The Northeast Corridor Rail Grants
The US government has just announced a large slate of grants to rail from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Amtrak has a breakdown of projects both for itself and partners, totaling $16.4 billion. There are a few good things there, like Delco Lead, or more significantly more money for the Hudson Tunnel Project (already funded separately, but this covers money the states would otherwise be expected to fund). There are also conspicuously missing items that should stay missing – But by overall budget, most of the grant is pretty bad, covering projects that are in principle good but far too expensive per minute saved.
This has implications to the future of the Northeast Corridor, because the total amount of money for it is $30 billion; I believe this includes Amtrak plus commuter rail agencies. Half of the money is gone already, and some key elements remain unfunded, some of which are still on agency wishlists like Hunter Flyover but others of which are still not, like Shell Interlocking. It’s still possible to cobble together the remaining $13.6 billion to produce something good, but there have to be some compromises – and, more importantly, the process that produced the grant so far doesn’t fill me with confidence about the rest of the money.
The Baltimore tunnel
The biggest single item in the grant is the replacement tunnel for the Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel. The B&P was built compromised from the start, with atypically tight curves and steep grades for the era. An FRA report on its replacement from 2011 goes over the history of the project, originally dubbed the Great Circle Passenger Tunnel when first proposed in the 1970s; the 2011 report estimates the cost at $773 million in 2010 prices (PDF-p. 229), and the benefits at a two-minute time saving (PDF-p. 123) plus easier long-term maintenance, as the B&P has water leakage in addition to its geometric problems. At the time, the consensus of Northeastern railfans treated it as a beneficial and even necessary component of Northeast Corridor modernization, and the agencies kept working on it.
Since then, the project’s scope crept from two passenger tracks to four tracks with enough space for double-stacked freight and mechanical ventilation for diesel locomotives. The cost jumped to $4 billion, then $6 billion. The extra scope was removed to save money, said to be $1 billion, but the headline cost remained $6 billion (possibly due to inflation, as American government budgeting is done in current dollars, never constant dollars, creating a lot of fictional cost overruns). The FRA grant is for $4.7 billion out of $6 billion. Meanwhile, the environmental impact statements upped the trip time benefit of the tunnel for Amtrak from two to 2.5 minutes; this is understandable in light of either higher-speed (and higher-cost) redesign or an assumption of better rolling stock than in the 2011 report, higher-acceleration trains losing more time to speed restrictions near stations than lower-acceleration ones.
That this tunnel would be funded was telegraphed well in advance. The tunnel was named after abolitionist hero Frederick Douglass; I’m not aware of any intercity or commuter rail tunnel elsewhere in the developed world that gets such a name, and the choice to name it so about a year ago was a commitment. It’s not a bad project: the maintenance cost savings are real, as is the 2.5 minute improvement in trip time. But 2.5 minutes are not worth $6 billion, or even $6 billion net of maintenance. In 2023 dollars, the estimate from 2011 is $1.1 billion, which I think is fine on the margin – there are lower-hanging fruit out there, but the tunnel doesn’t compete with the lowest-hanging fruit but with the $29 billion-hanging fruit and it should be very competitive there. But when costs explode this much, there are other things that could be done better.
Bridge replacements
The Northeast Corridor is full of movable bridges, which are wishlisted for replacement with high fixed spans. The benefits of those replacements are there, mainly in maintenance costs (but see below on the Connecticut River), but that does not justify the multi-billion dollar budgets of many of them. The Susquehanna River Rail Bridge, the biggest grant in this section, is $2.08 billion in federal funding; the environmental impact study said that in 2015 dollars it was $930 million. The benefits in the EIS include lower maintenance costs, but those are not quantified, even in places where other elements (like the area’s demographics) are.
Like all state of good repair projects, this is spending for its own sake. There are no clear promises the way there are with the Douglass Tunnel, which promises to have a new tunnel with trip time benefits, small as they are. Nobody can know if these bridge replacement projects achieved any of their goals; there are no clear claims about maintenance costs with or without this, nor is there any concerted plan to improve maintenance productivity in general.
The East River Tunnel project, while not a bridge nor a visible replacement, has the same problem. The benefits are not made clear anywhere. There are some documents we found in the ETA commuter rail report saying that high-density signaling would allow increasing peak capacity on one of the two tunnel pairs from 20 to 24 trains per hour, but that’s a small minority of the overall project and in the description it’s an item within an item.
