Standardizing the Right Way
Picking consistent standards in order to make use of economies of scale is an important part of good planning. In our construction costs report, we attribute a high cost premium on systems and finishes in New York to lack of standardization of station designs and parts, to the point that the three stations of Second Avenue Subway used two different escalator vendors. This point has appealed to a number of area activists, who reach to not just what we report cross-nationally but also American history. John Pegram, who comments here as BQRail and writes an excellent blog on Substack, gave the example of the PCC streetcars of interwar America a week ago, and I promised I’d follow up on this; the news of the cancellation of congestion pricing delayed this post somehow but it’s still important to discuss. The issue here is that good public transportation procurement requires not just consistent standards, but also good ones, which give international vendors a familiar environment and keep in touch with technological advances.
The starting point for me is that the rolling stock on American subways and commuter rail is fairly standardized. New York City Transit procured standard designs in the 1990s, dubbed the R110A and R110B, and for decades kept buying trains based on these designs. In the 1990s and 2000s, it worked, in the sense that the trains were of comparable quality and cost to rolling stock in other large cities (although they were on the heavy side). But over time, technology diverged, and by the 2010s, a cost premium started to appear. By now, NYCT subway car contracts have a noticeable premium over the European norm, even if this premium is far smaller than the infrastructure cost premium.
Commuter and intercity rail cars have a similar issue with what the standard is. American commuter rail cars follow a few standard designs – the EMU design (in either the LIRR/Metro-North version or the SEPTA one), and the unpowered car hauled by a diesel locomotive one. DMU designs are not at all standard, and do have cost premiums as a result, especially since these are also small orders. That said, nearly all American commuter rail ridership is on EMUs or locomotive-hauled trains (usually diesel, occasionally electric), and those, too, have their problems.
The most glaring problem is that those designs are not at all what the rest of the world does. A few of the changes are modular, including the platform height and the loading gauge. The others are not; the consultants who write the design specs do so without trying to fit themselves to common products made by the multinational vendors.
Then, those specs are extremely detailed; there’s little room for a vendor to try to pawn off a standard Coradia or FLIRT and make that fit with little modification. The RFPs run into the deep hundreds of pages; SEPTA had one with more than 500 pages, and Amtrak’s most recent one ran to, I believe, 1,000. They define even what a train is, as opposed to the looser RFPs common in Europe – Spanish RFPs are 50-70 pages and have single-digit summaries, detailing just how many cars are needed, what the loading gauge is, what electrification is required, and what the expected performance level is.
Designs exist that do dialog with the international vendors and aim at a comparable product – the FRA reform process that led to alt-compliance did exactly that. But then no American commuter rail operator has bothered to make use of alt-compliance; they still buy the heavy, low-performance, low-reliability equipment that they’re used to buying, even as technology marches on and vendors don’t specialize in making that anymore.
The original example of the PCC standard is well-taken in the sense that there need to be repeatable standards. However, it’s important to understand that technological advances in trains exist in East Asia and Europe, and not in North America. American standardization needs to be around what is sold on the other side of either the Atlantic or the Pacific, with no wheel reinvention, and no “we are familiar with this so we’ll keep buying this” excusemaking.
Pedestrian Observations 
Is there a database of passenger railcar purchase costs? That would be a good project for the DOT.
No. We should make one.
Apparently the new regulations went into effect in 2019. Who has ordered train since then?
I think the US should push for more DMUs. The old class 168s on the Chiltern line can do 150km/h-0-150km/h in 3 minutes with a 1 minute dwell.
While that isn’t as good as the ~100km/h a minute with a late model Shinkansen or better with a FLIRT train it certainly isn’t terrible.
I would’ve agreed a couple of years ago, but I think BEMUs are a better choice today (if you’re not able to electrify). The acceleration of the Class 168 is nothing to write home about and better performing DMUs (like the DB Class 650 which accelerates more like a good EMU) have been discontinued, to be replaced by more sluggish options. Manufacturers are moving away from DMUs and currently available DMUs are often worse than the options available in the 2000s, the heyday of DMUs (IMHO).
