Different Models of Partial Through-Running
I gave a very well-attended webinar talk a few hours ago, in which a minority of the time was spent on the 3D model and a majority about through-running and related modernization elements for commuter rail. I will talk more about it when the video finishes uploading, which will take hours in the queue. But for now, I’d like to talk about different conceptions of how through-running should work. I was asked what the difference is between my vision (really our vision at ETA, including that of people who disagree with me on a lot of specifics) and the vision of Tri-State and ReThink.
One difference is that I think a Penn Station-Grand Central connection is prudent and they don’t, but it’s at the level of detail. The biggest difference is how to react to a situation where there isn’t enough core capacity to run every line through. Tri-State and ReThink prefer connecting as many lines as possible to the through-running trunk; I prefer only connecting lines insofar as they can run frequently and without interference with non-through-running lines.
Partial through-running
To run everything in New York through, it’s necessary to build about six different lines. My standard six-line map can be seen here, with Line 7 (colored turquoise) removed; note that Line 7’s New Jersey branches don’t currently run any passenger service, and its Long Island branches could just be connected to Line 5 (dark yellow). The question is what to do when there are no six through-lines but only two or three. Right now, there is only one plausible through-line; the Gateway tunnel/Hudson Tunnel Project would add a second, if it included some extra infrastructure (like the Grand Central connection); the realigned Empire Connection could be a third. Anything else is a from-scratch project; any plan has to assume no more than two or three lines.
The question is what to do afterward. I am inspired by the RER, which began with a handful of branches, on which it ran intense service. For example, here is Paris in 1985, at which point it had the RER A, B, and C, but no D yet: observe that there were still large terminating networks at the largest train stations, including some lines that weren’t even frequent enough to be depicted – the RER D system out of Gare de Lyon visible starting 1995 took over a preexisting line that until then missed the map’s 20-minute midday frequency cutoff.
The upshot that whenever I depict a three-line New York commuter rail system, it leaves out large portions of the system; those terminate at Grand Central (without running through to Penn Station), Brooklyn, or Hoboken. The point is to leverage existing lines and run service intensely, for example every 10 minutes per branch (or every 20 on outer tails, but the underlying branches should be every 10).
Tri-State uses a map of the RER in its above-linked writeup, but doesn’t work this way. Instead, it depicts a trunk line from Secaucus to Penn Station to Sunnyside with branches in a few directions. ReThink is clearer about what it’s doing and is depicting every possible branch connecting to the trunk, even the Hudson and Harlem Lines, via a rebuilt connection to the Hell Gate Bridge.
The issue of separation
The other issue for me – and this is a long-term disagreement I have with some other really sharp people at ETA – is the importance of separating through- from terminating lines. Paris has almost total segregation between RER and terminating Transilien trains; on the most important parts of the network, the RER A and B, there is only track sharing on one branch of the RER A (with Transilien L to Saint-Lazare), and only at rush hour. London likewise uses Crossrail/Elizabeth Line trains to connect to the slow lines of the Great Eastern and Great Western Main Lines, more or less leaving the fast lines for terminating trains. Berlin has practically no track sharing between the S-Bahn and anything else, just one short branch section.
With no contiguous four-track lines, New York can’t so segregate services while keeping to the Parisian norm that shorter-range lines run through and longer-range ones terminate. Any such scheme would necessarily involve extensive sharing of trunk tunnels between terminating and through trains, which would make Penn Station’s schedules even more fragile than they are today.
This means that New York is compelled to run through at fairly long range. For example, trains should be running through on the Northeast Corridor all the way to Trenton fairly early, and probably also all the way to New Haven. This makes a lot of otherwise-sympathetic agency planners nervous; they get the point about metro-like service at the range of Newark, Elizabeth, and New Rochelle, but assume that farther-out suburbs would only see demand to Manhattan and only at rush hour. I don’t think that this nervousness is justified – the outer anchors see traffic all day, every day (New Haven is, at least on numbers from the 2010s, the busiest station in the region on weekends, edging out Stamford and Ronkonkoma). But I get where it’s coming from. It’s just a necessary byproduct of running a system in which some entire lines run through and other entire lines do not.
