The Northeast Corridor Should not Host Diesel Through-Service
The vast majority of traffic on the Northeast Corridor comprises captive trains, only running internally to the corridor. However, a noticeable minority of trains run south of Washington, swapping the electric locomotive for a diesel locomotive. Those trains have a certain logic to them today – through-service is valuable, and north of Washington they more or less substitute for Northeast Regional service. But drawbacks to reliability remain, and if the corridor modernizes its operations, they will need to be removed; several elements of modern operations are not compatible with keeping either the Virginia trains or the long-distance ones on the corridor. Instead, these trains should be cut to Washington, with transfers to much faster, more frequent Northeast Corridor trains. Potentially, some Virginia lines could be electrified and then through-service could be offered, if they can fill the same size of train that future Northeast Corridor service could.
Fortunately, this tradeoff still leaves the South with better service than it gets today. The forced transfer considerably speeds up the trip for New York-bound passengers, by more than the average transfer penalty even for passengers with heavy luggage. Nonetheless, a tradition of direct through-service from New York to diesel territory in the South will need to end.
Future Northeast Corridor service
Upgraded service, for example in our ongoing project at Marron for how to blend intercity and commuter rail on the corridor, should have all of the following features:
- High speed: our current timetables have New York-Washington trains taking 1:53, at a top speed of 320 km/h; a blanket speed restriction to 217 km/h, the upper limit of the catenary today, would only slow down the trains to 2:04, the rest of the difference in speed from current trip times coming from reliability improvements, higher curve speed, higher acceleration, and minor curve fixes.
- All-EMU configuration: nearly the entire world passenger rail market is electric multiple units rather than separated locomotives and coaches, EMUs outperforming locomotive-hauled cars in every aspect, and the exceptions are the less modern intercity and regional lines.
- Single-class service: trains may have first- and second-class seats, but the trains should not be differentiated by speed – Spain has trains of different speeds on its high-speed line and charges more for the faster ones, and the resulting hit to frequency and interchangeability of tickets explains why Europe’s longest high-speed rail network has a fraction of the per capita ridership of France, Germany, or Japan, which (largely) lack this misfeature.
- Affordable fares: the average fare should be in line with French and German norms, around $0.15 per p-km.
A train that does New York-Washington for a bit less than two hours and charges a bit more than $50 one-way on average – the current average is $106 on the Regional and $192 on the Acela – can comfortably expect ridership to quadruple, based on my two usual references on elasticity of high-speed rail ridership with respect to travel time and fares (Börjesson says -1.12 and -0.61 respectively, Cascetta-Coppola say -2 and -0.37 respectively). This forces running more frequency and longer trains. Frequency is a welcome addition provided there is capacity on the tracks for it; fortunately, there is capacity for an intercity train every 10 minutes in a post-Gateway timetable. The trains in question should be as long as possible, with platform lengthening where necessary to support 16-car trains, to maximize capacity.
The incompatibility of diesel trains
Very few diesel trains run on the Northeast Corridor today, and none run by Amtrak. The through-trains to the South run with engine changes: all Amtrak service today is run with locomotives, and at Washington, the trains change between diesel and electric locomotives. Nonetheless, even electric locomotive service as it is conceived today is incompatible with Northeast Corridor modernization, and future changes would still not make it compatible.
First, to the point on capacity: there is no way to run 16-car trains into the South. There isn’t enough demand for such trains. The Silver Star today runs nine coaches and the Silver Meteor runs 10, and on both trains, three coaches don’t sell seats but are used for baggage, lounge, and dining; the Palmetto runs six coaches, the Crescent seven, and the Cardinal five, each including two non-seat selling coaches. Speeding up the Northeast Corridor by an hour and a half can lead to ridership explosion internally to the corridor, but not on trains that take 30 hours today.
And second, there is no reasonable rolling stock for this, even if there were demand for a train with 16 cars or close to it. Locomotive-hauled trains would necessarily run slow, compromising not just top speed but also acceleration and, owing to the current equipment’s problems, reliability. The example train we’re using in our calculations, the Velaro Novo, has a power-to-weight ratio of 20 kW/t and an initial acceleration rate of 0.65 m/s^2. A pair of ACS-64 locomotives dragging 14 Airo coaches gets 14 kW/t but cannot accelerate faster than around 0.25 m/s^2 at any speed. The unpadded trip time for high-speed rail making one stop per state is 1:46; the unpadded trip time with the additional acceleration time of this example train and with a 217 km/h (135 mph) speed restriction is 2:09. If the timetable buffer time is still 7% then the trip time is 2:18, which means the train would be overtaken by about two faster trains, and this in turn would slow the trains further as more schedule contingency would be required for this more complex system. If the ACS-64’s problems or any interface with the freight-run Southern network forces more padding, then make it three overtakes.
The TGV used to couple a diesel locomotive in front of a high-speed trainset to reach Les Sables d’Olonne, before the branch to it was electrified. This option would eliminate the speed difference on the Northeast Corridor, but would also mean that expensive 16-car high-speed trainsets would be spending an entire day going to Florida at low speed and another going back, without being able to make back the cost through intensive operations measured in train-km per day.
Exceptions and the tail wagging the dog
The basic reason for prioritizing the Northeast Corridor’s internal traffic over through-traffic is the large mismatch in travel volumes. In fiscal 2023, the Northeast Corridor got 12,122,466 riders. The Virginia services got 1,300,776, the Carolinian 315,781, and the long-distance trains 1,308,211. A 4:1 ratio should tilt planners toward prioritizing the core over the long-distance trains.
Note that I have not, up until now, talked about Keystone service and trains to Springfield. This is because Keystone trains can run through to the corridor just fine. None of the reasons why the long-distance trains cannot do so applies: the Keystone corridor is electrified all the way to Harrisburg, and New York-Philadelphia is a significant enough portion of it that boosting speeds in the core (and acceleration everywhere) would lead to sufficient ridership increases to justify 16-car trains. Springfield service is currently unelectrified, and Amtrak generally runs shuttles with timed connections because of the mismatch in demand; it should be electrified, and through-service instituted.
On Keystone and the New Haven-Springfield line, the mismatch in capacity actually works in favor of through-service. The New York-Philadelphia section has the most demand, so having one third of the trains branch off to Harrisburg rather than continuing to Washington is a good way of assigning capacity. New Haven is not Philadelphia, but has so much commuter demand to New York that giving New York-New Haven an intercity train every 10 minutes is not so stupid; in contrast, unless a lot more is built, I suspect that 16-car trains running every 10 minutes between New York and Boston would end up emptier than most planners would prefer. Years ago, before I started looking at the track charts and the possible schedules systematically, I even used the greater demand of New York-Philadelphia to argue in favor of diverting some trains not just at New Haven to Springfield, but at Penn Station, to Jamaica and Long Island; as it is, my primary argument against sending intercity trains to the LIRR is timetabling complexity.
With Keystone and Springfield added back in, the traffic on the Northeast Corridor rises from 12,122,466 to 13,680,273. The ridership of the trains to the South that are to be cut from the corridor is 2,924,768, or 21% of the internal ridership; the tail should not wag the dog.
Is this even bad for the trains to be cut?
No. As mentioned above, the trip times would get a lot faster, it’s just that turning a 30-hour trip into a 28-hour one does not lead to a large ridership boom.
The extra transfer is annoying, but should be compared with the time cost of both running a slower train to New York and changing the engine at Washington Union Station. As explained above, the slower train would take a minimum of 2:09 between New York and Washington, stopping once per state. The scheduled time would be at least 2:18, and likely more, maybe 2:28 with 15% buffer time. The engine change takes about 20 minutes judging by southbound schedules on Virginia service trains; the wait time at Union Station is much longer northbound, because the train has to have more schedule contingency on the less reliable freight-owned section to make its slot on the more precisely timetabled Northeast Corridor. The most charitable interpretation, ignoring the extra required schedule padding, is that making passengers change trains in Washington would save them 45 minutes minus the wait time for the next train (at most 15 minutes).
The transfer penalty is extensively studied in the modal choice literature. For example, studying intercity trips in the Netherlands, de Keizer-Kouwenhoven-Hofker find that the penalty is 23 minutes, which already incorporates an imputed additional waiting time of 15 minutes. This penalty rises by seven minutes if the transfer is not cross-platform; a cross-platform transfer at Union Station would require the through-tracks to be upgraded with high platforms, as they are currently low-platform. It rises by a further seven minutes for passengers with heavy luggage. Even with all of those penalties, 23+7+7 = 37 < 45. And 45 is in a way a best-case scenario; there is a lot of padding involved in making a long-distance or even Virginia train make a specific slot on the corridor, as opposed to guaranteeing passengers a seat on the next available train, and this adds on the order of half an hour, counting both Alexandria-Washington and on-corridor buffer times.
The upshot is that while trains cannot run through from Virginia to a modernized Northeast Corridor, little is lost in making passengers transfer at Union Station. The transfer penalty is real but limited, even with luggage, and the speed gain from letting such passengers transfer to a faster train is noticeable, if small compared with the total length of a night train trip. It would break tradition, but offer a modest improvement in the quality of rail service on the long-distance trains using the corridor and the Virginia trains, in conjunction with the much larger improvement in the quality of internal Northeast Corridor service.
Pedestrian Observations 
Looks at all the random Diesel Services under wires in the UK with murderous intent.
LOL 😀
We are definitely getting better at that. A lot more dual modes now.
That doesn’t solve many of the problems because you insert high costs per rider, higher risk one of the modes will malfunction than conventional OLE electrification.
dual modes suck.
The class 800 dual modes seem pretty solid to be honest.
What is your approximate timeline for the proposed changes to be implemented (assuming the upcoming elections lead to sympathetic people having legislative power)? When can one expect a $60 2 hour train from New York to DC in the best case scenario?
It should be doable more or less simultaneously with Gateway, and some elements can happen earlier, like MBTA and MARC electrification, switch replacement, and schedule simplification. We just wrote an inherently post-Gateway timetable.
They were going to wave magic wands in 1965 too. You will run out of money before you run out of projects. Or run out of labor at the suppliers or directly on the projects. Or both.
The promises of the High Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965 were vaguely “soon” or “before 1980” They’ve been running test trains, late at night when the weather is cooperative, between New Brunswick and Trenton New Jersey for decades.
Is there a reason you considered Virginia out-of-scope rather than as a part of the Northeast Corridor? Those are relatively short branches to relatively large cities if I am not misunderstanding (and they’re better positioned than stuff like Boston – Portland or NH – Springfield), and upgrading or even electrifying them has been talked about a lot (if not in the works).
Electrifying to Richmond would be logical, but CSX likely opposes it, although with the planned dedicated tracks, I wonder if CSX would oppose it for the passenger dedicated tracks? You could use batteries for the few gabs in electrification were freight and passenger trains will share trackage. Sadly the problem of having private freight railroads own most of the tracks.
You are right, CSX is opposed to the passenger dedicated tracks and Virginia has no plans to electrify the corridor. They are counting on hydrogen to make the trains fast, according to my neighbor who is high up in the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation.
Well CSX has agreed to the third and in places fourth passenger dedicated track(s) DC-Richmond, but online some have claimed that the agreement forbids electrification, but I’ve seen no official text. The North American railroads are leaning towards H2 as an alterative diesel, but it remains to be seen if Green H2 can be produced and operated at a cost equivalent to diesel.
