Costing Northeast Corridor High-Speed Rail
As our high-speed rail project draws to a close, we need to not just write down what is needed for running the trains but also how much it costs. This post should be viewed as a work in progress, and it will not surprise me if I’m missing things that will make it to the report later this year.
The rule for this post is that costs only matter going forward, not backward. If it’s already committed, it’s not part of the budget; in particular, the $6 billion Frederick Douglass Tunnel, already fully funded and in the design and engineering phase, is not part of the budget. In addition, only infrastructure is costed, not rolling stock (new rolling stock may well have negative cost relative to current plans, through buying standard EMUs and not esoteric trainsets like Massachusetts’ battery train idea or nonstandard LIRR/Metro-North-style EMUs).
Bypasses
All bypasses can be seen on this map, but not all bypasses are part of the plan – in particular, nothing between Stamford and New Haven seems worth it for now.
The main bypass we’re proposing, between New Haven and Kingston, is 120 km in relatively easy terrain, including two constrained river bridges (Quinnipiac and Thames; the Connecticut is easier), but no tunnels. The cost should be in line with non-tunneled high-speed lines in Europe, which in 2024 dollars would be around $5 billion.
The secondary bypass, around Port Chester and Greenwich, is 7 km of complex els crossing I-95 multiple times, and should be costed at the upper end of els, which is high hundreds of millions. Call it $1 billion together with a new bridge across the Mianus. The current projected cost for the Cos Cob Bridge replacement is higher, but it should be easier to rebuild the bridge a bit upstream to straighten the approach curves than to do it in situ; with a short section of 4% grades on each side, it should be possible to clear I-95 west of the river and keep the Riverside station east of the river while also having around 23 meters of clearance below the bridge. (4% grades are routine for EMUs; freight trains are so long that they can ascend these grades just fine, since what matters is the grade averaged over the length of the train.)
Frankford Junction is about 2 km of complex urban el, including a rail-on-rail grade separation; the per km cost is likely high, in the very low three-figure millions, but it’s 2 km and so $300 million should cover it.
The other bypasses are very short and in easy environments, for example easing the curve at Kingston (also discussed here), with costs dominated by the track connections rather than the physical construction of 1-2 km of at-grade track outside urban areas. Call this entire portion $6.5 billion total.
Grade separations
The starting point is that NJ Transit thinks that Hunter Flyover should be $300 million in 2022 prices (source, PDF-p. 151). This is as close as can be to a nonnegotiable element of the program.
At the other end of the New York metro area, there’s Shell Interlocking/CP 216, which must be grade-separated as well, and is even more nonnegotiable. I have not seen recent cost figures; it should be comparable to Hunter or somewhat more expensive given the right-of-way constraints. A $500 million placeholder is probably right.
Further north, the junction with the New Canaan Branch is flat and needs to be grade-separated, at a cost likely similar to Hunter, in a similarly built-up area. The Danbury and Waterbury Branches have flat junctions too, but traffic is low enough that they may be kept so (especially Waterbury), but if not, Danbury seems comparable in difficulty to Hunter and New Canaan.
In Philadelphia, the Chestnut Hill West Line (former R8) has a flat junction with the Northeast Corridor, and there are a variety of proposals for what to do with it; for decades, an advocate wish was the Swampoodle Connection, to have it transition to a closely parallel line letting it enter the city via the Reading side rather than the former Pennsylvania Railroad side that it’s on. It’s largely dropped off the wishlist, and instead a grade separation could be done for a cost comparable to that of Hunter, or maybe less (potentially much less) if it’s possible to abuse the line’s low ridership and close proximity to the Chestnut Hill East Line to have shutdowns to speed up the work.
On the other side of Philadelphia, the junction between the intercity and commuter rail approaches to 30th Street is flat as well, which also incorporates the branch to Media/Elwyn (former R3); this should be grade-separated as well.
In Boston, there are two flat junctions on the Providence Line. Canton Junction separates it from the Stoughton Line, and looks routine to either grade-separate (it’s a low-density area) or, potentially, even turned into a shuttle with timed connections to the Providence Line if absolutely necessary, given the demand mismatch between the two branches. The Franklin Line, farther north, has a similar flat junction around Readville, technically within Boston but in an area with plenty of space, but can be sent over to the Fairmount Line if there are difficulties, and may even preferentially go to Fairmount regardless (the main argument against it is service to Back Bay). The answer to “how much should this cost?” is “no more than around $150 million each or else it’s better not to do it at all.”
In total, these should be around $1.8 billion, with New Canaan and Canton but not Danbury or Readville.
Note that rail-on-rail grade separations for bypasses are already priced in, especially New Haven-Kingston, which is of comparable length to European high-speed lines that have been built, with grade-separated connections to legacy lines.
Portal Bridge
The Hudson Tunnel Project within the Gateway Program is funded, but some tie-ins are not. Most (such as Penn Expansion) are useless, but one is essential: a second Portal Bridge, to ensure four tracks of capacity from New York to Newark. The current favored alternative is a lift bridge, budgeted at $800 million; it is a movable and not fixed bridge, but it is not a causeway and has some clearance below, and would only need to open when a sludge barge comes from upriver, which can be scheduled overnight.
High platforms
Everything that touches the Northeast Corridor needs high platforms at all stations. The definition of “touches the Northeast Corridor” is complicated; for example, in New Jersey, there are 68 low-platform stations on the lines that go through Newark Penn or Newark Broad Street, of which 26 are funded for high-platform conversions for around $23 million each ($683 million/30 stations; the other four are on the Erie lines), but of the 68, only 10 are on the lines that would be using the North River Tunnels after the Hudson Tunnel Project opens (see map in ETA’s report). Even taking all 42 as required, it’s around $1 billion at NJ Transit costs, with nearly all benefits accruing to commuter lines.
In Massachusetts, the definition is easier – everything on the Providence and Stoughton Lines needs to be raised; the TransitMatters report explains that there are eight stations, plus two potential infills, with the eight costing around $200 million in 2020 prices, which should be closer to $250 million in 2024 prices. If Franklin Line work is also desired then it should be another $200 million, split across more stations but with shorter platforms. Note that the second phase of South Coast Rail, if it is built, would extend the Stoughton Line, but as the stations are all new construction, they will already have high platforms.
In Pennsylvania, nearly total separation of intercity traffic from SEPTA is possible from the get-go – the only track sharing is peripheral, in and around Wilmington, at low frequency on SEPTA. If the entire Wilmington/Newark Line is to be upgraded, it’s a total of 12 stations, all in four-track territory; SEPTA’s construction costs for high platforms are lower than those of the MBTA and NJ Transit, but much of its construction has been single-platform stations with shorter trains, and my guess is that those 12 stations are around $200 million total. The seven inaccessible stations on the Trenton Line, which, to be clear, does not need to share tracks with intercity trains at all, should be another $100-150 million (it’s a busier line, so, longer trains, and North Philadelphia is more complex).
In Maryland, two stations on the Penn Line are inaccessible, West Baltimore and Martin State Airport. West Baltimore is being upgraded as part of the Douglass Tunnel program, while Martin State Airport has a separate program, which appears funded.
In total, all of this is around $1.8 billion, with the benefits going to commuters at such rate that state matches would be expected; in Massachusetts at least, there are talks about doing it as part of the Regional Rail program, but no firm commitment.
Electrification
The variable-tension catenary south of New York, as users of the Northeast Corridor were reminded two months ago, is substandard. It’s long been a wish to replace it with constant-tension catenary, to both improve reliability and permit unrestricted speeds, up from today’s 135 mph (217 km/h).
Unfortunately, precisely because it’s a longstanding Amtrak project, the project definitions have been written in a way that is not compatible with any cost-effective construction. For example, Amtrak is under the impression that the catenary poles have to be redone because higher speeds require denser pole spacing; in fact, catenary systems sold routinely by European vendors allow high speeds at spacing that exists already on the legacy Northeast Corridor system.
This makes costing this more difficult; Amtrak’s official figures are of little relevance to a project that has even cursory levels of interest in adopting European practices. With the poles and substations already usable, the wire tensioning should cost less than installing new wires; around half of the cost of new-build electrification is the substations and transformers and the other half is the wires, so take the cost of new-build systems outside the US and Canada, cut in half, and then double back to take into account that it’s a four-track corridor. This is around $3 million/km, so around $1 billion corridor-wide.
Commuter rail lines that touch the Northeast Corridor need to be wired as well, and then it’s a matter of which ones count as touching, as with the high platform item. This includes 25 km of the North Jersey Coast Line, 72 km of the Raritan Valley Line, 31 km of the Morristown Line, 30 km of the Montclair-Boonton Line, 38 km of the Danbury Branch, a few hundred meters of Providence Line siding tracks, 6 km of the Stoughton Line, 34 km of the Franklin Line, and 15 km of the Fairmount Line. Much of the unwired territory is single-track, so lower per-km costs can be expected, on the order of $600 million total.
Together, this is about $1.6 billion.
Total
The sum of all of the above lines is $12.5 billion. It’s possible to go lower than this: the high platform and electrification costs are partly modernizing commuter rail that may not quite use the Northeast Corridor, and the Greenwich bypass may be dropped at the cost of 80 seconds (more, if Cos Cob Bridge speed limits have to be lower than what right-of-way geometry allows). A numerological $10 billion limit can still be met this way.
Pedestrian Observations 
Interesting, a lot better than the $117B plan I keep reading about for the NEC 😅 Intercity Rollingstock is interesting, if it was up to me I would just have bought one big standard fleet of EMUs for all current Acela and NE Regional services, I’d electrify to Springfield and tow the EMUs in Virginia with a diesel locomotive I attach on at Washington Union Station. I recall that Amtrak initially branded in 2000s the Amfleet trains as ‘Acela Regional’ with the Acelas as “Acela Express” — but with on standard fleet you could just have the faster limited stop trains be branded as “Acela Express” and the slower all-stops trains as “Acela Regional”. Onboard service could remain the same, perhaps you included a dedicated attendant working from a dedicated galley on the “Express” runs, clall that “First Class”, while on the “Regionals” you skip the attendant and lock up the galley, and charge less for the 1×2 seating, and call it “Business”.