By using cheap, small-scale electrification at the terminals, most commuter rail will be able to operate with BEMUs available in the European market today (~150+ km range) and save on fuel and maintenance, while enjoying most of the benefits of an EMU (acceleration, noise, pollution), with the only downside being the increased purchasing cost (compared to an EMU). If they’re slowly electrifying, running a mixed EMU+BEMU fleet could be a great option, as they can often be coupled together.
Aren’t there two standardisations at play? There is internal standardisation, i.e. minimising the different types of material within the organisation, and external standardisations, i.e. ordering rolling stock that is a minor variation of stuff that is on the market. Large orders of “Universallokomotive” of the 70s were about the former, buying a Vectron is the latter. Ideally, you would want both, like the SBB’s huge order of Kisses.
There should not be a RFP to buy a train. You should instead look at manufactures catalogs, and when they can deliver to place an order for a train at list price. Of course some things are simple options (standard gauge or broad gauge; several different seat options; maybe an optional restroom), and you will need a custom work to get your way finding integrated (LCD screens might be included, but someone still needs to program them – though I would hope there is reuse and standards here I don’t expect it). It should go without saying that each manufacture has the ability to do some amount of custom painting/applying logos, but there are limits to what you can do. However in general you shouldn’t be buying a custom train, you should be buying a standard train. These trains should already be certified to run on standard system (FRA, whoever needs to apply certification)
This is a well meaning comment that doesn’t reflect reality. Trains are not commodities. There are, generally speaking, no ‘list prices’. Manufacturers do not have ‘catalogs’ in the sense that retail business or manufacturers do, where you can order a stock product ‘off the shelf.’ Unlike retail products, not a single train car is made without a confirmed order; rolling stock manufacturers do not make train cars worth millions each and just have them sitting around the warehouse hoping to make a sale. Those confirmed orders come as the result of RFPs and bids.
All of the “custom work” items you identify (seat options, restroom or not, integrated wayfinding, etc.) are all things that need to be specified in an RFP otherwise you won’t get what you want (or you will get non-comparable bids as each manufacturer interprets your ‘options’ differently if they are not consistently specified).
The answer is not to advocate for no RFPs, instead it is to advocate for a contracting environment that allows for shorter more efficient RFPs, which lead to less customization and lower costs. As Alon notes, every agency everywhere, even the best run ones, use RFPs, its just that they are 1/10th, to 1/20th as long as US RFPs. Some of this can come from the external standardization @wiesmann refers to above. If many agencies have the same standard specs, you can write a shorter RFP identifying the key elements knowing that you will get many more competitive bids (because they already produced rolling stock with those specs for another agency, so it costs little to respond to the RFP and they know what it costs to build), instead of getting a few higher bids from only the manufacturers who take the plunge to estimate a custom spec (with all of the overhead of designing the custom equipment and risk from mis-estimating how long/expensive it will be to manufacture built into the bid).
I would like to argue for a perspective flip. Trains should be seen as “slightly customized commodities” rather than “bespoke designs that curiously have a second-hand market anyway”. Which is to say, procurement offices shouldn’t think in terms of “we want this-and-that, by default/tradition we expect that manufacturers (ye olde times: the in-house works) would come up with a substantially new design for it, it is merely a convenient coincidence if they already have a standard design that almost fits our requirements and can be easily modified to fully do so”, instead they should think in terms of “these are the standard model-families (with their respective options) that manufacturers offer, we should pick the one that is closest to what we’d like to see”.
Which is to say, in most cases it shouldn’t be the designs that are customized around the requirements (which are treated as if set in stone) but the requirements should be, at least reviewed, in view of what designs exist already. This is a mature enough industry that if you ask for something that nobody is offering to build as “standard with options”, you are probably asking for something stupid.