I have seen costs for artificial fossil fuels, they are like £6/litre. No way they are anywhere near good enough for diesel and it is highly unlikely they ever will be.
The US will have to electrify like everyone else.
LOL 🤣
*Amtrak does now use Renewable Diesel in California, and Brightline Florida uses BioDiesel, both Biofuels sourced from commercial kitchens and other biological wastes.
Amtrak Used 2 Million Gallons of Renewable Diesel in FY2023.Three California Rail Lines Consume All of Amtrak’s Biofuel https://www.ttnews.com/articles/amtrak-renewable-diesel-fy23
On railway electrification, America… sadly is NOT as capable or visionary as India or Malaysia 😭
Renewable and BioDiesel are byproducts of the food industry. That is why they are cheap. There is some interest in ag in increasing production of the feed oils, but only so long as the economics work out and that means most of the crop needs to go to something else, or they need to extract the fuel from some current waste.
While the bio fuels market can grow a lot, there are limits to how much before prices have to go up a lot. Worth looking at when you need a liquid fuel, but not a miracle. Trains need to look to electrification because it is a known easy source of green power (when combined with wind or solar – there are other sources of green power but they are limited and so not where we should focus efforts).
10 percent of the gasoline sold in the U.S. is bio-ethanol. Depending on who does the accounting that may use more petroleum than it replaces. We do it to reduce pollution and provide subsidies to the farmers in Red States. Electric cars don’t need ethanol added to the fuel to reduce tailpipe emissions.
Europe is sadly not as visionary as India on this either – rail electrification here is a majority of route-km but advancing fairly slowly, and at this point India is ahead of every European country other than Switzerland. But hydrogen isn’t the technology of choice here – it’s Pareto-inferior to either wires or batteries.
Making hydrogen cheaper than the alternatives has been just ten years away for decades. And the alternatives keep getting cheaper.
1. CSX control introduces the element of freight rail extraction of surplus into everything, on top of dodgy reliability.
2. The branching structure in Virginia is less helpful than in Pennsylvania – it’s not one tail (say, to Norfolk) but a bunch, which need to be timed to make specific slots.
3. Without further upgrades in Virginia (electrification is necessary but may not be sufficient), Virginia still runs into the problem that Adirondacker in comments has brought up for decades about running NJT and SEPTA together through Trenton: the demand is so different that the train sizes are too different. In the case of Virginia, if the choice is between a 16-car through-train every two hours and an eight-car train every hour with a timed connection, the latter is both better for passengers and cheaper to run.
4. The planning can be separated, so it should be; for the same reason, I can only give you a sketch of how to timetable the NJT lines that are going to be diverted to Gateway.
”if the choice is between a 16-car through-train every two hours and an eight-car train every hour with a timed connection”
Although I’m not saying you’re wrong about all of this, but for the sake of argument what about splitting an hourly 16-car train that splits into two 8-car trains. One to Norfolk and one to Roanoke would be an obvious split, with Willliamsburg/Newport News as a branch with a transfer in Richmond.
From another perspective, the vast majority of Virginia ridership comes from the seven stations in the 187km between DC and Richmond. Would existing and potential ridership over this short corridor make through running viable if electrified (other Virginia/long distance services to transfer)? Compare Richmond MSA at 1.35M to Hartford/Springfield at 1.61M and 179km from DC.
Splits are possible, yeah. Annoying to handle, but possible, in case there’s more electrification in Virginia.
If there’s electrification to Richmond, then I can see some trains run through there, yeah. Richmond is also closer to Washington, which means that the impact of electrification in Virginia plus high-speed updates on the NEC is larger there, enabling an increase in ridership that supports the minimum frequency at which anyone has any business running trains at that distance (hourly) without having to split trains.
My suspicion of what’s likeliest is that Virginia is going to experiment with hydrogen, never mind that the experiments have failed and Germany is moving on (and that’s with an FDP-controlled transport ministry, which loves gadgetbahn as a way of poking the Greens in the eye); the laws of physics aren’t different there, so it will fail again, and by then there will be enough of a high-speed service on the NEC that Virginia will go straight to an HSR extension to Richmond and beyond.
because Virginia decided to amputate itself from the corridor by agreeing to terms and conditions with CSX that make electrification very difficult.
Very logical. However, couldn’t some of the LD trains depart and arrive at New York Penn so they are running during the overnight hours — like the Caledonian sleeper on the WCML from Euston — so that a 11pm departure southbound and 7am arrival northbound? Running on the NEC during the overnight hours would seem to be less of an issue in terms of capacity and interference with faster HSR intercity trains. A overnight (on the NEC) train to Florida and Atlanta from New York City would seem worthwhile, I know not just railfans, but co-workers who regularly take Empire Corridor trains from Albany-Rensselaer to Penn, and then a LD train to the Carolinians or Florida. My hotel’s chief engineer does this often to visit his son, riding in coach. For them, it would be two transfers between three trains.
The NEC also hosts a lot of commuter/regional trains, aren’t they a problem too, in terms of capacity and interference, how much are they segregated from intercity trains by multiple trackage? What about the remaining freight? And could parallel freight lines host LD trains?
Tooting my own horn, infographics by me of Amtrak’s Airo trainsets* for the NEC and Empire corridor…
*Not too happy with Amtrak replacing the Siemen ACS-64 City Sprinters with dual-mode Chargers, I would rather extend electrification to Springfield, and use a dedicated dual-mode sub-fleet for the Virginia services.
People are free to use these, just credit the Empire State Passenger Association 😀
Running them at night presumably runs into the “Tradeoffs in Reliability and Shutdowns” problem, compromising reliability of daytime service, which matters way more to way more people.
Maybe if they overlapped with a sufficiently reduced early morning/late night schedule, and stopping infrequently enough that even with the lower performance trains, they can get through fast enough avoid both night time maintenance and morning rush.
There is no “morning rush” south of Trenton New Jersey. SEPTA and MARC do increase service to more than once an hour but there is no rush. There are four or more tracks in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The “slow” long distance trains can use the commuter tracks between New York and Wilmington.
I think the sleeper running into Euston as opposed to Paddington via the Chiltern Mainline is actually a big issue.
Overnight NEC service needs to go too, to keep the tracks clear for nighttime maintenance, avoiding daytime disruptions.
The commuter and regional trains make it harder to schedule intercity trains too, but the difference is that their ridership is around 10 times higher than that of the Amtrak NEC (counting just the lines that share tracks, but not the LIRR), rather than five times lower. So a solution must include timetabling both on the line, with the required capital investments, like Hunter Flyover and a similar project in New Rochelle.
They don’t. 0% relevancy. You and your friends care. All 0% of the US population represented by nostalgic railfans.
Love the “research paper” by FOREIGNERS angle especially. Could see that coming a mile away. Niiiiiiice.
Richard is more or less correct. You’ve got 12 MM NEC is 2023, you’ve got 12 MM state supported, and you’ve got 4 MM long distance. The only justification for LD is as a coverage service for the America poorly served by trains and without any intercity buses. On basically any metric you can imagine otherwise: riders per mile, financial recovery, rider miles LD is a massive drag on Amtrak’s financials. This is of course all fine but only if we’re honest about what LD should be. That probably means the land cruisers should be paying much much more.
What does “being honest about what LD should be” entail?
There’s 100-535 people in Washington for whom the long distance service is very important to keep on board.
Same with the UK sleeper trains – although they are also useful for business people who do business in London and rich tourists.
Amtrak’s FY2023 performance report shows the following:
NEC: 12.1 million Ridership | 2.2 billion Rail Passenger Miles
State Sponsored: 12.5 million Ridership | 1.6 billion Rail Passenger Miles
Long-Distance: 3.9 million Ridership | 2.0 billion Rail Passenger Miles
This is the first time in years, if ever, that NEC Rail Passenger Miles have exceeded Long-Distance Rail Passenger Miles. This outlier registered only because Amtrak is purposely slow in restoring Long-Distance equipment mothballed during the summer of 2020 into revenue service. Stephen Gardner knows how to work the system. Before Amtrak hired him, he was a congressional staffer. Again, which performance statistic is more meaningful | transactions (Ridership) or Rail Passenger Miles? What benefits Gardner when he appears before congressional committees?
Amtrak and NEC apologists cherry pick which statistics they use when comparing business units. Some are simply ignorant. Some know better and simply parrot Amtrak executive propaganda. Amtrak’s half truths target Congress and an oblivious media with intent to maximize political/ public support for annual federal NEC appropriations.
Yes, Amtrak’s 457-mile NEC does require annual government appropriations ($1,519,878,400) or 40% of total appropriations versus ($2,305,443,934) or 60% of total appropriations for the 21,400-mile National Network (see Amtrak’s FY2025 grant request.)
As for costs and revenues, NEC apologists call the corridor ‘profitable,’ parroting Amtrak’s own claims of above the rails profitable operations. Amtrak’s own stated capital wish list for the NEC in its own “Vision for the Northeast Corridor 2012 Update” came with an associated $151 billion price tag. Amtrak’s adjusted operational earnings for FY2023 were just $202 million. That is a pathetic investment, considering that Amtrak’s market share across all NEC transportation modes is about 1% and declining. Buses carry more passengers on the NEC than Amtrak trains. Look it up in the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. In reality, the NEC is a money pit.
Amtrak misuses the Amtrak Performance Tracking (APT) cost allocation tool to assign costs where they do not belong. APT is not an accounting tool, it is a cost allocation tool with customized algorithms set by executives. Several years ago, Amtrak assigned snow removal charges to a Florida station. This places all of Amtrak’s financial statements in question, including those that lead NEC apologists to conclude that the national network loses money and the NEC is operationally profitable.
Hey, Cid attempted to take a train from New York to a conference in Rochester. It was canceled northbound so she had to take a bus instead (arrived eight hours later than she’d intended), and so delayed southbound that she again took a bus.
that’s a state supported service not LD (unless it was the lakeshore limited?)
Yeah, I forget if it was branded Empire or Maple Leaf; it was not the Lake Shore.
(I should at some point blog about things that seem obvious if you get used to Europe that are so strange when you visit the US outside New York.)
I basically agree with you – at least until electrification reaches south of DC (and possibly forever?), intercity trains from south of DC had really ought to terminate at DC.
A related (and interesting) topic is service planning south of DC. There are many branches to the south. Charlottesville, and then (via Richmond:) Newport News, Norfolk, Rocky Mount, and Raleigh. Overlay on top of that the two VRE regional lines.
How much service does each destination receive? Which stops are intercity stops and which are VRE/Regional-only? How do service patterns change as electrification stretches south? Do any of them make sense to run through onto the NEC?
One of the only profitable services Amtrak runs is Auto Train. Between Lorton, VA (outside of DC) to Sanford, FL (outside of Orlando). 18 hours/855 miles, non-stop (except for a quick crew change, water, and fuel in Florence, SC). All diesel. Many days, it is the longest passenger train in the world (40 carriage consist is not unusual, about half being auto haulers).
20 year old info, but with pictures:
http://www.trainweb.org/usarail/autotrain.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_Train
It doesn’t use the NEC!
Not gonna happen and not correct for marketing, financial and service reasons. Also, the advantages of this idea range between minimal and nonexistent.
The major traffic pattern is still NY – South, not DC- South.