Amtrak runs the NEC the way the SNCF ran its Intercity trains in the 1960-70s, with service divided between the premier First Class only TEEs and then the mix First-Second Class trains, usually branded as “Corail” after the new AC Corail coaches introduced in the 1970s. In contrast British Rail eventually dropped the “Pullmans” and branded everything as “Intercity”, and modern services in the UK seem to follow this, on the WCML you see Virgin/Avanti West Coast run a big fleet of Pendolinos under one service brand. Amtrak could have done the same by dramatically expanding its Alstom Avelia Liberty order, or perhaps ordering Siemens Velaro sets with identical seating and onboard service, though lack of tilt might be an issue, but then, you utilize the Alstom sets primarily for the “Acela Express” and Siemen sets for the “Acela Regional” trains.
If Amtrak is going to do an early replacement of the ACS-64 City Sprinters, I much rather see them replaced by Siemens Velaro EMUs then the dual-mode Airos. Although, going back to the unified fleet idea, one could imagine that instead of the Bombadier Acela, that the Metroliner and Regional services could have been merged together utilizing identical locomotive hauled trainsets along the lines of OBB’s Siemens Railjets, the Acela I’m told saves most of its time my skipping stops, than the tilting around curves. A Railjet trainset would have been cheaper to buy and maintain than the Acela, and provide most, if not all the benefit seen over the past two decades.
Hilarious. It’s a bit late to be calling the cousins in Connecticut. I suspect they will find it hilarious too. New elevateds in Greenwich. I’m going to scare the cats.
It’s mostly in the same ROW as I-95, not an el on a street or anything like that. But it’s going to be mostly aerial, yeah.
And the Turnpike is mostly up on a berm with a Jersey barrier between the opposing directions. You aren’t going to build a third level which will make it a Chinese Walllllllll !! !! !! etc. The tuxedo cat can be a bit skittish. He’s still avoiding me.
It’s not quite that simple. You also have to worry about sharp transitions in grade, and how that affects in-train forces for freight trains.
Here’s an example where undulations of just 10 meters in track elevation under a fast freight, combined with poor marshalling and a sudden emergency braking resulted in a derailment.
https://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/rail/2009/r09t0092/r09t0092.html#fn4-rf
The change of gradient will have to be reasonable for an EMU going at any pace so this should be fine.
As usual, I like your cost-saving NEC analysis. But given sea level rise and higher storm surges hitting Southeast Connecticut by 2040-45, shouldn’t more km between Rhode Island and Old Saybrook be inland (around I-95 Highway) ?
The bypass between New Haven and Kingston is already following I-95, largely on the north side. Around Old Saybrook, I-95 looks 6 meters above sea level, which is safe from any sea level rise that isn’t apocalyptic.
How can that 120 km be bypassed for only $6.5 billion in America?
$5 billion, not $6.5 billion; the rest of the money is for other bypasses.
And the way it’s doable is that the unit costs are not that high in the FRA standardized cost categories. If the tracks can be built on earthworks extending those built for I-95, and the river crossings can be done by bridge, then it shouldn’t be very expensive. CTDOT is uniquely incompetent when it comes to rail (the Cos Cob Bridge replacement is supposedly $4.5 billion; the new Q Bridge was $554 million, with 10 lanes, and inflation since 2010 has not been a factor of 8), but it doesn’t need to be the lead agency, and the MBTA, NJ Transit, and SEPTA can be surprisingly reasonable about their construction costs.
Don’t we have to allow for “Less Than” project management by most rail agencies in America? I would anticipate $12 billion
No.
Even if I were to pull out the crayons to debate an alternative bypass or route alignment (I’ve come to regret how previous comments to that effect have undercut my own argument, and so I won’t), this particular one is both marginally worse and also comes with a prebuilt coalition against it from the last time it was tried.
Now, you can argue we are probably going to have to fight those people anyway under any alternative that isn’t “doing nothing,” or you can argue that we shouldn’t capitulate to those people, which I would morally and ethically agree with you – but that’s probably impractical and again, my preference is to either save the money or pick from the list of a thousand better ways to use it.
I will admit to being sympathetic to wanting to fight and score a win over the kind of people who live in places with names like “Old Lyme,” though. I’ll give you that much.
Or, we could spend $0 to not do that. If we spend $0 to not do that, the price tag of your proposal falls under $10 billion with zero meaningful impact to ridership.
Maybe I’m not seeing the political vision here. It’s certainly a useful sacrifice piece to “respond to public concern” or “demonstrate fiscal responsibility” by deliberately padding the project with an easy cut target; or you can sacrifice it to accommodate any future cost overruns. Personally, I wouldn’t deliberately pad a 10-digit project with this kind of fat, but it’s certainly your prerogative to do so.
However, I just can’t help but to think about some of the other things we could do instead of this. You know, things like spending on 56 additional trainsets on another Amtrak Airo purchase (or significantly more than 56 trainsets at European procurement costs), or 500 km of electrification at an egregious but unfortunately plausible $10 million per km, or 838 km of right of way plus 484 km of track based on what CSX charged Virginia for its acquisition efforts, or 50 thousand person-years of labor priced at $50 an hour, or literally doing nothing and having $5 billion less of a budget to come up with, $5 billion less of negotiations.
There’s a thousand better uses for this money that don’t require any crayons to envision even if you don’t believe in the merits of avoiding unnecessary challenges. Insisting on this bypass is a failure of imagination and I’d go so far as to call it irresponsible. It undercuts what is otherwise a lot of excellent work that you and others have put into this project. And for what? 10 minutes less in southern New England?
I know my or anyone else’s single comment is unlikely to move the needle on this for you, nevermind any of the political brokers further up the line from us. But I still feel compelled to urge you to reconsider.
The real answer is that American needs to raise its financial commitment to both Rapid Transit and Intercity Passenger Rail. A good next step is the $205 billion HSR proposal currently stalled in Congress.
Multiple things can be simultaneously true.
We do have an urgent need for America to need to raise its financial commitment to passenger rail transportation at every level, but that doesn’t automatically make every dollar spent on passenger rail a good idea. And I can, in fact, be pro-HSR and pro-spending $205 billion while asserting that $0 of it should be spent on this bypass. There’s no contradiction here. It’s inarguably the least important line item on Alon Levy’s proposal by a long shot and I’m confident in my assessment that it weakens the proposal as a whole.
Unless they make the trains faster they don’t need 56 more trains.
Alon can probably provide more precise numbers, but to me it looks like the NH-Kingston would save at least 30min of travel time (cutting that section down from ca. 1h to ca. 30min), not 10min. I don’t see how you get Boston-NY down to a 2h travel time without it. You could try to upgrade the existing, winding, highly speed restricted, coast-hugging line with its numerous level crossings, but I suspect that doing that would end up costing more money, be more disruptive and result in slower overall travel times than a new alignment following I-95.
So I’m not sure why you’re so hostile to the idea. In terms of dollars spent for minutes saved on the NEC, it’s probably one of the most cost-effective measures on the list.
Or, again, you could do nothing. You could literally do nothing and have zero negative impact on travel times between New Haven and any point south of it, still have a 2 hour and 30 minute trip from Boston to New York, shave $5 billion off the price tag, prevent a whole number of easy bad-faith slam dunks from being written against NEC HSR again, prevent the fate of HSR improvements to the region from once again being tied to an over-optimized crayon fantasy of a single high-speed bypass, have $5 billion to invest into any number of projects which I am only not naming because the second I do the usual suspects will be right along to “gotcha!” about how clearly my actual motivation is I want that project instead of this one, which is true, but “that project” can be filled in by literally anything so long as it advances passenger rail – including, again, doing nothing and saving the money and political capital and other resources for another battle somewhere else. Possibly even another battle delineated on the very same damn project wishlist Alon is about to release!
This is a bad idea, has always been a bad idea, and will continue to be a bad idea up until the point that every railfan’s wildest dreams are manifested into reality and we’re literally running out of projects on the wish list.
You want to know why I’m so hostile to this? It’s because of the lack of nuance, love of infighting, and fetishistic coveting of Big Ticket Projects amongst urban advocates. This bypass is a microcosm for literally everything wrong with the American HSR conversation today, the same kind of all-or-nothing, we-just-need-one mentality I’m personally guilty of being suckered into wholeheartedly supporting for the past two decades in California’s own doomed HSR effort (sorry, Richard Mlynarik, I admit I’m a sucker and a mark), the insistence on megaproject-oriented planning and refusal to tackle easier wins at smaller scales like most of the rest of Alon’s project, and as you say, a desire to minimize route trip times over passenger trip times taken to the extreme where two additional tracks through the literal swamplands is somehow considered more cost effective than literally anything south of the Gateway Tunnel.
And it doesn’t have to be this way, and it should not be this way. We could, in fact, actually have half a shot at getting everything else on Alon’s project list done. Unfortunately, it does take two sides to have a fight, so as long as we insist on fighting for this useless bypass, I can’t back down either, and we’re all going to still be here fighting over it 20 years from now because having this fight means nothing else gets done for HSR on the corridor either. This is the one part of the route where no-build is a valid option and it’s going to be abused and contorted into No Building everything.
I’m hostile to this because I can already see that writing on the wall and it sucks.
If you don’t do anything the travel time is still three hours and thirty minutes and people still clog the airports.
See what I mean about “gotcha!” reply guys?
Yep, you sure did “own” me! Congratulations! You win at the internet!! Everyone is very impressed by how cool and smart you are.