This is normal in industry. Just in time is all about not making anything without a confirmed order. It is completely compatible with a catalog of things that can be ordered and then we will make it and deliver it in x time. All good companies try to operate this way, though of course the reality is there is some inventory along the way because in some cases it is worth keeping stock for various reasons.
Sometimes the catalog is very specific about what can be made, other times it is we will make “anything”. The more you stay in the catalog the more likely they have investing in tooling to make it easy to make that, which makes them faster, better, AND lower cost than someone without IF they get enough enough orders to amortize all that over. The more standard trains are the more tooling it is worth investing in.
That said, trains should be standard enough that manufactures invest in a few trains to “sit on the shelf”. However if you buy one “off the shelf” it will be higher cost than if your order one. The purpose of on the shelf trains is service loaners (here is a model not affected by that recall so you can run some service), sales/marketing (both come see the train you are thinking about ordering, and also you have a big voting on some new lines – lets get a train to a local park so voters can see what they will get), emergency (Tornado took out your shop – we are rushing something to you to restore service while you inspect each train), and rental (super bowl is in town so you need extra trains for just one weekend). This can only happen if trains are standard and interchangeable. If LA, Omaha, Toronto and Atlanta (picking random cities easy to spell) all use compatible trains it is worth thinking about, but if each is slightly different then we can’t. Which is one more reason to standardize.
@Basil Marte stated it well. Trains are not something to make custom. Buy something from the catalog for delivery in a couple years. If one manufacture puts the seats 2-asile-2 and the other does 1-asile-3 either should meet your requirements for 4 across seating. If you really think real leather seats are important then you might be limited to one manufacture because most cities won’t want this – but since the manufacture that offers this is competing with others for other cities business with open pricing they can’t price gouge you for the trains only they make.
Dude, there is no “train catalog”.
Repeatedly imagining that there is one does not make it so.
Trust me, bro!
(OK, there does seem to be something close to that in China. Good luck with getting NYMTA and SEPTA and BART to go along with that.)
May I offer a rephrasing? It would be better if there were one.
When Caltrain bought their double-entry-height internal-wheelchair-lift monstrosities, it would have been better for everyone if Stadler said “we will gladly build you an AAR-size KISS for 550 or 760 or whatever single entry height (and put some toilets at entry level) but your current request is folly; go and reexamine your assumptions”. Namely, Caltrain’s assumption that (platform height reconstruction is slow and would happen in a rolling program, over a period of years, therefore) there would be a period where both stops with a low platform edge and stops with a high platform edge would be simultaneously served, therefore there would be passengers (incl. disabled) who would board at one level and alight at the other, therefore internal wheelchair lifts. It would have been much more fruitful to start from the assumption that there will be a period (Asia: overnight, US: over a weekend?) where neither platform height receives service (a.k.a. full system shutdown), during which at least temporary platform edges at the new height are installed at all stops. (And if applicable, rolling stock can receive modifications.) Suddenly, you don’t need bastard trains after all.
China has huge domestic market and a powerful centralized government, thus creating and forcing the whole industry to follow such train standards is possible, which indeed improves efficiency and decreases cost. However I see little chance to duplicate such approach to the US.
There should be a train catalog. The reason for the catalog is it lists things that the manufactures have investing money in to build custom tools/jigs, and also invested engineering over time so that you train is different from a previous order because they have watched how the train works in the real world and thus reinforced areas that are wearing out in the real world, while areas that are over built are cheapened to reduce cost without sacrificing quality. Because these are catalog designs you don’t have to pay for all that engineering or tooling costs because they are shared with other cities.
RFP is for cases where you need something that is really custom. Trains are not places where custom is good.
If there is a RFP it shouldn’t be any city. It should be a joint effort between nations for something that really is new. Should we make a standard for maglev, monorail, gondolas, vacuum trains or other things that we here generall call gadget bahns – if someone really wants that we need to start with the standard and then cities can add that to the list of things they can choose for the new line. RFP is also a good thing for if we want to change the standard for some new train control, different brakes, or some such thing because technology marches on and so the best standard of today will in some way be bad for the future.
