Rail Reactivation in Suburbs vs. Rural Areas
On Mastodon, a longtime mutual by the nickname of Pony made a point that regional rail reactivation is a complement to road construction rather than a competitor. The context is that a study by Greenpeace has been making European media about unequal investment between roads and railways (for example, in Germany the ratio going back to 1998 has been 2.11:1), complaining specifically that rail networks have shrunk; in practice, all the shrinkage has been in very low-use rural lines. The issue is that network length isn’t a great measurement, precisely because it misses what makes public transport work; Jon Worth points out that during this era of road investment and rail shrinkage, German rail ridership has grown 40%.
The issue is that rail and road transport scale differently. Rail scales up better, cars scale down better. In low-density places, such as rural environments, trains can exist as money-losing tourist vehicles or transportation for a small, shrinking share of the population. Successful reactivation of lines outside urban areas occurs as these areas urbanize. Pony points this out:
It’s even funnier, lot of the line reopenings, the holy grail of this school of “thought”, is largely enabled by the new roads that have delivered needed demographic and economic changes to make some rail operations viable again, you’re not reopening branchlines against or to compete with new roads, you’re piggybacking on them…
We’re not doing [transit-oriented development] really, partially because the backlog of missing transit options for already existing development, partially because of incompetency, but that’s still mostly urban thing, for the most railway branchline reopenings, they are in more rural places and they are not in spite, competition or anything to road improvements, they directly correlate with them, they are not happening because someone got to their senses and figured they are going to take trains instead, but mostly because people got new economic connections through the roads that there is again enough demand for a train, but to celebrate that as somehow “reducing” and “competing with” road traffic is generally nonsense, they only do it once the road traffic hugely grew compare to the baseline during closure anyway.
This is relevant to the three German regional rail reactivation successes mentioned by Hans-Joachim Zierke as inspiration for some American proposals: the Schönbuchbahn and Ammertalbahn near Stuttgart, and Neumünster-Bad Segeberg near Hamburg.
None of these three lines leads to the main city, which is why they all lay dormant for so long, but once reactivated, they succeeded. Moreover, traffic has kept growing: the Ammertalbahn grew from 5,000 daily riders at reactivation in 1999 to 8,600 in 2019, and has recently been double-tracked and electrified. But this is not meaningfully a rural line. Herrenberg, at one end, is a Stuttgart S-Bahn terminus, with a train every 15 minutes taking 39 minutes to get to Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof and an hourly regional train doing the same trip in 31 minutes. Tübingen, at the other end, is a city, with steady if not stellar growth in both the city and the district. Herrenberg’s district, Böblingen, is adjacent to Stuttgart and has grown with the growth of the city’s economy, which is one of the wealthiest in Germany. This is a suburban orbital line, not a rural line.
The Schönbuchbahn’s history is essentially the same. Ridership grew rapidly in the 2000s until it hit the capacity of a single-track diesel line, leading to electrification in 2019 and double-track to increase frequency to a train every 15 minutes, growing ridership further. But like the Ammertalbahn, this is not rural rail reactivation. One of the Schönbuchbahn’s termini is Böblingen, the town that the district is named after; it’s a rail junction, on the same S-Bahn line that ends at Herrenberg, with additional S-Bahn service in a different direction every half hour, and additional fast regional and intercity service to Stuttgart. The line is for all intents and purposes a branch of the Stuttgart S-Bahn, with a forced transfer at Böblingen.
Finally, Neumünster and Bad Segeberg are both in the orbit of Hamburg, but are not as well connected as Herrenberg and Böblingen are to Stuttgart. Neumünster has two trains per hour to Hamburg, not running on a half-hourly Takt but rather having 43 minutes of offset; Bad Segeberg is on an hourly Takt to Hamburg. The line between them is an orbital, still unelectrified (it’s about to run battery-electric trains): it has ridership, but these are evidently not as intertwined with Hamburg as Böblingen is with Stuttgart, so the line is nowhere near so strong.