Ah, concern troll tactic 27 !
95% good rule: just stop reading anything as soon as you see the word “nuance”.
I’m tempted not to engage because you’re sounding trollish, but anyway. There’s no way to get down to a 2h travel time for Boston-NY without some kind of a bypass of New Haven-Kingston, or any other feasible way (like tunnelling through SE Connecticut) would be more expensive. Of course, we could go with your suggestion of spending $0 and putting up with 2.5h between Boston and NY, but this would be weighed up against the higher operating costs (to the tune of 25%) of running slower service, and the lower patronage that would result, since there would be a lot more edge cases where the train loses out to car or air travel.
There are some cases where spending money on rail or transit infrastructure is not expected to reap a financial return, but is more about investing in the greater social good. This is not one of those. Getting Washington-Boston total travel time down to 4 hours is basically a licence to print money. With well-disciplined operational efficiency (i.e. Swiss levels of punctuality) it can be one of the most profitable railway lines in the world. $5b to get it down from 4.5h to 4h would end up paying for itself very quickly. The proceeds can then be used to pay for all the other projects you have your heart set on (if they stack up).
If I’m sounding trollish, I apologize; it’s because I’m incredibly angry.
CAHSR is also going to be a license to print money except for the fact that it will never open, either. I’m skeptical that 4.5 hour trip times instead of 4 hour trip times produce 25% higher operating costs (I also remain skeptical that this bypass is actually worth half an hour and not 10 minutes) but the bigger issue is that staking the success of high-speed rail between Boston and Washington to a single $5 billion expenditure in the swamplands of New England is a great way to cause the latest round of visionary thinking on HSR to fail the same way it has failed every single other time we’ve tried to do anything stretching all the way back to 1965.
It’s the least populated portion of the corridor, the least traveled portion of the corridor, and also the singular most expensive line item on the proposal by a long shot. The campaign against it practically writes itself.
Again, I consider this bypass to be a microcosm of the bigger issue. We can’t tackle any smaller, singular individual projects that would contribute towards faster trains unless they’re packaged into a megaproject – we can’t do anything unless we do everything, we can’t just get to work on fixing a rail system that is literally falling apart at the seams. No, it has to be the Vision, it has to be perfect, it has to have $5 billion of unnecessary new track or there’s no point in doing anything else on the $12.5 billion project list because the end result just won’t be good enough. I reject that argument wholeheartedly and it infuriates me to know that because of that kind of argument we’re never getting NEC HSR and we’re never getting any other HSR either.
We’re also never getting functional lower speed rail travel anywhere that doesn’t already have it, not so long as the idea is that any and all of that work has to be supplanted by HSR and HSR has to wait for that one big win on either coast.
Yeah, I’m angry. Angry and feeling hopeless, and sick of being told that I just need to get with the program, or that rail initiatives are dead on arrival in this cursed country not because they’re loaded down with unrealistic extras but actually because the US just doesn’t believe in rail and needs to be shown rail that they can believe in.
Sorry, that last line probably also sounds too much like trolling, but whatever.
weird to see someone called propose buying more crap trains (Amtrak Airos) as a serious proposal of alternate spending over a high speed bypass.
The serious proposal is to buy more trains. The cost of the Airo procurement is used as a bench mark of how many trainsets we might expect to get out of $5 billion, not an insinuation that actually it’s a good idea to buy exactly 56 Airo trainsets.
Unfortunately, I failed to account for the fact that obviously that is what the point would be reduced to, much like how suggesting any alternative rail line construction project that would cost $5 billion or less instantly becomes the thing I actually want instead and therefore I clearly just need to be educated or convinced as to how New York to Boston is the second most important city pair in this country behind New York to Philadelphia and that because of this it’s obviously wrong to build rail between any other city pair anywhere and simply establishing that the cost per rider is lower between City A and City B means that the only correct and viable choice is to build a brand new bypass between Old Saybrook and Kingston – and that, if we don’t do that, rail between Boston and anywhere is not going to be good enough, so I have to accept this now if I ever want to see trains in any other part of this country later.
Sorry about that! I’ll do better to calibrate my comment next time to more accurately reflect that my objection is not, in fact, because I would prefer exactly 56 junk trainsets, or HSR between Nowhere and East Armpit, or whatever else. Rather, I will be clear in that what I want instead is a blend of acquisitions and staffing that would accommodate additional service frequency with an eye towards better train service today instead of the next iteration of A Vision to Connect US through Future High-Speed Rail Corridors that will surely be completed 20 years from now just like all those other programs were.
I look forward to being educated on how stupid I am in the replies. Thanks!
The 25% figure I gave was for the NY-Boston segment. Operating costs are mostly determined by travel times rather than distance covered. So if a 2h trip time is 2.5h instead, then that’s 25% more trainsets you need to purchase and maintain, and 25% more crewing costs. Power supply costs are more finegrained, but while maintaining high speeds is energy consuming, constant accelerating and braking from changing speeds on constrained tracks also guzzles power. It’s only things like station staffing and ticketing that remains constant.
You’re sounding trollish because you’re saying things that are obviously untrue (e.g. the bypass would only save 10min), and because what Alon is proposing here is the exact opposite of some bloated CAHSR-style boondoggle as you claim. Alon is precisely trying to capture the low-hanging fruit as much as possible: focussing on operations first, then looking at small things like high platforms, constant tension catenary, grade separated junctions, bridge replacements and the like.
But sometimes you’ve got to bite the bullet on big projects, and New Haven-Kingston is one of those examples. Doing nothing condemns the line to blown out journey times that nullify the gains made elsewhere, whereas trying to upgrade it would end up being more expensive, more disruptive, and more politically unpalatable than an I-95 bypass, while achieving worse journey times. Luckily there is a highway corridor sitting there that can be used to run a new line along it without encountering the usual NIMBY obstacles.
The fact that it’s the least populated part of the corridor is a good thing, it means you can actually build track capable of getting serious speed without having to weave a way through endless suburban sprawl as you do elsewhere in the corridor.
They’ve already had protest meetings, that putting railroad next to the Turnpike would ruin it’s bucolic charm.
And this is where our fundamental disagreement is.
I don’t believe, fundamentally, that doing nothing over this particular 120 km stretch of route invalidates the remaining ~600 km of route, and I don’t believe that getting through that stretch half an hour faster is going to meaningfully impact the decision of anybody as to whether or not they’ll choose the train to go between Boston and New York. I certainly concede that it’ll impact decisions in certain edge cases where an above-4-hour travel time results, but those trips are a smaller market by definition than all of the trips occurring over shorter distances within segments of the corridor.
On a related note, I don’t believe it actually matters to anybody booking a ticket as to how much time the alternatives that weren’t built might have saved them. I think the person who might have taken NEC HSR if it existed today isn’t carefully educating themselves on 60 years of HSR history in the US before deciding that taking Amtrak in 2024 actually sucks and they’re not going to do that based on the alternatives they have available to them. Actually, I think they’re checking how much it costs (too much) and how long it takes today (too long) and opting out. And if and when any part of Alon’s proposals actually get adopted and executed on, those same individuals are not going to read up on what didn’t happen before deciding whether or not they want to take a train that now takes 2.5 hours when it previously took 3.5 to more than 4, or a train that now costs in the vicinity of $25 to get them to New York tomorrow morning with no “saver fare” or “book two weeks in advance” nonsense instead of – at time of comment – somewhere between $74 and $272 depending on time of departure and whether or not the train is a “premium” “Acela Express” “product.” Those are the comparison points – 2.5 versus 4, not 2.5 versus 2.
Doing nothing is a viable strategy for Old Saybrook to Kingston precisely because of this and because of the potential strength and demand along the entire corridor. And insisting that we have to bite the bullet because not achieving 4 hours BOS-WAS invalidates every possible trip pairing within those two ends is every bit as disingenuous as you accuse me of being.
Doing nothing is also a viable strategy because it in no way prevents you from going back and doing something later, say, after the collective improvements between Washington and New Haven prove massively successful and the billions spent on them return enough surplus to finance this bypass – you know, the exact same way the NEC as a whole is being framed up as the only way to get to a place where we can explore more train service between other city pairs in the United States that form neat lines the appropriate distance from each other.
I’m here because I want, I would comfortably say, 90% of Alon’s proposals to actually happen; and because I think their inclusion of this bypass and the defense of it as necessary seriously jeopardizes the entire rest of the project. I question the insistence that anything in Connecticut could ever be vital to the success of future high-speed rail services in Pennsylvania and that’s not just because Amtrak themselves only barely stop short of declaring anything that runs through Penn Station to actually be two different trains. (“ALL TICKETS MUST BE RESCANNED!”)
And I’m here because we tried it the other way, I tried it the other way, I clapped my hands as hard as I could and believed with all my heart that faster rail service could come to the US if I and we supported it enough, and what that has gotten me over the past 25 years of my life (and really what it has gotten everyone in the US for the past 60 years of HSR history here) is a lot of maps drawn with a lot of crayons, a lot of broken promises and project cancelations, and a whole lot of money evaporated into the promise of one really good train that will change the narrative overnight.
It hasn’t happened and all my belief has now been exhausted and the only thing left is my anger, and so now here we are. Despite all of it, passenger rail has a future in the US – that’s an undeniable fact – but I’m simply no longer willing to accept biting the bullet on that one big project. I’ve been here before. I’ve seen how this story ends. And one way or the other, it’s long past time we wrote a different story instead.
SLE is not going to stop running once the bypass is built. There won’t be anything from stopping from toddling along all the twists and curves hugging the shore either on SLE or the few times a day Boston-Washington train that diverts off to the twisty curvy line hugging the shore. The rest of the world that doesn’t have a fetish for slow trains can avoid it. You can concern troll with your seat mate.
