Why New York-New Haven Trains Crawl
Between New York and New Haven, a distance of 120 km (from Penn Station) or 116 km (from Grand Central), the two fastest intercity trains of the day take 1:35 to travel, an average of 75 km/h. Most do the trip in about 1:40, averaging about 72 km/h. Commuter trains to Grand Central do it in about 1:40 three times a day, averaging 70 km/h, but the vast majority of even the rush express trains are slower, a few doing it in 1:52 and most in about two hours, averaging 58 km/h. This is not normal for a primary intercity corridor; the Acela averages about 120 km/h between New York and Washington and between New Haven and Boston, which is typical for non-high-speed intercity lines in Europe, while high-speed ones usually average 200 km/h or more. I’ve been asked by some big names in online transit content creation why this is so, and hope to explain why the trains are slow, and what it would take to reduce 40 minutes from the one-way trip time.
The contrast should be with the high-speed rail proposal that I’m working on at Marron, which cuts the intercity trip time between New York and New Haven to about 52 minutes, on the existing right-of-way, and the express commuter rail trip time to Grand Central to about 1:16. The result is not high-speed rail, but is a fast upgraded intercity rail line, on a par with the faster British and Swedish lines. Changes in right-of-way geometry, including buyouts of houses in expensive suburbs in Connecticut, could reasonably cut the intercity trip time to about 45 minutes; these are mapped here, the 52-minute trip corresponding to the alternatives that stay on the existing right-of-way and the 45-minute one to the alternatives that use the bypasses where they exist.
The primary culprit for the slow trip times today is poor scheduling practices. Those practices, in turn, come from mutual abuse between Amtrak and the commuter rail operators, in this case Metro-North and the Connecticut Department of Transportation, both of which display terminal incompetence on all matters related to rail. The state of the tracks contributes to the slowness, and thus the second most important issue is poor maintenance practices leading to unreliable infrastructure, which then feeds into poor scheduling. Metro-North and CTDOT are again especially bad even by American standards. Physical infrastructure problems add minutes here and there, but the most important interventions are cheap and for the most part can only work with better timetabling rather than on their own.
Of note, it is common to blame the low speeds on curves. However, the curves are not especially onerous – few restrict trains to slower speeds than about 150 km/h given good operating practices. In fact, the Northeast Corridor gets if anything curvier east of New Haven until after it crosses into Rhode Island, but the speed there is higher, as there is less dense commuter traffic complicating the schedule, and Amtrak’s level of incompetence is bad but less bad than that of CTDOT.
Timetable padding
Every rail timetable has to include contingency or buffer time. This takes into account primarily the need for trains to recover from delays, and secondarily suboptimal driver behavior, such as starting to brake a little too early. Switzerland pads its timetables 7%; the TGV network can only do about 10-13%, and the ICE network about 25%. What I and others have seen on Amtrak and Metro-North trains as well as what train drivers have told me suggests that the buffer time between New York and New Haven is 25% or even maybe 30%.
More complex networks require more padding, since delays on one train cascade to others. The ICE network mixes intercity trains together with much slower regional ones on the same tracks, all over Germany, and delays can cascade across the entire country, to the point that some people have begun to advocate that Germany build a separate high-speed rail network, not for speed (which activists here don’t care much about), but for the reliability of having a fast network and a slow network rather than one mixed network. The more segregated TGV network thus does better; the almost entirely dedicated-track Shinkansen system does even better, and JR East suggested 4% padding in its review of California High-Speed Rail. Switzerland is like Germany in having a single mixed-speed network, but it has more systematic processes for avoiding delays, such as strategic investment in bypasses around known bottlenecks.
The Northeast Corridor is not an especially complex network. It is a single line with branches, rather than a two-dimensional mesh like the German rail network. There is little freight traffic, which makes it possible to control freight through regular slots, with the number of potential slots greatly exceeding actual traffic so that if a train misses its slot, it can wait 10 or 15 minutes for the next one. Passenger traffic is high on all lines serving the corridor, and thus there is no need to cut corners on reliability (such as signals, or platforms) on any of the branches. It is a mixed-speed line, but nearly all of it has four tracks, and where commuter trains share tracks with intercity trains, they run express and the speed difference is not large. In the timetables we developed at Marron with Devin Wilkins, express commuter trains do Stamford-Grand Central in 28 minutes if they run as today, stopping only at Harlem-125th, and in 29 if they also stop at New Rochelle; intercity trains do Stamford-Penn Station in 25 minutes, on a marginally longer route into New York. Slotting intercity and express commuter trains on the same tracks between Stamford and New Rochelle is annoying, but is not an objectively hard scheduling problem.