From Miami:
Top city pairs by ridership, 2022
Tampa, FL 257 mi
New York, NY 1,480 mi
Orlando, FL 313 mi
Lakeland, FL 226 mi
Winter Haven, FL 209 mi
Washington, DC 1,255 mi
Kissimmee, FL 295 mi
Jacksonville, FL 460 mi
Savannah, GA 609 mi
Sebring, FL 168 mi
Top city pairs by revenue, 2022
New York, NY 1,480 mi
Tampa, FL 257 mi
Washington, DC 1,255 mi
Orlando, FL 313 mi
Philadelphia, PA 1,389 mi
Newark, NJ 1,470 mi
Savannah, GA 609 mi
Lakeland, FL 226 mi
Winter Haven, FL 209 mi
Jacksonville, FL 460 mi
—-
NY traffic is so far ahead of DC traffic that it makes NO COMMERCIAL SENSE to stop short of DC.
People buying the expensive classes of tickets like to get in the train and forget about it until NYC.
You have miscalculated the transfer penalty for someone BUYING A ROOMETTE. It’s much MUCH larger than the transfer penalty for someone in coach, even if you’re switching from a roomette to a roomette, and it’s worse when there aren’t any roomettes on dedicated trains from DC to NY. The perceived penalty is a minimum of 2 hours.
There’s a reason the long-distance international trains in Europe (which you may have never taken) still bother to go all the way to the city center terminals in Paris, rather than stopping at Strasbourg or something for TGV transfers.
The long-distance trains are basically slotted in around the regular trains on the NEC, in whatever slack space is available, sort of like the freight trains on the NEC are, and they’re run at low priority (all NEC trains run ahead of them), while they also skip stops. The FOUR TRACK railroad from NY to Phildalphia, and the undercrowded railroad from Phildalphia to DC, has plenty of capacity to handle this. They simply don’t disrupt the regular schedules.
Keeping the long-distance trains out of the high-capacity time periods is fine, and indeed *desirable*. I think at this point most people who take them would *prefer* if they all departed NY late evening (long after the commuter travel) and arrived early-morning (before the commuter travel) and took the overnight slots on the NEC. This clientele does not want to be in the midst of commuter traffic.
But they are going to go to NYC, because *that is where the demand is coming from*. Your proposal would basically set fire to Miami ridership and revenue for absolutely no benefit whatsoever.
The reason your argument sounds plausible is that it would be correct if conditions were different. There is still some demand to the South from Boston; it was low enough to drop Boston sleeper service and get away with it. Most of those customers simply stopped taking Amtrak — pure lost revenue. But the Boston-NYC railroad is two tracks and the congestion issues were real, so the tradeoff as you describe here made sense.
But NYC demand to the South is another matter. It vastly exceeds DC demand. You don’t actually want to alienate your high-paying NYC luxury clientele with a forced transfer to overcrowded trains. When there’s no upside to doing it — the FOUR TRACK railroad has plenty of capacity and is nowhere near the point where the long-distance trains from NY through DC would ever disrupt the NEC schedule. The congestion issues you use as an argument are in this case fake, or at least will be fake once the second pair of Hudson tunnels is built.
There will never be enough NEC night trains for running long-distance trains from NY to DC *overnight* into an issue. There isn’t enough redeye demand from NY to DC.
The Virginia trains are more frequent, and *must* run during the day, so they have more potential for disrupting the NEC schedules. But the structure of the stations involved indicates that all Virginia service should be through-running extensions of NEC service *if delays can be removed* — there’s no terminal tracks from the South at DC Union and it’s not reasonable to build them. In fact, the non-through-running VRE service creates congestion, and there is talk of running all of it through to the north to MARC. The Virginia tracks are being bought by the state, which should abolish delays, and they can certainly be electrified. They should then be through-run.
It’s also worth occasionally looking at revenue rather than ridership. The trains to NYC command very large roomette prices. For *overnight* travel. That’s demand, economically speaking. (Interestingly, the same is *not* true of roomettes west of Chicago.)
From a *demand* perspective, you can use an overnight slot for very-low-revenue discount coach tickets on a redeye train, for even-lower-revenue but legally-required, freight, or for extending the long-distance trains from the South from DC to NY for high revenue. I know which I would prefer to do.
Now, if you follow the commercial logic, and you do move the long-distance trains out of the way of the busy *daytime* NEC service, you will still *completely reschedule* the long-distance trains going south of DC.
Because NY demand to the South is *much stronger* than DC demand, it is worth departing NY southbound at, say, 10 PM, and accepting a DC southbound departure at 2 AM or whenever. The only issues with doing this relate to the hours of service on the far ends in Florida and near New Orleans, but that really would be letting the tail wag the dog. Florida’s local service south of Orlando should eventually be completely captured by Brightline.
The bottom line is that the vast majority of people want to go to or come from NYC, the transfer penalty is larger on the higher-priced tickets, and a respect for the actual demand says *you run all the trains with service classes better than coach to NYC*.
But *when* you run them is another matter. The longer the route, the less sensitive the customers are to the time of day the train departs, so the longest routes can and should be scheduled into NYC in the times of day when nobody’s taking shorter trips. There is plenty of railroad capacity for this.
TLDR: NYC is the center of the universe on the East Coast and not going to NYC is like not going to Paris for French trains; doing so will underperform badly
I would have thought a Eurosprinter U locomotive as on the railjet in Austria with a top speed of 230km/h could do the 225 miles between New York and Washington DC comfortably in 3 hours. So you could leave NYC at 8:30pm and DC at 11:30pm with stops only at Newark and Philadelphia.
Difficult to say you couldn’t rearrange things at that time of day to cope with that service running through.
It likely would also be politically difficult to cut all long-distance service north of DC to New York City, as those traveling by sleeper are not just wealthier than the average passengers (and I reckon the average Amtrak traveler is wealthier than the average American) but due to their wealth and leisure time, more politically influential.
Difficult to cut direct service to entire states too.
True 🤔
If they were that politically influential Amtrak would have been better funded the last couple decades.
Or they could have used their influence to get the DOJ to enforce the law about freight legally having to prioritize Amtrak trains
the Miami argument would be compelling if long distance service was not a black hole, and so unreliable north bound that even with huge windows the trains sometimes do in fact interfere with the commuter schedule. This is before we get into despite having negligible ridership huge amounts of planning, engineering, and construction decisions have to be made to accommodate those trains
A couple points.
1. The night trains in Europe are mostly wishcasting – they’re an attempt at making something work for enviro-martyrs who don’t fly but also don’t want to break their day trips with a night in an intermediate city (at this point I have a regular restaurant I eat at in Brussels), but their economics kinda suck. I know there are some attempts to improve them, for example by adopting airline business class-style seating, but that’s incompatible with roomettes. At the end of the day, it’s still a train that can’t turn over seats, is more labor-intensive than a day train, and has a meh average speed.
2. Slow trains don’t get to use dedicated high-speed lines, and there’s an attempt to move them to other terminals sometimes – some trains go to Bercy rather than Gare de Lyon, for example. The slow intercity trains get diverted to slow lines without much service; you can put them on slow lines with heavy traffic, like Frankfurt-Mannheim, but RIP your network reliability.
3. New York is indeed the dominant destination from the South on the long-distance trains. But from New York, the dominant destinations are Washington and Philadelphia. The 2010 Master Plan has each of New York-Washington and New York-Philadelphia outnumbering all city pairs on all five long-distance trains that run through to the NEC combined (link, PDF-p. 43). On the Regional-branded trains in Virginia, Washington looks like a bigger destination than New York (link), while on trains from North Carolina, it’s a mix (link).
4. Most passengers on long-distance Amtrak trains ride coach, not sleeper; sleeper passengers pay more, but also cost more to serve because of higher crew labor and rolling stock costs. So if you’re telling me that what I’m proposing is good for the coach passengers because the transfer penalties work out for them the way they do in the literature, but not for sleepers, then okay, I’m forcing the sleeper passengers, who are 20% of the capacity of a Silver Star (two out of six cars, with each Viewliner sleeper accommodating 30 pax vs. 60 on the Amfleet II), 25% of that of a Crescent (2/5), 27% of that of a Silver Meteor (3/7), and 0% of that of a Palmetto (it’s all-coach), the long-distance trains in turn carrying less than 10% of travel on the NEC, to accept inferior travel. At some point, “for the many, not for the few” has to mean something.
5. The through-tracks at Washington Union Station can be used to terminate trains from the south. There’s nothing about those tracks that forces trains to run through, and there are enough tracks that if there’s through-service, the through-trains can go around the terminating trains.
any train terminating in DC could unload and then continue north to the yard “running through” from the perspective of the station.
Well,
For what its worth my hotel’s chief engineer (building maintenance, not trains, drivers of course in UK, and I assume Europe) visited his son in South Carolina by coach this month, as he has done before, that took him two trains, under the no “LDs on the NEC” proposal (which of course is likely pie-in-the-sky as Amtrak for better or worse is buying dual-modes Airos from Siemens) it would take him three trains, Albany-NYC, NYC-DC, and DC-SC. Might that switch to him to another mode? I don’t know. In Europe, how many people make trips that have three or more changes of intercity or high-speed trains?
A good question for us rail geeks, is when planning out a rail service, does public opinion matter, should it be taken into account? Long Distance overnight trains may be inefficient and money-losing, but they are politically popular, otherwise they be long gone from America, and even Britain, with its Caledonian Sleeper and Night Riviera. And how would the Commonwealth of Virginia which invests heavily in its intercity rail service (for the USA) react to all their NE Regional trains terminating at DC? Would they approve, could Amtrak browbeat them into excepting it. Has anyone asked them? Its much easier for advocates to spin grand plans then it is to get them enacted.
Recently there was a similar argument on a HSR Discord I’m on about CaHSR service, some argued it was better for passengers to change at Merced so that they save time by riding at 200 MPH to Fresno and Bakersfield, while I argued that instead of forcing everyone off one train and on to another at Merced, it be better to use dual-mode trainsets (Spain does have 250km/h Talgo 250/Renfe Class 730 trainsets) or having a EMU HS trainset towed by a diesel locomotive to Oakland and Sacramento, eliminating the need for passengers to change trains. I figured traveling at 160 MPH would be fast enough until new HSR tracks reached the Bay Area, but others insisted that CaHSR needed to go 200 MPH from the start, and that changing trains was fine, even if that meant most of the passengers piling out of one train only to board another on the other side of the platform.
What Richard’s argued for maybe 15 years is that it’s just wrong to buy 300+ km/h trains for California until the HSR line goes all the way to either the Bay Area or Los Angeles; those trains are expensive, they’d be spending most of their time at low speed, and the expected ridership internal to Bakersfield-Merced is low.
France and Germany definitely got 300km/h trains when the LGV quality lines only went part of the way. Same we will do with HS2. It’s the right answer.
At opening, the LGV Sud-Est went two thirds of the way from Lyon to Paris, and the the remaining third was under construction and would open two years later.
I completely agree that in the event the initial operating segment hits either San Jose or the San Fernando Valley, the line should run 350 km/h equipment all the way, with through-service to the other big coastal metro area even at lower speed. Where I don’t agree is that Bakersfield-Merced alone merits this.
There is tonnes of run-on services that don’t go the whole way on TGV lines. There’s the German/Lyria/Le Harve/Milan/Barcelona/Toulouse services today.