This is a strange claim to make. The current fastest Acela looks timetabled at 3:35 or 215 minutes. Half an hour is about 13% of the travel time. Expecting that not to make any difference in ridership requires some really strange assumptions. And the shorter the trip gets the bigger the portion of the trip time you’re eliminating.
If the fundamental thesis here is that the money should be spread around the country, you’re in luck! That’s what the current funding paradigm is, and regardless of who the next president is, the Federal-State Partnership money will probably be spent proportionately less in the northeast.
We’re right back to ignoring the real point – to be clear, the real point is that we should do everything else Alon suggested to get the trip to 2:30 or whatever it ultimately would be and not spend time/resources/effort on this bypass even if it’s the difference between 2:30 and 2 hours even – in favor of scoring a “win” based on re-interpreting a single line or data point or suggestion within the larger point and then refuting that instead.
So, yeah, yep, you got me. It’s obviously very stupid of me to assume that $5 billion spent on an Old Saybrook to Kingston bypass that would reduce the fastest Acela Express trip time to 3:05 would not make a difference in ridership compared to today’s 3:35 trip time. I’ve been defeated in this internet debate. You win!
Just chiming in to add that the current tracks can’t support more than a train every half hour in each direction because of the movable bridges; the $5 billion is not just a speedup project but also a capacity one.
I would find the capacity argument more compelling at a lower price point than $5 billion and/or on a part of the corridor with an actual population to support it; as it stands, the main reason for it would be the idea that a full train from Boston to Providence running largely empty between Kingston and Old Saybrook can just operationally become the same full train from New Haven to New York, a concept I’ve previously supported but have also since soured on. Service between New York and anywhere south of it doesn’t really care where the train goes after it leaves Penn Station so long as through running is actually adopted as a matter of course; service between New England and those same points south obviously cares, but again, that’s definitionally a smaller ridership segment and one which is not worth $5 billion.
2 trains per hour can go to Boston and the rest of them can be cut back to New Haven or sent to wherever wacky other destinations are deemed viable (again, not listing them only because I’m already exhausted just thinking about the gotcha replies and attempts to educate me as to the relative value and/or cost of Boston/Providence compared to any of the other destinations reachable on lines which branch off of the NEC east of Penn) until those 2 trains generate enough return to justify a $5 billion capacity expansion project in SE Connecticut.
As a side note, I do recall from my previous support of CAHSR that I now regret and have changed my mind on, a lot of education as to how asking for 8 TPH was excessive and lots of successful European HSR lines run on 2, and I’m excited to find out why suddenly that isn’t relevant and the NEC actually needs more than 2 TPH between New Haven and Boston or it’ll fail.
train every half n hour may mean bidirectionally you only get a train every hour. No european city is as large as nyc, and the Boston + providence urban areas are roughly six million people. Madrid for reference is 6.7 MM. this just means there’s more demand than almost any city pair in Europe. (London-Paris would be the only greater I think until St. Petersburg-Moscow.). Also curious why you think the trains run empty east of New Haven. Back bay + south have far more riders than NHV that ridership must be going somewhere and it’s not to providence.
I believe it’s every half an hour in each direction, if you time it right?
The European HSR trunks also run a lot more than 2 tph. This is obscured by the fact that the TGV runs point-to-point so individual city pairs run 1-2 tph, but the total traffic on the core LGVs is much higher; the LGV Sud-Est peaks at 12 tph. The D-Takt plans for the core NBSes are 4-6 tph. AVE lines run infrequently – these days I’m seeing 3.5-4 peak tph on Madrid-Barcelona – but also AVE ridership is disappointing due to poor operations, with too many different classes of trains. Eurostar is compromised by passport and security theater, airline brain operations, SNCF monopoly, and business traveler-centric pricing.
There are more people along the “Inland Route” – via Hartford, Springfield and Worcester than there are along the “Shore Line” via Providence. They would have to spend money to make it faster.
Maybe someone who wants to make a living bloviating about transit could spend 75 or perhaps even 90 seconds looking things up?
WIthout looking things up there are going to be certain times of the day when there is an Acela, a Regional and an SLE train toddling along stopping at every former fishing village. There might even be six trains – three in each direction at particular times.
There is one SLE train pair per day east of Old Saybrook, precisely because of the bridge opening limitations.
What I’m saying when I caveat with “I believe” is that there’s a sensitivity analysis in this – it’s not hard to write a timetable in which trains in opposite directions take the bridge at the same time, but what I don’t know is how reliable it would be. I think it would be reliable just because this is a low-traffic corridor and the timetabling takes care of reliability west of New Haven and north of Providence, but I don’t want to commit to saying “it’s possible” when it’s not the preferred alternative and the preferred alternative is better even under best-case assumptions on the no-build alternative.
Is one option to do the new route but have 4 tracks so you can add a few stations along the way for the rich people who will be inconvenienced?
There are times of day when there is an Acela and a Regional in each direction in Kingston. which means they go through Old Saybrook. Maybe someone should look stuff up.
Why do railfans think the train that is NOT-stopping need to pass through the platforms of alllllllllll the stations? The old tracks aren’t going to be torn up. The people using the slow commuter trains will still be able to use the slow commuter trains. On the existing tracks. That won’t be torn up. They might even get a slower intercity train every few hours.
That would cost even more money than the $5 billion that is already too much money to spend here.
I want to take a moment to make something absolutely clear here – I have been holding back for the sake of civility but I’m getting the sense that people are drawing the wrong conclusion because of that.
I’d personally bulldoze every single property along the way of the bypass tomorrow with a smile on my face if given the opportunity. That portion of Connecticut has no right to exist as an autonomous entity nor should it have the continued right to self-governance. Condemn every single one of those towns. I despise those people. I hate that NEC FUTURE’s failure is partially attributable to them. They deserve nothing and should receive nothing. Not $1 should be spent to appease them.
My objection isn’t some backdoor sympathy for the poor little rats whose “neighborhoods” are “threatened” by the possibility of better rail service. My objection is that $5 billion out of a $12.5 billion plan is going into a single 120 km bypass and that this is somehow the make-or-break component of HSR improvements in the Northeast.
If it cost a fifth of what it does I’d be fully on board. If we had functional rail service in the country already, I’d say “sure, why not?” But we don’t.
Didn’t considering going from 2 tracks to 1 in California promise to save 1% of project costs or something? Given that how much extra could 4 tracks cost over 2?
Cost to appease the wealthy with some stations seems a very small price to pay in the scale of the overall project – especially as stations in wealthy areas have very high traffic on a per-capita basis.
*bangs head on desk* There already are two tracks. With trains on them that go from Boston allllllllllllll the way to Washington D.C. And have commuter trains scheduled around the trains alllllllllll the way from Washington D.C. just like they get scheduled around the ones to Washington D.C. Since the tracks went to the thriving fishing village in the 19th Century a dense walkable New Urbanist wet dream of a downtown and surrounding blocks and blocks of tightly packed residences grew up around them. Those tracks will remain there and can have commuter trains on them. It will make the real estate ads look real good because it will say “walk to train” And if there is enough demand to have an intercity train stop in Ye Olde Fishing Village one can toddle through a few times a day.
Just to clarify – all eight Shore Line East trains that operate in each direction seven days a week go to and from New London now, so that previous restriction was somehow managed/overcome etc. I’m not sure if it was somehow related to the swith to electric trains or not. See the current schedule.
Responding to Transit Hawk’s 19:09 comment here:
I’m sorry, but that’s a ridiculous argument to make. Passengers aren’t going to be judging a 2.5h service against a hypothetical 2h service that never materialised, they are going to be judging it against their other transport options: flying to a certain extent, but mainly driving.
They will also be judging it against the option of not making the trip at all because it takes too much time and effort (that’s the induced demand effect, which works for rail just as much as traffic, in fact even more so because greater demand generally doesn’t impact on travel time).
Downtown Boston-downtown NY in 2.5h would still be better than all other options. But if you’re coming in from a suburban home it might start looking less attractive. And things like Providence-NY, Boston-Philly, Boston-DC etc. all lose their competitiveness if you add half an hour onto those trips.
If you can’t understand that a 25% longer trip time dramatically decreases potential ridership then you really can’t be helped.
@df1982, how does the marketshare of Frankfurt-Munich or Frankfurt-Hamburg which take 3.5 hours compare to Barcelona-Madrid which takes 2.5?
It’s fully possible to understand something and still disagree with it, df1982.
I really don’t care if the flights between Boston and Washington stay up for the foreseeable future, nor do I particularly care if the train fails to induce demand for trips that aren’t being taken on any mode today; my primary concern is pulling VMT off of the roadways, my secondary concern is ending flights between Boston and New York, and a 2.5 hour trip time does both those things at a price point $5 billion less than the 2 hour trip time, which also makes it about $5 billion more likely to actually happen.
This argument is only “ridiculous” in a world where we have infinite money, infinite will to build, and zero competing priorities. Unfortunately, that isn’t the world we live in. We instead live in a world where we’re 60 years behind on passenger rail development and with few exceptions actively backsliding, forced to claw for table scraps worth of funding on any and all rail transportation initiatives, and beholden to a nationwide fetish for dreaming big instead of doing anything. And in this world we currently live in, devoting 40% of the proposed budget for high-speed rail on the Northeast Corridor to the least important 15% of the line is self-sabotage of what is otherwise a plan that is desperately needed and long overdue.
I guess it makes me beyond help to acknowledge this. That’s fine. You’re far from the first person to tell me that and you’re not going to be the last one either.
@Transit Hawk, also difficult to believe any country, especially the United States, can build high speed rail line through a wealthy area without any stops and for only $5 billion. Perhaps $25 billion.
It’s the least densely developed area on the entire corridor; there’s very little eminent domain required, and much of it is freeway exit businesses rather than residences.