This does not mean that Amtrak and Metro-North could just shave minutes off of the existing timetables, change nothing else, and run trains to the faster schedules. Other elements of the schedule would make the trains too unreliable. But it is possible to realign the schedules appropriately and cut the trip time by a factor of about 1.3/1.07 = 1.2.
Timetable complexity
The ideal schedule is one with as few variations as possible. This way, planners can write one schedule, ensure that it works, and, if there are problems with it, then develop an infrastructure program that builds around the bottlenecks. Switzerland, as usual, sets the standard, with its all-day repeating clockface timetable, or Takt. Swiss trains repeat regularly every hour, and on the busy lines every half hour; planners need to make sure one pattern works and then repeat it all day. It’s the planning equivalent of economies of scale in manufacturing.
New York planning, relative to the ideal, represents the list of what not to do, and it’s worse on busier lines such as the New Haven Line than on less busy lines. In effect, the New Haven Line schedule is the planning equivalent of rules for writing prose that illustrate each rule by breaking it – remember to not split infinitives, the passive voice should be avoided, eschew obfuscation, and so on – except that it is meant to be taken seriously. It has all of the following problems:
- Where good planning begins with one peak hour and repeats it all day, the New Haven Line has few repeating patterns, and practically none at the peak.
- Where good planning aims to have trains make consistent stops for legibility and for ease of planning around bottlenecks, the New Haven Line has bespoke stopping patterns – not counting branches, there are 16 trains entering Grand Central at the peak hour, which make 13 distinct stopping patterns.
- Where good regional rail planning keeps the peak-to-base ratio low – Switzerland is almost 1:1, and even very large cities that need a huge volume of commuter trains at rush hour like Paris or Tokyo do not exceed 2:1 (and London is well below it) – the New Haven Line has, with branches, 20 trains entering Grand Central at the peak hour and 4 entering each off-peak hour.
- Where good planning runs more or less the same service on weekends as in the off-peak on weekdays, the New Haven Line’s midday off-peak and weekend schedules are different even as they run the same number of trains (two express and two local per hour).
- Where good planning aims to use the timetable for a prolonged period of time to reduce the need to redo the schedule, for example updating annually as in Switzerland, New York-area practice is to update several times a year, in what looks like a 3-6 month period.
- Where good planning keeps the trains spaced far enough based on signal system constraints by default, Metro-North timetables somehow have trains on the shared trunk between Harlem and Grand Central sometimes arriving within less than the 2 minute minimum on the same track, requiring special speed restrictions, even with unimpressive traffic levels by urban commuter rail trunk standards.
- Where good maintenance is done when trains are not running, that is, at night, in order to avoid disturbing weekday traffic, American planning assumes that daytime maintenance will always take some track out of service; the New Haven Line’s track renewal program has been so mismanaged that at no point since it began in the 1990s have all four tracks between New York and New Haven been operable along the entire line – some section is always shut down. Daytime maintenance is also a problem in Germany, and is a factor behind the poor schedule reliability here.
The constant tweaks to the timetable are also a feature of the New York City Subway, with its substantially simpler stopping patterns. There, the services are consistent, and change at a rate of a handful per decade (most recently, when Second Avenue Subway opened; the previous time was during the 2010 service cuts). However, frequency is micro-targeted based on crowding guidelines, so the planners never have time to optimize one schedule; moreover, with 24/7 service, daytime closures for maintenance are unavoidable. This way, where planners at healthy railroads write schedules, planners at American passenger railroads write service changes. The New York City Subway at least has the partial excuse of 24/7 service; Metro-North has no such excuse. The maxim that the Northeast Corridor is held together with duct tape, and is managed by people who are unfamiliar with any more advanced tools than duct tape, also applies to timetabling.
In contrast with today’s morass, the schedule we’ve been writing aims to simplify whenever possible. Branches are slotted into windows that could be used by local or express main line trains depending on the desired service pattern. From New Haven south, everything is on a repeating 10-minute Takt. The New Haven Line is reduced to four stopping patterns – local Stamford-Grand Central, local Stamford-Penn Station, express New Haven-Grand Central, intercity New Haven-Penn Station – each running every 10 minutes. It took weeks to find a pattern that worked with all the constraints of the right-of-way and allowed some future desired infrastructure changes, and even that required some track changes detailed below. Off-peak, the commuter train patterns could run every 20 minutes instead, using every other slot; the timetable should not be tweaked further.