The upshot of all of this is that examples of successful rail reactivation should not be taken as evidence that rail can succeed outside major cities. It cannot: at most, it can succeed in places that, despite their protestations to the contrary, are embedded in major metropolitan areas, as those areas grow.
This is important, because much of the green movement in Europe shrugs off investments in urban rail tunnels, preferring to invest in tourist trains into rural areas or bring back night trains. There’s a lot of nostalgia and rural romanticism in a movement that exists largely in major cities and largely among people under the age of 30 (at the climate protest in 2019, the median age looked around 20). The problem is that rural rail doesn’t really work; in regions with no traffic congestion and not enough density for walkability, cars will beat trains to most destinations. Regional reactivation can work if it’s suburban as above – those towns can identify in opposition to the big city but for all intents and purposes they’re like city neighborhoods except at lower density (Böblingen even has a Green mayor).
Instead of trying to reach truly rural areas with rail, climate policy regarding rail should be to grow the cities and their immediate suburbs where rail is viable. The modal split in Berlin is high, and even in Brandenburg it is higher than the Germany-wide average (source, p. 76), due to the large number of Berlin-bound commuters. Densification of rail networks in growing regions is warranted, but this is distinct from trying to extend the mode into truly exurban places, where public transport cannot succeed.
Pedestrian Observations 
By exurban, do you mean a very low density far out suburb or do you mean a rural area? I think of the term exurban as implying that its a suburb of something, whereas rural areas I would think of as having no particular connection to a city. Some areas that I would describe as exurban, like Princeton Junction, a park and ride surrounded by patches of sprawling houses with backyard pools and patches of empty land, manage to get high commuter rail ridership. Of course, people living in Princeton Junction probably have high carbon footprints from their big houses and long drives to the supermarket, even if they take the train, so you could argue that serving these places with commuter rail is a net negative if it causes them to grow– (especially since they’d probably grow by expanding outward, chopping down more trees, rather than building up high density). However, that doesn’t seem to be the point that you’re making in this article, which seems to be about low rdership rural lines.
I use exurb to distinguish suburbs like princeton junction from ones like Floral Park which are significantly denser and more walkable.
Princeton Junction is dense enough that the Census Bureau gives it it’s own CDP. Within West Windsor Township. The station opened when the railroad was realigned in the 1860s and has always been in West Windsor Township.
People around Princeton Junction have high commuting rates to Manhattan, is the big difference with places farther out from big city orbits.
Mercer County used to be in the Philadelphia metro area. The Census Bureau shifted it to the New York CSA in 2000. Mercer County is an MSA within the New York CSA which tells me that most of them stay within the county for work. It’s popular because there is a fast train. I’m not in the mood to find a current American Community Survey.
Amtrak and NJTransit commissioned a survey soon after the Hamilton Station opened. Roughly half the people using the Trenton and Hamilton stations, are Pennsylvanians going to Manhattan. So half the people on a Trenton train don’t live in the MSA or even the New York CSA. They live in Philadelphia’s
You don’t need the ACS, there’s easy-to-use LEHD data at onthemap.ces.census.gov/ – you can select counties, or use the point tool with “county” overlay.
Assuming I used it correctly 5.6 percent of them work in New York City NY. From that, using my fourth grade math skills, I can figure out that 94.4 percent of them don’t. The biggest work destination is Princeton at 7.5 percent. I have questions. Most of them irrelevant. If Mercer County wasn’t it’s own MSA it would be a part of a bigger one. It’s not and that’s good enough for me.
….just because it’s part of the New York CSA doesn’t mean the majority of people commuting into the New York MSA work in Manhattan. I’d need a detailed ACS to figure that out. Experts at the Census Bureau already did and decided it is it’s own MSA.