(Also, we’re planning a stop at New London a few hundred meters north of the current Amtrak stop.)
@Alon, if it follows a freeway it should be much less controversial than HS2 was with a brand new alignment – regardless of the areas wealth.
It’d be good to see some parkway station(s) along the freeway in sensible location(s) though.
This is closely parallel to the Shore Line, which has stations at regular intervals on Shore Line East; SLE would get increased service from not having to share tracks with intercities.
Naughty naughty concern troll, you are supposed to be concerned about other people. You may not care if it’s still faster to fly from Boston to DC but other people disagree. Even Senators from flyover states because flights from New England to DCA take up “slots” that could be flights to their flyover state but aren’t because Senators from the Northeast have arranged it so they get to use them. Connect the high speed line from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia to the high speed lines in the Midwest someday the flights from Ohio and Detroit go away too.
this is great stuff, though the cats are beginning to get concerned, I don’t giggle and laugh this much, often.
If the bypass doesn’t get built there won’t be demand for much more intercity train than there is now. A two track line can cope with three maybe even FOUR !! trains an hour, in each direction. SLE isn’t going to get much of an increase in service because
Few people need few trains.
If you want VMT to be reduced, a 2h trip would do this a lot more than a 2.5h trip. The person living in Queens who needs to be in Boston will be more likely to get the subway to Penn and then the train, rather than hop in the car and cross the Throgs Neck bridge.
And I’m not sure why you want to reduce Boston-NY flights but not Boston-DC flights. Really nobody should be flying at all between points on the NEC, but only a 4h end-to-end time will achieve this.
There are plenty of projects in the USA that do exactly what you propose: just focus on little things, forget the big-ticket items. And they often end up being so inconsequential they have basically zero effect on increasing rail’s mode share.
E.g. Chicago-St. Louis. $2b was budgeted to on upgrade the tracks for the Lincoln Service, with the aim of a 4h travel time between the two cities, down from 5.5h. This actually would have given the train a chance of being a little bit competitive against driving. But what happened? The $2b was spent but the travel times barely came down at all (the trains still more than 5h as a rule) and ridership is BELOW 2010 levels.
@dt1982, a train every 4 hours which is roughly what is offered between Chicago and St Louis is also a pretty weak service level.
In Europe ridership picked up with ~60mph average speeds and at least a train every 2 hours at an absolute minimum.
Amtrak wish is 3 hours. It’s masochistic frugal railfans who want to make it 4 or more.
Railfans are deeply deeply fascinated with Connecticut for some reason. If you send the very high speed trains to New Haven via Jamaica and Farmingdale many people in Queens don’t have to schlep to Manhattan. They can get on high speed trains in Jamaica. Someday the LIRR and NJtransit will connect with each other through Brooklyn. Since everything is compatible there could even be a train that runs through “Wall Street” and Brooklyn once or twice an hour. And people in Nassau and Suffolk could go to Farmingdale. Or East Yaphank.
It’s not just Boston-DC flights. It’s things like Pittsburgh-Boston. Cut a half hour off NY-Boston it cuts a half hour off Harrisburg-Boston or Pittsburgh-Boston. Richmond-Boston.
Boston/DC is a short flight distance but still long enough that I would consider it economically and environmentally viable. You’re welcome to disagree with me on where you feel the minimum flight distance mark should be set – for me, I think 640 km is the correct “floor,” and conveniently enough, BOS-DCA’s air line is 641.
But even if that wasn’t the case, again, absolute project cost matters, and the potential ridership secured by saving 30 minutes is not worth $5 billion in a vacuum and especially not when there’s 60~90 minutes worth of savings to be had for a much larger ridership population through completing the other $7.5 billion worth of projects outlined here. I truly do not understand the resistance to disconnecting these two things from each other and using the litany of projects in one column to drive funding and consensus for the megaproject bypass.
Well, maybe I do actually understand your resistance:
Once bitten, twice shy, right? But this isn’t an example of the kind of marginal improvements I want to see more of failing. It’s actually an example of bad organization, horrible mismanagement, and breathtaking incompetence on the part of everybody involved, top to bottom. The sum total of what they did on that corridor should not have cost $2 billion and only did for the same reason that if nothing changes Alon’s proposed budget for the Northeast Corridor is actually off by a factor of 5.
Checking the schedules tomorrow and quickly reading through some of the press at the time, it looks like every train except the named train land cruise that continues onto Texas is around 5 hours exactly assuming no delays with the “Texas Eagle” clocking 5.5 on a schedule that is likely even further over-padded relative to the other 4 trips. (Quick sidebar to just note that by the way, $2 billion to shave 30 minutes even after an American 5~8× cost blowout? Still looks pretty good compared to $5 billion and a lot of hopes and dreams for 30 minutes.)
The problem is compounded by the fact that “no delay” is not a realistic assumption for Amtrak in 2024 as well as the fact that the new “Amtrak Midwest” fleet moved backwards away from level boarding and is just a miserable ride/experience, and didn’t even lead to more daily round trips. (Quick sidebar 2: hat tip to Matthew Hutton, who is absolutely right in pointing out the impact of a schedule that basically doesn’t exist. Run more trains!)
Given all of that, it’s no surprise that ridership is below 2010 levels and it’s also no surprise that railfans frequently covetously envision drawing a high-speed crayon line to replace it; but in actuality, the problem on this train line is the same problem that is has always been and the solution is the same as it is here: competent asset management, elimination of bad actors/organizations, level boarding and full electrification as incontrovertible requirements, and targeted elimination of slow zones. Small scale work that snowballs into big success – the current train averages 92 kmph and it would only need an average speed bump of 10 kmph to shave another half an hour off – not a perverse insistence on $5 billion for 120 km of bespoke high-speed bypass multiplied into $~19 billion for the full ~460 km of line between Chicago and St Louis nor an insistence that H! S! R! is the only way and that there’s no point doing anything if you can’t wrap it into a megaproject that sucks all the oxygen out of the room and forces us to decide on which one (1) rail line we can justify building approximately every, at this rate, approximately 40 years.
Realism is not masochism. Perfection is the enemy of progress. Delivering something better than the crap we’ve had shoveled onto us is worth more than a perverse insistence that it’s all or nothing on the Northeast Corridor and as goes the bypass so goes the project.
I’m comfortable disagreeing with you on that, df1982. I don’t think we’re ever going to convince each other, so I’ll graciously cede the last word to you.
Well, we’re in agreement that fixing operations is the number one priority, but that’s also what Alon has consistently stressed for more than a decade on this blog, including in this proposal. Organisation before electronics before concrete. But that doesn’t mean never do concrete. And when you fix the operational side, which is by far the lowest hanging fruit, and improve the electronics (e.g. constant tension catenary), there is still a lot of concrete that needs to be done to get things down to 4h. And of all the concrete proposed in this post, I would hazard that the I95 bypass actually has one of the best dollars spent vs minutes saved ratios out of any of the projects listed. It’s the biggest item listed, for sure, but it’s not a preposterous idea like tunnelling under Bridgeport sound. And it actually has a solid rate of return on things like operational savings (half an hour of labour and fleet maintenance saved on every trip to Boston) and increased ridership. That’s before you get into things like wider economic benefits from bringing Boston half an hour closer to its nearest peer cities.
And I absolutely do not think that we should be OK with people flying 640km. That’s precisely in the sweet spot for HSR to capture mode share, but it’s ability to do so is hampered if the trip starts edging over 4h. This is why Deutsche Bahn, for instance, spent serious amounts of cash to get Berlin-Munich down to 4h, including with lengthy bypasses (like Erfurt-Bamber and Nürnberg-Ingolstadt) that you would probably decry as unnecessary. Because they realised that without it the rail service couldn’t hope to be competitive against air.
Airlines which have to make money, disagree with you. Just a quick Google search for non stops between BOS and LGA show many. More or less once an hour on Delta but American and Jet Blue fly the route. All three to JFK with a bit less frequency. Spirit, Delta and Untied to EWR.
Really nobody should be flying at all between points on the NEC, but only a 4h end-to-end time will achieve this.
Connect the high speed line from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia to the high speed lines in the Midwest someday the flights from Ohio and Detroit go away too.
Except that at a 4 hr HSR train journey will not eliminate all flights along the NEC. Depending on your source, a 4 hr rail trip captures 40-60% of rail/air modeshare. Only at rail trips below around 2 hr do flights stop completely. The idea that a 5 hr trip to Cleveland (via Philadelphia/Pittsburgh) or 6 hr trip to Detroit would ever eliminate flights is preposterous – in Japan and France rail journeys this long get around 10% passengers compared to 90% air.
Pittsburgh would be connected to the Midwest with HSR long before Philadelphia. Connecting to Phila. would require a line through the Appalachian mountains would would be hugely expensive compared to a line through ~60km of hills to reach the flatlands around the Ohio/Pennsylvania border.
You have to convince Ohioans that trains aren’t a Communist plot to sap and impurify the precious bodily fluids of Real Americans. The Unreal Americans in Pennsylvania may decide to do something. Or is it Real Unamericans?
I got around to checking the distance. It is preposterous because at an average speed of 150 mph it would be less than five to Detroit. New York airports suck, getting to Manhattan sucks and five hours might be a bit high because lots of it would be new build with higher average speeds. I don’t know why railfans think “new build” is going to be Acela speed. It’s going to be much higher.
Even if it was faster it’s not going to eliminate flights. Detroit is a major hub. If I want a puddle jumper to the Upper Peninsula I will want to change planes in Detroit.
@adiron, 150mph average is what the TGV manages, I believe the Barcelona-Madrid trains average 155, but aside from that only the Chinese trains are quicker.
That said there are very few trips of 5 hours or longer with decent fastish direct service. London-Aberdeen, London-Cornwall, Paris-Nice, Paris-Perpignan-Barcelona, Hamburg-Munich, Turin-Naples, perhaps Vienna/Salzburg-Zurich?