It is particularly important to avoid timetable complexity beyond local and express trains east of Stamford. The line has four tracks, and could be run with commuter trains on the local tracks, making all stops before transitioning to the express tracks at Stamford, and intercity trains on the express tracks, running nonstop between Stamford and New Haven. In theory, this means this section could be run with less than 7% schedule padding, for example the Shinkansen’s 4%, but in practice, I suspect it cancels out with the more complex situation between Stamford and New Rochelle, so 7% is the best that can be squeezed with maximally simple schedules.
Speed zones and curves
The New Haven Line is rather curvy, having been built in the 1840s. But its speed limits are still too low for its curves. I wrote here about cant and cant deficiency, and am not going to repeat myself too much. But, in brief, the speed on curves is governed by the formula
where v is speed, a is lateral acceleration in the horizontal plane, and r is curve radius. The value of a is usually expressed not in units of acceleration, but in units of distance, scaled so that, on standard-gauge track, 150 mm (of cant) correspond to 1 m/s^2 lateral acceleration. Typical maximum regulatory limits on cant range between 160 and 180 mm; the US permits 7″, but nowhere is more than 6″ used, and the New Haven Line’s curves mostly range between 3″ and 5″ cant. Cant deficiency limits depend on the train – regular passenger trains typically do 130-150 mm at the relevant speeds, but in the US, the normal practice is to limit commuter trains to 3″ cant deficiency, and only use 5″ on Amtrak Regional trains (the Acela tilts and is capable of 7″ today, with the new trains rated for 9″).
The curves on the New Haven Line are, for the most part, built to a standard of 2° radius, or, in metric units, r = 873. The most aggressive common cant and cant deficiency limits, 180 and 150 mm respectively, allow a = 2.2, and thus v = 43.82 m/s = 157.77 km/h; our timetables limit commuter trains to 150 km/h, and there are surprisingly few curves with tighter limits. In contrast, current practice restricts a to about 1.2, which means trains take the same curves at a speed of about 116 km/h, which is rounded down to 70 mph.
The slowdowns also affect intercity rail more than is required. While Amtrak trains are cleared for 5″ cant deficiency, Metro-North prefers to timetable all trains at its own trains’ speed on curves. Then, because there are so few opportunities under current standards for trains to run faster than 70-75 mph within CTDOT territory, the entire line from the state line to New Haven is maintained to those standards, and thus even on relatively straight sections, there is no opportunity to gain speed. East of New Haven, the curves are if anything tighter, but Amtrak dominance means the tracks are cleared for 100-125 mph, cant is higher, and cant deficiency is higher as well.
All of these restrictions can be lifted. The work required to redo a line from 110 km/h to 160 km/h or even more is rather routine, as long as it can be done within the right-of-way. The standards for track irregularity get tighter as speed increases, but all of this can be handled with track laying machines, which use the track itself to do the work, at a pace of about 0.5 km/h, or about 1.5 km in a three-hour nighttime work window; the entire New Haven Line can be regraded in about a year this way.
Unfortunately, Metro-North is used to manual track inspections rather than modern machinery. It finally bought a track laying machine on the model of Amtrak, but appears not to use it very well; the productivity I hear quoted is one tenth what was expected. But what is hard for Metro-North and CTDOT is not objectively hard, and even other Northeastern American railroads are often capable of it.
Supportive infrastructure
Infrastructure construction and timetabling work in tandem normally. Swiss practice is to use insights from the timetable in theory and in practice to inform where to build new tracks. American practice does no such thing – for one, Metro-North is allergic to systematic track improvement, so over the generations, the timetable has diverged from the infrastructure that could support it.
In fact, a very high-frequency peak schedule requires eliminating at-grade conflicts whenever it is even remotely feasible. Shell Interlocking at CP 217, just south of New Rochelle, is a flat junction on which trains from the north can go to either Grand Central or Penn Station. Grade-separating the junction was occasionally on the wishlist for Northeast Corridor improvements, but Metro-North is not currently asking for it, even though it is especially important as Penn Station Access is about to open. The junctions with the branches farther north – New Canaan, Danbury, Waterbury – are flat as well, for which the solutions can be a forced transfer (as is sometimes practiced with Waterbury, the weakest of the three) or grade-separation. This does not cost a large amount of money – New Jersey Transit is applying for money for its equivalent of Shell, Hunter Flyover connecting the Raritan Valley Line to the Northeast Corridor, and the budget is $300 million in the plan and, I’ve been told, $400 million with recent inflation and perhaps some small cost overrun.