Yeah, CaHSR be better off with the dual-mode Airo (OK, if California could electrify its non-HSR lines than of course, no) till they connect the Central Valley with Caltrains, in fact they have Siemens Charger-Venture Airo trainsets for the ‘San Joaquin’, all they need to do is add the “APV” so they could run off the catenary on the HSR section, or skip the APV and Catenary, just run 125 MPH on diesel using their Renewable Diesel for eco-points, as they already do. Until frequency is high enough, they would be smart to like Brightline use Alternating Double-Single Track, that was suggested, but shot down.
CAHSR needs to be HSR right from the start. Otherwise its reputation is sunk.
I would be surprised if Hitachi couldn’t build a AT400 dual mode train that did at least 250 if not 300km/h on electric.
I don’t agree with the assumption that a transfer is necessarily bad from the perspective of public opinion; the riders from the Virginia and long-distance trains get to New York hours faster compared with today and maybe an hour to an hour and a half faster compared with HSR-with-through-service. The advocacy I’ve seen from RPA in favor of keeping the night trains has always centered their use as a lifeline in the areas they serve, especially the Empire Builder, rebutting the common belief that those trains are land cruises for the rich and therefore should charge land cruise prices and not involve the government. The non-land cruise passengers are unambiguously benefiting from this arrangement.
Your hotel’s chief engineer is pretty unusual in taking trains from Albany to South Carolina in the first place. I don’t know to what extent the literature studies the impact of the first vs. the second transfer, but there’s no a priori reason to think that there are huge nonlinearities – the models I’m most familiar with assume there aren’t, but I don’t recall having read a study in either direction.
Over here, it’s normal to have a many-legged trip, with local rail connections at both ends. It gets hairier if I need to rely on a connection that has DB levels of reliability – that’s essentially why I break Berlin-London trips with a stay in Brussels or in the Rhine-Ruhr – but the entire point of this exercise is to figure out how to have SBB and not DB levels of reliability on the NEC. (Note also that “Rhine-Ruhr” can mean “Bonn with an extra transfer” rather than just “Cologne,” so, counting the streetcar transfer where we somehow waited 20 minutes, it was a four-legged trip.) I think it matters that the NY-DC leg of your chief engineer’s trip would be a train coming either every 10 minutes (if the Keystone is cut too) or with a maximum 20-minute gap overlying to produce 15-minute headways by DC, and that NY-Albany can be improved in the same project to be faster and a lot more reliable.
People don’t like transfers at crowded stations, but they particularly don’t like SERVICE DOWNGRADES, which is what you get when you transfer from a long-distance train (even in coach — long-distance coach has large, comfortable seats) to an overcrowded NEC train. You’re proposing a forced class-of-service downgrade for the people coming from Florida.
This is understood to be so unpopular that the earliest subways maintained multiple classes of service until it became completely untenable due to very high crowding levels.
Now, I suppose we might eventually get to that point of untenability, but the NEC south of NYC is not going to be anywhere near that any time soon. When it’s seeing the crowds of the Lexington Avenue Line we can consider that possibility.
There just is zero penalty, zero, for running the trains from Florida and New Orleans through to NYC. Slot them in when there’s no inside-the-NEC traffic, by all means. I fully support rescheduling.
But that four-track railroad from NY to south of Phildelphia is nowhere *near* capacity and there’s plenty of room to slot them in in the early morning and late evening. If it starts having the loads of the Lexington Avenue Line, then that would be different, but that’s not happening any time soon.
1. Why is it overcrowded to ride the NEC with a seat reservation?
2. Devin and I spent two months optimizing the timetable between New York and New Haven. Four tracks do not guarantee a reasonable timetable when there are more than two speed classes; it’s a coincidence that between Newark and Metropark, our first attempt at same worked, abetted by the fact that there are six-track segments.
3. Class-of-service downgrades are normal in transportation. Amtrak has them whenever a long-distance train downgrades the diner from fresh food preparation to reheating, or when the Palmetto removed the sleepers and dining car. There’s no checked baggage here and as far as I can tell the only people who miss that are aging hippies who want to recreate the GDP per capita of their youth; I think the NEC finally removed checked bags only in the 2000s.
4. [Updated] In the tradeoff between speed and seat pitch, passengers who can afford speed generally prefer it. Concorde seating density was higher than modern premium economy and similar to modern JetBlue, but it got away with charging first-class fares because it was hours faster. Lie-flat beds are not necessary when you can get between New York and London in three hours. To just about any rail passenger, saving an hour and going from a coach seat pitch of 1.27 meter to 1 meter is a good deal. So the class-of-service downgrade is specific to the sleepers, which produce something like 2% of NEC traffic.
The mighty New York Westchester and Boston was gonna make gobs of money. Squint at the New Haven line and it’s six tracks wide between New Rochelle and the state line. Lots of the problems with trying to make things work along what made sense squiggling along the coast in 1840 goes away if there is a tunnel from Penn Station to Farmingdale.
NY-New Haven? I already told you that was different. The two tracks across the Hell Gate followed by the flat junction at New Rochelle, with SEVEN speeds of service (four from Metro-North which run *practically 24 hours*, plus *freight*) are a lot of fun to try to schedule, right?
Not comparable to the mostly-four-track (often five-track) NYC-Philadelphia-DC route, which does not suffer from branching to two different NYC terminals across a flat junction (Hoboken approaches are grade-separated) and has diverted or built extra tracks for most of the freight. There are no real capacity issues there which won’t be fixed by the second pair of Hudson tunnels and approach.
If such issues ever actually arise, perhaps due to a massive increase in NJT service, then they can be dealt with then. That’s an issue for far in the future.
Metro-North doesn’t run four speeds of service, our timetable assumes a grade-separated Shell from the get-go, and Hell Gate’s double-track bottleneck is not much more onerous than the North River Tunnels’ (the line is being quad-tracked in the Bronx for PSA). Gateway, in turn, is planned to remove M&E, RVL (with a grade-separated Hunter), and M-B service from the NRTs, which makes the remainder dramatically easier to timetable but does not let you separate the routes into Manhattan between fast and slow trains.
Everyone complains about the distance from airports to their hotels; it may not be fixable with airports but it is fixable with trains. Why make it worse if you don’t have to? And you don’t have to.
If you’re running overnight, when are you doing maintenance?
[Also, did a minor HTML formatting edit to fix the numbering.]
Dude/tte, sorry to break it to you but … NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOU AND YOUR ROOMETTE.
Nobody!
I know “coming from Florida” makes you super-super-Special, way more Special than than hoi polloi “overcrowding” … so … perhaps there’s some hereditary 17th century estate in which you and your luggage would feel more fully accommodated?
Believe me, nobody cares! They want to get where they’re going, and you’re just in the way, taking up the space of a dozen other (lesser, roomette-less) humans. Just go away. Take your beautiful roomette with you. Please.
WHERE IS MY LUXURY YACHT? I WAS PROMISED A LUXURY YACHT!
Metro-North does run four speeds of service, so I suppose you mean that your proposed schedule would do away with that (as it should). Grade-separating Shell Interlocking is a great idea — why don’t you focus on that rather than making unnecessary proposals to stop running long-distance trains into NYC.
Maintenance?
FOUR TRACKS
Actually FIVE TRACKS in sections
In practice you’re going to maintain two tracks one night, the other two tracks on a different night.
Running what are practically synchronized trains to the South, which barely need one track’s worth of capacity. This low level of service gets run through tracks under maintenance *routinely*; you can schedule around them without difficulty. This is currently done for freight on the NEC.
The redeye coaches on the NEC are much more of an issue for overnight maintenance, because there are more of them and their schedule has much less tolerance for changes. So I guess your plan is to just eliminate them? They’re popular and there are squads of parallel buses which are even more popular.
It’s hard to do maintenance with short windows of time. You want a nice long window. So if you want to operate with no trains running through, in an efficient manner, you’re talking about shutting down ALL service from 10 PM to 4 AM or so.
But I didn’t see you making a big attack on all overnight NEC service — is that what you’re actually proposing, a “NO OVERNIGHT SERVICE” plan? Nooo, you singled out the run-through trains. They don’t create any more problems than any other overnight service.
People like high span of service, although it does create maintenance issues.
The maintenance isssues are why a lot of places where there are parallel lines have switched to “blockades” where they shut the whole line down for a week. This works.
But on a FOUR TRACK line the norm would be to maintain two tracks (the northbound, for instance) overnight, while running traffic on the other two, and then maintain the other two on a different night.
Having a lot of local stopping trains can be a problem for this with stations which don’t have platforms on all the tracks.
A few sleeper trains? Not a problem at ALL, as they only stop at stations with many many platforms.
Seems to me you’re just making excuses for an irrational attack on long-distance service. Your arguments are thin, weak, and ever-changing — they look more like rationalizations for a pre-conceived idea you have in your head than actual arguments.
Really you’re talking about two travel markets here, though:
1.Intercity services to Virginia and maybe even North Carolina, which are really extensions of the NE Regional. I don’t see too much harm here in a transfer at Washington, on the other hand Richmond probably warrants electrification and a direct service. And the other alternative is bimodal multiple units that split at Washington (16-car sets are usually 2 x 8-car units anyway).
2.Truly long-distances services: which are essentially the Florida trains and the Crescent to New Orleans. Beginning the service in Washington really would be a downgrade for the majority of passengers. But here I don’t see any problem with slotting them into late-evening departures (around 10pm) and pre-peak morning arrivals (ca. 7am). Any Acela Corridor trains would be running at a reduced frequency at this point, but it would still allow for a nighttime closure of the line from ca. 12am to 5am). They can serve as an effective overnight train to North Carolina, then a land cruise south of there.
Exactly.
Now, if the route wasn’t FOUR TRACKS, a capacity argument might be real.
Since there are NO capacity concerns WHATSOEVER, just run the Florida and New Orleans trains to NYC (on the slow tracks if you like).
One can make the “for the many!” argument but this isn’t Soviet Russia, this is a capitalist country, and “for the rich!” is documented to consistently win in Congress. If you can support the desires of the rich *without causing any harm* to the many, which you *can* in this case, surely you do it?
“For the rich” is the exact opposite of a documented win when it comes to a government-subsidized service. It’s a longstanding problem with any American welfare spending; you see it with the Biden student loan forgiveness program, where complaints that it would favor the rich led to an opaque redesign with a maximum amount of loan forgiveness leaving a bunch of debtors uncertain whether they were eligible. That’s where the means-testing obsession comes from. This is also where the criticism of Amtrak focuses, as in the OIG report on dining car losses or in the land cruise appellation for the long-distance trains.
Wrong.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/04/08/rich-people-rule/
There’s what people chatter about, and then there’s the actual evidence. 😦
Do some rich people take private airplanes and want trains for the poor? Yeah. Keep them happy if you want funding.
Do some rich people want service they are willing to use themselves? Yeah, they do. Keep them happy if you want funding.
It’s documented that “a program for the poor is a poor program”, because the rich won’t support it. The only reason the NEC gets routine funding is the elite-class service, Acela, even though most of the riders are on the Northeast Regional and the time savings from Acela are barely worth mentioning.
1. There’s a lot of criticism out there of Gilens-Page. Vox has a summary, citing further analysis that shows, for example, that on issues within the Gilens-Page dataset on which the rich and middle class disagree, each side gets what it wants about half the time.