The one exception in this section is the Connecticut River. This bridge replacement has a much clearer benefit – but also is a down payment on the wrong choice. The issue is that pleasure boat traffic has priority over the railroad on the “who came first” principle; by agreement with the Coast Guard, there is a limited number of daily windows for Amtrak to run its trains, which work out to about an Acela and a Regional every hour in each direction. Replacing this bridge, unlike the others, would have a visible benefit: more trains could run (once new rolling stock comes in, but that’s already in production).
Unfortunately, the trains would be running on the curviest and also most easily bypassable section of the Northeast Corridor. The average speed on the New Haven-Kingston section of the Northeast Corridor is low, if not so low on the less curvy but commuter rail-primary New Haven Line farther west. The curves already have high superelevation and the Acelas tilt through them fully; there’s not much more that can be done to increase speed, save to bypass this entire section. Fortunately, a bypass parallel to I-95 is feasible here – there isn’t as much suburban development as west of New Haven, where there are many commuters to New York. Partial bypasses have been studied before, bypassing both the worst curves on this section and all movable bridges, including that on the Connecticut. To replace this bridge in place is a down payment on, in effect, not building genuine high-speed rail where it is most useful.
Other items
Some other items on the list are not so bad. The second largest item in the grant, $3.79 billion, is increasing the federal contribution to the Hudson Tunnel Project from about 50% to about 70%. I have questions about why it’s necessary – it looks like it’s covering a cost overrun – but it’s not terrible, and by cost it’s by far the biggest reasonable item in this grant.
Beyond that, there are some small projects that are fine, like Delco Lead, part of a program by New Jersey Transit to invest around New Brunswick and Jersey Avenue to create more yard space where it belongs, at the end of where local trains run (and not near city center, where land is expensive).
What’s not (yet) funded
Overall, around 25% of this grant is fine. But there are serious gaps – not only are the bridge replacements and the Douglass Tunnel not the best use of money, but also some important projects providing both reliability and speed are missing. The two most complex flat junctions of the Northeast Corridor near New York, Hunter in New Jersey and Shell in New Rochelle, are missing (and Hunter is on the New Jersey Transit wishlist); Hunter is estimated at $300 million and would make it much more straightforward to timetable Northeast Corridor commuter and intercity trains together, and Shell would likely cost the same and also facilitate the same for Penn Station Access. The Hartford Line is getting investment into double track, but no electrification, which American railroads keep underrating.
Pedestrian Observations 
The Susquehanna River bridge doubles tracks from 2 to 4 and increases operable speeds over it from 90 mph to 160 mph.
Click to access susquehanna-river-rail-bridge-project-industry-day-outreach-presentation-120222.pdf
Yeah, that’s not worth $2 billion. Mid-line speed restrictions are the opposite of near-station speed restrictions: they are less important the higher the train’s performance is. For a train that performs like a Velaro Novo, a 1 km restriction like this slows the train by about a minute (and the Avelia Liberty performs like the Velaro Novo at these speeds – locomotives vs. EMUs only matter at lower speed).
If the Connecticut coastal towns don’t want HSR, we should listen to them and build a new inland HSR corridor from Providence to Hartford via UConn, opening up new markets that don’t compete with an interstate while offering intrastate utility for CT.
If the Connecticut coastal towns don’t want HSR, it’s completely irrelevant, because HSR is for the entire Northeast, predominantly for the productive parts of it, i.e. the cities.
Alon, you have gone on at length about how the people who live along the route of HS2 in Buckinghamshire raised the costs of that project significantly. That is true.
So the solution for the Americans is to do one of the following:
a) Work with the people who live along the route constructively and give them suitable stations or other reasonable mitigations
b) Pick a different route
And actually if option a works for some towns and not others – well then you can let them battle it out between themselves.
They have suitable stations, right in what could be called downtown. It’s okay if the slow train toddles between stops every few miles on the old route and the high speed trains are somewhere else. Take the slow train to the major station and change to the high speed train there.
The people who live along the route did not raise the costs; the British state raised the costs by refusing to tell them no.