Then there is the issue of the Grand Central approaches. The current throat limits trains to 10 mph on the last mile into the station. In other words, the last mile takes six minutes. It should take about two, based on actual throat and turnout geometry; the turnouts are #12 until around 700 meters from the end of the platform, and in Germany, a 1:12 switch is 60 km/h, and closer to the platforms, the turnouts are #7 and (on one cluster of tracks) #6.5, where in a Germany, a 1:7 is 40 km/h. Even with bumper tracks, the last mile has no reason to take longer than two minutes, saving all Metro-North travelers to Grand Central four minutes. The turnouts would need to be regraded to tangential standards, but this can be done within their existing footprint; the cost of a new turnout in a selection of European countries and also on American freight railroads is around $250,000 in the prices of the 2010s, whereas Metro-North’s switches cost perhaps five times much in the same era.
Finally, the movable bridges impose certain speed restrictions. Those are the biggest projects currently in planning for speeding up the New Haven Line. In truth, the slowdowns imposed are secondary (though our timetables still assume they are fixed). They are also extremely expensive – one of them is currently slated for in situ replacement for $1 billion, for a span of 220 meters from tower to tower, on a river about 100 m wide. CTDOT rail projects are generally absurdly expensive even by American standards – infill stations on the Hartford Line are coming in at $50 million or more, twice the cost of suburban Boston and more than twice that of suburban Philadelphia – for which the culprit must be poor project management and lack of in-house expertise.
Conclusion
The New Haven Line is a busy railroad at the peak, but nothing about it is special. It is old, but no older than faster sections of the Northeast Corridor or fast legacy intercity main lines in parts of Europe, especially the United Kingdom. It is busy, but its total ridership is unimpressive by European S-Bahn standards – the single trunk line in Munich with its seven branches on each side generates about 900,000 daily riders, perhaps a bit more than all three New York-area commuter railroads combined. It is branched, but the branching is simpler than on the busier systems, and the graph of the Northeast Corridor overall is acyclic, simplifying planning.
The reason the trains are slow is not the infrastructure. The elements of the infrastructure that need to be fixed to shorten the trip times from about 1:35 intercity and 2:00 commuter to 0:52 intercity and 1:16 commuter are cheap. Rather, the reason is that the line is managed not just by Americans, which is usually bad enough, but specifically by Metro-North and CTDOT. The schedules are designed not to work; the maintenance is designed not to work either and is too expensive.
Pedestrian Observations 
Thanks for this excellent piece and the work you are doing on behalf of the New Haven line users.
You believe that, maintaining the tracks to a 70-75 mph (112-120 km/h) standard, the CTDOT lacks ambition since the right of way allows 160 km/h. This is reasonable but I disagree. I believe that the tracks are maintained to a much lower standard. The cars bounce along the way but not in unison, generating clanky noises in the coupling/bogies area. The seating and lighting reminds me of 1960’s French rolling stock. I take these trains at the end of transatlantic flights and the difference between the ride quality between the first trains of the day, in Europe or Morocco, and the last one is shocking. I am quite confident I will have the same experience when the RER reaches Dakar airport.
This makes sense, technically, and I wish it would happen. The finger-in-the-eye approach, however, makes it unlikely that this paper will have any practical effect. Sad.
Alon, @bqrail has a good point here. I assume you would like to see NY-New Haven rail actually get better, which is why you are putting in the time on this. This post however makes improvement LESS likely because calling people idiots is a way to get them to tune you out and ignore your suggestions, not get them to say “you’re right I’m an idiot” and then change.
I believe you have mentioned Ezra Klein’s ‘Health of Nations’ blogging/reporting as the inspiration for this blog. Ezra Klein did not have a big impact on the debate leading up to Obama Care because he said how stupid American’s were about healthcare, but because he wrote clearly with good research. In other words he showed how American healthcare was stupid based on practices in other countries, without calling anyone stupid. The one time he did call someone out directly – the “Joe Liebermann is killing people” article – it encountered significant backlash. You could do the same by writing a post that shows how Swiss/French/Japanese practices could lead to much shorter trips saving people time without calling the existing officials incompetent. The incompetency will be obvious to anyone who reads it, and such a post could be used by politicians to argue for change and pitch to their constituents how they are going to make things better.
The approach in this post will go no where unless you happen to become close to a powerful enough figure (governor(s), president?) who wants to see this change and is willing to bulldoze other interests to execute your plan. This is a long shot, however, and your work will otherwise languish if you cannot present it in a way that others will accept.