Getting cities on board shouldn’t be hard – require the FRA to reject all proposals that don’t use a standard train. The FRA should be gatekeeping bad projects from getting any federal funding. (this of course requires competent congress and FRA leadership…)
I can’t possibly emphasise enough that the “standard train” would be created by the very worst people on the planet, namely the sort of sub-siminan elsewhere-unemployable scum who infest the US domestic transit-industrial consultancy mafia, people like LTK Engineering Services. You won’t anything other than SEPTA? You can’t have anything but SEPTA. It’s the law.
The only time any vehicles remotely acceptable appear anywhere in the USA is when these assholes are sidestepped or where they neglect to 100% control the process. For one heart-breaking, the only modern, pleasant transit buses that have ever operated anywhere in the USA were ordered from Van Hool over the dead bodies of the mafiosi a couple decades ago. They have made very very sure that will never happen again. Buy America! Front-door boarding! FOREVER.
The only reason that the various fucked-over-by-consultants-but-not-completely-ruined Stadler GTWs and FLIRTs and KISSes have appeared in the retarded hostile wilfully ignorant USA is because the consultants somehow didn’t get their filthy paws on the bogies and traction systems, and that Stadler is a very savvy engineering business organization and will take money from anybody, no matter how insane, given the right price. And boy are we paying hugely over the going rate.
Oh, and speaking of Stadler, they build one-off rack locomotives and they land $2.2 billion contracts for hundreds of trains in a series. Weird, huh? It’s almost as if real world engineering isn’t just what you read about Henry Ford. Sure Stadler has “a catalog” of what they’ve delivered, but they’re just some ideas as to what they can cool up, you can order what you want. Want 200kmh sleeper FLIRTs? No problem. Want FLIRT/KISS single/double hybrids? Great idea, no problem! 1668m gauge 720mm level boarding? Got it, we’ll have them to you in just two years. 25kv and battery backup for yard moves? Sure. 600v and battery dual mode? Got it.
And you know why? Because the FRA isn’t there to stop them, and LTK Engineering Services and Parsons Transportation Group and AECOM and their hideous ilk are an ocean away. (How are those new NEC high speed trains working out, guys? A: very very profitably, for us. Too bad about not being in service, and being shit whenever they ever do manage to run, and costing over twice what something better would have.)
These “people” should be at the bottom of the ocean, not getting their filthy paws all over anybody’s National Standards.
Richard: I deliberately decided against including an “escape hatch”. Obviously, there are places that do genuinely push the technological frontier forward and thus need to do R&D to in the end get rolling stock that matches the vision. There also exist places with genuinely unusual requirements, needing bespoke designs unlikely to be of use to possibly any other organization. Unfortunately, we already observe American agencies (and their consultants) doing utterly ordinary things claim that they are pushing the worldwide technological frontier and/or that they have world-unique constraints. CBOSS, anyone? Thus I baked “no you don’t, and shouldn’t try to” into my point. (With a side dish of “well yes you did specify world-unique performance figures, but those are simply not justified”.)
And fairly explicitly, the “standard train” designs would be created by the manufacturers — Stadler, Siemens, CAF, Alstom, Talgo. As in “they already did it, that’s why we speak of a Siemens Desiro or a Stadler Flirt or an Alstom Coradia or a Bombardier Talent, as opposed to [railroad] 1234 class”. If necessary, feel free to compare the “nearby” modes of transportation: aviation, buses/lorries, and cars. Or, for that matter, locomotives.
the “standard train” would be created by the very worst people on the planet,
No, the “standard train gauge” (not standard train) would be what is already in use by the thousands every day, carrying more people than all other N. American rail systems combined – “NEC Gauge”:
Standard gauge track
AAR Plate B
3.25m width
1220mm platform height
25m long cars
Type H Tightlock coupling
25kV overhead catenary
Nothing about these standards would require that you use SEPTA Silverliners, or prevent using anything from Stadler. Since, as you point out, Stadler (and Siemens, and Alstom, etc.) can build trains to any dimensions, they will be able to design a product that meets these specs, and then anyone who buys it in the future will only have to pay for the product, not for the redesign to some other specs.