2. All of the papers in question are about broad class interests: the rich are taken as the entirety of high-income Americans, the middle class as the entirety of middle-income Americans, etc. A large majority of rich people do not ride sleeper trains, but do pay taxes to subsidize Amtrak. “This helps a tiny subset of rich people defined by romance for riding sleeper trains all the way to New York” does not make it something the rich as a class favor.
3. The means testing issue is completely different from this. It’s not quite that a program for the poor is a poor program – these days, the serious criticism of means testing is not political economy but paperwork burden and the obscurity of knowing which welfare programs one qualifies for.
There’s a reason the long-distance international trains in Europe (which you may have never taken) still bother to go all the way to the city center terminals in Paris, rather than stopping at Strasbourg or something for TGV transfers.
Actually, at the distances Alon is referring to, it is required to make a TGV transfer, although it usually happens in Brussels or Frankfurt or somewhere.
NY-Charlotte is 1133km, to Atlanta is 1382km, to Miami is 2235km. Comparable distances from Paris are Berlin at 1054km, Vienna at 1235km and Bucharest at 2310km. None of those cities have direct through service to Paris, in all cases you have to transfer from an ICE to a TGV somewhere (for Bucharest it appears you cannot even make a reasonable all rail journey, all of Google’s options involve a bus ride as part of the multi-seat transfer).
The longest scheduled continuous long distance service in Western Europe I’m aware of was London-Marseille on the Eurostar at 1003km. Currently the longest I can see is Paris-Munich at 841km. Those are equivalent to 911km Bos-Richmond, which is further argument that Alon is not totally correct and the existing Northeast Regional routes in Virginia should through-run. Paris-Amsterdam and London-Amsterdam are 510/585km, while it is not possible to go London -Cologne direct at 485km. In this respect the all-day direct service 735km from Bos-DC looks quite good, even if the speed is not.
I think rail is losing a lot of mode share from not doing Cologne-London and Frankfurt-London as direct trips. They both have large potential markets but these are dominated by air because the rail trip is annoying and expensive. But we all know the stumbling block there is the UK’s ridiculous border policies.
Yeah but even beyond that the onward connections from Lille, Brussels and Gare du Nord are pretty crap.
So basically if you want to do Oxford to Kitzbuhel you have to do Oxford-Paddington-Brussels-Cologne-Munich-Kufstein-Wörgl-Kitzbuhel.
Even if there was just an actual Lille/Brussels-Munich train every 2 hours that would be a huge upgrade.
Also the French frequency departing Paris at ~12-2pm is degraded even though that’s the sort of time a reasonable Eurostar from London arrives, and you still have to cross Paris and they won’t hold trains for a late Eurostar or even prioritise a late running Eurostar going into Paris.
AIUI, it’s not the border policy, sensu strictu, but the equally ridiculous Channel Tunnel security policy, in which every single bag loaded onto a train that is going to pass through the tunnel has to be individually scanned, but if that bag is, instead, loaded onto a car that is loaded on a train to go through the tunnel, then it’s clearly no threat and there’s no need to scan the bag.
If every car loaded onto “Le Shuttle” had to be completely emptied, and then all the luggage X-rayed and the people passed through metal-detector gates, then that would be obviously impractical and no-one would use Le Shuttle. But they insist on that level of security on board trains, which means that the vast majority of stations opt-out of this.
There is, though, another big problem: the Belgian/German disagreement over and general crapness with the Brussels-Cologne high-speed line. If that line was less shit and more trains ran along it, then there would be far fewer cases where you have to change in Cologne, as there would be Brussels-Munich and Brussels-Berlin trains.
PS: Paris-Bucharest: Nightjet from Paris to Vienna, then spend the day in Vienna, then Dacia Express overnight to Bucharest. I think the problem is that the Paris-Vienna Nightjet doesn’t operate every day until sometime next year and you’re probably picking days it doesn’t run.
Bad spamfilter :(.
Re Chunnel security: there are no such inspections on the car shuttles, so you can bring a bomb in a car on the train, only passport inspections.
If you’re going back to pre-covid times, there was the Paris-Moscow train, far longer than anything running today, but yes, long-distance trips generally involve multiple legs. For instance, I’m travelling from Manchester to Lagos soon (the one in Portugal, not the one in Nigeria) and I have transfers in London, Paris, Barcelona (and an overnight stay there), Madrid, Sevilla and Huelva (and I’m being driven from Huelva, but could get a taxi/bus from there if I wasn’t visiting a friend who is prepared to drive me).
Bad spamfilter :(.
What do you know about Chinese intercity high speed sleeper trains? Are they more viable than in Europe? How do they interact with other HSR trains?
They are economically viable since they run short non-sleeper services at daytime. At nights it’s not difficult to arrange a window for slleeper thains as other HSR trains are not that frequent.
And Leo Sun just described why there isn’t any problem running sleeper trains on the NEC from NY through DC.
As far as I could tell they only run on weekends (Friday-Monday) and are a way to get a little bit of extra capacity at peak demand times.
“The transfer penalty is extensively studied in the modal choice literature.”
I am skeptical. The otherwise excellent de Keiser, Kouwenhoven, Hofker paper is short on references. It raised the penalty to 23 minutes on empirical data. Previously, the NS had a 10 minutes estimate based on “expert-judgment”. These estimates are at odd with SNCF and RENFE’s experience.
Trains to Brittany were pulled by an electric locomotive from Paris to Rennes, and a diesel one for the next 248 km to Brest along Brittany’s north, or 247 km to Quimper along the south shore. The LGV Atlantique would put an end to these one seat rides unless the Brittany lines were electrified. SNCF had some experience with a similar problem (the Lyon-Grenoble line was only electrified a few years after the LGV Sud-Est opening) and decided that electrification was in order. When the LGV Atlantique opened in 1989, the Paris-Rennes trip was cut by 52 minutes. Ridership to Brest increased by 30%, to Quimper by only 3%. The divergence was due to the fact that the TGV ran to Brest, but the Quimper service required an “optimized” transfer to a comfortable Corail train across the platform in Rennes. Once the catenary reached Quimper in 1992, patronage increased by 30%.
RENFE had an even worse experience with transfer between the AVE and conventional trains. Iberian gauge Madrid-Barcelona trains were struggling with a 14% market share, well below the 45% traveling by air, 29% by car, and just above the 11% using coaches. In 2003, the Madrid-Lleida segment of the AVE line opened. Its 200 km/h speed limit was raised to 250 in May 2006, then 280 km/h in October, saving 2h05 over the pre-AVE schedule, but the Madrid-Barcelona ridership barely increased. In December 2006, the AVE reached Camp de Tarragona gaining another 20′ with a Madrid-Barcelona trip now taking 4h18 and the same result. Ridership tripled right after the last 98 km opened, 6 years late, in February 2008. It went to 400% of pre-AVE levels in 2009, 500% in 2010, and 600% in 2011.
The Netherlands are a large regional train market with frequent trains. On long distance trips, which are only done occasionally, selling a one seat ride is important.
There have been overnight trains between New York and points south of Washington that left New York mid to late evening and arrived there early morning, but times at Washington were at the wee hours and they weren’t standout trains compared with flagship trains to Miami and New Orleans. One such train dragged out NY-Miami to a 2 night trip. Most such trains carried mail and express, and were the first to go when the Post Office or USPS canceled nearly all mail contracts with the railroads.
Amtrak runs more than one LD train to Florida/Carolina, so you could just keep one to New York City, terminate the others at Washington. In fact, Amtrak is already considering doing that with the ‘Silver Star’ by combining it with the ‘Capitol Limited’ to solve some issue with lack of Superliners. Have the ‘Silver Whatever’ depart NY Penn at 9pm southbound and arrive 9am northbound, or something like that. So, to directly serve the New York City and Philly market (and those connecting from trains from Albany, Springfield, Harrisburgh, Boston, etc) the departure times at DC don’t matter, as those in DC will have other trains to the South.
To be fair times have changed at both ends and culture has changed. The NEC runs a German? quality railway? And Brightline runs a British speed/French reliability? one in Florida.
Doesn’t seem pointless to link them and aim for a 10% market share like Kyushu to Tokyo.
Also there are probably more people who want to avoid flying if they can and more holiday maximisers who want to avoid a day of travel if they could and the train was sped up a bit?
Holiday maximisers would perfer utilize sleeper trains. It frees up the day times.
I don’t get the point. Take a 9:30 p.m. flight. Leave for the airport at 8:00 p.m., land at 11:00, get to your hotel by midnight, and wake up at 7:00 a.m. It’s better sleep and you still get a full day exploring. Same deal with a five-hour high speed train. Take the last train of the evening and get to your destination at midnight–still better than trying to sleep on a train.
New York to Miami is a 3 hour flight. So you would need to leave before 8pm for the flight to land by 11pm at night.
If you finish work at 4pm on a Friday and you obviously need 2 hours for check in, then that leaves at most 90 minutes or so for the plane to take off depending on how far away from the airport. If we assume it takes an hour to get to the airport then the window is 7-8pm.
Thats a pretty narrow window – and those flights are also super expensive.
Plus at the other end you realistically will need a taxi to your destination which also isn’t cheap.
For the train to beat that as an option with a 7pm departure time from the city centre it probably needs to arrive at the destination by 9am or so.
You can get to LGA or DCA 45-60 minutes before departure. It’s 15 minutes from Farragut Square or Gallery Place to DCA. Maybe 30 from Midtown to LGA. So assuming you work until 5:00 p.m., flights departing from 6:15-9:00 p.m. are all fine. Maybe you get to your hotel at 1:00 a.m. instead if you take the 9:00 p.m. flight. Big deal.
If you are prepared to risk missing your flight then sure you can turn up super late.
But most people aren’t rich enough to gamble that.
It literally takes ~180 seconds to clear security with PreCheck and another ~400 seconds to walk from security to the farthest gate at DCA. Maybe you show up 90 minutes early at Dulles or LAX or O’Hare or Heathrow. *Maybe.*
You sound like you cut things super tight. Most people leave more time. Especially with checked bags etc.
I might add five to ten minutes to check a bag, which I would not do if I were going to Miami for a weekend. There is literally no reason to sit at a gate for an hour. My point, generally, is that overnight trains do not need to exist and are not competitive, price or time wise, against taking the last flight of the day and spending the night in a hotel at your destination. The consequence either way is that you zero out your evening (which doesn’t affect work/being a tourist) and you wake up at your final destination.
The cats are becoming increasingly concerned. 30 minutes was a long giggle not actual laughing. 30 minutes in the dead of night when there isn’t road construction somewhere. Most people don’t work in Midtown or live there. Especially the ones who will be departing for Florida somewhere far far away from Midtown. Like Cleveland.
And renting a significant fraction of a railroad car for a day isn’t cheap either. You want cheap you take the day off and fly at odd hours on the secondary airline. Perhaps to a secondary airport. Where, because it’s Florida, you rent a car. which means it’s less important which airport you are at. Because the automobile can go almost anywhere.
Fair. But even in Florida now Brightline runs a European level service with European reliability they are getting respectable passenger numbers.
I’m illustrating the point that flying late is time competitive against taking a night train. This example assumes an office worker heading to LGA from Midtown East at 5:00 p.m. on a Friday. Which is a 25–40-minute cab ride. On the arrival end in MIA, they’re probably taking a 25-minute Uber to their hotel in Brickell or South Beach and not renting a car. If you want to replace it with a family in your much-loved Garden City, driving to JFK is also going to be much easier than taking a night train. You are absolutely right to note that night trains can be used once every 24 hours, and a lie-flat bed will likely cost much more than the $220 flight to Florida.