Also Alon has been overly bold with their pronouncements historically. As we have discussed before there is no way HS2 could have been built for $20m/km – probably more like $40-50m/km or even more.
In terms of scheduling you look at the Chiltern Line the 1707 train from London takes 35.5 minutes to get to Haddenham and Thame Parkway non-stop. In contrast the 0810 arrival into London takes 40 minutes to complete the same journey in reverse. As the 1707 has 2.5 minutes of defined padding if we assume the technical travel time is therefore 33 minutes that would point to 7.5% and 21% padding respectively. That is very different on a train-by-train basis.
I struggle to believe that examples of good practice like the Swiss stick rigidly to 7% padding across the network – and we showed previously that some examples like the single track running into Geneva were padded by 20% or even more. And even if they do in a lot of cases, London, Paris and New York are much larger than any Swiss city.
Also even with 20% padding or more the 08:10 arrival into London still averages 63mph or over 100km/h.
My mentor, a leading patent litigator of his time, would write a brief, strongly expressing his views.
The next day he would say, “Now I’ve got it out of my system” and rewrite gthe brief to be more persuasive and unoffensive.
Does the sharing of tracks/stations with the Hudson Line and Harlem Line get in the way of New Haven Line schedule improvements? Obviously, speeding up the last mile of all three into Grand Central benefits all of them.
Harlem Line sharing is annoying as all fuck; see post here.
The Hudson Line is a smaller hurdle. Mott Haven Junction is a giant pain, but I think we’ve managed to schedule around it with sufficient slots for Hudson Line trains.
What about the turnbacks at Stamford and New Haven? Since the local trains run on the outer tracks, trains that turn around also present conflicting moves with through-running trains on the inner tracks, which is especially bad at Stamford due to the higher train congestion there. Is it worth it to invest in grade separated turnbacks at these locations (along the lines of what the 6 does at City Hall)?
Ooh, good question.
Easy mode is if there’s a grade-separated junction to New Canaan. If there is, it can also be used for turnbacks, since traffic is never going to be heavy enough to conflict (worst-case scenario: delay the branch trains to let the locals turn). Hard mode is to use the yard for free layovers for outbound locals and then schedule them to cross during windows between oncoming trains.
Summer, winter-holidays ( November and December ) and not-either early in the year and again later in the year. It’s just awful the way they don’t run summer excursion trains in the winter. Or holiday shopping trains in the summer. Awful.
Seasonal services can be planned out in advance, such that paths for them exist inside a longer-lasting regular-service timetable.
For example, the JR companies typically do a single timetable update per year (often in March), with slots for additional holiday trains during the year (Golden Week, Obon, New Year’s, etc.) already accounted for.
And I’m not a trainspotter who has compared the schedule from 1998 to the one from 2017 to see how similar they are. Or how similar they are with the extra trains. Some railfans, with what would have been a supercomputer 40 years ago, in their hand, can’t be bothered to check a schedule. Which, oh the humanity!! changes a few times a year.
You shouldn’t have to check a schedule. Tracks are far to expensive to leave them unused for long. Tracks are expensive, if you don’t have enough riders to run a train every 10 minutes all day you don’t have enough riders to pay for the track. In some cases it should be a short train, but a short train more often is so easy that more people will use it just because they don’t have to think about if what they want to do fits the schedule.
Intracity trains should be every 5 minutes. People have places to be and if you have enough demand to build tracks you should make them the backbone of your system, and be as continent as driving when there is no traffic. Anything less is user hostile, people are always running late when they leave the door and they want to get wherever on time, or at least not too late.
Intercity might be as little as every 20 minutes. When I did the math, assuming reasonable costs/prices (you should do these yourself with what you think are reasonable assumptions comes up with similar conclusions!) I concluded that if you are not running a train every 20 minutes to a reasonable fill level you don’t have enough passengers to make the line cost effective.
For intercity trips every 20 minutes is frequent enough that you don’t feel a need to check a schedule, you just show up and buy your ticket for whatever is next (I’m a fan of monthly pass so don’t even buy the ticket, but there are arguments both ways on this).
If you don’t have that much demand, the just run a bus. They are cheaper because they run on existing roads and so don’t have to pay for their track.
Which LIRR branches or NJTransit branches are you going to close down so the other ones can run every 10 minutes? Tunnels under estuaries are very very expensive and people out in the suburbs can spend a few seconds four times a year to check if there have been any pertinent schedule changes. And perhaps pick up a paper schedule if they don’t want to check their smartphone.
