I’m Giving a Webinar Talk About Penn Station
The model that I’ve been blogging about is going to be the subject of a Zoom webinar, on Thursday 9-28, at 19:00 Berlin time or 13:00 New York time.
The talk will be in conversation with New York Daily News reporter and editor Michael Aronson, who has been very passionate in private conversations with us about improving rail service in the area and criticizing poor project management and high costs. In particular, he may yet save the Gateway Project three years, advancing capacity that much faster.
Specifically, the issue is that the existing tunnels between New Jersey and New York, the North River Tunnels, were heavily damaged in Hurricane Sandy, and require long-term repairs. The preferred alternative is long-term shutdowns of one track at a time, which is not possible until the Gateway tunnel (the Hudson Tunnel Project) is completed and would take a total of three years across both tracks then. The alternative is to do those repairs during weekend shutdowns. It is commonly believed that already there is repair work every weekend, and the timetables through the tunnel are written with the assumption that traffic can fit on a single track every weekend, giving a 55-hour shutdown period once a week. However, Michael found out that over a four-year period ending in 2020, the full shutdown for repairs was only done 13 times, or once every three months, and most of those shutdowns were not for repairing the tunnels themselves; in the following year, no shutdowns were done due to corona, and subsequently, the sluggish pre-corona rate has continued. If the repairs are done every weekend as the timetable permits, then it should be possible to wrap up simultaneously with the completion of the new tunnel, saving those three years of shutdown.
Pedestrian Observations 
This time may be inconvenient for me. Will the webinar be recorded so I can watch it later?
Yes, we’ll record.
When does demand increase enough to need four tunnels? Probably years.
there are things that don’t happen over a weekend like the curing time for concrete. They can remove concrete, set forms, pour concrete and have it cured enough to run a train over it in a weekend?
Concrete curing is weekend-scale – I’ve been repeatedly told in Boston that this specific reason is why they do weekend closures of some lines rather than wrapping up everything overnight.
Concrete curing depends on chemistry and tradeoffs. They regularly reopen freeways to truck traffic just 6 hours after pouring concrete for a patch. Though if the freeway isn’t in use anyway (rebuilding a bridge) they will let the concrete cure for a month or more. The month cure is much cheaper, and probably a little stronger. However an engineer would need to consider trade offs. Weekends for curing is probably a good compromise for a line you want back in active use soon, but don’t want to spend too much.
There are a gazillion specifications for concrete. The usual suspects get hard in a few hours, don’t reach something close to full strength for a week and are almost there in month. It very very slowly gets very slightly stronger over a much longer period. How well it cures depends on the specific formula and whether or not it was kept wet for a month. And what is added besides cement, sand, gravel and water. And how much water… Add something fibrous and it needs less or no steel. Pre-cast things can be cured in something other than ambient conditions and that changes the results… There are a gazillion specifications.
The North River Tunnels will be 125 years old when Gateway opens. The replacements (not repairs) they need cannot be done in a series of weekends. The tunnels should be stripped to the lining and everything operational installed new. The Hudson Tunnel Project EIS shows this is basically what they are planning (slab track not ballast, etc.).
You can’t pull out track/ballast, take down catenary, cut cables, jackhammer out side benches, seal/grout cracks in the lining, install waterproofing, install drainage pipes, pour a track slab, install new conduit and wire, pour new side benches, install rails, put up catenary, and test all of the signals and life safety systems you cut to gain access to the lining, all in 55 hours from Fri night to Mon morning, even if for just a section.
Or, if you could do this, it would be ridiculously more expensive, starting with paying for all work on overtime. The inefficiencies of stop and go work are huge (testing the fire alarm every week instead of just once, wasted set up and take down time each weekend, etc.) You shorten time to full capacity 3 years, but lengthen the rehabilitation project 9 years; paying project staff for four times as long.
You could call this a once-in-a-generation opportunity but actually it is once-in-four-generations. The 18 months a tube would be out of service represents just over 1% of its life since 1910. 99% planned availability is really good.
Also if something goes wrong during intensive repair (cause a big leak, blown circuit, concrete fails and you can’t attach track) you are now down to one tunnel come Monday morning, too much risk.
…Just like railfans can forget passengers and staff bring their stomachs, bladders and bowels along with them they can forget other non-symbol-manipulators bring them to work too.
I’m not sure about “overtime”. It would be very difficult to find people who want to work continuously from Friday evening to Monday morning. It would be unsafe and probably illegal. ( things kick in at 12 hours. I’m not in the mood to spend hours looking at New York and New Jersey labor regulations. It may be illegal to work more than 12, regularly, without a waiver. ) 48 hours would be covered by a 12 hour “day” shift and a 12 hour “night” shift. That’s only 24 hours for each employee and they would likely want a full week’s pay to work it. It’s also unlikely there would be something else, at another site, for them to do 16 hours a week. 40/24ths is 1.66.. So it’s a two thirds premium versus half. Or same pay for a 40 percent shorter work week!
It’s a good thing to have shifts overlap. Things don’t always go according to plan. It probably has to be three shifts so they overlap and when something doesn’t go according to plan they can work past 8 hours. I’m gonna stop thinking about it.
There are older tunnels in New York, and in other cities with early subways. Subway tunnels don’t really depreciate and don’t really need replacement.
And excuse me, but delaying the opening of four-track Gateway by three years because of weekend overtime is just daft. None of what you say is what the idiots who are in charge of these agencies are saying to defend themselves; when Michael asked one of the Amtrak high-ups about this, the high-up insisted that Amtrak really does do repair work in the tunnel every weekend, the agency is that clueless.
You are living in some fantasy where it goes from 20 trains an hour to 40 instantaneously.
The day after Gateway opens it’s not going to be 40 trains an hour. NJTransit doesn’t have the equipment and it will take time for demand to build. Depending on whether or not “the Erie Loop” in Secaucus is open it may take longer or be like MidTown Direct’s opening where they were scrambling for more trains. It depends on how much LIRR and Metro North demand builds too. In 2019 they couldn’t have eastbound morning rush hour trains evaporate into Sunnyside. Or westbound evening rush hour trains appear from Sunnyside. The LIRR was sucking up capacity. During the three years they can finagle things that involve Sunnyside.