TL;DR: Flying is very efficient and does not eat up a whole travel day. You just schedule things strategically. However, HSR is even more efficient, and many of the arguments for flying late also apply to taking the train late. E.g. taking a 7:00 p.m. Shinkansen from Tokyo -> Hakata is better than either flying or taking a night train if your goal is to minimize work/tourist time taken up by travel. Focus on shifting routes like DC->Atlanta to high-speed rail and give up on the night train retrofantasy.
Ca(e)-Free LA wrote:
For someone so insistent that night trains are dumb, and talks of costs, you haven’t actually ‘done the math’. How about including the cost of that hotel, and we’d have to assume that is not a Motel 6 on the edge of, or edgy side of, town. Say, somewhere as convenient as the downtown rail station that they do in almost every major (even minor) city in the world served by HSR. Then throw in taxi or Uber at both ends, which from airports are notoriously expensive. Then try to put a dollar value on the endless hassle of waiting for all these things including those absurd demands by airport security theatre to arrive 2h or 3h before your flight. When I flew more regularly as part of my job I even got fed up with those central chain hotels (3-4 star) in American cities that manage to make you queue to check in and check out!
Maybe it is not for you but I get the impression you probably haven’t even tried (being a presumed American), but for some of us sleeping on an overnight train is perfectly adequate (and in some senses the absence of the clickety-clack of non-HSR is missed). Indeed countless millions of Americans do it in a non-lay-flat chair on the coast-to-coast redeye. Even a deeply reclining chair is not so bad which I have done many times in Europe (eg. Madrid-Lisbon, Barcelona-Bilbao, mostly because there weren’t sleeper options.) Then, waking up very early morning on a train in the centre of a new city can be quite exhilarating (though American cities…). Add the avoidance of all the hassle and cost of flying. Add to all that, the fact that a train is a very nice environment in which to do some work (say, complete or review a business/scientific presentation) or some reading either at your seat or in the cafe/resto car etc. Trying to do the same on a plane is usually a nightmare, especially as you are stressed and irritated by all the hassle of getting to that plane. Oh, and it is almost always more convenient/relaxed after a regular work day catching a night train at mid- to late-evening rather than a flight which has to leave early evening or afternoon to meet airport curfews, security theatre or allow travellers to get to those overpriced hotels the same evening.
Arriving by train is almost the only mode of travel in which the traveller arrives more refreshed than when starting the journey. Air travel is the total opposite. Americans put up all that hassle because they know of nothing else.
Sitting in a coach seat for an hour or two means a lot less railroad car to rent. Which someone else can rent for an hour or two later in the day. Sleeping car rents in whole days.
I agree. Sleeper trains are dumb.
Why don’t we just leave the doubt on sleeper train’s competitiveness to the market? Let ridership say. I’m not familiar of those in Europe but I do know that those sleeper HSRs in China and the only remaining sleeper rail service in Japan do achieve full occupancy from time to time. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t suit you. It’s alright as long as there are enough people who consider it attractive to fill up the train.
@adiron, a 150 seat Airbus costs as much to buy as a 1000 seat high speed train, plus it has about as many staff and probably has similar fuel costs.
Fill the high speed train with sleeping compartments there won’t be 1,000 seats. Renting 6 or 8 seats worth of it for a day isn’t going to be cheap.
I’m generally against sleep trains.
First and foremost: You need to do regular track maintenance and overnight is a great time for that. While I generally support 24×7 operations with reduced hours for local trains, sleeper trains are clearly about long distance trains and so I’m fine with shutting down the tracks overnight to work on them. People don’t expect the same show up and go from long distance trains.
Trains work best when you stop at stations in between, but sometime around 10pm (midnight?) people are already asleep and so they won’t get on, and then until 6am you have to keep moving (or sit in a siding while waiting for people to wake up). Yes I know people in Minot ND get on the train at 2am – but they don’t like it, it is just the only option when you live in the middle of nowhere and so they are forced to take abuse as it is all they can get.
Many trips should involve a transfer. Start someplace in Rhode Island, end up someplace in Ohio should be a reasonable trip, but it is only possible if you can transfer. Last I checked nobody was willing to connect cars full of sleeping people to a different train for safety reasons. (not to mention the logistics of getting people on the right cars).
As already pointed out sleeping cars are somewhat expensive, but really only useful at night. Your “normal car” you want to have people get on and off all day, 2-3 different people should be use that seat every day as the car goes back and forth.
there are not many routes that can use a sleep train given the above constraints. How many people want to get from NYC to St Louis? Anything in between those two should be – at HSR speeds be too short a trip for a sleeper car. Maybe we can justify extending the tracks farther to Kansas city (Alon has done the math previously and found it doesn’t work out, but the numbers are close enough that you can maybe add it, and then add a couple cities in Pennsylvania and a few in Missouri. (NYC to Minneapolis likewise is a reasonable sleeper route)
I know sleepers are run all over the world. There are people who use them. However I think there are better uses for track.
At an average speed of 150 mph Columbus Ohio to Providence Rhode Island is a bit over 5 hours and doesn’t need a sleeper. Saint Louis would be 8. Most people would fly but 8 hours doesn’t need a sleeper. Doesn’t even need to be a transfer. There can be the extra special through train that ferries people to the Sunset Limited, which terminates in Kansas City, that starts in Boston. Boston to Kansas City is ten hours. Leave Boston at 8 in the morning, Eastern Time, they could be having cocktails at the Harvey House in Kansas City at 5 in the afternoon, Central Time.
You make some interesting arguments Henry!
I think the first flaw is that people don’t really like changing trains. Look how many more passengers and passengers from London Oxenholme gets compared to Windermere even though Oxenholme is a junction station in the middle of nowhere.
The other thing is that certainly on a Friday/Saturday evening is that late night non-sleeper trains are pretty popular. So the window when there are fewer passengers probably doesn’t start until 1am or maybe even 1:30am.
Now there is another question about whether sleeper trains should sit in a siding from 1am to 5am or whatever time in the morning you start running services again – and I think there is a stronger case there – and that buying some high speed or tilting sleeper trains to make that work is pretty compelling.
London-Glasgow/Edinburgh by modern trains with 1 stop takes maybe 4 hours. The idea that the sleeper follows the ‘last’ train to Birminghamish and then runs ahead of the 5:15am Wolverhampton to Glasgow train seems relatively sane. You would arrive into Glasgow at ~8:15am rather than 7:30am on the current timetable, but that feels OK.
@adirondacker12800 I have yet to see a serious proposal to run direct service from Rhode Island to Ohio. everyone with a sense of Geography realizes that you have a Boston->DC route (could go north into Canada and south to Florida) that stops in Rhode Island. You also have a NYC to Chicago route (which may continue on to St Louis, or even Kansas City), those two lines meet up someplace around NYC and you transfer if you want to go Rhode Island to Ohio. Your point that Rhode Island to Ohio might not be a sleeper is taken, but still St Louis is a reasonable destination for someone in Rhode island (or there is Boston to Ohio)
There have been a number of proposed routes for the NYC-Chicago rail, but all will miss important cities. Detroit really should get service, and there are other parts of Michigan or Toronto that you should study sending that track to. There are cities in Kentucky and south that should somehow get service – whatever route your choose will not cover all cities that you should serve so you should place for transfers to them someplace on the main line (again, there are lots of options). The important take away is there are a lot of city pairs that are a sleeper train from each other – you cannot do them all on branches as the track cannot handle that many different trains. Sure with the current Amtrak network you can make it work, but the US has every reason to aspire better train service at which point it won’t work.
@Matthew Hutton While people don’t like transferring, but it is a fact of life. Station design needs to make this easy so that once a few people try it they can report to their friends that it isn’t as bad as it sounds. People who fly transfer all the time, unless you live in a hub city (airlines choose hubs near large cities but even still transfers are common) you will transfer most of the time – none of them like it but they have no choice.
I do agree about transfers, the example above is somewhere you obviously want to do them. But I do think running a service as frequently as possible it’s important. Perhaps at the sorts of frequency you have suggested before like every 10 minutes even in the countryside.
Why do railfans think people changing trains don’t take up space on the train they are transferring from? Or to?
If you have a whole trainload of people from east of the Mississippi who want to take the Southwest Chief there can be a once a day train that loiters for a few moments in North Philadelphia while the baggage cart moves their steamer trunk onto the baggage car. Partly because the trains flitting between Washington D.C. and Boston aren’t going to have baggage cars. They can share the high speed train with people who want to take the California Zephyr to Oakland.
There are enough people in Michigan that there can be a different train that serves the Michigan to East Coast market. And there are enough people in Ontario that there can be a separate train, likely configured differently, for the Toronto-East Coast market. Which will much like the Montreal-Chicago trains or the Montreal-Washington D.C. trains.
The train from Detroit to New York can share the tracks with the train from Chicago to New York east of the general vicinity of Toledo. Both of them can stop in Cleveland. Someday far far in the future the train from Chicago to New York can alternate between going through Cleveland or going through Columbus. And since it’s Cleveland not Nagoya there can be a Cincinnati-Boston train later in the hour. Especially since Boston isn’t Tokyo.
60 years ago American Airlines computerized all their reservations. People have been optimizing that since. The computers are really good at collating origins and destinations and spitting out proposed service patterns. The train from Chicago to New York doesn’t have to go through Detroit and it definitely doesn’t have to go through Toronto. The bridge across Lake Ontario to Rochester would be really long.
There aren’t going to be “many different trains” because most people will see that it takes ten hours to get to Kansas City and will fly there instead. Which makes the trip between Boston and Los Angeles three days and even people who are afraid to fly will fly.
If you run a service that isn’t completely shit you will get a 10% marketshare like Fukuoka-Tokyo does.
That can be pretty decent.
Kansas City isn’t Fukuoka and it’s realllly realllly far from New York. Wikipedia says Fukuoka is 1069 km from Tokyo. 1000 km from New York is someplace in Ohio. Which is about halfway to Kansas City. Because Kansas City is reallly really far from New York. And someday far far far in the future when there are tracks between Kansas City and the rest of things east of Interstate 35 there could be a train or two or maybe even three a day that go allllllllllll the way from Boston to Kansas City.
Because it’s realllllly reallllly far away from the coast and most people will fly.
…..Youse all understand that the dots on the map are farther apart because the actual places they represent are far away.
At 3 trains a day from Boston to Kansas city some of them will figure out that it is stupid to get one of those trains when a more convenient time to leave (or arrive) is perfectly possible if they just get whatever train and then transfer. Now you only have 2 trains per day worth of demand. Or you can just make those transfers easier and tell people to transfer. And better you can can mix people going Boston->DC Boston->Detroit, they all get a better experience as the train is more on their schedule (but again this assumes your transfers are not hard!)
Certainly with Eurostar it looks very much like people do/did prefer 1tph to London and then 1tph to Paris than 3tpd from Ashford to Paris direct.
More convenient transfers than what? Go ahead, tell us what is more convenient than many times an hour between Boston and New York? All of you have to get a grip on reality. The reality is that North America is reallllly reallly big and crossing half of it will take a realllly really long time. It takes a really really long time in airplanes. Kansas City is so far away from the East Coast that it’s in a different time zone.