Chiltern nearly covers it’s costs with 2tph to Aylesbury, 2tph to Oxford, 2tph to Birmingham and 1tph to High Wycombe.
So broadly a train every 30 minutes should cover costs.
@ adirondacker12800 There are a number of options. Build another tunnel is preferred, though I will acknowledge the time and expense (particularity if we have to pay NYC prices) make that likely impossible. Lacking that, I’d build a transfer station before the tunnel and make everyone get off for a single train that doesn’t share tracks with anything and thus can run back and forth fast (if possible two train lines – one to Penn, one to Grand central – if there are enough tracks for this without any sharing conflicts). Of course I’d use the swiss model of finding the worst bottlenecks and fixing them first.
@ Matthew Hutton If the line was built in the 1800s you don’t have to pay off construction costs anymore and so the costs to break even are much less. I’d still want to see more frequent service, but if the construction costs are paid for you can probably pay for the rest on just 1tph. When I did the math I found 2tph borderline – if the trains are full you can do it, but trains will not run that full all the time and so you need 3tph. (trains also shouldn’t run full all the time – full trains means someone who wanted to ride couldn’t, train economics are not like airplane and so you shouldn’t run full)
@henry, I think breaking even on the running costs is pretty good.
Capital costs can be covered by the overall economic benefits.
I don’t know why many railfans seem to think passengers changing trains don’t take up space on the train they are changing to.
Instead of running a half empty train on one branch, every ten minutes and half empty train on another branch, every ten minutes and making those people change trains they could run a train on each branch every 20 minutes, fuller, and nobody has to change trains.
They get off the train now. And stand on the train they change to. They’ve needed a new tunnel for almost 30 years. They don’t need advice from the Swiss on where the trans-Hudson bottlenecks, plural, are, they can see them during rush hour. And the ones across the East River
From Oxford Circus Monday to Thursday they run 27 trains an hour northbound on the Victoria line between 10pm and 11pm, 22 between 11pm and midnight and 9 between midnight at 0040 when the last train runs (so 13-14 an hour). They will all be running pretty empty.
The main argument against Henry’s position of running ultra high service levels is that people prefer not to change, and 3tph to 2 branches each might well give you higher passenger numbers than 6tph on one branch with you having to change for the other.
That all said if you were 100% having a branch line anyway Henry is probably 100% correct.
It would probably make sense to run a train from Oxenholme to Windermere even every 10 minutes rather than hourly and it would be profitable to do so. Now a train every 10 minutes might only get you a million extra passengers a year, but it would be a million people who have travelled a long way. And yes a whole bunch of those trains would run (nearly) empty, but that isn’t the point. The point is that once in a while there would be a delay on the mainline and then it is worth it to give a good experience.
Track logistics mean you can run a lot more trains on a track with one line no branches than the same track with multiple branches-lines. You don’t have to have schedule padding just in case a train is late. Thus you get better use of those tracks in the tunnel. Since it is short trip you can also get away with more standing passengers, while those who have to be on the train for a long time demand a seat, so you get more capacity. You may also be able to run a longer train (you have to extend 2 platforms which is not cheap at NYC prices, but a lot more affordable than every platform). All of that means the dedicated train can put more people in the tunnel.
Fuller trains is a bad goal. Service and riders is the goal. People who don’t have to think about the train schedule are more likely to ride. People who are confident they can get home for an emergency (either the kid gets sick, or the boss needs them to work late) are more likely to ride. People who confident transit will be there start to think transit is more than about work but also about evening activities.
Ease of transfer is key of course. Easy transfers will mean you get more riders with my idea just because you are able to run more frequency, (in turn driving more need to build that tunnel now), while hard transfers will turn riders away.
I have not always agreed with you on this, but to be fair I don’t think having to get the tube when you get off a long distance train is depressing ridership at all.
Is the agency running empty trains going to get funding from an orchard with heirloom money trees or are they going to plant a new one with modern money trees that grow more bills?
The elephant in the room – $$$. I’m convinced that after 10 years the above service would increase the number of passengers by enough to pay for the costs – but you have to invest that money up front and run that better service for all the time while people continue whatever it is they are doing instead. Worse some people will refuse to learn how to transfer trains and so for the first couple years there will be less riders even though the plan is good. This is also the New York area which is world famous for the ability to spend far more than it should on projects, so even if I’m right, it may never pay off just because they make it too expensive. And of course despite my claim that the above plan is better, there is always the possibility I’m wrong.
I don’t have an answer to the above, but I acknowledge them.
Interesting article.