It’s not going to be 40 trains an hour the day after the tunnels are complete. Concrete takes time to set. People can’t work from Friday evening to Monday morning. It takes time to train the staff for the equipment they don’t have. It can’t be the day after the tunnels open either. It takes time for experienced staff to qualify to use them. Come back to planet Earth.
Yes, there are older tunnels, such as the Thames Tunnel, which was closed for three years in 1995 then another two in 2007 during major maintenance such as a new shotcrete lining, tracks and signals. They didn’t do the work on the weekends.
I never said the tunnel itself needed replacement, just all of the systems inside it. Those do depreciate.
Set aside cost for a moment – the issue is you probably just can’t do the work required during weekend windows. There are high voltage feeders in the tunnel, you can’t move them and energize them a few days later like plugging in an extension cord. You can walk on concrete a few hours after it is poured, but you are not supposed to drive on driveways for three days. One reference for a precast slab track system calls for 48 hour cure time for grout. Precast slab track elements are often cured for 7 days, which tells me cast-in-place slab track probably needs more than a weekend to achieve sufficient strength.
But lets say you can do it. Baseline is three years of work at 40 hours a week or 6,000 hours with 50 work weeks per year. If you work 55 hours for 50 weekends for 12 years that is 33,000 hours. All weekend and late night work is at an overtime or double time rate, so you are looking at 8 to 11 times the labor cost. Running a project for twelve years instead of three means 4 times the overhead and management costs. You widely criticize projects that cost 4-10 times what is needed.
What is daft is ignoring the risk. If a major leak is caused or uncovered after the new tunnels are completed the impact is zero, the tunnel with the leak was already out of service. If it happens on weekend work you have a crisis because come Monday a critical piece of national transport infrastructure is down. It would also be daft to conduct a less thorough rehabilitation to avoid this problem, only to have something un-addressed fail a few years later requiring a multi-year shutdown after the full four track service is up and running.
All all of that cost and risk to do what, get a four track line instead of a three track? Given that NJT only uses a single track inbound or outbound at rush hour currently, after the two new tunnels open you have already doubled capacity to Manhattan, with space in Sunnyside to store the extra trains. Bi-directional through running doesn’t exist today, as advantageous as it is, getting it in 12 years instead of 15 isn’t nearly a benefit to offset the cost and risk, especially when you can still get the increased service to NYC.
Just because executives are clueless or don’t make the same arguments as me doesn’t mean my arguments are not true.
The problem with ad libbing your own argument for why it can’t be done on weekends is that I’m staring at a lot of old tunnels whose systems are being repaired in nighttime windows, and even more whose systems are repaired in weekend windows. It’s notable, for example, that Paris keeps the summer shutdowns to places where the RER and Métro are redundant with each other; it’s easier to do it this way than to run service every day (or every weekday), but the latter is possible.
And no, a three-track Hudson tunnel is out of the question. Asymmetric service is incredibly expensive to run (it’s done today and the costs are insane), and there are some nontrivial capacity issues that a) are moot today because the two-track NRT is a bigger constraint and b) become moot with the full opening of Gateway because the two tunnel pairs would be feeding different parts of the station. Crossing many tracks’ worth of opposing traffic isn’t easy to timetable, and asymmetric infrastructure doesn’t lend itself well to a simple Takt where you can ensure there are no conflicts.
I gave an example of a tunnel closed completely for reconstruction and your reply is that Paris . . . closes lines completely when there is a redundancy because it is easier than night or weekend work. Well, obviously the Gateway tunnels are the redundant line that allow the NRTs to be closed in turn for easier work.
The most cursory check shows that RATP is fully closing Line 14 for 26 days this year between Jul and Nov in two blocks of two weeks so please don’t try to sell “they do everything on nights and weekends”.
The type of work that RATP is doing nights and weekends is nothing like what is proposed for NRTs. Line 11 is testing new rolling stock. Line 4 for platform door installation. Line 1 for track alignment. RATP is doing repairs. NRTs need reconstruction.
The benches are higher than platforms which is an egress safety issue; they have high voltage lines in them so you can’t lower them without cutting traction power. There are still wooden(!) ties in the tunnels, they need slab track. Embedded cast iron (conduit, ladders, drains) should be removed so chlorides from Hurricane Sandy can’t further degrade the concrete. There are known cracks but half the liner is behind ballast/benches, they must be removed to survey/repair beneath them.
The tunnels should be fully rebuilt on the inside. No one builds train tunnels on the weekend while running service during the week.
A three track tunnel is absolutely in the question for a few years if it allows critical work on nationally important infrastructure. Asymmetric service is bad, but it’s existed for decades on all NYC commuter rail, the world won’t from 36 more months without a takt. RER E was originally the “East-West Express” but will have been running for 25 years as an stub before it gets to Nanterre and becomes a through-route RER – should this have been “out of the question” for Paris? Don’t let better be the enemy of good. Take the good and work towards better.
Even if all you can do is 30-35 tph because of crossing conflicts, no one will say “This isn’t a full 48 tph!” Instead everyone on the Main/Bergen/Pascack lines will be thrilled they get some Midtown Direct. Everyone will be even happier in three years from increased frequency and through-routing when you ramp up to 48 tph.
Onux isn’t ad libbing. He lives on planet Earth not planet Railfan. Where people work 8 or perhaps 12 hour shifts, concrete is difficult to remove, inspections have to be made once it’s removed, problems that have to be remediated are discovered, concrete takes a week to cure, and everything has to go through extensive testing before passengers run through it. Schedule that 600 times over 12 years of weekends instead of once.
They wouldn’t be crossing tracks they’d be running through the same way they would in your through running fantasies. I still want to know how 4 Hudson Line trains, east bound at Tenth Ave and 40-ish NJTransit trains eastbound at Tenth Ave become 30 eastbound LIRR trains, 6 New Haven Line trains and 20 to Grand Central and beyond.