These standards would actually cut out consultants. BART having broad gauge track is the result of consultants deciding that things had to be different to meet ‘unique requirements’. But if the money won’t come unless you have standard gauge track, then any consultant that tries to suggest otherwise will be shown the door. Even if the politicians and executives being hoodwinked by consultants are incompetent, the one thing they are competent enough to care about is making sure the money comes. If consultants doing dumb things stops the money, then they will make them get smart real quick.
What’s more, you don’t need to have the standards created by consultants. All you need is to get a few members of Congress smart enough to put the standards above into law and tie Federal New Starts and Small Starts funding to them, and there you are. LTK/Parsons/AECOM/etc. won’t be able to change it.
Please cut with your over-the-top hyperbole, its more useless than you claim the consultants to be. Since AC Transit, Van Hool has provided busses to DC, Utah, and Baltimore; they are about to open a factory in Tennessee (i.e. will meet ‘Buy American’). “The only time any vehicles remotely acceptable appear anywhere in the USA” is when consultants are avoided and “not-completely-ruined Stadler GTWs and FLIRTs and KISSes have appeared in the . . . USA” are contradictory statements. If the consultants messed up the orders then ‘remotely acceptable’ vehicles CAN appear without consultants being sidestepped (if they were sidestepped, then they couldn’t have ruined the vehicles!). Front door boarding has nothing to do with which bus manufacturer you use, and SF Muni has all door boarding without any Van Hool units in the fleet.
Please stop the dehumanization, references to sub-simian or scum, references to “people” in quotes, suggesting people be shot or downed, etc. You are a very smart person with a lot to contribute. You cheapen your arguments and yourself by using this type of language. Furthermore, referring to people as animals is a trait of the very worst kind of human beings, serial killers, sociopaths, the Nazis before the holocaust, the Khmer Rouge before the killing fields. As a decent person you should not want to associate yourself with this kind of behavior.
If you truly think anyone is less than human (even in jest) because of something as inconsequential (compared to human life) as how badly a transit RFP is written, then I strongly suggest you seek professional psychological and spiritual help. Being upset at the state of US transit planning is completely understandable; being upset to the point that you feel it necessary to make reference to murder or “death is too kind a fate” means that you are being hurt more than any rider is ever being hurt by a botched project, and I hope you can find a way to treat that pain inside you.
Loading gauge is extremely modular, and also fits on one page; that’s not where the 500-page RFPs comes from.
And re dehumanization: there’s been a lot of revision of what exactly was involved in genocide, mostly coming from already-existing academic work becoming popular after people had some wild reactions to things over the last 8.5 months. One of the things that was pointed out is that the Nazis didn’t engage in dehumanization. Eve-of-Holocaust actions like forcing the middle-class Vienna Jews to sweep the streets while the Aryans pointed and laughed were the exact opposite of dehumanization: they were the sort of humiliation that requires understanding that the people you are about to kill are humans with their own sense of dignity (that you’re about to destroy).
Loading gauge is extremely modular, and also fits on one page; that’s not where the 500-page RFPs comes from.
Agreed, however, interoperability requires more than just meeting a given loading gauge. Train width and floor/platform height (for level boarding), power supply (voltage and frequency), couplings, even things like over or under running shoes for third rail (hello LIRR/MNRR) all need to be consistently specified for interoperability. One thing I haven’t mentioned yet is door locations, to allow future retrofit of platform screen doors. Quarter point doors are preferred for commuter operations, but I don’t know if anyone uses mid car doors for intercity services. You are correct that none of these lead to 500 page RFPs but they are all very important for standardization.
One of the things that was pointed out is that the Nazis didn’t engage in dehumanization.