Ah, but the people who live along the route put in place local actors who’d ensure that a sensible, cost-effective route was out of the question (if they weren’t the obstructors, themselves). At best, there lacks an override mechanism at the regional/national level to tell these people “no”. At worst, advocating for own’s own petty self-interests even at the larger cost of others is such a widely-accepted tradition that this behavior seems rational, instead of essentially sociopathic.
Being able to “just override” local elites with reasonable concerns isn’t something that has ever been possible under democracy. It wasn’t even possible under whatever word you use to describe pre-1832 Britain either.
It’s important to make the point that these concerns have to be reasonable and to attract widespread support from the community and not just a small handful who object to everything.
What do you mean, it’s never been possible? France and Southern Europe do it all the time to this day, for examples. YIMBY bills pass over the opposition of local notables in the Anglosphere.
The places in rural France or Spain where they have “got away” with it have a super low population density. Theres no way you can justify a station for 3 villages with 800 people
each.
And actually as you said before the French did overpay the farmers for the land – and where there were places with 10-20k people stations have been built.
Yeah, they overpay in France, but they didn’t compromise the entire route the way they did in the UK or the Netherlands and the way they are in the US.
If HS2 had built stations at Calvert and Kenilworth, electrified the line from Calvert to London and extended all off-peak Aylesbury-London trains to Calvert and there were still insistences of a long tunnel under the Chilterns or whatever then we could talk.
As that didn’t happen it’s not really possible to claim that the British had the political capital to avoid the mitigations they did do when they refused to build stations that would get millions of passengers a year and which would be profitable on ticket revenue alone to build.
Also if you look at say the Rhode Island House Seat that has just had a special election.
If 1/4 of the Democratic voters in that seat voted Republican due to a poorly thought out infrastructure project – well that’s that seat flipped – and the Republican house majority increased from 9 to 11.
And I think this issue is probably worse under PR where elections are more likely to be close and losing a few hundred votes in other parts of the country over projects also matters.
@Matthew Hutton
I’m sympathetic to your views here, but they require a populace with a sense of civic responsibility and collective duty, a general prosocial orientation that’s just lacking in modern societies. There are often major gains to be made for the majority at a minor expense to a minority. A well-functioning society should–under certain circumstances–be prepared to make those choices. But if the mask-and-vaccine debacles of the last four years is any sign, we just can’t count on that from modern citizens.
It’s hard not to come away feeling that this falls into the category of “democracy doesn’t work.”
As for local elites and reasonable concerns–local elites have often so contrived the political and information systems of their localities as to ensure that no other local residents have any kind of voice. The vast majority of the population does not meaningfully participate in the political process. Take that special election in Rhode Island’s 1st District you’re referring to just for an example–66,000 votes cast, in a district with half a million residents and around 400,000 eligible voters. There’s very little reason to think elections under this system convey any kind of democratic legitimacy anyway. And that’s elections, which we at least sort of try to make accessible–the entitled-NIMBY resentment-fest of any town hall or public-hearing process? Forget it.
I know I have said that I like town meetings before, but I only think they are good compared to only having informal lobbying. Otherwise I fully agree that they are pretty unrepresentative.
Certainly with HS2 people bought up opposition to it on the doorstep when canvassing according to people who did, so it certainly wasn’t just an elite opinion. It’s difficult to see much response electorally, but then both Labour and the Conservatives supported it.
The only hint is the 2021 Chesham and Amersham by-election – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Chesham_and_Amersham_by-election – where the Lib Dem’s (a third party) did a lot better than in their other recent by-election wins when you adjust for the national polling picture. Plus when you adjust for the fact that the by-election was replacing an MP who had passed away, not one who had resigned in disgrace.
So you agree.
Hartford and Providence are 2 productive cities whose metro areas aren’t linked by an interstate and where HSR would add value.
Versus CT shore towns whose heyday was in the whaling age 200 years ago.
Amtrak has done a lot to the Baltimore tunnels but they are 150 years old. In the past portions have collapsed. It needs to be filled in. Unless you want to wait until it collapses again.
I would suggest the opposite. When the new tunnel opens, close the old one for a few years to rebuild it, and reopen it. For the MARC Penn Line to have frequent regional rail service that connects with the Red Line at West Baltimore, you need separate tracks. (I don’t know whether the current design for the new West Baltimore stop is compatible with that.)