Michael Aronson explained on video how a lot of those arguments are contradicted by e.g. advice Amtrak got from London Bridge Associates; I’ll link to the video when it’s uploaded.
Onux, railfans have lost sight, that passenger railroads exist to move passengers not trains. It takes time for demand to appear. It’s hazy whether or not it will because things look different after management discovered, in 2020, that people can work from home. How long will take to soak up a 50 percent increase in service, from 20 commuter trains an hour, to 30? Projections can be wildly off, like they were with Midtown Direct, but it takes time. Three years of standing room only, like they tolerate now, won’t be the end of the world. … it might be for the bus companies in Bergen and Passaic counties but it won’t be the end of the world.
“e.g. advice Amtrak got from London Bridge Associates”
The LBA Report had a number of issues:
1) It assumed 100% of planned shutdowns would support reconstruction, which means that for 3 years the other tunnel would get no maintenance windows, raising the risk of service disruption from normal breakdown. Wait, wouldn’t you be rebuilding both tunnels at once and just include maintenance at the same time? No, their plan was for 31 months on one tube then 31 month on the other.
2) The report suggested you could place slab track at 250m per weekend based on construction of a new-build tunnel in France/Spain, but then gave as an example a London Underground project that poured slab track in an existing tunnel at 10m per shift – a rate five to six times less than what they planned (and there was no other work going on in those tunnels). Another example was a 12 day full outage to install just 500m slab track, which isn’t exactly weekend work.
3) Other rates of work are equally fantastic, such as installing 2km of cables per overnight shift. Or all pipework in the tunnel being stripped out in 1 week.
4) The schedule/logistics was a mess. They had up to 9 separate activities underway at once, with no thought if they could happen simultaneously. For instance, the slab track laying plan very clearly said old ballast and ties would go out one end of the tube and concrete would come in another, but there are supposed to be fire main brackets installed in two places and 8 separate gangs of electricians installing electrical cable – with the tunnel blocked by the slab track equipment how will the work trains for the other groups get in, or did LBA assume the workers would be carrying all of their tools and material by hand a couple kilometers each shift?
5) The plan involved unrealistic assumptions for utility relocation. Everything was going to be duplicated before the old utilities were removed (obviously, if the tunnel stays in service), but there isn’t really enough room to double up every system. One thought was installing a second set of high voltage cables in one tunnel to power the other tunnel during its refurbishment. The worst part here isn’t the waste of installing 18 km of high voltage cable for temporary use, it was the caveat that they “assume can configure circuits” to power one tunnel from another. Also, those HV cables have to be fire rated, normally done by encasing in concrete (right now they are in the concrete benches). The LBA solution was to place the temporary cables in a fire rated box, but those are 2’x2′ which means they would take up too much of the current 3′-3″ walkway to continue to walk on it which means there is no way for workers to install all of the other utilities they want to hang on the tunnel lining.
6) Their examples of successful projects include a road tunnel, a railway building (not even track or tunnel), new-build non-refurbishment tunnels like HS1, etc. Only the London Underground project came close in scope, and again it was track replacement in short tunnels of a few hundred meters, on land, with no simultaneous utility relocations, yet still at a rate far slower than what their schedule showed.
7) “Confined working environment” was assessed as an “unlikely” risk. I wish I was making that up.
At best the report shows that with proper mix specifications (special additives, exacting aggregate selection) it is possible to remove sleepers and pour new concrete slab track to cure in a few hours for use. But it is a long from that to “you can remove and replace every system in a 4km tunnel on nights and weekends over a few years” or “its a good idea to take the risk that a construction mishap will sever the NEC because there are no redundant tubes yet.”
What was that line by the mayor in The Wire: “You want it to be one way, but it’s not.” LBA saying something or Michael Aronson repeating it doesn’t make it true.
“No maintenance windows” is how it works now, with how few weekend shutdowns there are.
And then there’s the issue of the L train doing it in weekend windows with the same Sandy damage.
Also, you’re misquoting The Wire – “you want it to be one way, but it’s the other way” is a line by Marlo Stanfield to a security guard he’s deciding to kill just because he wants to kill someone to feel better about himself, not by Carcetti.
Ah, someone finally brought up the L tunnel shutdown.
1) L tunnels already had slab track, so they didn’t have to remove ballast and pour new.
2) L benches were already platform height, so they didn’t have to cut them down.
3) With no high voltage lines, everything could be hung on the wall in normal conduit.
4) With existing systems staying in place, they only had to install new, instead of the inefficiency and complexity of shutdown/cutover/restart of systems.
4b) This also means there was low risk of service disruption, because the existing signals, etc. used to run trains each week were not under construction during the weekend.
5) The reduced scope of work means the tunnel is expected to need another refurbishment in 40 years, instead of 80 after the full shutdown.
6) Because they were not shut down with the tunnel, the cost for upgrades to L stations in Manhattan almost doubled.
For the L, the switch to weekend shutdowns (basically no bench demolishment) may have been the right choice. But the North River Tunnels don’t have that option (among all the differences above) so it’s not a viable choice there.
My quote may have been inaccurate, but the sentiment remains exactly on point: “You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way.”
Almost forgot, “no maintenance windows” is NOT how it works now. Your own post said there is a shutdown for maintenance every three months or so, however irregular. Maintenance every three months, even if only as needed, is a lot different than no maintenance for 31+ months.
Which brings up another point, if the non-construction tunnel has an issue you would have to devote a weekend maintenance period to it, which means you would have to cancel the rehabilitation work for that weekend, but still pay the contractor who was fully mobilized, then pay for the missed work at a higher rate via change order, plus additional overhead for the schedule slip. The inefficiencies and costs just compound and compound.
Maintenance every three months is not significant here. The issue is that this is not continuous maintenance in the other tube, where it’s not possible to interrupt. This is weekend maintenance; you can miss a weekend, in which case you delay the final completion by a weekend, which is fine if you build in about 10% slack for the one weekend in three months you need to do additional work.