On the New Jersey side, this compels a setup in which the Northeast Corridor and North Jersey Coast Line run through, even all the way to the end. The Morris and Essex Lines and the Montclair-Boonton Line would then be running to the Gateway tunnel, running through if the tunnel connected to Grand Central or anything else to the east. The Raritan Valley Line can terminate at Newark with a transfer, or be shoehorned into either the Northeast Corridor (easier infrastructure) or Morris and Essex system (more spare capacity) if extensive infrastructure is built to accommodate this. The Erie lines, planned to have an awkward loop at Secaucus, should just keep terminating at Hoboken until there’s money for a dedicated tunnel for them – they’re already perfectly separated from the Northeast Corridor and tie-ins, and can stay separate.
On the LIRR side, this means designating different lines to run to Penn Station or Grand Central, and set up easy connections at Jamaica or a future Sunnyside Junction station. I like sending the LIRR Main Line to Grand Central, the Atlantic lines (Far Rockaway and Long Beach) to Brooklyn, the Port Washington Branch to the same trunk as the Northeast Corridor, and the remaining lines to the northern East River Tunnel pair (with Empire Connection through-running eventually), but there are other ways of setting it up. Note here that the line that through-runs to New Jersey, Port Washington, is the one that’s most separated from the rest of the system, which means there is no direct service from New Jersey to Jamaica, only to Flushing; this is a cost, but it balances against much more robust rail service, without programmed conflicts between trains.
And on the Metro-North side, it means that anything that isn’t already linked to a through-line goes to Grand Central and ends there. I presume the New Haven Line would be running through either via Grand Central or via the Hell Gate Line, the Harlem Line would terminate, and the Hudson Line depends on whether the Empire Connection is built or not; as usual, there are other ways to set this up, and the tradeoff is that the Harlem Line is the most local in the Bronx whereas the New Haven Line already has to interface with through-running so might as well shoehorn everything there into the system.
Pedestrian Observations 
Have you considered the other pairing of lines with tunnels– having NJT’s NEC, NJC, and RVL trains run through Gateway to the New Haven/Hudson lines while the M&E and MBL go through the old tunnel to the Port Washington Branch and Penn Access? The benefit is that the NEC and New Haven Express lines should probably run 12 car trains due to their very high ridership, and because of their long-range nature should have trains with lots of seats, while the Morris & Essex, Montclair Boonton, Port Washington, and Penn Access lines could probably make do with shorter trains and due to their short stop spacing should have trains optimized for short dwells with wide aisles. Pairing the two NEC expresses could also be useful for trips like New Haven-Princeton (Yale-Princeton) or Stamford-New Brunswick (UConn-Rutgers). I guess the downside is that this arrangement is that only the longer-range NJT trains get the 1 seat ride to Grand Central, while 1 seat rides are more valuable on shorter trips.
I just noticed in your video that you mentioned that your reasoning for having the NJ Northeast Corridor trains use the old tunnel was because they share tracks with Amtrak and so should remain tied with Amtrak. However, if the tracks between Newark Penn and the Kearny Connection are four tracked the NEC commuter trains don’t ever need to share tracks with Amtrak, except when they cross over the Amtrak line to reverse direction at Jersey Ave and west of Trenton. If you don’t four track that segment then you have to run the Raritan Valley Line into the old tunnel which means that the old tunnel will have a capacity crunch while the new tunnel only runs 18 peak tph.
We aren’t spending billions of dollars so a few Amtrak trains can have things all to themselves.
Between intercity trains, reverse branches to serve legacy terminals, and demand imbalances, Tokyo manages to mix through running and terminating on the same tracks. While there are a lot of quad track corridors into the suburbs, that often means trains on the local tracks through run, but trains on the express/rapid tracks mix through running and terminating services. And deeper into the suburbs, the all trains share the same pair of tracks.
This actually works quite well in practice.
The reverse branching to serve legacy terminals is unfortunate, but a separate issue to mixing through running and terminating trains. Even if in some fantasy world Skytree Line trains were able to through run into the Ginza Line at Asakusa instead of reverse branching into the Hanzomon Line, it could still make sense to terminate all intercity services at Asakusa to avoid losing a ton of Ginza Line capacity from shoving intercity trains through it.
The Japanese do have the advantage that they have insane reliability.
Yeah, they do, and the throughput isn’t great as a result; does the Chuo-Sobu Line really need to reverse-branch to the Tozai Line given that on both lines the worst capacity bottlenecks are from the east and not from the west?