I’m sorry, what?!?! Nazi propaganda is replete with references to Jews as rats, snakes, lice, vultures, spiders, cockroaches, etc. You can find examples in an instant by searching for images online with “Nazi dehumanization” or “Nazi Jews animals.” They wrote a children’s book whose message was basically don’t trust the Jew the way you don’t trust the fox with the henhouse (i.e. Jews are predatory animals, and not in a positive name-your-sports-team-the-eagles way). In “The Eternal Jew” crowd scenes from the Warsaw ghetto were spliced with footage of packs of rats. Jews were referred to Untermenschen, which means under or lesser or subhuman. Over the span of decades and across the tens of millions of people living throughout Germany there will of course be a wild variety of actions. Having someone sweep the streets, even as you laugh at them, is not dehumanization, but to think that the Nazi buildup to the Holocaust only took place on Vienna street corners is absurd, and ignores the overwhelming documentary evidence of Nazi literature, posters, newspapers, movies, and speeches.
rolling stock on American subways and commuter rail is fairly standardized
I actually disagree with this from a subway perspective. @weisman made the distinction between internal standardization (are all of your lines and rolling stock interoperable) and external standardization (is your rolling stock of the same specifications as other agencies). With the exception of Boston (where each of the 4 lines uses different rolling stock) and Philadelphia, internal standardization is basically a given for every US subway (NYC of course has the A-Division and B-Division with different specs, but each is so big it doesn’t matter, they each have thousands of cars in use.
External standardization is much worse. Much of what I write below I previously covered in comments at https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/08/12/connecticut-pays-double-for-substandard-trains/, so head over there for a deeper treatment.
Basically, pre-1960’s there were two main standards for subway cars in the US: NYC A-Div (former IRT), NYC B-Div (former BMT and IND) and Chicago L. Chicago L was not relevant to future subways as its loading gauge was tied to the very narrow curves of the Loop. B-Division was by far the largest, and the one used to some extent outside of NY (Phila. Broad St line, Boston red line, etc.). When the “Great Society Subways” (DC, Atlanta, SF) were funded in the 1960s, it would have made sense to require them to adhere to NYC B-Div specs, making it the de facto national standard.
Instead, each system was designed slightly differently. DC Metro and Atlanta MARTA use the same voltage, DC and BART have the same platform height, BART and MARTA have the same width trains. As a result these three otherwise very similar systems cannot share rolling stock orders with each other or with almost any other system in North America. It has only gotten worse. When Miami and Baltimore opened their systems they choose vehicles that did match B-Division specifications – except for power, which is the same as DC and Atlanta. As a result almost every US subway rolling stock order has to be bespoke, instead of everyone just ordering a few more of whatever the NY Subway ordered most recently.
The US is currently in a position for intercity rail and HSR that it was in the 1960s for mass transit. Between Gateway, CAHSR, Brightline West, and Texas Central, more money is going to go into new intercity rail and HSR infrastructure than ever. This is the perfect time for Congress to act and make such funding contingent on buying equipment that meets the standards used on the NEC between Boston and Washington. Just as the NY subway is by far the largest in the country, the NEC will always have more rail passengers than anywhere else. If this were done, then rolling stock orders for other operators can take advantage of not spending money on R&D/customization by ordering whatever Amtrak already bought a ton of. Conversely if another operator does make the investment in new technology first, then Amtrak can specify it for their next order (indeed manufacturers would have an incentive to work or such a new order at a competitive price, knowing they could later sell it to a larger market). Same for commuter rail.
The US is already close in this regard, commuter rail/intercity rail equipment is already much more standardized, it would be a shame if balkanized decision making (Tx Central chooses a Japanese supplier, CAHSR a French one, each has slightly different specs for traditional reasons) hurt any future US HSR in the long run.
