Reports on High-Speed Rail and the Northeast Corridor
Two reports that I’ve collaborated on are out now, one about high-speed rail planning for Marron and one about Northeast Corridor maintenance for ETA. A third piece is out, not by me but by Nolan Hicks, about constant-tension catenary and its impact on speed and reliability. The context for the latter two pieces is that the Northeast Corridor has been in a recurrent state of failure in the last three weeks, featuring wire failures, circuit breaker failures, track fires, and transformer fires. The high-speed rail planning piece is of different origin – Eric interviewed officials involved in California High-Speed Rail and other American projects that may or may not happen and this led to synthesizing five planning recommendations, which aren’t really about the Northeast Corridor but should be kept in mind for any plan there as well.
The broader context is that we’re going to release another report specific to the Northeast Corridor, one that’s much more synthetic in the sense of proposing an integrated infrastructure and service planning program to cut trip times to about 1:53 New York-Washington and 2:00 New York-Boston, informed by all of these insights. Nolan’s piece already includes one key piece of information that’s come out of this work, about the benefits of constant-tension catenary upgrades: 1:53 requires constant-tension catenary, and if it is not installed, the trip time is 2:04 instead, making this the single biggest piece of physical infrastructure installation the Northeast Corridor needs.
The catenary issue
Trying to go to Philadelphia, I was treated to a train stuck at Penn Station without air conditioning, until finally, after maybe 45 minutes of announcements by the conductor that it would be a while and they’d make announcements if the train was about to move, I and the other passengers got out to the station, waiting for anything to change, eventually giving up as the train and several subsequent ones were canceled. My post from three days ago about Germany has to be read with this context – while publishing I was waiting for all three pieces above to appear.
I encourage people to read the ETA report for more detail about the catenary. In brief, overhead wires can be tensioned by connecting them to fixed places at intervals along the tracks, which leads to variable tension as the wires expand in the heat and contract in the cold; alternatively, they can be tensioned with spring wires or counterweights, which automatically provide constant tension. The ETA report explains more, with diagrams, some taken from Garry Keenor’s book on rail electrification, some made by Kara Fischer (the one who made the New Mexico public transit maps and others I’ll credit upon request, not the USDOT deputy chief of staff). The catenary on the Northeast Corridor has constant tension north of New York, and for a short stretch in New Jersey, but not on the vast majority of the New York-Washington half of the line.
Variable-tension catenary is generally unreliable in the heat, and is replaced with constant-tension catenary on main lines even in Europe, where the annual temperature range is narrower than in the United States. But it also sets a blanket speed limit; on the Northeast Corridor, it is 135 mph, or 217 km/h – the precision in metric units is because 217 km/h is the limiting speed of a non-tilting train on a curve of radius 1,746 meters, a common radius in the United States as it is a round number in American units (it’s 1°, the degree being the inverse of curve radius). This blanket speed limit slows trains by 11 minutes between New York and Washington, subject to the following assumptions:
- The tracks otherwise permit the maximum possible speed based on curvature, up to 320 km/h; in practice, there are few opportunities to go faster than 300 south of New York. There is an FRA rule with little justification limiting trains to 160 mph, or a little less than 260 km/h, on any shared track; the rule is assumed removed, and if it isn’t, the cost is about one minute.
- Trains have the performance of the Velaro Novo, which trainset is being introduced to the United States with Brightline West. Other trainsets may have slightly better or worse performance; the defective Avelia Liberty sets are capable of tilt and therefore the impact of maximum speed is larger.
- Intercity trains make one stop per state, counting the District of Columbia as a state.
- Intercity and regional trains are timetabled together, on a clockface schedule with few variations. If a train cannot meet these requirements, it stays off the corridor, with a forced transfer at Philadelphia or Washington. All train schedules are uniformly padded by 7%, regardless of the type of catenary. If variable-tension catenary requires more padding, then the impact of constant-tension catenary is increased.