I generally think of exurban as hobby farms just outside a city. They are mixed in with real farms, but the people who live there have a day job in the nearby city/suburbs, and then come home to “farm” for a few hours. Most are losing money on their farm and don’t care. Commonly they are raising horses to ride, some have a garden. There are a few neighborhoods in the area that look like suburbs until you realize that they have a lot more land, and are surrounded by farms with nothing except farms and houses close.
Suburbs look like a small town or city in that they have commercial areas in easy biking distance of everybody to do basic shopping (often the route is not safe to bike on, but the distance itself is reasonable for a short bike ride). Almost all of them have industrial parks where people can work. They are on the edge of the city and clearly economically depend on the city, but they have all the elements such that they could stand alone as a city.
The definition of an exurb is that it’s mostly rural in form, but more prosperous. Examples could be the areas around college towns or rural areas within commuting distance of cities. There’s nothing in the definition to imply “hobby farms,” though they might have them. Having grown up in my first example, where there are exactly zero “hobby farms” (but many real ones), I find your definition offensive.
The parking desert is in Hamilton. They built it because they were running out of space in Trenton and Princeton Junction. Wikipedia says it opened in 1999. Partly because the American Standard factory that had been there was redeveloped into office space. Making bathroom fixtures, or whatever it was American Standard was doing there, isn’t my idea of rural or even exurban. Whatever exurban is.
I’ve always taken exurb to me essentially a rural area where people don’t do rural jobs.
Define rural job. Does the dentist across the street from the feed store, in the county seat of Rural County do rural work or urban work. How about the cashier in the feed store. Or the people working at the grain elevator? … the bus driver that ferries farm family children to and from school and the teachers and support staff in the schools. Are they urban or rural? … “farmer” is a small percentage of the population even in places that solely exist to support agricultural production.
You just did it. Two equivalent ways to net out all the “support” workers:
1) Look at the percentage of the population that are farmers (or where the primary occupation of the household is farming, to be very pedantic) and see that it is much lower in places referred to as exurban.
2) Ask what is the economic purpose, the primary exported value-add, of e.g. the county. Is it crops, or is it the labor supercommuters perform elsewhere (or send in from their home office)?
To sum up, if a patch of countryside produces more value in spinning and weaving under the putting-out system than it produces in crops, then it is exurban and the population is ready to move to cities.
I was thinking of white collar workers, professionals, and business people that prefer even lower density that prefer even lower density and more of a rural feel than nearly all suburbs. A population ready to move into the cities or a place ready to urbanize is not exurban.
I’ve never had a transportation company ask me what kind of job I have. They don’t care if someone is too old to work either. Or is independently wealthy and clips coupons for a living. I’m showing my age, bonds haven’t had coupons in decades. How the passenger managed to pay the fare doesn’t matter. That doesn’t change that whatever you want to call someplace with few people, doesn’t have many of them. If there aren’t many people out there there aren’t going to be a lot of passengers.
Yes, the last paragraph is a joke. “Exurb” is very much a concept that is basically nonexistent until the late 20th century. That the above definition happens to classify some 18th, early 19th century landscapes (“putting-out system”, really?) as exurbs is the joke.
I think they came up with it because upper middle class suburanites who live close in like to sneer at the upper middle class suburbanites that live farther out? Since it less populated I’m sure it difficult to get good Cantonese and forget about getting Szechuan? The malls suck too.
I would define that dentist as working in a town, and so not rural. The town might only exist for the farmer (though many have some other industry that would remain if all farming in the area stopped – a factories making various widgets are scattered all over), but they are still a urban area even if only 500 people live there. A dentist could open up in his house, but I’m not aware of any case of that: they all seem to be in a town.
If the town is small enough, even if it an incorporated place, if they don’t have enough people the Census Bureau will classify it as rural.
….. dentists, who see patients, work with their hands all day, every working day. So do surgeons.