Great idea! Freeze the entire USA to whatever shit was in use in NYC in 1970 and whatever shit Amtrak was running on the NEC in 1980. Ignore what everybody else on the entire planet is doing, ignore anybody who has had any success at doing anything, ignore anything that’s ever been improved, because, um, National Standards, because economies of More More More Amtrak. Toe the line, Brightline, you are required to use national standard PCC cars, for great prosperity.
The Soviet Union really did win the Cold War, didn’t it?
What matters is that the train control system (US and Europe have different systems, I’m not sure what Japan uses), various physical distances (rail gauge, platform height…) , and the power supply (US should be 25kv at 60hz, but many other schemes exist). There should be no reason you can’t run a train from Japan and a train from French on the same line. Standards should exist to make that possible. It might be nice if you can run some Japanese cars and some French cars on a single train, but that is much less important than that you can run mixed fleet trains.
Yes the current standard will change. Computer train control didn’t exist in the 1820s when the first trains were being built. Air brakes went through several revisions before they were worth using, but now they should be standard (though perhaps it is time for electronic brakes – maybe they already exist and I’m not aware???) I have no idea what technology of tomorrow will be. However we have a good idea of what should be standard today, and what is likely to come in the next 50 years and so we can make standards that are extensional to allow for the likely changes. When those things come it will be up to our future to figure out how to mix (in come cases the new trains will be better for having that new things while in other cases the new trains will detect the old trains and drop back to the old standard until the last train with the old is scrapped). If our future selves come up with something that can’t fit into our current standards it will be on them to figure out how to make a new standard that works and then how to transition to the new one. However we shouldn’t let the possibility of something we don’t know of today stop us from reaping the benefits of standards for the near future.
In some cases there is good reason to have more than one standard. High floor trains are better for grade separated systems (metro), but for a street running systems (tram) a low floor train is better. However we should have probably have less possible floor heights – remodel your system to a new floor height if needed. Likewise to support platform screen doors we should standardize where the doors on a train are. (some lines with platform doors will need to be remodeled when we next replace the trains). There advantages to different widths of train, so we probably need more than one possible width, but we should limit what is allowed so you can trade trains with a different cities if needed.
It would be nice if US and Europe used the same train control standard, but it shouldn’t be hard to plug in different radios (or whatever) and install different software. However nobody should be designing a new train control standard without experts from the US, Asia, and Europe also in the room with a goal of making a next standard that is good for everyone.
It already is possible without industry-wide standards. Singapore’s two oldest metro lines, for example, currently have a mixed fleet of Kawasaki, Bombardier/Alstom, and Siemens trains, all built to the system’s fairly bespoke specifications despite those manufacturers’ different backgrounds, product platforms, and preferences. The customer’s special asks just have to be within a manufacturer’s usual repertoire to keep cost and complexity in check.
Every Shinkansen trainset today has the same track gauge, same width, same platform height and uses the same 25kV overhead catenary as the very first 0-Series bullet train that ran back in 1964. Does this mean that the Shinkansen system is frozen in the 1960’s (Gasp! Even older than 1980’s Amtrak!)? No, of course not, continued use of basic dimensional standards has not prevented Shinkansen trains from getting faster, using upgraded signals, etc.
The same would apply in the US. Ensuring that all US intercity rolling stock can berth at NY Penn and run under wire from New Haven to Boston wouldn’t lock trains into using technology from the 1960s or 80s, it would just mean that all future intercity (and especially future HSR) train orders would be cheaper, since once a manufacturer has a trainset that meets that basic gauge interoperability for one operator, it can bid on all future orders for other operators as well, and without having to charge extra for custom redesign as well.