Many railfans think skyscrapers and arena sit on dirt. That all trains can go everywhere and will meet the platform edge. The real world has pesky details that have to be evaluated on a case by case basis. It’s much more fun to airly wave them away and discuss, for instance, that the evil NYCDEP was being irrational when it said, this a paraphase “You can’t go near water tunnel 1 until it goes out of service for inspection and repair”. Endlessly even though that was pertinent for a project that was canceled.
Maybe in 40 years there will be a proposal to quad track the L/14th Street/Carnasie line and send half of the westbound trains into New Jersey and half of them to the Upper West Side. I’ll be dead in 40 years and I would settle for the shit I was being promised in 1970.
….maintenance. When the weather is very cold the the leaks and the condensation from warm humid tunnel air meeting frigid air forms icicles. Left alone and growing they would short out the catenary. Or do. The immediate solution is to send a crew out there to beat them with sticks. I’m sure the following weekends there is an elaborate inspection. In railfans world it’s always sunny in Philadelphia. Even at midnight, so the tracks and platforms are sunlit. Shit happens in the real world.
….. I’ve checked, again, with friends who live in the outer boroughs and use an open air subway station. Underground subway station are smelly, dirty, smelly, noisy, smelly, hot in the summer, smelly, vermin infested and smelly. Nobody cares that they aren’t sunlit. Sunlit is highly overrated.
There isn’t going to be demand for 40 trains an hour a week after Gateway opens for revenue service.
You are losing sight that trains running through the third tunnel can RunNnNn ThroOougHhh! to the
New Haven line or Sunnyside and be balanced with LIRR trains evaporating into or magically appearing from West Side Yard. They can finagle things for three years while demand builds to 31 trains an hour.
Closing a tunnel once and reopening once 18 months later is a lot less risky very likely cheaper. And can be finagled to 19 months and a week without serious disruptions. Versus closing hundreds of times on Friday and reopening for Monday morning rush hour.
….. Try to keep two or three things in mind. Including that it’s a passenger railroad. Moving passengers when they want to move from where they are to where they want to go is it’s primary purpose.
Yeah but then you have to run trains through the tunnel that’s under construction which means it needs tidying up etc.
To be honest there’s probably a decently compelling case for having a spare tunnel. That way you almost never need to have closures of the line going forward – even on weekends – but you can also shut one of the tunnels for an extended period to redo it without the additional costs of continually opening and closing it.
“if you build in about 10% slack for the one weekend in three months you need to do additional work.”
So now you just made the entire project 10% longer, with 10% higher overhead costs. And it still doesn’t help you for an unplanned outage, if you call a contractor on Thu and tell him not to mobilize the next night because your maintenance crews need access to the other tunnel, you are getting a change order.
But maintenance is the least of the issues here. The risk that a construction mishap leaves the NEC with one tunnel (or zero tunnels, if there is a breakdown in the other) is enormous. Cost will be much, much higher due to the overtime of shift work and the inefficiency of start-stop work hours, plus the cost that will go into redundancy to mitigate the risk above. The fact that the only example we know of slab track being poured in an operational tunnel is 20% or less the rate assumed by London Bridge (even though that example was in their report!). The difficultly of working on/moving high voltage lines that are expected to be in service a few hours later.
Rebuilding the North River Tunnels during weekends while they are in service is a non-starter. Luckily there are replacement tunnels that will avoid every single one of these problems. If you have a gripe, it should be the 18 mo. timeline for rebuilding. Track laying machines lay 1500m of track a day, so pulling rails out should be a three day job. Ballast goes down as fast but might take longer coming up (can’t run a dumper in reverse against gravity). With an empty tunnel you can achieve 150m/day for slab track and pour an entire tunnel in a month. If they could do systems/signals in the L tunnels in a year on weekends, that suggests 3-4 months working full time. If you want to spend money on overtime, spend it where you can accelerate work, instead of on weekends where no matter how fast you finish section E you can’t start section F until next weekend because the tunnel has to be open Mon.
If you consider four track service to be essential (but see Adi’s good point about how demand doesn’t jump immediately, and mine about how 3 tunnels gets you greater capacity at peak immediately) then push to have the rebuilds done in 20-24 months, instead of 36.
Yes, it’s 10% longer and 10% costlier. And that’s fine, because Gateway has benefits and the faster those benefits can happen, the better. The official estimate a few years ago was that the cost of a one-day delay was $1 million; I think it’s a lowball, because it assumes poor operations, whereas better operations make the benefits of infrastructure greater, which is why I think it’s okay to spend $16 billion on the tunnel – $365m/year is too low to justify $16b.
….is the “Erie” loop in Secaucus open or will there be multiple cycles of NIMBYs BANANAs and treehugger lawsuits that delay it four years? And it opens a year after the 3 year rehab? Though there aren’t a lot of trees out there. Swamplovers. “Meadowlands” is a euphemism for swamp. One where the tide goes in and out twice a day.
Did Metro North New Haven Line Penn Station Access prove to be a six train an hour success or was it a three trains an hour disappointment? Those trains could run through. Though if they run through to the Hudson Line, they can’t go to New Jersey. Railfans forget that we haven’t figured out how to warp space and time so that two trains can be in the same place and time or that one train can be two places at time. Passengers might find that disconcerting. Pesky passengers. On a passenger railroad.
20 trains an hour to 26 trains an hour is a 30 percent increase in service. They tolerate standing room only trains now, they can tolerate 30 percent more standing room only trains for three years. They need the equipment and qualified crews to do that. That it takes three years to get to full capacity isn’t a problem. Thinking it needs to be full capacity on Gateway’s opening day – and that there will be demand, equipment and crews to do that – is railfans having a circle jerk.
And things could be finagled so that peak morning westbound LIRR trains disappear into West Side Yards freeing up eastbound capacity for through running PSA trains or sending NJTransit trains to Sunnyside. And.. It’s railfans having a circle jerk imagining how demand will double immediately.