And yeah China has longer direct service, presumably that gets a decent marketshare, and Japan obviously does too but it is much more expensive than flying and is also less convenient as they don’t have early morning departures or late arrivals.
So it’s difficult to really judge how an hourly, say British level reliable, 5-6 hour trip in the US would really go.
Is there, I dunno, a Facebook group you are all in, to try out the jokes before you post them here?
Aberdeen? The population of Greater Detroit is ever so slightly less than the population of Scotland. To get to New York the train will pass through Toledo Ohio, roughly the size of Glasgow. On to Cleveland whose metropolitan statistical area is half the size of all of Scotland. Then probably Youngstown another Glasgow-ish sized metro. Pittsburgh, half of Scotland, Harrisburg… Glasgow, Lancaster… Glasgow, Philadelphia about a million more than all of Scotland and then New York which is two Londons. Or four Scotlands. I suspect there might be some demand along a string of cities like that. Especially since the New York City airports suck.
It’s going to be new build. The tunnels and viaducts in the mountains can real straight and real flat. The stuff west of the mountains is on the Great Plains. Plains are really really flat. Which can have really really fast trains… because it’s realllly reallly flat. 4 hours needs an average speed of 175
@adirondacker12800
” If you send the very high speed trains to New Haven via Jamaica and Farmingdale many people in Queens don’t have to schlep to Manhattan. They can get on high speed trains in Jamaica.”
How would this work? Do you mean that wacky Long Island Sound tunnel proposal to bypass Connecticut entirely? I think that is beyond US state capacity, but it is a cool idea nonetheless.
@adirondacker12800
Or do you mean that Long Island trains just run only to DC without going to Boston.
Why do railfans think it has to be a tunnel? It can be mostly causeway with a bridge or two so the gravel barges and the mighty pleasure sailing fleets can get east of it. There are never going to be naval bases west of it or Post-Panamax container ship ports. It wouldn’t be much longer than the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel and since there is never going to be a naval base west of it, it wouldn’t need the expensive tunnels and artificial islands. And it would be shorter than many other bridges
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_bridges
Why do railfans think Stamford is the center of the universe? Fairfield County is a small part of Connecticut. Most of it is in New Haven County or north or east of New Haven County. The rest of New England is north or east of New Haven. Railfans in New Haven would be deeply deeply disappointed that they won’t be going through Stamford and over the Hell Gate Bridge. Almost everybody else won’t give a shit that the train to New York and beyond goes through Garden City instead. Nor would it stop railfans from getting on the slower train that does go through Stamford and over the Hell Gate Bridge.
Combine it with roadway people in Nassau and Suffolk who want to go places in New England that are not Stamford could avoid going through Queens, the Bronx and Westchester to do it. People in Suffolk County east of or near the bridge might even want to take it to get to Stamford! And since the Triboro Bridge can turn into the Triboro parking lot which turns the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge into a parking lot which turns the Throggs Neck Bridge into a parking lot maybe even people not so close to the bridge who want to go to Stamford.
@adiron, if you are going to be that rude about Aberdeen, fair enough, but then surely Detroit-New York can support a half hourly service at ~150mph with a stop in Cleveland taking ~4 hours or a little more and New York-Chicago can also support half hourly service non stop or perhaps with a service parkway station stop in perhaps 5 hours or a little more?
I didn’t realize that the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel was nearly 28.3 Km long. If the Acela is extended out to Greenport, NY and connects back to the mainland at Old Lime, CT that would be about 21 Km of water crossing which is shorter than CBBT. Of course you would have to re electrify LIRR with Catenary since it’s third rail right now or use dual mode intercity trains. But that’s certainly doable.
The people who want to go to Stamford can use the train that goes to Stamford. Just like they do today. I don’t know why railfans think that there can only be one route for the trains. There is enough demand in the Northeast for there to more than one destination. Or origin. That already has tracks with trains currently running on them. Some of them with electricity!! !! Like they have had in Stamford for over a century.
In nice round numbers there are less than a million people in Fairfield County and 8 million on Long Island. An extra 20 miles/30 kilometers to give 8 times as many people shorter rides is a reasonable compromise. Especially since the people in Stamford will still be able to get on a train that while a whole 15, 20 minutes slower because it’s not the mostest fastest train ever, is still faster than anything other than a personal helicopter. People other than starry eyed railfan fantabulists think Stamford-NY or Stamford-New Haven could be a half hour. Which means Stamford-Boston would be 90 minutes instead of screamingly fast very expensive, slow to build because of the NIMBY and BANANA lawsuits 75. Or Stamford-DC a WHOLE TWO HOURS!! !! !!! !!!! instead of an hour and 45.
It’s not going to cost less – it’s the richest part of Connecticut where the NIMBYs and BANANAs don’t have to hire high paid lawyers because they are the high paid lawyers. The state in one way or another owns a very straight right of way on Long Island. Long Island is a terminal moraine. A big pile of sand, gravel and the occasional house size boulder. Connecticut isn’t. It’s rocky fjords
A causeway across Long Island Sound will cost less than the tunnels through mountains that connect to viaducts across the valleys that would be needed for four hour service between New York and Detroit.
Counting Brooklyn and Queens (for the most part) as potential Jamaica customers rather than NY Penn customers is ridiculous. At most, serving Jamaica, Hicksville, and Ronkonkoma (presumably?) would serve 3.5 million customers. At the same time, it loses 2 million customers between Westchester and Fairfield. The question becomes “Is a new-build causeway across the Long Island Sound less expensive than condemning 1,000 homes in Connecticut?” Given the answer to this is self-evidently no, the question becomes “Is making it slightly easier for net 1.5 million customers to reach Boston worth the additional cost of constructing a causeway across Long Island Sound?” I doubt the answer to that is yes. And I’m still not sure how you get from the LIRR Main Line to the north shore of Long Island, where this causeway would presumably originate, without condemning even more real estate than you might in Fairfield County.
Whether or not crossing the Appalachians costs more is irrelevant. A causeway across the Long Island Sound is mostly useless. It has a perfectly acceptable substitute–the existing Northeast Corridor. There is no such substitute for crossing the Appalachians–other than no build.
It’s not 1,000 houses in Connecticut. It’s triple decking the Connecticut Turnpike and that ain’t gonna happen.
I just want to make sure that you understand that passenger railroads carry people and that sending them to places where there are people makes sense.
People who want to go to Stamford can USE THE TRAIN THAT GOES THROUGH STAMFORD. Or any of the other Amtrak stations in Westchester or Connecticut. People in Westchester County aren’t stupid. Or dazzled by the stupendousness of Stamford. They can get on Amtrak trains in Yonkers or Croton too. Which aren’t on the line that goes through Stamford. Poor unfortunates. Most of the high speed trains from Boston via Providence can go south across the Sound and a few of them could continue west to Bridgeport!! Stamford !!! !!! and New Rochelle. Or the high speed train from Boston via Hartford. I hope that didn’t make your brain melt down. Trains flitting hither thither and yon. And not going to Stamford three different ways!
The Financial District/Wall Street/Downtown Manhattan is the country’s third or fourth biggest central business district, depending on who is counting what. After Midtown Manhattan, Chicago and perhaps Washington D.C. Which means it’s bigger than Boston. Or Philadelphia. Or Baltimore. Or Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Miami, Los Angeles or I know this may be shock, Stamford. And even Hartford.
People in Brooklyn could get on the intercity trains that are using the tracks between Brooklyn and Jersey City. Which are there because clueless railfans from the hinterlands have no idea of the scale. Getting suburbanites who want to go Downtown out of Midtown means they aren’t using space other people could use to get to Midtown. The G train sucks, that and the F train would be the only ones in Brooklyn that wouldn’t pass an intercity station. 20, 30 minutes faster than schlepping to Midtown. Leaving space for other people to get to Midtown. That doesn’t change that there are more people in Nassau County than there are in Fairfield County and there are more people in Suffolk County. If the intercity trains are going to be stopping in extra wide place along Interstate 95 that is New London Connecticut they can stop in Farmingdale and Yaphank. And the people in Fairfield could USE THE TRAIN THAT GOES THROUGH STAMFORD.
Railfans love to froth and foam about high speed rail to St. Louis. More or less the same population as Brooklyn. Or San Antonio. Or Portland. Oregon, not Portland Maine. Not that much smaller than metro Baltimore.. Sending passenger trains to places where there are people, what a concept… And the people in Greenwich and even Cos Cob could USE THE TRAIN THAT GOES THROUGH STAMFORD.
We’re about to post the webtool map with a layer for buildings that need to be taken; you don’t need to speculate on the numbers.
I suppose the Whitestone and Throggs Neck Bridges are too. The Triboro and the Hells Gate aren’t “the Sound” anymore they are… Hells Gate…
Those pesky pesky people in Virginia have a bridge and tunnel complex that connects the Virginia City Combined Statistical Area with the Delmarva peninsula. A lot less people than Long Island and Connecticut.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesapeake_Bay_Bridge%E2%80%93Tunnel
Though getting to Connecticut facilitates getting to the rest of New England just like getting to the Delmarva Peninsula facilitates getting to places beyond Delaware. A bridge from Shorehaven Long Island to New Haven would mean people from as far away as Brooklyn could drive to Stamford faster than through the gridlock of the Bronx and Westchester. They would miss the gloriousness of Stamford along the Turnpike or the scenic Meritt Parkway/Rt 15 but they would cope with their disappointment. Since there aren’t going to be any naval bases west of Groton or post Panamax container ships there won’t need to be tunnels or high bridges.