The old tunnel is actually being retained, but is going to be exclusively used for freight service as I understand it. It definitely would be possible to also use it for additional service, though I’m not sure how much the tunnels themselves represent a constraint for increased service.
The plan is for NS to continue to use the tunnel for 2 freight movements a week, but it will mostly be mothballed. I have to believe the plan is to rehab the tunnel and bring it back into service for MARC, however I can find no evidence of this.
The tunnel will have two tubes, but immediately afterward it will split out to have 4 tracks, 2 for MARC and 2 for Amtrak. So MARC trains will benefit from increased speed and reliability through the new tunnel, but can still stop at the new West Baltimore MARC station that will be constructed, without interfering with Amtrak trains.
In some wildly successful scenario there might be 10 or maybe even 12 trains an hour between Washington D.C. and Baltimore. Two tracks between Baltimore and West Baltimore is good enough.
Agreed – if there are no stops and the 2 track section is short then it doesn’t affect capacity too much unless the total number of trains on a line is over 12-14 trains an hour
The 2002 Baltimore regional rail plan included local service with EMUs and several infill stations along the NEC in the Baltimore metro area. If the MTA intends to revive that idea it would probably add 6tph.
There isn’t enough demand and probably never will be enough demand for that many trains.
Serving West Baltimore is important, but for Baltimore to build a network, instead of a bunch of lines with missed transfers, MARC should use the old tunnels (after refurbishment) where a transfer can be built to the Metro SubwayLink Green Line at Upton.
It won’t be possible to fit a MARC-Metro transfer into the new tunnels due to the great circle curve.
When did portions of the tunnel collapse? A google search doesn’t turn anything up.
The Hartford Line is getting investment into double track, but no electrification
It has 18 trips southbound on weekdays, between Hartford and New Haven. Less to Springfield. Wikipedia says the last single track section is 12 miles long, north of Windsor Locks, which is north of Hartford. Where there is less service. They can think about electrification when demand gets up to three trains an hour during rush hour.
Brightline is working with the Coast Guard and local government to replace the St. Lucia River (Stuart, FL) drawbridge. It is the only single track segment on the Miami-Orlando run. It has 6 foot 6 inches water clearance. For $218 million, the plan is to build a two-track drawbridge with 16 foot clearance.
On what alignment would the conneticut River bridge have to lay in order to be HSR compatible? My understanding is that the short section through Old Saybrook to the west would be retained, and the trick is to get back over to I-95 passing around Old Lyme. As long as the new bridge lies more perfectly E-W than the old bridge, and that the western approach is eased, the eastern approach can be realigned in a later phase.
Near I-95, yeah, as part of a longer bypass (doing it one bridge at a time is pointless).
The new bridge will be useful to CDOT for passenger and what little freight moves on it.
It won’t, because in the presence of a bypass, the route never needs more than half-hourly service. This is neither a highly populated area nor a growing one.
If the train isn’t useful for people why would they be running a train every half hour?
I just saw that they are planning a completely parrallel span, with 100% design complete. Yeah, missed opportunity, especially when an HSR compatible bridge wouldn’t take that much more work.
Regarding Penn Access — In addition to Shell junction rebuild (New Rochelle) being some time in the undefined future, Can someone please explain how service to the Bronx will begin, before construction of the replacement Pelham (Hutchinson) crossing ??? Not to mention, why a two track fixed span over a shallow river is budgeted for half a billion ?? Thanks.
Is this the track replacement machine that should be used on the New Haven Line? https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F44ravtxpr8zb1.jpg
I would say the Frederick Douglass Tunnel is comparable to the Weinberg tunnel that was built in 2014 in Zürich for the Durchmesser Linie, they are both around ~4 km in a urban setting.
https://wiesmann.codiferes.net/wordpress/archives/36722
The 30 mph speed limit is what the new tunnel aims to lift.
Doesn’t the Weinberg Tunnel also have new platforms at Zurich Hbf? Or were the platforms already there before?
Yes, they built four new underground tracks in Zürich HB (under the Sihl river). But that’s kind of the point, except for the speed limit, the Weinberg Tunnel is, I think, a more complex version of the Frederick Douglass Tunnel at a third of the price.
About the speed difference, the Weinberg Tunnel is rate at 120 km/h, whereas the Frederick Douglass Tunnel is announced at ~180 km/h. Maybe this is why they need two separate tubes?