I never thought about it. All of my dentists have been in a house. It’s quite common, places that developed before World War II, for residential on busy streets to be converted to commercial.
extend the mode into truly exurban places, where public transport cannot succeed.
The definition of rural or exurban is low population. If the population is low there aren’t going to be many passengers. Because there aren’t many. Why is this a revelation?
The borders railway was getting 2 million rides a year in a rural area. Thats not shit.
There are always exceptions to the rule. That doesn’t mean it’d going to work in North Dakota.
the borders railway seems like something that Alon was describing above – a line serving the wide quasi-rural periphery of a metropolitan area (in this case, Edinburgh), rather than rural rail service par say.
The whole Scottish borders region has 115k people. Once the line leaves Edinburgh its properly in the countryside.
The reason the line works is that they stripped out all of the intermediate stops that get under 50k passengers a year and they run a good service all day.
Its a more frequent service in the daytime than Frankfurt-Nuremburg or Paris-London! And to give a rural/tourist example it is a better service than Munich-Füssen/Neuschwanstein which is hourly assuming you can make a 9 minute connection in Germany 🙈.
Albeit compared to the high speed examples the borders service is with 3 car trains not 16 car trains – but that isn’t an issue.
And all that makes sense. Railways have high fixed costs so as long as you are getting enough passengers to warrant paying the driver, fuel and marginal maintenance costs you should run the train – and just like in the city a frequent service encourages people to use the train. I suspect if the Germans ran a train every 30 minutes from Munich to Füssen/Neuschwanstein that it would make them a profit.
There is a problem of definition here. I don’t really know the region, but from what I see on the map, Newcraighall, Dalkeith, Newtongrange, Gorebridge would generally be considered as part of Edinburgh “urban area” and Galashields-Tweedbank would be considered as another smaller “urban area” of 15,000 people. Between those 2, only 1 village (Stow) has a station, all other villages are not even served. So this line is definitely “urban” with enough population to generate demand for 2 trains per hour, similar to the German lines Alon write about here. A rural line would rather be something like Inverness – Kyle of Lochalsh that can’t support more than 4 trains per day.
Ok fair. But 15k for Galeshiels /Tweedbank is pretty small. Especially given the wider area has low population density. I mean its not like one of the village stations in the Thames Valley or Cotswolds where the village is small – but there is a fairly densely populated wider area too.
Because commercial interests built a railway there in the late 1800s, and it survived until after WW2. The latter involved not just normal maintenance, but repairs of war damage. Clearly, the evidence says a line can work there! “If there’s a will, there’s a
railway.”Oh, the passengers had always been piggybacking on farm produce traffic, which had been the primary purpose of the line, and went to trucking? And the passengers themselves moved to buses, cars, and the cities, because agriculture doesn’t employ more than half the population anymore?
Depending on who you ask, they may even say that they wish to reverse the last part, that they think it would be good if more people moved to semi-rural areas. Look at solarpunk and you’ll quickly run into examples.
Something I’ve long found interesting is that early interurban promoters actually thought they were going to be passenger-primary services in many cases, but stumbled into primary freight service sort of by accident (or they didn’t, in which case they didn’t make it past the 1930s)
I am pretty sure reopening the Borders railway counts as being a success – and that is definitely a rural line. Edinburgh at the end is a city – but only a medium sized one of 400k.
The same kinda applies to tourist focused rural lines. Yes passenger numbers can be kinda moderate – but I am sure average fares are much higher than the national average.
The main group of lines that possibly don’t really make sense financially are the “rural” and “semi rural” lines in areas that need levelling up.
That said in a lot of cases the main thing you need to do is to run a decent service. The Borders railway has a train every half hour in the daytime Monday to Saturday and hourly otherwise from 6am to midnight. And the hourly train runs about 20 minutes after the fastest hourly London express – so offers good tourist connections from London at least.
Edinburgh is a city, full stop – its population is much larger than that of any of the towns on the three lines I brought up in the post.