It’s unclear who owns the golf cart track between the two golf courses in Meadowbrook State Park. It’s either the NYDEC that got it from the NYSDOT via the MCTA ( the state agency that absorbed the bankrupt LIRR ) or if the MTA still owns it. Alienating state parkland for transportation projects happens all the time. The rest of the route is either active LIRR or inactive LIRR or former LIRR that is being used by the state owned electric utility. It’s nearly dead straight and all owned by New York State in one way or another to Montauk. And Greenport. From the general vicinity of Yaphank it’s either highway, parkland or Brookhaven National Labs. I’m sure the Labs will be cooperative if it means trading in their drafty old 1950s office building for a shiny new LEED certified with solar panels on the roof and a windmill in the parking lot redevelopment. Especially if the Senate confirmed whoevers get prodded by the President to be agreeable. All without triple decking the Connecticut Turnpike. And people who want to get to Stamford could still get on the train THAT GOES THROUGH STAMFORD.
There is this perverse relationship between distance, speed and time. Chicago is a great distance from New York. At an average speed of 150 mph it would take more time, more than 5 hours, to get there.
New York to Chicago is 790 miles so at an average of 150mph like the TGV it would take 5 hours 16 minutes, or at an average of 155mph like Spain it would take 5 hours 6 minutes. Given non stop service or single stop service without leaving high speed running the whole way I am sure you could get it under 5 hours – as those times for France/Spain are based on shorter trips with intermediate city centre stops.
It’s 790 miles along Interstate 80. I-80 manages to miss the few population centers along the desolate route. Use the Great Circle route, it’s a bit over 700. The tunnel or bridge across Lake Michigan and Lake Erie will be expensive but that doesn’t matter in Railfanlandia.
There isn’t going to be a dedicated route between New York and Chicago because they are realllly reallly far apart and normal people will fly. If you leverage the high speed tracks that are there for other reasons it’s around 900. Which because it a longer distance will take more time. Which makes flying even more attractive for people who aren’t afraid to fly.
5 hours is high speed rail distance in Europe. And my experience is that the airports in New York and Chicago are pretty crap.
To make it in five hours it would need an average speed of 180 which is unlikely. Except for people traveling between Manhattan and the Loop getting to the station is a PITA and neither of them are all that wonderful. Click your ruby slippers harder, most people will fly.
790/5 is 158.
There isn’t going to be a 790 mile route between Chicago and New York. There isn’t enough demand for a SECOND one. Across hundreds of miles of mountains. Where there aren’t very many people.
Difficult to believe New York Chicago doesn’t deserve half hourly service and that you wouldn’t pick the optimal route for that as your main route given its importance, especially as you would also be providing better links to Detroit and Cleveland.
Buffalo can be served in the same distance from an I-80 route or via Albany so no difference there and Albany-New York can easily be served with a classic line. A Brightline style service could do that journey in 2 hours which is faster than flying.
….Buffalo…. going through the desolate mountains of Northern Pennsylvania would be the THIRD route between Chicago and New York and unless you want to ban airplanes no one is going to build it. Even if you ban airplanes because it would be a THIRD route without many people along it. Through lots and lots of mountains.
..Albany… is along the way to Montreal. Bypassing Scranton in the rugged mountains of Northern Pennsylvania doesn’t get you to Albany or Utica or Syracuse or Rochester. Or Montreal. Albany already has Brightline like service. And it’s along the way to Montreal from Philadelphia. And Washington D.C. if they can figure out how to do customs and immigration while in motion between Saratoga Springs and Montreal. And along the way from Boston, Providence and the center of the universe in Connecticut. Unless of course you think the Williamsport-Lock Haven Combined Statistical area, all 150,331 them near Interstate 80 is more important.
New York Chicago will get more traffic than New York Montreal.
Plus you have the advantage that you will probably double traffic on the cross country services out of Chicago as you would be able to start/end in NYC on the same day.
And yeah they might have fuck all traffic, but they are politically important for sure.
Twice, three times almost nothing is still almost nothing. They let people from Philadelphia or Boston or Syracuse or Pittsburgh or Cleveland or…. use the long distance trains originating in Chicago. They aren’t going to drive hours and hours to Interstate 80 to get to Chicago. They will get on the train that passes through their city. The people who are taking a land cruise from Chicago don’t care if the train from New York to Chicago takes 7 hours instead of 5. Especially since they avoided a long drive I-80. Normal people will fly because a two and half hour flight is faster. There is never going to be a THIRD way to get to Chicago, that manages to miss places with people, because 7 or 8 hours is good enough for the few people unwilling or unable to fly.
It is way more practical to build a 220 MPH (900 miles, 180 MPH average speed) railway where the fastest service runs NY Penn-Newark-Philadelphia 30th Street-Baltimore Penn-Pittsburgh-Cleveland-Chicago (and the Cleveland-Chicago leg is at the 220 MPH cruising speed for ~300 miles) that takes five hours than it is to build a second crossing of the Appalachians that is somehow only engineered for 150 MPH service.
Going through Baltimore would make the trip even longer. Just because the Baltimore and Ohio thought it was a good idea to serve New York – Chicago through Maryland doesn’t meant it’s a good idea today.
It’s an extra 40 miles (15 minutes) and dramatically cuts the amount of new track that needs to be built from the NEC-Pittsburgh. You can make up for that with a higher-speed crossing of the Appalachians. Besides, a new ROW from West Baltimore towards Frederick is going to be a lot easier to build than something west from 30th Street. The existing Keystone Corridor won’t cut it.
Your dealer has been supplying really good hallucinogens.
Prove my math wrong.
As near as I can tell your math is 2 plus 2 divided by Baltimore. 40 miles longer than what?
The problem with just replacing the catenary itself on the NEC is that the substations and other infrastructure are 100 years old and long overdue for replacement, and runs on 25kHz power, which is seriously nonstandard. See this recent Times article (gift link) for details.
The substations have been rehabilitated over the years. Physics is a cruel cruel mistress and it’s very difficult to get railfans to understand that there isn’t infinite electricity. If you want to run more trains you likely need more substation. Perhaps not at the moment but eventually you need more substation.
You know what runs on “seriously nonstandard” power, seriously worse than 25khz? The entire rail networks of the entire countries of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, that’s what.
Big boy and big girl electrical engineers put on their big boy and big girl pants and just get on with dealing with something extant which may non-optimal but is perfectly feasible for competent (non-US) engineering professionals to work with.
So many levels of whining for so many decades and so much cash disappeared doing fuck-all. Seriously Nonstandard 25khz for sure isn’t the reason that any non-constant-tension overhead is allowed to exist on the NEC in 2024, nor in 2010, nor in 2000, nor was it in 1990 or 1980.
First off, nothing anywhere is running on 25kHz power. The NEC has three different electric traction systems:
Richard, you are correct that Germanic countries with their excellent rail networks use 15kV, 16.7Hz. That does not mean @CharlesO is wrong. Higher voltages provide more power for high speed service, while higher frequency means a lighter transformer, reducing train weight. Although electrical engineers can equip trains to use 2 or 3 different power systems (changing voltage is easier than changing frequency) there is absolutely no reason to ever want to do so since it adds cost/weight for duplicative equipment or introduces performance penalties (transformers designed for 50Hz provide just 1/3 the power when used at 16.7Hz).
Europe in this regard is more than just “non-optimal” there are real negative effects from the 15kV 16.7Hz network in Central Europe. In the last post there was criticism that Eurostar nework doesn’t better connect London/Paris with Germany – the lack of support for 15kV 16.7Hz in the original Eurostar e300/Class 373 trains is a part of this (they originally could not use the Netherlands’ 1.5kV DC system either). Even the TGV POS which is designed as a tri-power set for use into Germany via LGV Est only gets 6.8MW under 15kV versus 9.6MW under 25kV.
Traction gauge (voltage and frequency) should be standardized just as much as track gauge and loading gauge. There is simply no reason to maintain 12/12.5kV (with its reduced power versus 25kV) or any 25Hz system (with its heavier transformers than 50/60Hz). To say otherwise is like saying level boarding is “non-optimal but perfectly feasible” and you shouldn’t bother with it because there are some trains in Europe that don’t have step free platforms.
Come on Richard, if Metrolink in LA decided to electrify with 15kV 16.7Hz because “that is what the railways in Switzerland use” even after Caltrain completed 25kV 60Hz you would be howling about how “America’ Finest Transportation Professionals” were screwing over people and leading to perpetual rent seeking through more expensive dual-power trains for CAHSR able to use both systems in Northern and Southern California even though any mildly competent European rail designer would never deliberately introduce such a break in the power system. Yes, NEC electrification is legacy not new-build with different power, but low platforms, loco hauled trains and random schedules are legacy too, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be switching to level boarding, EMUs and Takt.
The main reason Eurostar isn’t serving Germany is that it insists on sterile platforms with border controls and some security theater, and the natural entry point into Germany, Cologne, doesn’t have spare platforms for this. It’s not the voltage – Switzerland is negotiating with Eurostar since Basel and Geneva do have room for sterile platforms and Switzerland is used to being a rule taker even if the rules are in its view stupid.
Britain being difficult doesn’t stop Brussels/Lille trains being more adventurous.
The TGV began serving Switzerland with the Lyria service after tri-voltage sets of the TGV Sud-Est fleet were introduced, sets 110-117 (I believe a few were sold to SBB, the rest operated by SCNF. They have been replaced with TGV-POS sets which are also tri-voltage and specifically designed for German/Swiss service (the “S” in POS stands for Suddeustchreich).
Traction gauge is absolutely a concern. My understanding (which is not perfect if someone with an Elect. Eng. background wants to correct) is that the wrong voltage (thousands of kV difference or AC vs DC) is an absolute showstopper for interoperability, but that modern electronics/motors make it easy to handle multiple voltages. Different frequencies on the other hand can be used by almost any AC equipment, but because of how AC transformers work there is a huge performance penalty unless you go to the expense and weight of a second transformer set.