Part of this is the travel times. The Silver Meteor is currently around 27 hours NY-Miami. However, this includes 3.5h to DC, and 5.5 hours for Orlando to Miami. If you follow Alon’s plan and get NY-DC down to 2hrs, and arrange with Brightline for track access at the Florida end, with a split of the train to serve Miami and Orlando/Tampa separately, then you can get the train down to around 22 hours. This doesn’t seem like much of a reduction but it’s important for two reasons:
Oh my god just fly.
where are you getting 1:50 between DC-NYC from? All the alignment level analysis I’ve seen suggests that without a bypass of Philly(which seems undesirable) the best achievable time time is 2:15 or something like that. if it’s your own analysis is it published? would love to see it.
Everything will be stopping in Philadelphia. It doesn’t matter if it’s curvy on either side of 30th Street, the trains will be going slow anyway because everything is going to stop in Philadelphia. 10 or 12 blocks of realignment in the Frankford neighborhood isn’t bypassing Philadelphia. It’s even not-bypassing North Philadelphia too.
On overnight maintenance, would four tracks always be out of service every night? If not, could you man around that, not running north of DC on nights when all four tracks would be out of service, could you not run on specific days of the week to open maintenance windows?
I presume so. Maintenance around active tracks is not normal; in Spain, I’ve been told, it’s done only in an emergency, for example when a signal or switch breaks on the approach to Sants and they need to fix it right now or an entire rush hour’s worth of commuters to Barcelona are going to be late for work.
Now, to be fair, this is on two-track railways. There just aren’t a lot of four-track mainlines out there, and it will not surprise me if there is some way to work around it at reasonable productivity. (On a six-track railway, it’s quite easy, which matters for operations into Chicago on the former IC, now Metra Electric line.) Evidently it’s not used this way on the high-intensity four-track lines that I am aware of except the New York City Subway and the Chicago North Side Main Line. That said, four-track lines in Japan tend to be two two-track lines in a trenchcoat, with limited ability to substitute for each other, like Chuo, Tokaido, and Sobu; the ones in London are more conventional, but then how much demand is there even for night service on (say) the South West Main Line.
Late night the UK West Coast mainline uses 2 of 4 tracks.
On NL’s four-track lines, maintenance does happen on 2 of the lines, with the other 2 in regular service.
That may not continue however, because of safety: Following the Voorschoten train crash, the OVV did find that wanting to keep some tracks open for operation was a factor that causes the risks involved for passengers, train crews & maintenance employees to be downrated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Voorschoten_train_crash
“the ones in London are more conventional, but then how much demand is there even for night service on (say) the South West Main Line.”
Thameslink runs a 1tph service between Bedford and Brighton through the entire night…
Levy,
I take it that in your proposed timetable there are no regular overnight red-eye coach trains due to track maintenance?
I have noticed that overnight bus runs seem popular enough to justify running them between New York City, Buffalo, and Montreal, were there are several overnight intercity coach frequencies; FlixBus, Greyhound, Trailways, and until this month, MegaBus. Checking NYC-DC, there are 7 departures between 11pm and 3am for Greyhound, FlixBus, and PeterPan, which is picking up former MegaBus routes. One good think about Amtrak, it will very likely never be bought by private equity with massive debt, that is what sank MegaBus in the USA. I’ve watched a few night bus trip reviews on YouTube, judging from the videos, they do seem to fill them up with passengers.
On track maintenance, with four tracks you only need one run the occasional overnight train, and they could run at “restricted speed” (20 MPH in the USA) with the schedule padded for recovery time to take in account track maintenance. And what about the freight that still runs on the NEC? Its not much, but its still there, even I believe a CSX coal train, one derailed on the NEC a few years ago, but that might not be running for much longer of course.
Ben
@Alon: “Maintenance around active tracks is not normal”. Don’t they do this on the New Haven line pretty much 365 days a year? And in any case an overnight train would still give you maintenance windows. With a 2-hr NY-DC trip, a 10pm departure from NY and 7am arrival still leaves the tracks free from midnight to 5am.
Yes, they do, and the New Haven Line is a really good example of what not to do.
7 am arrival is dicey – the train in question departs DC around 4:30 (5 am is only if it’s a high-speed train), and then the maintenance window around DC is too narrow unless the last train of the day gets to DC well before midnight. Pushing it to be later is dicey because it gets into New York rush hour.
Ridership on the corridor would be cut by roughly 0. Those people will still want to go wherever it is they are going. Since almost none of them have personal helicopters they will still be on a train. It’s just that some puritanical railfan thought they should get some punishment for their sin of not living within the corridor.
….. Why don’t railfans understand that transferring passengers take up space on the train just like originating passengers do? A passenger who has warmed the same seat from RIchmond to Baltimore didn’t warm a seat on an Acela. And until sometime in the future when there are upgrades send them through. With perhaps some minor improvements. If the train was hauled with a dual mode the stop in Union Station D.C. would be much shorter. It would be much shorter in New Haven, Harrisburg and occasionally Albany too.
And when service between D.C. and the rest of the corridor is much faster that is going encourage ridership. 500 people cross the Potomac and get off in Union Station. 250 of wander away to the destinations in D.C. And 250 of them want to change trains. I realize in railfan fantasies there are never any problems. What happens when the train is 15 minutes late and the train they were going to transfer too has left? Do you keep 40 seats open on the next six trains in case that happens. How do you decide who gets on the train leaving in 5 minutes versus 15 minutes. or 45? Or when it’s late getting to New Haven. Do they have a lottery to determine who gets on which train. Nevermind, railfans mistake Providence for Nagoya and think there will be 1,000 passenger trains every five minutes. There will plenty of seats.
And while railfans have trouble thinking about more than one thing at time why would there be lots of upgrades north of Washington and none at south of it?
On NYC-Florida, its actually the one super long proposed HSR route I could see come into being, sometime this century, one piece of the silly nation-spanning HSR map you see online.
First, of course you have the NEC, NYC-DC. Then, lets proposed for the sake of argument that CSX allows are is arm twisted into allow two passenger dedicated tracks that are electrified, DC-Richmond-Petersburgh, speed remaining at 90 MPH. Next, let’s say the S-Line gets double-tracked and electrified to Raileigh, speed 110-160 MPH, and then the state owned tracks to Charlotte, speed 110 MPH. Atlanta is 240 miles down the I-85, both are big cities, so let’s say they build a new 160-220 MPH HSR line to Atlanta. Next is Atlanta-Orlando, both big cities/destinations, and you could branch to Jacksonville and use Brightline to get to Tampa. Down the I-75 that is 430 miles, so within the range of a 160-220 MPH HSR line.
That gets you an electrified passenger rail pathway to run HSR trains from NY Penn Station to Orlando International Airport, and while you would never build a HSR between NYC and Florida (maybe, unless your Chinese 🤣) if several HSR/HrSR lines link up end-to-end (NEC, DC-NC, NC-ATL, ATL-ORL) then running a few through trains would seem to make a lot of sense, perhaps you with a First Class option with those airline style pods you see in China, and proposed for CaHSR trains.
In very round numbers it’s 1,500 miles from New York to Miami via Atlanta. At an average speed of 150 mph it would take 10 hours. People who don’t want to fly might find it intriguing but it’s not going to be able to compete with flying.
There is no service to Miami from Albany’s airport. Going to Miami involves changing planes somewhere. Since it has moderately good service to a few hubs I have many choices and very attractive fares. Six hours or a bit less with an hour and half layover somewhere. since it’s a selection of hubs I’d likely be able find something that won’t have Florida HSR service. For six hours with an hour an half layover somewhere.
Well I know people today who take the train from New York to South Florida, or Albany to South Carolina. They exist, Amtrak today runs the Silver Meteor, Silver Star and Palmetto which is pretty amazing as all other Long Distance routes have on daily frequency, not three. That shows the strength of the market, not any where strong enough for a NYC-Florida HSR line, but, if you have several HSR/HrSR lines linking up, then it would make sense to run several daily through trains, if the electrified tracks are already there catering to high-speed trains linking shorter city pairs. China already does this because unlike America they have built a nation spawning HSR system. The Beijing Shenzhen High Speed Train Route is 1,497miles and takes about 8 hours by direct daytime HSR train, the overnight HSR sleeper train takes 11-12 hours, standard non-HSR train takes 21-22 hours. I don’t see why doing the same for NYC-Florida would not make sense if electrified high-speed and higher-speed tracks were in place: NYC–DC–Richmond–Raleigh–Charlotte–Atlanta–Orlando
Beijing-Shenzhen Trains
https://www.chinahighlights.com/china-trains/beijing-shenzhen-train.htm
Land or air? The Post weighs up options as China Railway launches new high-speed sleeper train from Hong Kong to Beijing, Shanghai
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/transport/article/3265392/land-or-air-post-weighs-options-china-railway-launches-new-sleeper-service-hong-kong-beijing-and
People do all sorts of peculiar things. That doesn’t mean every whim should be catered to by every vendor.
The Beijing Shenzhen line has a bigger population density than does NY Florida, and is more accessible by high capacity transit than a NY-FL line would be. 7 metro systems from Beijing to Shenzhen, 8 if you go to HK. Compare to 4 metros and 2 light rails on your proposed route, 5 metros if you go to Miami.
Whoops, not sure how this is a reply to adirondacker; should be to Benjamin.
Most passengers on long-distance Chinese HSR trains are short-turn. Although, establishing super-long through service is still worthwile as it maximizes efficiency. It’s silimar to what can be observed in Japan.
A sleeper train that took 12 hours to do New York to Florida would be competitive on time elapsed with flying.
Strongly disagree with this take. Politically, it’s never going to happen. You can’t cut off the the southern routes to the largest city in the country, to which they’ve been connected to for over 100 years. This affects not only these long-distance routes, but sends a message to other long distance routes as well that they’re second fiddle. Why would southern politicians support any kind of long distance service anywhere in this country if their long-distance service is going to be relegated to second class service? This move would have knock on effects.
I’m skeptical of your claims on transfer penalty. That study you cite is from the Netherlands, where trips are almost never more than 2 hours. Totally different ballgame on long-distance 12-24 hour trips. You see this with aviation, there’s been a long-term push for more point to point service instead of hub-and-spoke. Nobody likes transfers. The effect is so pronounced that Airbus and Boeing have entirely retooled their product line to accommodate these types of flights, instead of larger planes which are more appropriate for hub and spoke.
Lastly, you also haven’t outlined the negative cost to the Northeast corridor for allowing slots of long – distance service. The implication is that it’s some kind of vast negative cost, but I don’t see it explicitly stated anywhere here. You propose 10 minute service between DC and New York. Let’s say you cut out a frequency here or there so you don’t have to worry about trains passing? You don’t need to run the Northeast corridor like a Subway, it’s a long distance route after all. What’s the cost of skipping a ten minute frequency here or there?
1. It’s not a cutoff, because the passengers still have a rail connection, it just has a transfer. An actual cutoff is something like when the Sunset Limited was cut east of New Orleans, or when the Three Rivers was discontinued.
2. Transfer penalties are not especially dependent on overall trip times; the implied transfer penalty not counting the waiting penalty is similar to the range found in the literature for urban transit, for example.
3. Airline transfer penalties come from a context with more takeoff and landing inconvenience, and much longer walk times between terminals. They’re not especially relevant to a five-minute walk between train platforms.