Fair. But Galashiels, the largest place on the line is only 10k people. And the whole Scottish borders region is only 115k.
Its a train line going through some of the richest suburbs of Scotland. Its an urban line more than its a rural line. Despite Scotrail best attempts ignore it Edinburgh has an extremely good legacy rail network to build on.
The UK in general has very few rural to rural lines. And a lot of them have tourist potential (West Country and East Anglia, Central Wales/Highlands to a lesser extent).
Now you are in my position arguing we should have more cross country service to serve those places 😜
Hardly, I’m against ridiculous services like Plymouth to Edinburgh or all the weird Manchester airport ones.
Giving Boston 2tph to Nottingham or Barnstaple to Exeter are very different kinds of services. They don’t create nearly so much pressure on the timetables.
I’d want to cut Cross-country to have more regional rail services, and use Takt style timed connections.
Fair enough!
I do think most of the issues with the Aberdeen-Penzance train are on the York-Birmingham section – so with some strategic 4-tracking it would be better 😜.
That said if there are trains on the Bristol-York section every 30 minutes I don’t think doing Penzance-Birmingham, Birmingham-York and Leeds-Edinburgh/Aberdeen would be that bad – and you could offset by 15 minutes at Birmingham/Leeds.
4-track? They should just learn that passing-loops can be built outside megastations (average passing loop in UK is every 30-60km, while in Japan its 6-15).
Cross-country services should not go to York at all. Sheffield/Nottingham is acceptable. The ECML connection should be at Newark, which could be made into much more of a hub.
The other thing about tourist trains – is that they help grow the tourist industry without having to build ugly car parks or new roads. And tourists spend huge amounts of money and are very profitable.
Most tourist areas these days seem just as worried about over-tourism as tourist dollars. I think tourists mostly use tour buses on existing infrastructure. Germany isn’t really reliant for tourism compared to the rest of Western Europe. It’s probably better to make infrastructure for locals that tourists happen to use since there are far more locals.
To expand upon your point, tourism is often subject to a great deal of seasonal fluctuation. That would make it uneconomic in most situations to build expensive rail lines just to provide transport for tourists. The instances in Germany that I know about where a Museumseisenbahn runs are only where tracks already exist.
Its difficult to prove as they would probably declare “commercial sensitivity” if you did a FOI. But I suspect that the average ticket price to places like Falmouth, Newquay and Windermere is a LOT higher than average.
Newquay only gets 100k passengers a year and the branch is like 30km long. If truly the average fare wasn’t massive (like £50 per passenger) they’d have closed it long ago.
Alon’s point that successful rail depends upon the existence of adequately large population centers is clearly correct, but the Regionalstadtbahn Neckar-Alb, a project based on the Karlsruhe model of which the electrification and expansion of the Ammertalbahn is an initial segment, will hopefully prove upon completion around 2030 to be a useful example of how rail can be extended outwards from even mid-sized population centers to successfully serve relatively small towns in the rural Umland that previously weren’t considered large enough to support rail connections. The two cities which anchor the project, Tübingen and Reutlingen, have a total population of just over 200k. Many of the future stops will be in towns with fewer than 5000 residents, and a fair number of these will require the reactivation of old tracks or even the construction of entirely new lines.
The Bad Segeberg-Neumünster line felt to me more like a niche circumstance (I’ve ridden it). The line goes through Using a single DMU, it’s like a service route replacing a rural bus. It just happens to align with what would otherwise be a bus corridor while extending an existing branch, albeit missing the center of Walstedt. Therefore, the marginal operating cost of having a train is low compared to what would have to be operated otherwise.
Looking at that route, it looks like the line starts in Neumünster and then goes past Bad Segeberg, terminating in Bad Oldesloe. I wonder why there don’t appear to be any trains that go further to Lübeck, a much larger city? I could even imagine there would be enough demand to warrant a new line between Bad Segeberg and Lübeck, which would shorten the travel time between Neumünster and Lübeck further, while providing an additional possible direct, albeit more round-about route between Kiel and Lübeck.
