Subway-Intercity Rail Connections
Something Onux said in comments on yesterday’s post, about connecting Brooklyn to intercity rail, got me thinking more about how metro lines and intercity rail can connect better. This matters for mature cities that build little infrastructure like New York or Berlin, but also for developing-world cities with large construction programs ahead of them. For the most part, a better subway system is automatically one that can also serve the train station better – the train station is usually an important destination for urban travel and therefore, usually the same things that make for a stronger subway system also make for better subway-intercity rail connections.
Subways and commuter trains
Like gender, transit mode is a spectrum. There are extensive systems that are clearly metro and ones that are clearly commuter rail, but also things in between, like the RER A, and by this schema, the Tokyo and Seoul subways are fairly modequeer.
The scope of this post is generally pure subway systems – even the most metro-like commuter lines, like the RER A and the Berlin S-Bahn, use mainline rail rights-of-way and usually naturally come to connect with intercity train stations. Of note, RER A planning, as soon as SNCF got involved, was modified to ensure the line would connect with Gare de Lyon and Gare Saint-Lazare; previous RATP-only plans had the line serving Bastille and not Gare de Lyon, and Concorde and not Auber. So here, the first rule is that metro (and metro-like commuter rail) plans should, when possible, be modified to have the lines serve mainline train stations.
Which train stations?
A city designing a subway system should ensure to serve the train station. This involves nontrivial questions about which train stations exactly.
On the one hand, opening more train stations allows for more opportunities for metro connections. In Boston, all intercity trains serve South Station and Back Bay, with connections to the Red and Orange Lines respectively. In Berlin, north-south intercity trains call not just at Hauptbahnhof, which connects to the Stadtbahn and (since 2020) U5, but also Gesundbrunnen and Südkreuz, which connect to the northern and southern legs of the Ringbahn and to the North-South Tunnel; Gesunbrunnen also has a U8 connection. In contrast, trains into Paris only call at the main terminal, and intercity trains in New York only stop at Penn Station.
On the other hand, extra stations like Back Bay and delay trains. The questions that need to be answered when deciding whether to add stations on an intercity line are,
- How constructible is the new station? In New York, this question rules out additional stops; some of the through-running plans involve a Penn Station-Grand Central connection to be used by intercity trains, but there are other reasons to keep it commuter rail-only (for example, it would make track-sharing on the Harlem Line even harder).
- How fast is the line around the new station? More stations are acceptable in already slow zones (reducing the stop penalty), on lines where most trips take a long time (reducing the impact of a given stop penalty). Back Bay and Südkreuz are in slow areas; Gesundbrunnen is north of Hauptbahnhof where nearly passengers are going south of Berlin, so it’s free from the perspective of passengers’ time.
- How valuable are the connections? This depends on factors like the ease of internal subway transfers, but mostly on which subway lines the line can connect to. Parisian train terminals should in theory get subsidiary stations because internal Métro transfers are so annoying, but there’s not much to connect to – just the M2/M6 ring, generally with no stations over the tracks.
Subway operations
In general, most things that improve subway operations in general also improve connectivity to the train station. For example, in New York, speeding up the trains would be noticeable enough to induce more ridership for all trips, including access to Penn Station; this could be done through reducing flagging restrictions (which we briefly mention at ETA), among other things. The same is true of reliability, frequency, and other common demands of transit advocates.
Also in New York, deinterlining would generally be an unalloyed good for Penn Station-bound passengers. The reason is that the north-south trunk lines in Manhattan, other than the 4/5/6, either serve Penn Station or get to Herald Square one long block away. The most critical place to deinterline is at DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn, where the B/D/N/Q switch from a pattern in which the B and D share one track pair and the N and Q share another to one in which the B and Q share a pair and the D and N share a pair; the current situation is so delicate that trains are delayed two minutes just at this junction. The B/D and N/Q trunk lines in Manhattan are generally very close to each other, so that the drawback of deinterlining is reduced, but when it comes to serving Penn Station, the drawback is entirely eliminated, since both lines serve Herald Square.
If anything, it’s faster to list areas where subway service quality and subway service quality to the train station specifically are not the same than to list areas where they are:
- The train station is in city center, and so circumferential transit, generally important, doesn’t generally connect to the station; exceptions like the Ringbahn exist but are uncommon.