Does what they do move the maximum number of passengers? After they’ve taken everything into account instead of blindly moving the maximum number of trains. I don’t know. Or care.
Yes, by virtue of horrific overcrowding, caused by the government of Japan’s austerity policy of not building new subways unless they can get 3.3% financial ROI, in an economy where private railroads borrow at something like 1.5%.
It may just be me but from my point of view the reason passenger railroads exist is to move passengers. Not trains. The people who make decisions about that, right now, with what they got to work with, not what could have been but or with what could be some time in the future, are what the people actually using the trains have to cope with. Or if the accounting environment was different or Dagny Taggart through the Herculean force of her sheet will and some Reardon Metal made it work.
You want to make a living being taken seriously. Attempt to be serious.
Okay, but the same people who make those decisions often go to great lengths to reduce the extent of reverse-branching. TfL is doing a lot of work at Camden Town to deinterline the Northern line, and in Tokyo, the private railroads reverse-branch but only to a point, and in some cases they for the most part function as a suburban extension of a subway line, like the Den-en-toshi Line to Hanzomon.
Last time I checked Camden Town isn’t in Tokyo and Chuo-Sobu line isn’t in London. They are going to make decisions based on what they have to work with.
the vision of Tri-State and ReThink.
You made me giggle hard. Again. It’s railfans throwing darts at old railroad maps. Some of those things didn’t make sense when they they were built in a 19 Century fit of railroad mania. Internal combustion engines have been perfected and they don’t make any sense today. it also seems they have managed to miss every crosstown bus route in greater Newark. It’s hilarious.
As far as a terminal on the east side for longer trains, I do remember hearing that prior to East Side Access there was a plan to build out Hunterspoint as an alternate terminal. And the Lower Montauk still exists.
(1) Since there are four tunnels going east and (after Gateway) four tunnels coming in from the west, can’t they be balanced into two pairs even without the Penn-Grand Central link? You could send the M&E to the Port Washington and the NEC to the Babylon branch or something? Is there something about the track layout that prevents this?
(2) East Side Access passes through Woodside, so it seems that connections to the main line can be sorted by making all trains stop there? If so you could leave the entire Metro North system (plus some LIRR) terminating at Grand Central, and send the Penn Station part of the LIRR through to New Jersey…
1. They can, but it’s really awkward. The East River Tunnels are under 33rd and 32nd Streets. The North River Tunnels face 32nd, and the new tunnels are to their south, mostly matching the stub-end southern tracks (1-4).
2. Jamaica has more space for such transfers than Woodside. It’s possible to set up a Sunnyside Junction transfer with Penn Station Access, but Woodside is too far east for that.
Thanks. Presumably in this world it would be best to scrap Penn Station access. Amtrak still gets you from NJ to New Rochelle for the MetroNorth transfer to local stops on the New Haven line. There are some station pairs like White Plains – Newark that remain inconvenient but that’s the price you pay for not being able to build useful things…
No, Penn Station Access is good, just not for the $2.87 billion cost. Those Bronx stations they’re adding really could use the service.
I saw the announcement that they were re-configuring Elizabeth NJ, including adding a fifth track. And bothered to look at the then current documents. It appeared from the artist’s renderings that the platforms would be cantilevered off the viaduct. Which is probably cheaper than attempting to route elevator shafts through a 19 Century viaduct. So it’s not plopping precast concrete platforms sections onto some piers. If I remember correctly 53 million dollars. There are things hiding in the stuff in the Penn Station access project that isn’t just a few opulent stations, they do look quite posh in the artist’s renderings, being plopped down by the side of existing tracks. Probably costs too much but it’s not just a few stations either.
Having a train that stops once an hour in New Rochelle that will stop in Newark and beyond doesn’t get you from Mamaroneck to Hunts Point Ave in the Bronx. Or from Parkchester in the Bronx to that great job in Stamford. Most of the ridership is going to be to and from Penn Station but it doesn’t have New Rochelle as it origin/destination.
It’s not awkward . One tunnel track spreading out to four tracks/two islands is lot less shifting around than they do today. That it’s not perfectly aligned to some idealized Wunderhaupbahnhof isn’t going to have a big effect on capacity, if at all. Assuming they want to do some railfan’s ideal of what should be going on not what actual demand is.