I live in Lübeck. I hesitated to comment because there is so much on my mind.
1. nah.sh -> Karten [that’s not ‘tickets’ but ‘maps’] -> Stationspläne
nah = near (Nahverkehr “near traffic”) .sh is actually St.Helena but also some Schleswig-Holstein companies like to use it. If you would want to run a train from Neumünster via Bad Segeberg via Bad Oldesloe to Lübeck you would need to build new tracks. Anyway, Neumünster-Bad Oldesloe is dozens of passengers hourly, Hamburg-Lübeck is hundreds twice hourly, total travel time less than an hour. More trains from bigger Hamburg end at Bad Oldesloe (on the dead end tracks closer to town) and serve more stops in towns like Ahrensburg, Bargteheide and a lot of Hamburg’s North Eastern districts.
There exists an hourly bus from Lübeck to Bad Segeberg (40 min.) on weekdays and in the past, there was a railway (Kleinbahn). German-language wikipedia knows about this and if you zoom in and out on openstreetmap.org you grasp where the tracks used to be.
2. Years ago I was able to look at a Raumordnungsplan (or similar) of 1947(?) when Schleswig-Holstein state (Bundesland) already existed but West German state not. There were a lot more railway lines and even planned to add more, for example a more Western line from Lübeck to Kiel. Places like Wankendorf, Trittau were ‘hubs’ or ‘knots’ at least on the map. A new motorway was also envisaged but somewhere else than the one built later…
3. Rail history in this region is very interesting and confusing. At that time the king of Denmark was also the duke of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg, but Lübeck and Hamburg were free cities.
Speaking of rail activation, Friday, Sept 22:
— Brightline started Orlando service today
— In Delray Beach, a pedestrian was killed by a Brightline train today
I should look at it sometime in the future when there’s enough of a record to look at ridership.
Coast to Orlando is new-build through farms or never-developed.
I’m aware; I assume Reedman knows it’s intercity and not regional and just alerted me to this so that I’d know.
Reactivating rural lines by definition don’t serve cities, at least not on the rural end….
While Florida East Coast did a lot of upgrades to the existing and built passenger stations, except perhaps during some reallllly ugly strikes, it’s never gone out of service. I’m not in the mood to find out how much government loan and tax abatement went into it. There was some going all the way back to when it was built and the state gave them big land grants to go along with the railroad.
They are profitable. And hold big chunks of valuable real estate. They had the assets and income to invest money. Unlike abandoned rural lines that foamers think would be a good idea.
“where public transport cannot succeed” -> “where rail cannot succeed”?
(Is that series on national traditions of rapid transit still ongoing?)
In theory, yes. I should do an entry on Japan when I have the energy.
Reminds me of Washington states study of reactivating passenger service on the stampede pass corridor to connect Seattle and Spokane. Bad travel time, bad costs, low ridership.
The line goes through definitively rural towns that do not have ridership demand. The line also is quite slow and could have time shaved off if it used some of the Milwaukee road right of way instead from ellensburg and also possibly from Seattle, through Renton, back onto the mainline, which would mean going through even less populated territory which is (part of) why the Milwaukee road was a failure. It’s also a trail which is another complication
Intercity mostly rail can’t work in Washington state. It’s too mountainous and geographically constrained without nearly the population density to make large infrastructure investments justifiable
What about the Rhaetian Railway connecting alpine villages in Grisons, Switzerland? The biggest city in it’s 386km network is Chur with a population of 33,000. It doesn’t get much more rural than this but it seems to be working great.
It will be those tourism dollars that make it work.
And to be fair Switzerland has two season tourism. Winter for skiing and summer for walking, climbing etc etc.
The 92.5% of trains being within 3 minutes of the expected arrival time doesn’t hurt either.