- If too many lines connect to the one station, then the station may become overloaded. Three lines are probably fine – Stockholm has all three T-bana lines serving T-Centralen, adjacent to the mainline Stockholm Central Station, and there is considerable but not dangerous crowding. But beyond that, metro networks need to start spreading out.
- Some American Sunbelt cities if anything have a subway connection to the train station, for example Los Angeles, without having good service in general. In Los Angeles, the one heavy rail trunk connects to Union Station and so does one branch of the Regional Connector; the city’s problems with subway-intercity rail connections are that it doesn’t really have a subway and that it doesn’t really have intercity rail either.
Pedestrian Observations 
For the Paris case, there should likely be a secondary stop in the suburbs for many TGVs.
Each suburban station reduces access time to their respective station by between roughly 15 and 30 minutes for the part of the suburb. When many TGV trips are around 2h long, this is quite considerable and makes the TGV more attractive. Another added benefit, even if the time to the main station and the suburban station is the same, all the M15 stations have elevators making the trip with luggage easier.
Another benefit is adding capacity to the main terminal. Montparnasse, Gare du Lyon and Gare du Nord are currently add their capacity limit some parts of the day. Reducing the number of passenger and trains would help.
There’s the significant disadvantage of what you are proposing that people outside the Périphérique would benefit from the TGV. And that would be truly awful.
@Matthew Hutton
But you’re missing the advantage: those awful Franciliens and District 13-ers no longer have to pollute the pure Parisian gene pool:-) This is the true evil genius of M15 etc. Well worth the €40bn.
As a serious point though a second TGV line towards south eastern France should definitely use Gare de Lyon for simplicity and there is clearly capacity there for vastly more trains.
Hamburg Hauptbahnhof, Germany, is an example of too many lines connecting at one station. With about 200 million passengers per year (sum of all modes at that station) it’s the second busiest station in Europe and clearly at or over capacity in terms of passenger volume for large parts of the day. All intercity and all commuter rail connects to all subway lines in just that one station, making it the best (and often only) station do your transfer. Many intercity trains stop at other stations, too, but unfortunately, the geography of the city limits how many passengers profit from that.
Intercity trains to/from the south stop in Harburg (a transfer station south of the river Elbe), but there is only a single subway line there and that runs parallel to the main line rail tracks across the river Elbe to the Hauptbahnhof. So, while Harburg is a good stop for anyone South of the river, it does nothing for people heading north of the river, where most of the population lives and works. Some intercity trains continue on from Hauptbahnhof to Dammtor (but that’s just one stop by subway from the Hauptbahnhof) and Altona (also much lower volume, limited connections). ICE trains from Berlin don’t stop anywhere before they reach Hauptbahnhof. The only option would be Bergedorf, but the ICE’s today run through Bergedorf close to 100 mph, so the time penalty of an extra stop would be considerable for a station that is essentially just a suburb with a single subway line and a population of only 100k.
Short of a really large scale solution that would make the NSRL in Boston look like a piece of cake (e.g. a new intercity rail tunnel from Altona below the Elbe and the container port to Altenwerder), the city of Hamburg and Deutsche Bahn have settled on an expansion to increase capacity of the Hauptbahnhof .
Tokyo actually isn’t the best example given;
The best example of subway-intercity interaction is Kintetsu’s Namba line which effectively Osaka’s 3rd/4th busiest subway line with subway stop density, feeding express regional rail services from as far as Himeji and Nara and having 1/2 intercity services from Nagoya/Mie per hour. No 4 tracks anywhere by the way.
It was only built in 2010 and saved Hanshin’s bacon (or Takoyaki rather) in particular. Its success feeding into the Naniwa-suji line and Osaka metro getting over its Monroe doctrine madness.
It manages something like 500,000 people a day and that’s with a the Sennichimae line paralleling in the densest sections. It should have been built in the 1970’s.
The modequeerness in Tokyo isn’t the intercities but rather than through-running; you can vaguely divide the system into lines that feed Tokyo Metro or Toei and lines that feed JR East through-lines, but then the Chuo-Sobu and Joban Lines do both. The issue is then that the subway side of the system doesn’t serve Shinagawa and barely serves Tokyo Station, but a) Otemachi is very close and b) enough metro-like commuter lines do get to Tokyo/Shinagawa/Ueno.