I am shocked by the price for Norwalk bridge. Looking on the map of Norwalk I do not understand, why there is need for movable tower bridge. Marina could be moved few hunderd meters south for much smaller costs I guess.
Sure, it is complex project to build bridge on place of older one, while maintaining continuous train operation. I do not know whether they plan to raise the tracks, this could also increase expenses.
On another topic, is there some plan to standardise electrification on the Northeast coridor ? There are 3 or 4 different voltages and different frequentions, this surly raises costs of rolling stock.
For example here, Slovakia and Czechia are slowly moving to one 25kv standard (but Poland stays on 3kv).
There are shelf plans to standardize electrification, but nothing active. The 25 Hz electrification south of New York is mildly annoying, but is not too different from what vendors are already used to when selling to Germany with its 16.7 Hz electrification.
It costs a lot of money. The conversion process isn’t 100 percent efficient and the equipment to do it isn’t cheap. And needs to be maintained. There might even be staffing. It’s not easy, cheap or quick when you want to increase capacity either. Moar train will use Moar electricity.
Just curious, do railroad companies from German speaking countries (DB/SBB/OBB) own and maintain the 16.7Hz grid themselves, or outsource them to utility companies?
One huge problem I’ve long been aware of, yet doesn’t seem to be emphasized elsewhere, is that Amtrak’s 25Hz electrification is built upon its own, dedicated 25Hz grid, with 33kV transmission lines sharing poles with trolley wires.
I think Austrian OBB and German DB have their own dedicated power network, but Sweden and part of Germany uses power from national grid. For OBB, they have their own water power plants, under öbb Infrastruktur AG.
Because of physics, the lower the frequency the large the needed transformer. Most of what works with with 16.7hz works with 25hz, or 60hz – but it costs a lot more materials. If you have enough demand you can make a dedicated equipment for your frequency and safe a lot of money – but often the engineering costs are more than the material savings and so it isn’t worth it. If it was the 1800s I’d say use 441hz so musicians can tune to the hum of the equipment (I don’t know why most in my city use A=441hz, A=440 is international standard and in the 1800s A=435hz was standard). Today though 50/60hz equipment is really common because every utility uses it and so you can buy off the shelf equipment – everyone should look to switch to whichever their local utility uses so they can buy off the shelf equipment (and also look into emergency interconnect agreements with the local utility since you are on the same standard)
FYI – The US Department of Energy has efficiency standards for utility distribution transformers. For cost reasons, most use aluminum wire and silicon steel laminations. High efficiency transformers use copper wire and amorphous steel for the core.
FYI FYI — aircraft that use AC power generation and distribution use 400Hz to make the transformers smaller and lighter. There is a small drop in efficiency due to increased skin effect loss in the wire and higher hysteresis loss in the steel. I think Airbus has widened the frequency standard to 380 – 800 Hz to make it cheaper/easier to operate the generator/alternator in jet engines.
BTW — some musicians used to use the old telephone network off-hook dial tone for tuning. In North America it is two-frequencies added together 350Hz + 440 Hz. The idea isn’t around much anymore because it doesn’t work in phones that generate off-hook sound locally in the phone.
Fascinating read as always. Appreciate you backing up your criticism of folks with data too. I rode the full length NEC a year ago for the first time and I was amazed at slowness of the New Haven Line. How are those commuters not demanding faster service? Would love to see all of the New Haven Line’s drawbridges welded shut and rehabbed in place. Virtually all boat traffic are pleasure yachts and it is insane to spend so much money on subsidizing their lifestyles with new drawbridges.
Switzerland is like Germany in having a single mixed-speed network
Is Switzerland really mixed speed though? Switzerland doesn’t really have HSR like the ICE. No rail line in Switzerland has track rated for higher than 200kph (and only 57km in the whole country even goes that fast) except for the Alp Base Tunnels, and even there trains are limited to 200kph normal service/230kph catch up. You yourself have stated frequently that Swiss rail is designed to run as fast as necessary (i.e. a takt with half hourly or hourly nodes) rather than as fast as possible. Switzerland seems much more like a single-speed network, not mixed speed.
It’s more that there is extremely intensive track sharing between intercity, local/regional services, and freight in Switzerland.
Average service speeds are quite disparate, making the scheduling to accomodate them on a largely two-track network (with so so many single track choke points, everywhere!, and only really a dozen or so strategic quadruplings or new two-track bypasses built over the last three decades or so) very impressive, and the operations/maintenance discipline that keeps it from falling apart even more so.