The bulk of the difference between 1:53 and the current trip time of about 2:50 is about timetabling, not infrastructure – when the trains are running smoothly, there is extensive schedule padding, in one case rising to 35 minutes south of New York on a fast Regional. Rolling stock quality provides a boost as well, to both reliability and acceleration rates. Faster speeds on curves even without tilt matter too – American standards on this are too conservative, and on a built-out line like the Northeast Corridor, being able to run with 180 mm of cant and 130 mm of cant deficiency (see explanation here) is valuable. But once the regulatory and organizational issues are fixed, the biggest single piece of infrastructure investment required is constant-tension catenary, simultaneously reducing trip times and improving reliability.
Nolan’s piece goes more into costs for catenary repair, and those are brutal. The Northeast Corridor Project Inventory includes $611 million to just replace the catenary between Newark and New Brunswick, without constant-tension upgrades. This is 36.5 route-km, some four- and some six-track; the $16.7 million/cost electrifies a new line from scratch around six times over in non-English-speaking countries, and while the comparison is mostly to double-track lines, around half the cost of electrification is the substations and transformers, and those aren’t part of the project in New Jersey.
State of Good Repair projects always end up as black holes of money, because if half the money is spent and there’s no visible improvement, it’s easy for Amtrak to demand even more money, without having to show anything for it. An improvement project would be visible in higher speeds, better ride quality, higher reliability, and so on, but this is free money in which the cost is treated as a positive (jobs, the appearance of work, etc.) and not something to be minimized in pursuit of another goal. One conclusion of this is that no money should be given to catenary renewal. Money can be spent on upgrades with visible results, in this case constant-tension catenary. On all else, Amtrak cannot be trusted.
High-speed rail planning
The report we wrote on high-speed rail planning at Marron is longer than the ETA report, but I encourage people to read it as well, especially anyone who wishes to comment here. In brief, we give five broad recommendations, based on a combination of reviewing the literature on high-speed rail, cost overruns, and public infrastructure management, and interviewing American sources in the field.
- The federal government needs to nurture local experimentation and support it with in-house federal expertise, dependable funding, and long-term commitment.
- The FRA or another federal entity should have consistent technical standards to ensure scale and a clear operating environment for contractors.
- The federal government should work with universities to develop the technology further, which in this case means importing standards that work elsewhere – high-speed rail in 2024 is a mature technology, not requiring the inventions of new systems that underlay the Japanese, French, and German networks.
- Agencies building high-speed rail should have good project delivery, following the recommendations we gave in the subway construction costs report. Using consultants is unavoidable, but there needs to be in-house expertise, and agencies should avoid being too reliant on consultants or using consultants to manage other consultants.
- Agencies and states should engage in project planning before environmental reviews and before making the decision whether to build; the use of environmental reviews as a substitute for planning leads to rushed designs, which lead to mistakes that often prove fatal to the project.
Currently, all American high-speed rail plans should be treated as case studies of what to avoid. However, this does not mean that all of them fail on all five criteria. For one, California High-Speed Rail largely used pan-European technical standards in its planning; Caltrain did not in related planning including the electrification project and the associated resignaling (originally intended to be the bespoke CBOSS). The criterion on technical standards becomes more important as different projects interact – for example, Brightline West is inconsistent about what it’s using. Then there’s Texas Central, which uses turnkey Shinkansen standards, but as it’s turned over to Amtrak is bound to get modifications that conflict with what Japan Railways considers essential to the Shinkansen, such as total lack of any infrastructure mixing with legacy trains.
Notably, none of this is about the Northeast Corridor directly. My own interpretation of the report’s recommendations points out to other problems. For example, the Northeast Corridor’s technical standards are consistent but also bad, coming from an unbroken legacy of American railroader traditions whose succors can barely find Germany on a map, let alone bother to learn from it or any other foreign country. This way, the New Haven Line, which with modern trainsets and associated standards has few curves limiting trains to less than 150 km/h, is on a blanket speed limit of 75 mph, or 121 km/h, in Connecticut, with several further slowdowns for curves. There’s long-term planning for the corridor, and it’s bipartisan, but this long-term planning involves agencies that fight turf wars and mostly want to get the others out of what they perceive as their own turfs. There is lush funding, but it goes to the wrong things – Moynihan Train Hall but no improvements at the track level of Penn Station, extensive track renewal at 1.5 orders of magnitude higher cost than in Germany, in-place bridge replacements on curvy track instead of nearby bypasses.