I don’t think we disagree. The metaphor works perfectly.
Its just I think Kintetsu’s Osaka-Nagoya networks needs to be seen by more people as an example since it doesn’t have a quadtrack its genuinely the modequeerest of modequeer lines given its effectively all types of sub-high speed heavy rail in one line*. (And it should be made more so with through-running on Nagoya’s Higashiyama line**).
I think a lot countries could learn from it ~looks at the Chiltern mainline~
But at Tokyo scale mixing proper intercity*** like Kinetsu does without at least a 4 track runs into real capacity issues.
*Some of the rural bits are almost light-rail in infrastracture.
**of course most of the major JR lines in Tokyo have freight interactions which are intercity.
**Yes I know the electrification and the loading gauge don’t match up. But considering Aichi/National government are looking to kill Kintetsu’s intercity network with the Maglev its only fair.
What are the specific learnings from Kintetsu for the Chiltern Line(s)?
1. Electrify.
2. Passing loops, lots of passing loops (i.e. 1 per 4-6km).
Alon, for some reason I can’t post a new comment, only reply?
If there’s an RR tunnel from New Jersey to Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn and that route passes Secaucus Junction, it seems like the cleanest answer is for intercity trains to stop at Secaucus Junction so riders can transfer there. On the one hand, this isn’t ideal in that intercity riders have more luggage so there’s longer dwell times at Secaucus, but if your trip is so time sensitive that you need to get right to Wall St, you probably don’t have that much luggage on you and dwell times are going to be long there anyway. Stopping at Secaucus also lets inbound riders from North Jersey use the NEC to get to points south without backtracking through Penn Station.
They allow people changing trains in Secaucus to go to Newark and points beyond. You want to go to Philadelphia, you can board an Amtrak train in Newark. Or MetroPark or Trenton depending on how frugal you are. If you want to be very very frugal you’d do it on NJTransit exclusively.
They have also been allowing people who want to go to “Wall Street” to change trains, in New Jersey, and get there, since 1910.
For the same reason you want to send trains directly to Wall Street, the people in North Jersey not on a line that runs to Newark Penn want to get to those places quickly (with fewer transfers). PATH trains are smaller and don’t get as close to Wall Street.
Yeah but reverse branching also isn’t great. The branch to Grand Central from Long Island has added ~0 extra riders according to Alon.
So you want the people from the high demand markets, Lower Manhattan/Financial District and Brooklyn to change trains so that people from the low demand market don’t have to?
In a perfect world, yes you’d absolutely send a few intercities to Wall Street and Brooklyn directly. (I think they would do better than East Side Access.) But you’re competing for slots with local trains limits capacity, and there’s not enough room for four tracks in the new tunnel. A Secaucus transfer, though, gives Lower Manhattan/Brooklyn-bound riders a faster ride *and* more NJT riders a better connection to the NEC, so it gives you more bang for buck IMO.
How many commuter trains are you sending through the tunnels? You can’t on one hand argue there isn’t enough demand – “branch to Grand Central from Long Island has added ~0 extra riders” – and then claim there isn’t enough capacity.
Probably around 24 tph based on the existing Hudson tunnels and Thameslink. The argument isn’t that there isn’t enough demand, it’s that there’s more demand from the immediate suburbs than from the NEC further south, and it’s hard to adequately serve the local demand *and* give intercity riders a one-seat ride.
Oh, there’s a lot of extra demand – the LIRR just hasn’t been good at providing it. It hasn’t added service with ESA, only split frequencies, so now service isn’t any better – the option of trains to Grand Central is balanced out by much worse frequencies to each destination, since they broke the timed transfer system at Jamaica.
When timetabling New York-New Haven, I’m assuming 24 commuter tph need to go into Manhattan, in some combination of Penn Station and Grand Central, plus six intercity tph; today it’s 20 commuter, zero intercity (since intercity fares are too high for commuter trips). If the long intercities can substitute for some commuter trains then maybe 18+6 works, but I’m not playing in easy mode.
Where are you sending 24 trains per hour? This would be sometime after the LIRR and NJtransit are sending 40-ish to Midtown. Places like Queens Village or Rutherford don’t have enough people and never will, to need a train every five minutes.