Browse the full set of national timetable graphs at https://www.oev-info.ch/de/fahrplan-aktuell/grafische-fahrplaene some time — there’s so many sets of lines at different slopes (different average train speeds) and so many tightly-constrained well-engineered solutions to see.
What they “lack” in top track speed they make up for in sheer traffic density and trains/track/day intensity. The scheduling problems involved are much more complicated than a primary grade exercise like “making the ultimately simple North East Corridor with what ought to be a fairly simple and attractive mix of mixed-speed services not be a total fucking basket case.” I think the comparison is apt, and if anything just highlights how utterly pathetic and hostile the four-pretty-good-legacy-tracks clown show of Amtrak/NEC/NYMTA/CTDOT is.
From New Haven south, everything is on a repeating 10-minute Takt.
Does this mean that intercity/Amtrak services are limited or required to be 6 tph to fit the takt? What are you assuming for NY-Bos services as part of this pattern?
It means intercity services run every 10 minutes, which I think is about right for the expected demand at high speed without connections beyond the NEC.
I’m assuming that by Providence the trains are on a 15-minute Takt. This is done through having, of the six hourly trains going north toward New Haven, two either turn or go to Springfield, two continue and stop at New London, and two continue and skip New London. The stop penalty at New London is around 4 minutes, and then the slow trains can be held for one more minute at New Haven or Providence to fit the Takt.
Japanese levels of demand in New England …. doesn’t need six trains an hour unless they are short stubby little things that would be wasting capacity west of Manhattan. Or there are a lot of empty seats running between New York and Boston.
It took me less than a minute to get a list of former counties in Connecticut and their population. And the same for Massachusetts. There are more people in what was Hampden County Massachusetts where Springfield is than there are in what was Middlesex County and New London County in Connnecticut. And many more people in Hartford County than both of them. Almost as many people in Hartford county as there are in Rhode Island.
It makes sense to send passenger trains to places where there are people. And then send them where people want to go…… In New London County that is the casinos, not the few blocks of downtown such as it is. The casinos can fight it out, where the rural-ish station is going to be and the state and municipalities can require them to run shuttle buses that make local stops to the ferries. Or extend SLE track to the high speed tracks. Or sumptin.
I realize you have great difficultly considering more than one thing at a time. Some of the Japanese level of high speed rail travel will be to places other than Stamford-Center-of-the-Universe. Like Montreal or Cleveland. Those trains won’t be going through Stamford.
London-Bristol probably has enough demand to be 3tph.
London-Birmingham is 6-7tph (2tph Marylebone to Moor St, 2tph Euston slow, 2-3tph Euston fast).
So its not just Japan.
I think it has enough demand for Hyperloop. And that the U.K. is going to ban automobiles.
11,000,000 people in Southern New England get the urge to make one round trip per year that works out to a bit over 30,000 per day per direction. That would be more intercity travel than Japanese do. It would be more on certain days. On Thanksgiving Day they can run some commuter trains on the commuter tracks where possible. Like they do now. Over a 15 hour service day that’s 2,000 per hour. And some of that demand will be going through Albany, not New Haven. You can run 1,000 passenger trains six times an hour to Boston. With two thirds of the seats empty. Or four trains an hour with half the seats empty. Or run 500 seat trains, which wastes capacity through Manhattan.
Mr. Levy, or anyone else who wants to chime in: What specifically do you recommend for the Port Chester curve? Back in my high school days (the 1960s), when I rode the line fairly frequently, the MAS through that curve was 40mph for passenger. I don’t know if that’s been increased but I’m sure there is still a significant reduction from the MAS both east and west.
And what of the twisty curvy alignment through New London where the MAS I suspect isn’t higher than 40-50 mph? Remember what happened to the FRA-blessed bypass (with new bridge across the Thames) that trains not stopping there were to use, thus cutting the overall NY-BOS running time by IIRC almost an hour? The great liberal hope, Sen. Richard Blumenthal(D-CT), really made a name for himself with that one.
(Not a Mr.)
Port Chester is a candidate for a bypass; see alternatives map here. That said, the speed could be significantly increased without changing the curvature. The curve radius is 569 meters (3° 4′). It’s tight, but with modern superelevation and cant deficiency, it’s 127 km/h territory. Today it’s limited to 45 mph, or 72 km/h, because it is only superelevated to 3.5″ rather than the ~7″ allowed in regulations, and Metro-North limits cant deficiency to 3″ and not ~6″.
Regarding the flat junctions with Danbury and Waterbury, I don’t know why they don’t just run eastbound trains on the left-hand side during the evening so that branch trains don’t have to cross over the other three tracks.