The current planning does use too many consultants – in fact, Penn Reconstruction’s interagency agreement stipulates that they use consultant-centric project delivery methods, with one possibility, progressive design-build (what most of the world calls design-build; what New York calls design-build is different and better), not even legal in New York state law, but the local power brokers are trying to legalize it and break their own construction cost records. But it’s not quite the same as not bothering to develop in-house talent – there is some, and sometimes it isn’t bad, but poor project management and lack of interagency coordination has caused the budgets for the big-ticket items that Amtrak wants to explode beyond anyone’s ability to manage. The five recommendations, applied to the Northeast, mostly speak to the low quality of the existing agencies, rather than to a hodgepodge of standards as is happening at the interface between California High-Speed Rail and Caltrain or Brightline West.
The ultimate problem on the Northeast Corridor is that it is held together with duct tape, by people who do not know how to use more advanced tools than duct tape. They constantly fight fires, sometimes literally, and never ask why fires always erupt when they’re around; it’s not the heat, because the Northeast isn’t any warmer than Japan or South Korea or Italy, and it’s not underinvestment 30+ years ago, because Germany has that history too. Nolan points out the electric traction backlog on the Northeast Corridor grew from less than $100 million in 2018 to $829 million today; the people in charge are substantially the same ones who deferred this much maintenance over the six-year period that included the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. I didn’t get into this project in order to study other people’s failures again, as we did with the construction costs report. But everything I’m seeing on the Northeast Corridor, even more than in California or Texas, points to what may be the worst intercity rail planning of any even vaguely modern country.
Pedestrian Observations 
Good article, However you will NEVER see High Speed Rail Service in the USA due to the Special Interest Groups that are DEAD SET against it from day one. They are very common and are very successful in many foreign countries, and the USA will NEVER admit that they are WRONG. But they always have plenty of money for WARS and Regime Change operations, thru CORRUPTION, even though it no longer works anymore.
There’s also plenty of money for high-speed rail! The amount of money spent on rail renewal in Connecticut over 10 years pays for reducing New York-Boston to two hours if spent better.
Yep Alon. I know you really know your stuff, and are concern for same. Also Vladimir Zelensky just freely spent 270 million USD dollars to purchase a hotel & casino in Cyprus recently. He just made SUCKERS of the US taxpayers monies.
No he didn’t, and also US aid to Ukraine is not really displacing domestic infrastructure spending. Most of Europe gives more aid to Ukraine than the US relative to GDP and manages to build infrastructure just fine.
The correct solution is to delete, not reply. Your blog doesn’t deserve this. There are other places (eg all of Twitter) for the deranged to piss all over themselves.
CANCEL CULTURE. Cancel FOR culture. Help help I’m being oppressed.
God this is so depressing. Is there any hope that this will get better in our lifetimes?
I agree with you about same, and if they can really put their hearts and mind and $$$’s to it – then maybe it will get done. MAJOR improvements are needed BADLY as our infrastructure continues to CRUMBLE. So what happened to Joebama Buydens so-called BUILD BACK BETTER PLAN ??? Also use some if that 2 trillion dollars that the USA gave to Ukraine, could have also done a LOT of GOOD here as well. Have a nice day as well.
Where were you and others like you who wanted Obama to build HSR in the first place back in the early 2010’s?