…. Onux, our problem is that we are considering what is planned on being done. Assuming it doesn’t get canceled. Not what could be done after 20 years of Major Investment Studies, Draft Environmental Impact Studies, quite a few phases of lawsuits and appeals, Final EIS, another few rounds of lawsuits, an Amended FEIS, more lawsuits, a Record of Decision, in 2050 and something opening in 2065.
ARC should be open by now. It had it’s compromises. I’ll take a few compromises that Gateway has versus waiting for a groundbreaking 15 years after the current projects’ projected completion.
I suspect that just like railfans think 40 eastbound trains west of Penn Station can become 56 east of it, concrete cures to full strength in hours, etc, they think their plan, that would impress Dagny Taggart, can have a ROD in December of this year too. I settle for Gateway not something that would open after I’m dead.
“Yes, it’s 10% longer and 10% costlier.”
But 10% of what. Rehabilitation is 1.8B of Gateway cost. Doing it on weekends is at least 50% higher – workers will earn overtime/double time, yet you will get less done in a 48 hr window than you will in six 8 hour regular days. Thus at a cost of 2.7B, adding 10% means 2.97B or 1.17B over baseline. Three years at $1M/day is 1.095B, so you are already net negative.
Cost could easily be higher. If the Spanish tunnel achieved 150m/day with one normal and two overtime shifts, but on the weekend you do 30m/day (per the London Underground example) with one overtime and two double time shifts, then your labor costs are about 7x, and total cost 4x. Also remember London Bridge Associates recommended logistics redundancy to ensure breakdowns wouldn’t prevent reopening on time. Renting two concrete mixers so a breakdown doesn’t strand you with incomplete track obviously costs double.
And then there is risk. The cost to the economy of NEC shutdown is estimated $100m/day. A week and a half of single tube/no tubes across the Hudson would be negative return even if you are equal on the construction premium (you are not).
You are probably right the benefit is greater than $1M/day, but the value of Gateway is not $0 at 3 tubes and millions at 4 tubes. Just the opposite, the majority of benefit comes with a third tube and the ability to run more trains at peak – no matter how much unbalanced running offends you it gets more trains through when it matters. Thus the return on 4 tracks early is even less. Adirondacker is correct that demand doesn’t jump instantly.
Once again, if you feel the benefit is high enough, argue to spend overtime money and shorten the full shutdown timeline. Overtime spent on a normal job accelerates schedule. With night/weekend work, overtime gains you nothing in schedule/efficiency, it’s actually has negative return. You can have a super efficient weekend where the crews finish the job in 42 not 48 hours yet those 6 “extra” hours are totally wasted, you still pay for them but you cannot get any extra work done because the tracks have to be in service Mon morning and you can’t start/complete any activity in that short time. And next weekend you can’t plan to do 1/7th more because not all days are good and if you tear up a bit more and you’re not super efficient then come Monday you (and hundreds of thousands of commuters/travelers) have a problem.
Labor is not 100% of the cost, for one. In normal places, it’s 25%. In New York, it’s 50%, but the ridiculous overtime rules are already priced in.
The value of a triple-track tunnel is very low, because there is no place to store trains during the peak with the asymmetry of a triple-track tunnel. The plan for Gateway is to expand Secaucus Yard, which means trains have to be able to back out during the peak. You can squeeze a handful of extra trains at such high operating costs that the HTP would just not be worth it; taking $1m/day at face value as what a lot more extra peak service gets you, this is worth maybe $9b, and the triple track is worth a lot less because the peak capacity would (again) be a lot lower, by a factor of 2-3. When every commuter railway in the developed world that gets good ridership (i.e. nowhere in North America) runs mostly symmetric service, it’s worthwhile asking what you can learn from them and not how New York is special. “We’re special” is what failure is made of.
I assumed labor as 50% of cost, which is why I stated that doubling labor would increase cost 50%, or 7x labor would be 4x total cost.
Overtime rules are not “priced in” because the average NY subway project is not working at 3am on a Saturday (excepting TBMs, which run 24/7 worldwide), let alone ONLY working weekends, as you propose.
Note that I pointed out how equipment and material cost would be higher to ensure that logistics problems don’t leave the working tunnel stranded. Examples include buying/renting twice as much critical equipment so there is always a spare, concrete mixes with specific aggregates, high tolerances, and special additives for quick and reliable cure, and paying storage costs for material bought up front to avoid missed deliveries. This was mentioned in the LBA report, and it costs money.
“there is no place to store trains during the peak with the asymmetry of a triple-track tunnel” Sunnyside yards is one of the largest in world. The LIRR used to run 95 trains to Penn during the peak, or 48 tph over two hours. That would be two tubes at 24 tph, leaving two. If one is taking 24 tph through from NJ, then you have another tunnel that could theoretically take 24 tph from the third Hudson tunnel, doubling peak direction capacity from the west (at least for 75 min, until the 30 tracks at Hudson Yards are full).
I am well aware this is an ideal situation that can’t be realized, but LIRR is currently running only 19tph into Penn, and with East Side Access would be unlikely to run 48 tph to Penn even overall ridership returned to pre-covid levels.
The plan for Gateway is also no through running of any kind, no Long Island trains to/from Jersey and no connection to GCT. If you can change those conditions, then you are not stuck with NJT deadheading to Secaucus and can use Sunnyside instead. Under these conditions you can do much more than squeeze a handful of trains out of the third tunnel, and dramatically increase NJT service (40%, 50%, 60%? – some of the 24 peak hours slots got to Amtrak now not NJT, just 30-32 tph from two tubes would be huge). Note also if you are through running NJT-LIRR using two Hudson tubes and two East River Tubes as soon as Gateway opens (as you I assume you assume if you want all four tunnels for symmetric service) then you are also gaining through-running benefit with just three tubes as well.
“When every commuter railway in the developed world that gets good ridership (i.e. nowhere in North America) runs mostly symmetric service”
I am not in the slightest bit suggesting that asymmetric service is better, or that it should be pursued as a normal operating procedure. You may recall in the previous threat I pushed back hard on Tunnelvision and his claim that you can’t get to GCT from Penn. I am suggesting that for the once-in-three-or-four-generations need to conduct a major rebuild of infrastructure with national level importance we can endure the inefficiencies of asymmetric service for a few years. ALL commuter rail in NY is currently asymmetrical, and the sky hasn’t fallen.