*bangs head on desk*
They didn’t break the timed transfer system. The timed transfer was to trains to or from terminals almost no one used. With lots of loitering in Jamaica. If you want to go to Brooklyn there is a shuttle train.
What do you mean, where am I sending 24 tph? The New Haven Line today runs 20. If you’re asking how they fit into the tunnels, the answer is that the northern tunnels have intercity, Stamford locals, and Port Washington Branch trains, and the southern ones have the rest of LIRR-Penn (let’s say, Babylon and Hempstead, with Long Beach and Far Rockaway going to Brooklyn with cross-platform connections at Jamaica), and then the LIRR-ESA and Stamford local + Port Washington trains get a cross-platform transfer at Sunnyside.
The tunnel through Brooklyn. I know you have bizarre fantasies of sending all the trains everywhere but Metro North trains are unlikely to be going to Long Island and also going to New Jersey.
*There’s probably room for around 24 tph. Even if you run a bit less than that, you don’t have much of a window to fit intercities in unless you can shorten the dwells to be ~equivalent to regional trains.
And when anybody else mentions it, whenever a commuter station on “Wall Street” comes up, you get in a fit of transit geekery about how it will interfere with the commuter trains. All the trains will be using “Amtrak” loading gauge and any of them can go to any platform that is long enough. Skim off two trainloads an hour of people going to Wall Street or Brooklyn that’s two trainloads of people NOT IN PENN STATION. And their overall trip is faster. Because they didn’t have to go through Penn Station.
Wall Street is the country’s third or fourth largest central business district, depending on who is counting what. Which means it’s bigger than Los Angeles’s, Atlanta’s, Philadephia’s, Dallas’s, Houston’s… And a few miles away there is Brooklyn which would be the country’s 23rd largest metropolitan statistical area the same size as Saint Louis or San Antonio. Without going through Penn Station.
What’s the best option for San Francisco, where the nearest intercity rail stations are in Oakland and Emeryville? Currently, Amtrak has a shuttle bus to downtown San Francisco, or SF-bound riders can transfer at Richmond, which is at the very end of the BART line.
Presumably you can re-extend Amtrak to San Francisco itself like the old days?
Except Amtrak has never served San Francisco itself. In fact, except for Southern Pacific service to Los Angeles along the coast (which used SP’s peninsula line, currently Caltrain), as far as I’m aware no intercity service has ever reached SF proper, all of them (other SP, ATSF, Western Pacific) stopped in Oakland for a ferry transfer, just as the Penn Central, Erie, etc. all stopped at the Jersey Shore for a ferry across the Hudson to reach NY. Trains like the City of San Francisco and the San Francisco Zephyr never actually rolled a foot through SF, terminating in Oakland instead. More regional operators (Northwestern Pacific, Napa Valley) used ferries from the North Bay.
The map here http://www.thegreatermarin.org/map-store/9covl6ose3l38s51xjif105a9uorn1 has a great layout of Bay Area rail service in 1937, around when the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge opened. It very misleadingly makes it seem as if rails crossed the Bay in a tunnel to “Market St” station, when in fact Market Street was the ferry terminal, while the notes make it clear that a ferry transfer was required.
Interestingly the map does not show service over the Dumbarton rail bridge, even though there was supposedly a shuttle from Newark to Redwood City.
Oh interesting. Fair enough.
Yeah, it’s worth keeping things like this is mind when people romanticize history around transit. Despite all their (many) flaws, between BART and Caltrain San Francisco has far better rail transit than it did during the “Golden Age of Rail”. BART’s Transbay tube is a quantum leap over ferries or Key System streetcars that only had one stop in SF; SP at its WWII peak ran 26 trains per day from SF to San Jose with no reverse direction trains, a five hour midday gap, and no service on Sundays or after 6:20pm – Caltrain by comparison runs 104 weekday trains today.
The California High-Speed Rail plan has always been to go to Transbay Terminal via the DTX tunnel. The quality of the legacy track to Sacramento is low enough that I don’t think San Francisco can meaningfully have intercity rail without such a high-speed rail plan.