Something for people like you to remember:
<blockquote>
or at best, be of “academic interest” only. I live in New York State. If I were to live in New York City, or any major urban center, mass transit would be a core issue. You’re going to be advocating strongly for public transportation, you probably want “walkable communities,” bike lanes, and so on. It’s a given, a part of being “progressive” and “environmentally concerned.” Leave the city, and move up to my area in the Adirondacks? No one cares about those things. We’re rural, sparsely populated, and there are long distances between small villages. We’re never going to have mass transit, our communities may be walkable, but our jobs and shopping are often far away. So if you’re making that a big centerpiece of what you think it means to be progressive, you’ll be upset that those of us who don’t live in urban/suburban environments are going to go “whatever.” We’re not necessarily against it, it’s just not anything that really concerns us.</blockquote>
From here.
See – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKHMR3tq1WU&ab_channel=JudgeNapolitano-JudgingFreedom and here’s your real answer. Have a nice day.
Not watching a YouTube video for this. Here, for example, is Cypriot media on the fake corruption story.
Awwwww Im guessing that you wonder why we cannot have anything GOOD because of the Military Industrial BLACK HOLE, and Special Interest Groups that wants constant WARS which NO LONGER WORKS ANYMORE – because the ones being attacked by the USA are FIGHTING BACK NOW !!! Remember Vietnam in 1976 and Afghanistan (aka the graveyard of empires in 2021 ??? HIGH SPEED RAIL – FORGETABOUTIT !!! Unless we get our act together and spend taxpayers monies wisely instead. You should listen to Colonel Larry Wilkerson, and STOP being ignorant, since the USA is losing its dominance and power on the world stage due to its arrogance, ignorance, and STUPIDITY as well. Wake-up and smell the coffee please ??? Have a nice day, and STOP listening to a senile 82 year old Joebama Buyden whom is severely suffering to brain fog and dementia to boot.
Something for you and other like you to read about Biden and his accomplishments:
TOP ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Lowering Costs of Families’ Everyday Expenses
More People Are Working Than At Any Point in American History
Making More in America
Rescued the Economy and Changed the Course of the Pandemic
Rebuilding our Infrastructure
Historic Expansion of Benefits and Services for Toxic Exposed Veterans
The First Meaningful Gun Violence Reduction Legislation in 30 Years
Protected Marriage for LGBTQI+ and Interracial Couples
Historic Confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and Federal Judges of Diverse Backgrounds
Rallied the World to Support Ukraine in Response to Putin’s Aggression
Strengthened Alliances and Partnerships to Deliver for the American People
Successful Counterterrorism Missions Against the Leaders of Al Qaeda and ISIS
Executive Orders Protecting Reproductive Rights
Historic Student Debt Relief for Middle- and Working-Class Families
Ending our Failed Approach to Marijuana
Advancing Equity and Racial Justice, Including Historic Criminal Justice Reform
Delivering on the Most Aggressive Climate and Environmental Justice Agenda in American History
More People with Health Insurance Than Ever Before
Obama’s accomplishments
Of course, non of these was getting HSR built, but at least they did improve the country; too bad that people like you can’t see that, obsessed as you are with getting the United States to have HSR.
Alon – I’ve known you, and you are smarter than that, but because you chose to believe in FAKE NEWS instead. Now you bring-up very good topics, but do NOT have a good solution regarding same. Solutions are what is needed in this day and age, and not the BS spewing out of DC which has NOT won a war since May 7, 1945 !!!
The US won the Iraq war. Where they failed was winning the peace.
Buddy, what are you even doing here?
A criticism I have heard of the Transit Costs Project is that it does not take into account land costs and accounting methods (i.e. what is counted as a project cost). What is your response to these claims?
We take into account land costs when we can, but they’re not even second-order elements. We likewise exclude financing charges whenever we can but include all other soft costs.
Firstly, are you saying land costs only make up a minor portion of cost differences?
Secondly, how are you sure that the same types of costs are included in the figures for each project?
Because we’ve looked into some (far from all or even most) projects’ breakdowns to get a good sense of what matters and what doesn’t. For example, Italian projects are very good at breaking everything down, and if anything, the headline costs in Italy include more things than in the US (or UK), like rolling stock.