4. The 10-minute frequency proposal is for capacity, because that’s how high ridership is when fares are competitive and speeds and reliability are high. If you cut a train, the adjacent trains will sell out. If you cut multiple trains because that’s how much capacity the slower trains consume on the fast line, you’re wrecking the corridor.
I would also posit that you should look at this decision more from the perspective of passenger-miles rather than solely passenger volumes. Yes 12 million vs 1.3 millions may make it look like you should solely prioritize the corridor trips, but if you start putting it in terms of passenger-miles, then you could say how these trips are much more comparable.
1. From whose political perspective is it a cutoff? The second daily Vermonter that only runs north of New Haven is not considered a cutoff – passengers have a guaranteed connection to the NEC. Ditto the New Haven-Springfield shuttles.
2. So? Transfer penalties are studied at the scale of multi-hour rail trips, just not multi-day ones.
3. Yes, they do, and that’s quantifiable.
4. By how much: if you gravity-model the NEC, with the trip times I’m discussing here, benchmarked to the TGV with an elasticity-2 reduction in market size to take into account lower average speed, then the New York-Philadelphia segment should get 49 million passengers a year. That’s 67,000 a day in each direction, which is 650 per train if you can squeeze 17 hours of effective service per day and run every 10 minutes. There are busier and less busy times, but a missed train means the adjacent trains overfill in the average case, and remember, you need to drop two intercities to through-run a LD consist without overtakes.
5. Passenger-miles do not vote. Airlines and intercity railways use them as a proxy for revenue, but fares are so degressive at this scale that it doesn’t matter – the lack of seat turnover for night trains really bites (it’s why night trains are having difficulties here).
Amtrak long-distance trains are not used by a lot of anybody. They’re simply irrelevant except to US railfans and to Amtrak employees.
Stop pretending that zero is not zero.
Sure they do. For many other passengers (actual human beings, not “miles”) on several other trains which all cost less to operate.
I’m just a down-home simple farm boy and I don’t have any truck your your fancy big- city macroeconomics. (Also, I’m backrupt.)
So Japanese people are allowed to Have Nice Things (core Shinkensen routes have more trains per direciton per hour than the majority of US “urban transit” basket case lines) but Americans deserve shit, because shit was good enough for my grand-pappy, and we don’t have much cause round hereparts to be paying no mind to any of your post-1915 big city foreign-influenced communist balderdash.
I thought the peons who didn’t live on the corridor were going to be forced off the train that was off-corridor to get on 16 car, 1,000 passenger trains. 650 times six is 3,900. Or four 1,000 passenger trains which would leave two “slots” for the peons to have through service. Though the 3,900 includes the people who had to change trains because it offends your aesthetics to have different trains doing different things on the same tracks.
Last NJTransit train of the “day” arrives in Trenton at 3:04 in the morning and the first train of the day departs for New York at 3:47. I didn’t bother to see when the Dead-of-the-Night Amtrak train toddles through.
If you want 6tph there is no reason you cannot offer service at :00, :03, :20, :23, :40, :43. Then can a long distance train not run at :06 and run OK?
There are two reasons you can’t do this:
1. The tunnel is also getting used by commuter trains, and those need to be spaced more evenly.
2. At this scale, a lot of passengers are going to take whichever train comes first, so :00 and :03 makes the relative crowding levels on the trains very different, and can also lead to overcrowding on the platform at Penn Station.
3. A 17-minute window doesn’t get rid of the overtake problem, and if anything means the long-distance train has to be overtaken by two high-speed trains in short succession.
Penn Station Baltimore? are you going to collect all of this stuff into one stand-up act and take it out on the road?
The long distance train can be on the MARC/SEPTA track that wanders through downtown Tiny Village Maryland while the high speed trains are out on the bypass.
@Russell, I do basically agree with you, but changing planes is much more painful than changing trains. London to Singapore is 13h direct out and 13h30 back. Via Abu Dhabi it is 17h15 hour and 16h50 back.
“Lastly, you also haven’t outlined the negative cost to the Northeast corridor for allowing slots of long – distance service. The implication is that it’s some kind of vast negative cost, but I don’t see it explicitly stated anywhere here.”
Repeat: it’s near-zero-cost to allow the sleepers to run on the NEC. I notice you didn’t respond to that criticism here, and I’ve completely demolished the hypothetical problems you made up elsewhere.
You seem to be starting from a preconceived desire to get rid of them, and inventing (incorrect) reasons why you think they might impose a cost (which they don’t).
It would be different if they really did impose a cost. They really really don’t, as long as their scheduling takes second priority after the in-corridor scheduling (i.e. they arrive in the slots which are available after scheduling the short-turn trains).
300 km per hour all the way NYP-WAS won’t happen in my youngest grandchild’s lifetime.
Alon:
A modest proposal to the problem of randomly arriving long distance southern trains on the North-East Corridor:
From Philadelphia to Newark: Two track the West Trenton Line (formerly Reading) and modernize it to the standards of IMPROVED CONVENTIONAL RAIL. This would include four tracking the Lehigh Line from Manville Yard to Bound Brook and then continuing on the Raritan Valley Line two track passenger line to a two track connection and flyover onto the Lehigh line, thence to Hunter (Yes, Norfolk Southern will insist that you can’t run at reasonable speeds on their freight tracks, so consider three tracking then find a way to overcome the problem.)(This alignment will also support a sound commuter business, once one notes that Pennsylvania passengers will go through to New York on it; so, let the commuter railroad pick up the cost of one of the tracks. The right of way is there.) (1.8 billion)
Fix the gap in six tracking south of Newark and straighten the curve at Elizabeth to at least 300 km/hr, preferably higher (You’re only going to get to do this once every hundred years, so do it right.). This should give you greater schedule flexibility on the north end of the run, and speed up the NEC. (You tell me how much, but both of these improvements should be made on the NEC anyway.)
Going south from Philadelphia, four track the NEC all the way to DC and across the Potomac. This should do wonders for regional rail south of Newark. It should also help your scheduling and increase your operational flexibility.
Electrify, two track and raise to the standards of Improved Conventional Rail the Virginia passenger line at least as far as Richmond. Plan on changing propulsion in Richmond. (less than a billion and it does wonders for Virginia.) (I am avoiding discussion of true high speed service, and of extending the two tracks and electrification as far as Norfolk (and someday Newport News if CSX becomes more tractable.))
Consider the unthinkable, double track some of the single track that is handicapping CSX south of Richmond. Much of the alignment is already doubled, but the single is a major problem. They might even split the cost.
1. Part of what we’re doing is avoiding quad-tracking long sections, to reduce costs. Baltimore-Washington has plans for quad track to extend south to BWI, and we’re working with that; if the entire line is quad-tracked, it should be for the purposes of cramming 8 intercity tph, not for the purposes of the odd night train.
2. There’s no need to six-track the Elizabeth narrows. I was worried about it, but the first try at a timetable already worked with the existing infrastructure.
3. The Elizabeth S-curve can support around 145 km/h, and this close to Newark, trains accelerating wouldn’t be able to hit 300 km/h anyway even if the speed limit were lifted (we’re getting 260 km/h). It costs time but it’s not onerous and way too much stuff has been built within the curve in the last 15 years; this is what happens when your country doesn’t safeguard routes.
4. Electrifying to Richmond is great and then it should be natural that about a train every half hour should continue south of Washington to Richmond; it’s even better if this can be done to Norfolk. But it’s distinct from the issues of engine changes and long-distance trains.
5. The West Trenton Line doesn’t have much on it in New Jersey; it isn’t a good commuter line. For service from Philadelphia, the NEC will always be faster and more convenient.
The French and the Japanese do more than that regularly and reliably. Richmond isn’t Yokohama and Washington isn’t Tokyo. Whether or not there will be demand for 8,000 seats an hour is questionable. And they have to share tracks with the other trains between New York and Philadelphia. The slow long distance train can be on the commuter tracks. In Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Why do railfans think the the train that is NOT-STOPPING needs to pass through the platforms? Someday far in the future when they need the capacity a very short tunnel from the north side of the curve to the south side of the curve solves the problem. Without tearing down wide swaths of downtown Elizabeth. Or having it grow trees indefinitely.
Your view across Ninth Ave is showing again. It has more on it than the twisty curvy tracks crossing the fjords of Connecticut east of New Haven. NJTransit studied it before Access to the Region’s Core was canceled. It will be relatively cheap and will get people off the roads and off NEC trains.
The B&O was gonnnna out compete the PRR in the Washington-Baltimore-Philadelphia-New York market. If you don’t want to put the train on the former PRR tracks between Baltimore and Philadephia, the B&O tracks are still connected to the Reading and Central of New Jersey. And these days the Lehigh Valley.
It’s all railfannery too. Normal people will be delighted to get on the dedicated high speed rail shuttle that whisks them to DC in 90 minutes where they mill about on the platform for 15 minutes while their steamer trunks get unloaded and loaded.
It will be faster but it’s the same stations these days so getting to the West Trenton line in Manhattan would no longer involve a ferry ride to Jersey City. And these days it could go allllllllll the way to 30th Street. Conveniently stopping at Temple, Jefferson and Suburban along the way. It could then magically turn into the all stops train to Harrisburg. Or the all stops train to New Haven via the Northeast Corridor. Or continue on to Washington. Or terminate at Penn Medicine. Or sumptin.
I lean towards something like Washington-Boston every other hour alternating with Springfield-Harrisburg.
A simpler proposal to the problems of “randomly arriving trains” is to get the trains running on time south of DC. Which is certainly possible: the only obstacles are institutional, and those obstacles are being broken down *right now* during STB hearings.
The simplest solution would be to make sure the railway was double track. I would have thought there was enough freight service for that.
And actually if a reliable hourly passenger service was run that might well make some money. At least enough to cover its marginal costs.
It’s not actually possible to run a rail network this complex on time without massive timetable contingency. DB is struggling, without Class I freight flat wheels and derailments.
Re: Concorde analogies
Alon: Flying on the Concorde, you had a perceived seat width somewhat less than 4 seat railway coach, but bearable, BECAUSE it was compensated for extraordinarily well engineered seats with deep recline and more than adequate legroom and the customers tend to be less obese at those ticket prices. What was sacrificed was overhead compartment space (barely enough for a wallet much less a hand bag), but bearable because the time penalty for getting checked bags was effectively eliminated by excellent ground arrangements. Normally, one could expect to be off the plane with checked bags in hand and through immigration and customs in much less than twelve minutes. I regularly connected at JFK to a flight to SF in a different terminal with a scheduled departure 25minutes after Concorde arrival. Yes, they were selling time, but not just time in the air, but overall convenience. You could check in later than for other flights, and you got out faster; the ground game saved you considerably more than an hour compared to that for other services, and left you feeling unhassled.
SPEED SELLS so does CONVENIENCE and COMFORT. Long distance passengers tend to have more luggage and often more family than the passengers in the Dutch studies. What you’re proposing may offer a modest relative speed saving, but a significant degradation in convenience for the elderly or families with children or a sailor from Norfolk with a full sea bag. When traveling to Europe with either my parents or children, I took the non-stop from SF and not the Concorde. Just as I would pick a slower through rail service when traveling with more impedimentia.
First class on the ACELA has less seat recline that coach on DELTA which is awful. And, that wonderful ACELA cuisine is not up to the standards of coach fare on any one of the domestic big three in the 1960’s. Perhaps there’s a reason ACELA is more popular in coach than first.