No you can’t. Things aren’t balanced and never will be because east of Penn Station is New England and Long Island, excluding Brooklyn and west or north of Penn Station is the rest of North America excluding Brooklyn and Staten Island. Send all of the LIRR Penn Station trains to New Jersey or vice versa none of them can go to Grand Central. “Fix” one problem you create two more. Try to “fix” the new ones more appear and some options start to undo the initial one.
Adding another operator (MNR) to Penn Station is trouble in the making. What needs to happen is to have one interstate agency gradually take over all lines serving Penn Station. It could be NJT acquiring LIRR, or it could be Amtrak, though neither probably don’t have the political will or support to do so.
In an ideal Phase 1, said interstate agency should just run an entirely local S-Bahn service between New Brunswick and Stamford; call it the Penn Line. The electrification and trains to do so are there, as demonstrated by past NJT Secaucus / Metlife – NH Line football trains. Penn Line service would take over the NJT NEC local service and MNR PSA, running at 15-minute all day headways. Then in Phase 1B, the Penn Line can take over the Trenton express trains and some outer NH service, creating one unified line between NH and Trenton (with provisions for expansion to Philadelphia). This frees up Amtrak from having to serve minor stations along the corridor and keeps them on the middle tracks where they belong.
The Penn Line also needs a third hub to spread out transfer volumes. A good supplemental project would be to build the Sunnyside Junction station, to serve LIC and consolidate transfers between ESA, PSA, and LIRR. Then you have 3 hubs along the trunk corridor (Secaucus, Penn, Sunnyside).
You will like the 19,000-word report.
It’s not a problem. Amtrak owns the infrastructure in Manhattan. They get to say Metro North gets so many “slots”, NJtransit does and the LIRR does. They then all fight over who pays for what but the allocation of time/space is relatively uncomplicated.
Thinking more about the phased implementation of Penn Station through-running, I think this could work:
1. As proposed in this post, Trenton – New Haven with existing infrastructure, and then additional local trains between Stamford and Long Branch.
2. Gateway Project: This is tricky because of the plans to terminate trains at Penn/Empire South. Clearly this needs to be cancelled, but terminating NJT trains using today’s patterns shouldn’t be the new plan either. The easiest solution would be to just through-route the Morris / Essex lines with the Babylon Branch, avoiding the complex LIRR main line for now.
3. While not optimal, I think it’s easiest to extend ESA to Hoboken via Union Square, since existing service wouldn’t be disrupted and only an additional underwater tunnel needs to be built. Then the Morris / Essex lines would be transferred over to connect with the LIRR main line. The Babylon Branch through runs with the Raritan and Montclair / Boonton (via Kearny Connection) lines.
4. By this phase, there would be enough momentum to construct the NYP – GCT and West Side connections to through run all the MNR lines, splitting and reconnecting lines as needed.
5. If we ever get here, there should be enough support to electrify the Erie Lines and build the Hoboken – Brooklyn (via Fulton St) tunnel to through-run with the Atlantic branches.
6. Then the lower Montauk line can be extended across Midtown to connect with the newly electrified Erie Lines. This allows for 8 tracks west and east of Jamaica.
7. I’m ambivalent on the Staten Island underwater tunnel. While transformative, I’m not certain SI will ever offer enough ROI to directly link St. George and South Ferry by train. I do think the Bay Ridge – SI subway and HBLR extensions are worthwhile. Extending Metro North down to Fulton St and Brooklyn is also definitely worth it, but it may be more prudent to add express tracks to the Second Ave Subway, or alternatively a Third Ave subway line.
Also somewhere along the way, the Port Washington Branch is added to the MTA subway network’s new C Division, alongside the IBX.
Okay, can you say more about what you think needs to be done about 1-2? There’s a spike in extra construction work that needs to be done between 2 and 3, since the HTP is already funded and beginning construction and nothing else is (I think Penn-GCT and the Empire Connection realignment are easier than the rest, but neither is even in planning yet, let alone design, let alone construction).
At my end, what I’ll tell you is that after the HTP opens, everything from the New Jersey side that goes to Penn Station via the old tunnel needs to run through. The lines through the HTP have to terminate on tracks 1-4 or 1-5 (maybe 1-6 if you really need it), so it’s important to make this as simple as possible and have the fewest branches possible do this, which I think means M&E and Montclair-Boonton trains go via HTP and NEC/NJC trains go via the old tunnels and run through.