And yeah, land costs are always a minor portion. The big cost items are tunnels, stations, and systems. The US and UK have high soft costs, but that’s not land, that’s third-party design and engineering, which are less efficient than in Continental Europe (this can be seen from design and construction management contract costs – those don’t include land).
Land here is £10k a hectare for good agricultural land in the Home Counties so assuming a 100m wide land purchase you would be talking about £100k/km for land. Perhaps it would a little more if the purchase is particularly inconvenient to the landowner for some reason.
Yeah I mean this isn’t causing HS2 to cost too much.
The thing that is more expensive is the need for a new terminal station in central London and (arguably) the approaches – but while that makes a material difference to the overall cost it doesn’t cost tens of billions either.
The new Birmingham station is £1 billion, no? Then the Euston project is much more than that.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-57058937
Apparently £570m. I mean that is pretty good.
An Antwerpen Centraal clone would be about £1bn at Belgian costs.
“Because we’ve looked into some (far from all or even most) projects’ breakdowns to get a good sense of what matters and what doesn’t.”
What precisely do you mean by this? Do you mean that you’re confident all the expensive items are included in the project pricetags?
Yes, at least for any project big enough that its costs matter to the national or regional budget (like GPE or Nya Tunnelbanan) – it’s just not possible to sweep a significant portion of the cost of such a project under the rug. Nor have we heard that smaller projects sweep e.g. utility relocations by budgeting them off-books.
There is UK criticism that HS2 includes the depots and rolling stock. I don’t know if that is fair or not.
The depots are part of the system. The rolling stock, sure, that should be subtracted.
So of the £66bn for phase 1 you should subtract maybe £3bn for the terminals the French built long ago, maybe £3bn for the rolling stock. So including the London approaches we are probably talking £10bn of extras.
That said the 230km of phase one should then be maybe £40m/km on top of that so the whole of phase one should be a total of £20bn or something. And the whole Y should have been doable for like £32bn really.
And like yeah thats a lot of “extras” but it still is overpriced by a factor of over 3 if phase one is £66bn – and hitting a HS1 esq price should certainly have been possible (and I might be wrong but I believe the £1bn for St Pancras international was excluded from the HS1 costs)
I don’t think it’s correct to subtract the terminals – Euston is an old train station, the UK just never figured out how to turn trains there efficiently enough.
I do think the sleeper could go down the Chiltern Mainline and the goods line into Paddington. Or perhaps terminate at Old Oak Common in the morning – especially if it was running late.
And that would address my (and likely Network rails) objections to your previous proposal on that.
And I think that would allow you to run the sleeper slightly shorter which would enable you to have some more stops. I think Stafford and Leamington would be good. Especially Leamington.
When you say land costs are always a minor portion, are you including the costs of getting planning permission etc. in that?
(Rescued from spamfilter.)
The US doesn’t really have a notion of planning permission – the only detailed planning is done in the environmental reviews, and for those, studies of property acquisition are a minor component. The American state is extremely powerful in eminent domain cases, and the only check on it is political, not legal, and the way it ends up working is that politicians say “don’t carve a new right-of-way” and then consultants follow the directive and, through accretion of real and imagined political constraints, come up with a route that ends up buying out a bunch of corner stores, farms, and adjacent houses, without looking as obvious on a map as if they’d carved a right-of-way through farmland but with no less forced purchase. Once the reviews are published, the owners have little recourse.
One way to see that the check in the United States is purely political is that California HSR, otherwise hemmed by premature commitment and lock-in, did manage to modify its initial promise to use existing transportation corridors and avoid eminent domain once it became untenable, and so the route under construction swerves around unserved towns through farmland. This works because the farmers are Republicans, and have no political recourse in a single-party Democratic state. But where the promises were made to Democrats, such as on the Caltrain corridor or in LA County, the authority is spending billions to avoid reneging.
I wasn’t just talking about land costs in the US, I was talking about land costs among all the countries studied in the project. If gaining planning permission etc. is considered a “land cost”, are land costs still a minor portion of costs worldwide? Does this apply to countries like the UK?