The current Capital Corridor train from Sacramento to Emeryville (opposite San Francisco) takes 1 hour 37 minutes. In contrast, driving takes 1:15 in the middle of the night, often 2 hours at rush hour. Improvements to the current train, like electrification and better rolling stock (tilting?), could further improve travel time. So I don’t know why you say the current route is meaningless. It seems to be competitive with driving already, with room for more improvement. The main thing it seems to lack now is good headways.
It’s owned by Union Pacific Railroad. That means that anything you propose isn’t happening.
That’s all there is to it. End of story.
I mean to an extent so what?
No they aren’t. Just like there is life west of Ninth Ave there is life south of 34th Street.
North side of the Manhattan Bridge connects to the express track of Sixth Ave and the south side of the bridge connects to the Broadway express tracks. The Fourth Ave. local tracks can connect to the tunnel and the Broadway local track without interfering with anything. How do you “deinterline” without digging up Flatbush Avenue for a few years. And bustitituing around it?
Yes they are. Maximum about 500m apart.
What’s your take on Let’s Go LA’s proposal to dig metrolink tunnels in LA between Union Station and 7th/Metro, to allow mainline trains to service the LA financial district? Should CA HSR trains use a potential future tunnel too?
My prior is that a metrolink tunnel would be incredibly useful, preventing an extra transfer, but might cause some overcrowding issues at 7th/metro. Not sure if an HSR link makes sense though -> the extra time traveling to union station is unlikely to push people to fly instead.
In the magical world where we’re digging new tunnels for Metrolink, let’s have one half end up somewhere on the Westside, as opposed to merely circling back towards the existing tracks by the river…
In the New York context this would make more sense to me in the future of a hypothetical Sunnyside stop that Amtrak (at least perhaps the regionals) might consider stopping at. It wouldn’t be a “transfer” in the strict sense of the word, but you’d at least be walking distance to the G and all the Queens lines, not to mention the LIRR (this is an extremely hypothetical Sunnyside, where all the agencies actually work together to ensure they all can stop there). I’d assume this would decongest Penn a bit and definitely save people some time going from east of the river to points North.
Sunnyside is too far from the subway for this. Its value is elsewhere:
1. O&D traffic to Sunnyside and Long Island City.
2. Connections between PSA and ESA trains.
Why would anybody except an especially frothy railfan want to change from a Penn Station train to an East Side Acesss train in Queens when they could change from a Penn Station train to a Grand Central train along the New Haven line? And be 15 stories closer to the street when they get to Grand Central.
Because stations on PSA in the Bronx have no access to Grand Central today, and if the LIRR stops splitting frequencies there will be a ton of stations with access to only one of the two terminals (for example, the entire Port Washington Branch should be running only to Penn).
Port Washington passengers can and do change trains in Woodside. Have been approximately forever. And the bane of the LIRR, approximately forever, has been “change at Jamaica”. I just asked the trip planner for travel between Jamaica and Grand Central for a weekday, next week at 7:50 AM. There’s a train to Grand Central every five-ish minutes. Dese people with the awful split frequencies can CHANGE TRAINS IN JAMAICA.
Just like you want people to change trains in some mythical station in western Queens which isn’t being built.
They can change at Woodside, but what would they change trains to? If it’s to other Port Washington trains, then by definition they gain nothing. If it’s to LIRR Main Line locals, then first of all it’s not a cross-platform transfer, and second of all there’s a strong case for running those trains to Penn Station and not Grand Central as well.
At rush hour out of Jamaica, the effective frequency to both terminals is good, sure. But then off-peak on individual lines, it isn’t – there are hour-long waits.
You can change from Port Washington trains to other lines in Woodside. People do it all the time. Especially when there is an event in Flushing Meadow Park. There isn’t hour long wait if there are two trains an hour THEY CAN CHANGE TRAINS IN JAMAICA.
Herald Square to Moynihan is 500-600 meters, which from Queens Plaza would get you to anywhere they’d presumably think to put a Sunnyside Station. Based on the latest Sunnyside Yard master plan (lol), they’re envisioning a station underneath Queens Blvd / the 7 tracks, which would be about 300 meters to Queens Plaza, ~600 meters to Queensboro Plaza, and ~300 meters to 33 St-Rawson St for the 7. Not ideal, but definitely not out of scope of the Herald Square to Penn (and especially to Moynihan) transfer suggested above.
(whoops, accidentally unthreaded that)