I’ll note again that RER E has been asymmetric for a quarter century, plus Transillien exists, so its not as if asymmetry is absent elsewhere.
“it’s worthwhile asking what you can learn from them and not how New York is special. “We’re special” is what failure is made of.”
I agree with you here! We should learn from the fact that RATP shuts down lines completely for major work, such as the month of Line 14 shutdowns this year, instead of only working nights and weekends. We should learn from the fact that TfL only did track work when going to slab track on the Metropolitan line one night at time, instead of running 8 other simultaneous construction activities. We should learn from the fact that TfL shut down the Northern Line Bank branch completely for major work. Your proposed rebuild of the North River Tunnels while keeping them in service is the special exception, and it would quite likely lead to failure where NY can least accept it.
Once again, if you care that much about speeding up 4 track symmetric service, then look for ways to shorten the timeline after Gateway opens. Maybe you can install new signal and fire alarm wiring during weekend shutdowns (like the 14th St Tunnels) or demolish the bench not carrying high voltage lines bit by bit while Gateway is being built. Maybe you can grout and repair the upper (exposed) half of the lining over night. There are lots of ways to tighten up the proposed 36 month timeline. But conducting major reconstruction of the track and power systems (along with everything else) while running trains is like changing the engine of an aircraft in flight – you are just asking for a crash.
You are being deliberately obtuse, changing the subject and using long term costs when it will be a short term problem. You want to be taken seriously, be serious.
They don’t have to store anything. You are aware of the concept of running through. They can run them through and have them remain in service.
Even if they didn’t, they manage 6 in each direction bidirectionally through one tunnel on the weekend. Which results in the infamous “40 minute gap”. The trains to and from Boston…….run through… The trains that come in between 7:00 and 7:20 can loiter on the existing tracks 1 through 6. Change ends and leave tracks 1 through 6 between 7:30 and 7:50. The trains that come in between 8:00 and 8:20 can use them and do the same thing. They need three platforms and six tracks. All day long, like they do over the weekend now, if they want to. Railfans claim that on high demand days it is 7. The Trenton local splits into two. Or something. And it doesn’t even need to be six tracks/platforms because have two different trains on the same platform, one on the east end and one on the west end, on the weekend, now.
Even though railfans think there is robust hate between the LIRR and NJTransit and they obstinately refuse to cooperate ever on anything, the LIRR doesn’t want to run empty trains to Babylon, Port Washington, Ronkonkoma etc. during the peak of morning rush. They send more than a few to West Side Yards now which frees up capacity for NJTransit to send things to Sunnyside. Reverse it for evening rush. And it doesn’t have to be NJTransit-LIRR. Train-to-the-game was NJTransit-Metro North that raaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnn throoooooooooooough!!
And it’s not going to a binary increase in demand to 100 percent of capacity immediately. 26/20ths is the same as 13/10ths and that’s a 30 percent increase. It’s enough for three years.
….. I still want to know how 44 eastbound trains west of Penn Station become 56 eastbound trains east of it.
….really, be serious.
If they run through, they can’t run that asymmetrically. They can run somewhat asymmetrically, like the subway or like the RER A (which used to run 30 peak/24 reverse-peak), but the value of Gateway is not the extra 6 tph, it’s the extra 24 tph from full four-track service. The really asymmetric services around, like the 3-and-1 use of the Park Avenue Tunnel at rush hour, only work with extensive city center storage of trains; near-center storage doesn’t work because Sunnyside Yard doesn’t have extra room.
Re 44 and 56 trains: if you’re asking about the model, then this is because I (and ETA) call for a realignment of the Empire Connection to through-run with the 33rd Street East River Tunnels. So it’s not actually 42 vs. 54 but 54 vs. 54 (I’m assuming 6 Amtrak tph post-Gateway, not 4), or probably 54 vs. 66, with half of the 33rd Street trains running through and half terminating at Penn.
They don’t have to be symmetric for the 90 minutes a weekday of morning rush hour or 90 minutes of evening weekday rush hour. You are being deliberately obtuse. For the umpteeth time they won’t have demand or the qualified crews to run the maximum
amount of trains for years if not decades. …after new tunnels are open however they arrive there and what’s east of them. Obtuse.
And I can do fourth grade arithmetic and add 40 eastbound trains from New Jersey and 4 Hudson line trains to come up with 44. It cannot become 30 LIRR trains, 6 Metro North trains and 20 to Grand Central because 30 plus 6 plus 20 is 56. And if I made the correct assumption about your vague description there are never going to be dozens of trains an hour going to and from the Hudson line. And it’s quite vague about Grand Central. And they are never going to move the Empire Connection because for the umpteenth time they went and built 20 billion with a B like in boy over it. And surfing around Google’s Streetview the wide open space, behind the Post Office, on the west side of 9th Ave. between 33rd and 31st and back side of the United Press Building on the east side of 10th Ave is even more skyscrapers. Your plan is a foamers’ circle jerk with a whole lot of obtuse.
And who poked at wordpress which way that I can’t make paragraphs.
Those 90 minutes of rush hour, at 24 tph, are dumping 36 trains into the system that can’t get out for hours.
You obfuscate, are very obtuse or answer a question by changing the subject. And I’m not trying to make a living at the by being taken seriously. Go jerk somebody else around and when you decide to be serious we can consider one question at a time so you can’t change the subject, be obtuse or obfuscate.
“the value of Gateway is not the extra 6 tph,”
Since NJT only ran 20 tph to Penn pre-Covid, an extra 6 tph (30%) would be significant.
If LIRR were back to nominal 48 tph morning peak, then a 30% shift to East Side Access means 34 tph to Penn, of which 24 tph would be through to NJ, and 12 tph would go to Hudson yards (which with 30 tracks can take 2.5 hr). That’s two East River Tubes. Of the other two, one would be 24 tph through from NJ. That leaves a whole tube to take 24 tph from a Hudson tube to Sunnyside, giving you full 48 tph from NJ to NY with three tubes, or “the extra 24 tph”.