A common gauge standard would actually INCREASE the ability to innovate. Once one operator develops/adopts a new technology, others can gain it by re-ordering the same trainset if standards are compatible. For instance, the NY Subway is stupidly only ordering some R211s as open gangway R211Ts, but the trains exist and are in service. Can DC Metro or BART take advantage and get higher capacity open gangway trains by purchasing R211Ts? No, because of incompatible standards. Similarly, Texas Central is looking to use the N700S from Japan, a superior piece of equipment to the semi-loco hauled son-of-Acela Liberty trainsets Amtrak is buying now. If TX Central gets off the ground, can Amtrak purchase an N700S derivative too? Not unless Tx Central is required to meet NEC standards, because max width there is 3.25m while the N700 is 3.35m. If Tx Central is required to bite the bullet and fund the customization of the N700S to a US compatible standard, then high quality Shinkansen train sets become available to any US HSR line (Brightline west, CAHSR, etc.)
A common gauge standard would also mean that future HSR networks could grow. Do you want Brightline West to reach LA Union someday, or trains on CAHSR tracks from San Deigo to reach Las Vegas? Do you want HSR along the NEC to be able to branch at regular speeds to existing stations in update NY or Virginia? (you know, things that “everybody else on the entire planet is doing” and people like Switzerland and France have “had any success at doing”). If so you need compatible standards, otherwise you don’t get the service or you have to spend extra money to rebuild things like Japan had to do with the mini-Shinkansen.
Which brings us to the reason you should like national standards the most – it writes out the possibility to the “transit industrial complex” to milk money for consultants by customizing the requirements. I don’t care how deep the consultants, contractors, and agencies are tied together, they are dependent on federal funding. If the federal funding will not come without meeting certain standards, then those are the standards that will be used, and a contractor/consultant trying to say otherwise for their benefit will be told “No”. No “lets make BART trains broad gauge because it is more stable”, no “maybe we should build these Caltrain EMUs with multiple door heights because we can’t figure out level boarding”, no “CAHSR picked a different platform height so Caltrain is screwed from level boarding forever”. Even if you believe things are hopelessly corrupt, politicians will shut down some corruption by to get federal money that allows them to do the project at all. And riders will benefit from things like level boarding or not having to transfer trains or having a service that runs at all, whether the consultants care or wanted it that way or not.
Texas Central talks about a lot of things. I’ll take trains that are actually running over trains that someday perhaps may run. At the rate the Texans are talking, endlessly talking, the N700s will be obsolete.
There is life west of Ninth Ave. The trains should be high speed as far as Montreal, Toronto, Chicago and Atlanta.
The trains should be high speed as far as Montreal, Toronto, Chicago and Atlanta.
Even more reason for standardization.
There is one, “Amtrak loading gauge”. It isn’t the bestest greatest mostest thing railfans can come up with but it’s almost Shinkansen and it’s good enough.
The commuter rail standard seemed to have come about in the 1990s. When Metrolink opened in Los Angeles in 1992, it received the Bombardier bi-level cars like the ones used by GO in Toronto. As Metrolink had to scale up, it faced a car shortage. In the same decade, a lot of other cities opened commuter rail lines as well. Other cities were able to loan their spare cars to Los Angeles until Metrolink received its next batch of bi-levels. That’s kind of how the Bombardier Bi-Level became the commuter rail car standard in the U.S.
In L.A., you could see Metrolink running Bombardiers from GO, Seattle’s Sounder, Miami’s Tri-Rail, the Bay Area’s Altamont Commuter Express and even old single-level Comet cars from New Jersey Transit and Utah (the NJ Transit cars were sold to Utah but ran in L.A. first).
The US commuter rail standard is not Bombardier bi-level, it is the M7/8/9 on the LIRR and MNRR. There are at more than twice as many M7s alone as there are bi-levels in service at every commuter rail operation in the US combined. Adding M8s and M9s with options would be double again. Adding compatible vehicles like Silverliners and the difference grows further. In terms of passengers carried the disparity is much greater still in favor of units operating between Phila and NY.
It just occurred to me that standardization has an ADA component. If your trains and stations have a standard layout a blind person can confidently exit any train in any station and find an exit, or on entering a new station can get to the correct platform (once they figure out which platform is correct – something hard for a sighted person at times). They won’t run into a post, wall or other such thing in the way, and they will be waiting at the platform door when the train arrives.