I really think planning permission and associated paperwork is a soft cost, ultimately government can legislate to reduce it.
The farmer definitely has to be paid the £10k/hectare regardless.
Decide on what you are going to call trains and use it consistently. My brain hurts. Is a regional train the SEPTA or NJtransit train originating or terminating in Trenton? The all-stops train between Boston and Washington D.C.? Or the Acela schedule?Or the railfan fantasy of New Haven to Trenton? Just WTF is an intercity train and why is it only stopping once per state? The long distance Amtrak land cruise trains have finally been upgraded, with a locomotive change at the edge of electrification, they can keep up with the slower Amtrak trains on the corridors. Plural. In what dystopian car-free airplane-free future is there no capacity for a once an hour land cruise trains to toddle along in between the all-stops Boston-DC trains? Or in between the commuter express trains in Pennsylvania and New Jersey? In some interim service plan. Ya made me look. For some odd peculiar reasons Amtrak and MARC’s wishlist is have four tracks between West Baltimore and Union Station D.C. and there are three and could be four north of Wilmngton. Acccording to WIkipedia it’s 72 miles or 115 kilometers between West Baltimore and Wilmington. Figure something out with the 7 or 8 trains using the tunnel between West Baltimore and Baltimore. And it’s unlikely to ever be anything more than that.
don’t know why railfans can’t juggle two concepts at once. Why would there be land cruise trains east of Chicago? Or east of Kansas City? Someday the land cruise company can charter a high speed train that whisks people from New York to Kansas City during the day. They can have dinner in the Harvey House restaurant while the porters make up their rooms. Or have breakfast in the Harvey House restaurant while the porters put their baggage on the high speed train that is returning to New York. Rinse repeat in Minneapolis and Atlanta or Birmingham.
Capital-R Regional is the Amtrak train. Small-r regional rail is commuter rail. Intercity is the standard terminology for trains that connect different metropolitan areas; all Amtrak trains are intercity, whereas shorter-distance trains, which would be called commuter, regional, or interregional in this part of the world are run by state commuter rail agencies. (Yes, there are some edge cases like New Haven-Springfield or San Jose-Sacramento, which could be classified as either; they’re not relevant to what we’re talking about.)
Changing the locomotive in Washington only works if it hauls Amfleets or other cars designed for low and medium speed. So you can do this to extend a Regional (which, again, is an intercity and not small-r regional train), but not an Acela, because both the Acela and Avelia Liberty cars are permanently coupled, TGV-style. The TGV did use to stick a diesel locomotive in front of the entire train to get to Sables d’Olonne, but because high-speed trainsets are more expensive than medium- and low-speed ones (by a factor of about 2 in Europe), it’s not advisable to do this if only a small proportion of the route is fast.
Re Baltimore-Washington: four tracks aren’t needed beyond what’s already under construction (to Halethorpe), if MARC brings back electric trains.
Someone needs to snap you out of trainspotter mode.
I thought everybody was going to be buying off the shelf whiz bangery without any local anything. They were just going to submit the omniscience of Stadler.
Here I thought the meme was that the FRA was beholden to the freight railroads and AREMA. Already clear and consistent. Antiquated but clear and consistent. If the standards are consistent and clear why does anyone need to do any experimenting?
To do what? Besides have circle jerks with other academics and write papers about it?
They do. It gets filed with all the other plans that nobody does anything with. Just because you personally are unaware of it doesn’t mean there is nothing at the DOT. Federal, state or local.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Speed_Ground_Transportation_Act_of_1965
or
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_to_the_Region%27s_Core
Amtrak has been mumbling about Gateway since someone fired up his copy of Visicalc in 1983 and projected they would run out of capacity around 2010. They ran out the 1996. To beat the dead horse, again, Acesss to the Region’s Core should be open by now.
And you just had a long whine about how, after years of planning, the Governor canceled congestion pricing. To study and plan it more.
Sorry, wanted to post this as a reply to your comment, but it doesn’t seem to be working. When you say land costs are a minor portion of costs, are you including the costs of planning permission in that?