Is this over optimal, probably. Even if you only got 12 tph out of the third tube, that would be 32 tph for NJT (with 4 tph for Amtrak). For comparison NJT is running ~46 tph today on all branches, so ~70% of trains could reach Penn. That’s big, enough for 85% of NJT’s ridership shed.
“near-center storage doesn’t work because Sunnyside Yard doesn’t have extra room”
Sunnyside was built by the PRR with capacity for 1078 cars, or ~89 12-car commuter sets, or 3h45m capacity at 24tph and 7h30m at 12 tph. You only need 2 hr capacity. If 24 tph of LIRR trains are through-routing to NJ, there will definitely be room at Sunnyside.
You’re letting perfect be the enemy of great, and advocating huge expense – and worse, critical risk – to avoid a few years of much better service along the way to much, much better service. This is a terrible trade off. Open the new tubes, increase service, everyone will love you; a few years later open both refurbished tubes an increase service even more, everyone will love you more. No one will cry over the train from NJ-GCT they couldn’t take two years ago. As Adirondacker points out, you wouldn’t fill 48 tph on day one even if you ran it because travel patterns take time to shift.
Onux, an additional 24 trains an hour might happen 15 years after the new tunnels are in revenue service. It might never. The conundrums are focused on the time between the new tunnels are open for revunue service and the time the both old tunnels have been rehabilitated and are open for revenue service. It hasn’t been established what railfans have in mind because ask them one question they give you the answer to different question. I ain’t gonna be jerked around no more and once somebody decides what the initial question should be I might have something to say.
Weekend and overnight work is not overtime. It is more expensive, but the typical added cost is around $1/hour. Since this is a long term project you hire people who are willing to work an odd schedule for that extra money, and because it is a long term project they learn to adjust their life around it. It isn’t common, but many people do it.
Yes it will take longer and be more expensive, but planning to shutdown the high voltage wires, and then only replacing a section you know you can do in a weekend is not hard. (you typically plan on ending several hours early and do training or even let people who go home early (with pay) in the leftover time. Likewise, the need to keep the old controls system working until the new controls are ready makes it harder, but the not something that cannot be managed.
Don’t forget that when you shutdown tunnels in the busy time the entire city suffers. People learn how to drive and don’t come back when the tunnels reopen. As such when doing the 3 year shutdown you should pay for a larger labor workforce to get everything done as fast as possible. The 3 year shutdown is 6000 working-hours of work, while the 12 year on weekends is 12000 working-hours of work, but the costs are per person-hour not working hours and the crew sizes are different.
Weekend and overnight work is NOT overtime. It is more expensive than regular 9-5 shift work, but it isn’t overtime pay. The premium is generally around $1-$3/hr. The important part is you hire workers for the sift they are working and keep them on that shift so they can adjust their life around the odd hours the are working. Once you get the team together you keep them going, sure sometimes people will transfer to a different shift (with a pay cut – unions often standing in the way of doing this which is a problem!) but you replace them and keep the team working every weekend, or every night. There is always maintenance work to do, so get it done with a team of experienced people.
Short term is this more expensive, but the team of experienced people you build up and keep building up can work a lot faster that a larger team who only works for 3 years on the project and then goes back to building skyscrapers or whatever it is they do when you don’t have a mega project.
People can’t work 40 hours in the 55 hour period between Friday evening and Monday morning. They can work two 12 hour shifts. It is very very unlikely there is 16 hours of work they could do on another project. Ignoring that they would be getting shift differential for working on the weekend that’s 40/24th pay. That’s a 66 percent premium or 40 percent less hours for the same pay. You won’t get “an experienced crew”. This isn’t do-it-yourself kitchen remodel. It’s not the same people doing different jobs it’s different specialists rotating in as their special skills are needed and rotating back out.
and they haven’t dominated the state until recently. The Senate flipped when the nominal Democrats that were blocking marriage equality got primaried and lost? And other districts flipped. Ten years ago? 12? Nominate people who pass around crude emails and have extreme policies, you will lose elections. I think it is all just too, tooooo, too bad. They then double down. It’s just too too bad.
There are plenty of other projects they can do when the tunnels are open. Installing elevators in all those stations that NYC still hasn’t brought up to ADA standards – the station would be under remodeling getting slow progress for months, but we have already wait 33 years, we can wait another if we actually get an elevator. They can also put in infrastructure for platform screen doors. Or they can grease some of the trains overnight. There is plenty of work that a crew can do – some people want the repetitive do the same thing over an over again, but other people like variety in their shifts and want to be on that crew.
Electricians, especially union electricians can’t grease trains. And vice versa. It’s called skilled labor for a reason and people who …put concrete in place… aren’t the ones screwing things into platforms. People who lay rail don’t do concrete, electricity or fiber optics. They aren’t the people putting in the pumps. You are imagining what labor on a large construction projects do.
Even on relatively small projects they bring in specialists. I am pretty sure when I got my kitchen changed that he could do plumbing but got someone else in for the electrics and tiles.
A multi-functional team that just does everything is well know to be the most productive to anyone who studies this. You get comradery and a get it done attitude that makes manual work fun and everything happen fast. Sure you sometimes are paying your $30/hr electricians to do $20/hr concrete work (wages made up for effect), but the important part is the work gets done right. It isn’t a good use of expensive labor to have an electrician greasing trains, but there is no good reason they can’t (I’m saying union rules saying they cannot are bad!).
25kv AC wires are not covered in the NEC other than words to the effect of do whatever the engineers say, so you really should
opps, hit post too soon on accident
. 600VDC also isn’t covered in the NEC. So union electricians don’t even have the right training. They can learn, but rail roads really should have them internal, maybe you hire a few helpers, but most work needs to be internal.
On a large project you aren’t paying electricians to do concrete because electricians have more electrical work to do. And the suits get paid big bucks to schedule electricians at the right time and concrete workers at the right time. None of the of plumbers, electricians, concrete workers or candlestick makers are going perform maintenance on trains.
