Wilmington itself is so slow that it may be valuable to bypass it roughly along I-95 anyway.
I-95 would be a longer bypass through developed neighborhoods. It seems to be in a trench for a few blocks in Wilmington. It has quite a few curves in it. Along I-495, which roughly parallels the PRR freight bypass of Wilmington, is much shorter, straighter and is undeveloped or commercial/industrial. Wilmington is almost exactly halfway between NY and DC. It would be okay if a slightly slower train stopped there twice an hour. A Kodama-ish one that terminates in New York and Hikari-ish one to Boston would be nice. Wilmington is becoming a banking/financial center because of lax Delaware laws. Once an hour through Wall Street, someday, would be good. Four intercity trains an hour, one to Harrisburg, one to Wall Street and two to Penn Station New York means there might be seven or eight trains an hour going to Philadelphia.
There are only five stations on the double- and triple-track narrows – BWI…
They didn’t ask you and have approved plans to four track it through BWI. Wikipedia says for 9.4 miles or 15.1 km. Whether or not they find the money, it was approved in 2016, is another question. If they haven’t started to dig holes the FONSI will be too old and people will sue over that. It does seem a bit excessive because someday far off in the future there might be six intercity trains an hour and three or four MARC trains. That might partly be that they’ve traded electric trains for diesel trains that are slower.
loading the trains more within Newark but does not eliminate it
Huh?
The demand is south/west of Penn Station Newark. And the demand on PATH is north/east of Penn Station Newark. Wall Street trains, in some far off future must go through Penn Station Newark.
Until then the plan is to send trains to Penn Station New York. Conceptually the Morris and Essex trains get paired up with the “Erie” trains using the “Loop” at Secaucus. Plans for that are bit hazy. One of the ones I’ve seen, combined with the obsolete plans for ARC, would have the M&E stopping on the upper level and the Erie trains on the lower level. For delightful cross platform transfers to Hoboken and someday Wall Street, for the Erie passengers. The M&E passengers already have that at Broad Street Newark.
They get 23 trains an hour in and out of Penn Station now. Anecdotally, if you parse all the schedules, sometime in the past when NJTransit had more money, there was a 60 minute period when it was 26. Through Wall Street would be less complicated. …. every six minutes from Hoboken or Journal Square, on PATH, and every three to five from Newark is more than 22 an hour, through Grove Street or Exchange Place…To keep the arithmetic simple, 24 an hour, through Wall Street it could be four branches on either side with service every ten minutes. Through the magic of cross platform transfers or up, over and down, at Jamaica, it’s less than a ten minute wait.
PATH trains are “IRT” loading gauge. I leave it up to you to compare the capacity of ten car PATH trains with 12 car M7s/M8s. East Side Access trains to terminals in Newark would be every five-ish minutes at Penn Station Newark and every ten at Broad Street Newark. It would be expensive. But less expensive, for express service, than splattering local trains all over the place. They could do very very clever things on the New Jersey side like have Wall Street trains every 20 minutes to Summit and every 20 minutes to Montclair, every 20 minutes to Ridgewood via the Main line and every 20 via the Bergen. The Penn Station-Suffern express could go via the Main and stop in Paterson! Vaguely like the LIRR seems to be plotting with East Side Access trains.
In order to bring my rambling about the west coast mainline in the UK to the topic. If the northeast corridor was 125mph throughout with Swiss logistics then a train could do Boston – New York City – Philadelphia – Baltimore – Washington DC in 4 hours dead. And I’m assuming a 5 minute stop penalty for New York and Philadelphia.
The squiggly bits are in Connecticut. The rest of it, with a few tunnels or bridges here and there, that you would need for 125/200 anyway could be a lot faster. There are long stretches west/south of New York that are 135 that would need new catenary and rebuilt track for 200/325.
There are, roughly, four times as many people on Long Island as there are along the New Haven Line. Many of them would be using New Haven. With a very straight ROW that is already owned by the government by one agency or another on Long Island. Re-imagine things.
Wait, how? Boston-DC in 4 hours is an average speed of 180 km/h, which does not exist anywhere with that top speed. Berlin-Hamburg is around that with a top speed of 230 km/h and pretty straight tracks. The NEC has pretty sharp curves in southeast Connecticut, conveniently the easiest segment to bypass with a high-speed alignment…
The slowest part is between New Haven and New York. This is very tidy. Westerley is twice as far from NY as New Haven. It takes an 1:43 for an Acela to make it between NY and New Haven and 1:10 for a Regional, that can’t tilt, to make it between New Haven and Westerley. The squiggly part of the NEC is “Connecticut”
The calculation which is probably wrong is.
The distance (by road) from Boston to Washington DC is 441 miles. At 125mph that would take a raw 3.528 hours or 211.68 minutes. Add 3 minutes to speed up and slow down, 5 minutes for NYC, 3 minutes for Baltimore, 3 minutes for Philadelphia and you get 225.68 minutes. Multiply by 1.07 and you get 241.5 minutes or 4 hours 2 minutes.
It’s 453.4 railroad miles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Corridor#Stations
Whatever road route Google suggested is probably a bad idea. Did it actually go through Philadelphia or did it suggest the New Jersey Turnpike? …..It doesn’t matter. The idea of doing that makes me twitch.
Rounding either off to 440 makes life a lot easier. It’s an average of 110 if it’s a four hour trip.
450 in three hours is real easy too. it’s an average of 150.
For TRE-PHL, the local/SEPTA tracks should be together out of Zoo (SSAA), with the NB track crossing over to the East side somewhere around Frankford (SAAS). See Ben She’s google map https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?hl=en&mid=1mkVoIHSHuzx2Xb9bTKlxO6pClnlWOuVo&ll=39.98579704330081%2C-75.29065293995318&z=10