Calling the National Electrical Code the NEC in this context is confusing. Very very simplistically it deals with the customer side of the demarcation between the utility and the customer. Things can only happen at that point and it can become complex. Almost always it deals with 480 volt/three phase and lower. 600 volt three phase is popular in Canada and exists in the U.S. The people who deal with things that are 600 volt three phase and lower hire specialists when it’s not. They don’t hire a plumber. Even in a small commercial installation where there is going to be … loss prevention systems…. specialists do that because the networking paradigms aren’t ethernet. Or plain old telephone service. Again very very simplisticly the National Electrical Code didn’t deal with “low voltage current limited” wiring other than to define it, and it was up to the fire code inspector to make sure the stuff in plenums was plenum rated. Everybody except clueless symbol manipulators on the internet and do it yourselfers know that you have to put plenum rated cables in the plenums and while you can put it in risers you can’t put riser rated cable in plenums. I suspect many people reading this have no idea what the difference is between a plenum and riser. I’m gonna stop.
I apologize for the NEC confusion. I should know better in this context.
600VAC 3 phase is common in industry, but trains mostly are using 600V DC. DC has a few things different from AC and most electricians would not know what those things are (other than in a low voltage context where mistakes are not fatal).
The key difference between us is size of project. If you are closing the tunnel for 3 years, that is a large or mega project and what you say is 100% correct, everyone does what they do best, if your project management is done correctly there is plenty of work for everyone. However Alon and I are suggesting a weekend only close plan, that is a long series of small projects. The way those projects are done requires more generalist labor as sometimes there isn’t electrical work to be done – but you still want to keep the electrician around for when there is. Maybe you have 3 teams working, but each are working separate projects (with just enough coordination to ensure they don’t get in each others way), and you can trade your team’s electrician to a different team for their concrete guy, but often no team really needs that. Small projects are a very different way of working. I have to apologize about the formatting of this – something isn’t allowing me to insert newlines between paragraphs.
In thinking about through running, you might want to know that before the PRR sold LIRR to NYS, there were interline tariffs–tickets could be bought from points on either RR to points on the other. This was not only for single trips,but multi-ride/passes. When I moved to NY in 1966 there was signage at Penn regarding abolition of these fares.
Anectdotally (that is, my own experience) Amtrak Northeast Regional trains, going back to PRR-NewHaven Wash-Boston trains, have always had major turnover of riders at Penn. I long ago learned to find out the arrival track and go down to the platform as pax were exiting thus being able to snag aleft hand window seat. The dwell at Penn has always been exacerbated by crew changes dating back to the separate RR cos. Given the ever more insane rules for “safety mtgs” wherein the detraining crew is supposedly briefing the new crew as to quirks in the behavior of the train, this time cannot easily be speeded up.
Train-to-the-Game, where Metro North crew turned over the train to a NJTransit crew or vice versa, was scheduled for 10 minutes. Apparently NJTransit crews aren’t qualified east of Penn Station and rumors on railroad.net are that NJTransit turns over the few trains going to Sunnyside, to Amtrak in four minutes.
…. crews don’t arrive at work five minutes before departure. By the time the train makes it from Washington D.C. to New York it’s time for their lunch break. Pesky passengers and crews, bringing their stomachs, bladders and bowels with them.
NJT crews are not ualified East of Penn and also likely under union contract with different terms. Changing crews itself is not an issue–it is the time it takes that is. Amtrak crews change out at Penn–an engineer qualified between Boston and Penn may noy be qualified betweenPHL and DC..
Rumor has they do it in four with trains that aren’t on the public timetables and ten for the ones that were, recently. The crew that takes the :00 Acela to New York didn’t report to work at :55. Once they get to New York there is some business to take care of, when that’s done, it’s lunch time.
Ticket checking at the “Gate” is unnecessary and was not practicedyears ago. In PRR/PC times once the track was announced, it was simply a stampede.
In ancient times any coach ticket was good on any coach. The people staffing the Pullman cars would check your ticket as you entered the train. Vaguely like Amtrak does with the business class car at other than major stations today. Even today, when they announce the train, I duck down to the lower level, people don’t know those stairs exist and it’s much faster to get to the train. I suspect people in the know, back in the day, did the same. If you arrive in Moynihan Train Mall you can walk the platform and use them. All the way to a “LIRR” staircase if things are arranged the right way.
Indeed, I too used the arrival concourse. That said having the actual platforms visible from street level (as was the case when first opened) will be phenomenally nicer. Preventing the overly officious gate dragons from controlling access will speed everything up.
No, some trains were all reserved seating with a surcharge, and monthly passes were not eligible for step up. Remember, until the last decade or so Amtrak still ran “clockers” which in PRR days were often full of commuters from beyond Philly–many holding either punch or flash passes. By the 60s only the more elite of the through trains had actual diners.
There were trains that were “all parlor car”, you couldn’t use your monthly/weekly/ten trip to use those but you could on trains that had parlor car and coach. Or that were all coach. On coach. And go to the dining car or lounge/bar car if they had one. You could do that until Conrail divested passenger operations to the commuter agencies.
By the way, you mention that you want most NJTransit traffic to be running through by 2028. Does this involve NJTransit buying rolling stock capable of operating on LIRR third rail (which they should definitely do but I’d think they’d have to start ordering it pretty soon to get it by 2028) or do you plan on running everything through to the NEC?
Yes, but only in the medium term; in the shorter term, NJT’s new MultiLevels can run through to the New Haven Line via Penn Station Access (ideally as soon as PSA opens).
an ALP46/46a could haul the existing ones and have. I don’t know if they have tested running Silverliners to Boston. Those are supposedly dual frequency, those could too. That nobody has excess ones laying around is a different answer to a different question.
It is pretty damning that Amtrak’s whole argument for new tunnels has been a “required” three year shutdown but they ignore the weekend windows. I guess I should not be surprised but that lie greatly corrupts the public trust, especially at a time when billions have been steered Amtrak’s way.