There are no border concerns for travel between Germany/France/Belgium/Netherlands, yet still almost no Eurostar service between them. Not sure the status with the newer tri-voltage sets, but I remember reading somewhere Eurostar terminated at Cologne not Frankfurt because original TGV sets running on 15kV 16.7Hz had such poor performance it was effectively a standard speed train and could not make effective use of the Cologne-Frankfurt high speed line. If wasn’t an issue SNCF wouldn’t be ordering tri-voltage POS train sets or Eurostar the tri-voltage e320 trains. There is no reason to carry this problem (and added rolling stock cost) over to the NEC if modernizing it for HSR, consistent 25kV 60Hz electrification should be part of any plan.
Onux, Thalys is an utterly clusterfuck for Business Reasons. (Eurostar, too, but it get to hide behind the blatantly more obvious security theatre.) This is widely known.
The exclusion of competition, poor service, punitive fares, low capacity, etc, have less than nothing to do with varied European traction power combinations. They’re a Choice of Business Model. (Just like Amtrak’s shit “Acela” business class business model is shit, indepentently of Amtrak’s traction systems being shit.)
Of course nobody else can stop you free-associating and blathering out “your understanding” about “wrong voltages” or whatever, but maybe sometime consider what value there is in typing stuff not based on facts.
Disinfected platforms? Are they that afraid of infectious diseases?
I have heard that it’s not Eurostar’s choice but that a large chunk of increased security is mandated by the laws regarding the Channel Tunnel. I’m not sure to what extent that’s true, though.
@Richard I am not sure Thalys being a shitshow stops there being Brussels-Lille-Strasbourg-Zurich TGV trains every 2 hours, or that it stops there being a Brussels-Munich ICE service every 2 hours, or perhaps hourly with 1 going via Nuremburg and 1 via Stuttgart.
This has gone totally off the rails.
I was replying to a dipshit suggestion that the reason Thalys/Eurostar are so bad (expensive, infrequent, uncompetitive) is becasue of 16.7hz traction transformers or something.
I don’t know why the trains you suggest don’t run, or can’t run, or are not allowed to run, or would hugely under/over-perform if run, so I’m going to say nothing. Crazy crazy policy, I know.
Alon’s written occasionally about under-performingborder-crossing routes in Europe. Try here for example … there is more, but you can do digging. Jon Worth has written a great deal and “walked the walk” of generally wretched service.
I’ve no special insight on the “business model” that makes this stuff so bad: all I’ve done is experience it and only as a tourist. I do have some generalized experience of that fact that “human beings can be total shits”, and that probably goes a long way, but as for details … [insert “IDKWTFHUH” shrug emoticon here]?
I was replying to a dipshit suggestion that the reason Thalys/Eurostar are so bad (expensive, infrequent, uncompetitive) is becasue of 16.7hz traction transformers or something.
I never said 16.7Hz had anything to do with price or frequency, I said that different traction gauges limited length of route and thus usefulness of service (how far without transfer).
It isn’t just Thalys/Eurostar. Back before TGV POS, Lyria (the SNCF/SBB joint venture for French/Swiss HSR) served Geneva (just across the border) with normal 1st Generation TGV Sud-Est rolling stock, but used tri-current TGV Sud-Est stock of a follow on order for journeys to Lausanne, Bern, and Zurich (which require longer running under 15kV 16.7Hz). Lyria had nothing to do with Eurostar or Thalys, SNCF and SBB are both competent operators, and yet they all reached a conclusion that trains crossing from 25kV 60Hz to 15kV 16.7Hz needed multi-current equipment for all but the shortest trips. This is an issue in Europe and any plan for the NEC should aim to remove the similar issue there.
It’s not 1984 anymore. Amtrak doesn’t have much of a problem with 25Hz and 60Hz.
Up until recently switching between 25Hz and 60Hz wasn’t possible for the older rolling stock. All of the rolling stock can, these days. The conversion equipment doesn’t last forever. Not replacing it is cheaper than replacing it. It is not 100 percent efficient. It is also yet one more thing to break down. Since everything can cope with both, replacing the oldest creakiest most likely to breakdown part would make sense. Rinse repeat until the conversion is complete.
Less to buy. Less to maintain. Less electricity. Better reliability. What’s not to like?
The conversion from grid frequency to railroad frequency ( or DC ) isn’t 100 percent efficient. The equipment to do that isn’t cheap. It breaks down. The inefficiency is probably the biggest consideration. When you are buying electricity by the megawatt a percentage point or two or three is a lot of money. All far far over the heads of most railfans who seem to think electricity is infinite.
Onux, it’s obvious that I fully understand the points about which you apparently believe you are educating me. Just stop it. Do you just enjoy typing? It’s tiresome.
The point is, the facts are, that the legacy 25hz is no obstacle to any NEC traction upgrade, and far less than no excuse for the utterly unexcusably shit state of the overhead itself.
Grown up adult competent professional electrical and traction engineers know how to design and build non-optimal power transformers. Oh boo hoo hoo it’s a weirdo voltage and frequency — big fucking deal. Just suck it up and do the best given the constraints. That’s their job. That’s why they have jobs, that’s their education and actual proven real world experience, and that’s why nobody conneted with Amtrak should be employed.
Exactly this. I 100% unequivocally agree with you.
I didn’t always, but I do now. And all I want now is for any kind of positive momentum, any measurable improvement, I just want to see them doing something! Why can’t we actually have service improving in this country? Why do I have to deal with the bad service we’ve had for decades actually getting worse year over year? Oh, right, it’s because worse service has had zero appreciable impact on either the ridership numbers or the money flowing in. No need to do anything to improve conditions going into 2025 or even 2030, we can just keep right on promising that big blue sky beautiful future that’s been 20 years away for the past 60.
I’m not sorry for feeling this way. I am sorry if it makes me a bad commenter, but it is what it is.
Richard, that a 50Hz transformer can only provide 1/3 the power when operating with 16.7Hz, or that a 60Hz transformer produces 40% of the power with 25Hz is a scientific fact. I would tell you to take up your argument with James Clerk Maxwell but the facts are a universal aspect of nature regardless of who discovered or derived them. Less power means slower acceleration (detrimental to trip time over shorter distances with more stops) and lower ultimate speed (detrimental to trip time over longer distances with fewer stops).
Yes, electrical engineers can get around these limitations by building trains with multiple transformers or equipment for different voltages, but mechanical engineers can get around low platforms by building trains with traps at doors or platforms with mini-highs. America’s Finest Transportation Professionals (TM) know how to design and build non-optimal schedules without using Takt. Neither is an obstacle to any rolling stock upgrade. Oh boo hoo hoo it’s a weirdo schedule or non-level boarding – big deal. Just suck it up and do the best given the constraints.
When it comes to things like level boarding and takt you rail at the sub-optimal decisions and work of American transit, why with traction gauge are you suddenly going to bat for the sub-optimal? The actual transit professionals in the Deutschsprachbund didn’t use one voltage in Zurich and another in Munich, or different frequencies in Berlin and Frankfurt. They ensured interoperability across the polity. The NEC is a single unit, why would you ever plan for anything other than fully consistent voltage, PTC, platform height, etc? I can see arguing other improvements have higher priority or a better cost-benefit, but arguing that infrastructure which either degrades performance or leads to higher priced trains isn’t an issue? That I don’t understand.
@TransitHawk
Except things are not getting worse. Acela didn’t exist a quarter century ago, before that it was impossible to take an electric train from Boston to DC non-stop, even at the peak of the golden age of the Pennsylvania RR or New York Central. Caltrain in less than a month will institute electric service that will cut local trip time from San Jose to SF by ~25% – a vast improvement.
I’m curious to know what you would consider a measurable improvement, what “something” would you like done that would improve service? So far it appears you have opposed every project suggestion, even those that are incremental not blue sky dream, and even those that would improve service (i.e. platform raising).
@Onux But things are getting measurably worse, year over year. To use the Acela as an example, it’s true that it didn’t exist 25 years ago and it’s also true that today those trains are past the end of their useful service life while the junk trains meant to replace them continue to fail tests and suffer delays in start of service. Train delays continue to rise throughout the system as well. As I somewhat flippantly acknowledged in another comment, this hasn’t appreciably slowed down ridership growth, which means there’s no impetus to actually correct any of those problems or even really acknowledge them, which is why outside of the already deeply invested transit advocacy space the Avelia Liberties are functionally invisible.
To your other point, I have not opposed every project suggestion. Far from it. I have, in fact, specifically opposed the bypass and only the bypass while either expressing support for or just not commenting on more or less every other part of the proposal here.
To be clear, I think platform raising is a good idea, and I think we should be striving for 100% level boarding. Obviously, we’re not going to get there any time soon or maybe ever, but moving in that direction is a good idea.
I think electrification is a good idea and we should be striving to electrify much more than we are; real electrification with overhead wires, not batteries. A national electrification program with achievable goals of some number of route-km electrified annually would be a great thing to see the US embark on.
I think more service frequency everywhere is a good idea which is why I make a point of including the cost of trains and labor when suggesting categories of things that $5 billion can buy.
I think there’s plenty of short range city pairs where the train would be a viable alternative if it existed, but again, naming those places just turns this into a referendum on why some other regional rail project somewhere else in the country is worse than any NEC HSR improvement because obviously less people live in those regions and so the return on investment is lower.
Any of these things are measurable and attainable improvements. Service frequency bumps and platform raising in particular are two that you can start seeing the payoff from pretty much immediately once they go into place, and for all of these, a quarterly or annual report that says “we modernized this many stations and electrified this many km of track and added this much service” is both easier to deliver and far more tangible for the public to see or feel than “we’re now 12% of the way towards completion of the Kingston-Old Saybrook High Speed Bypass.”
More broadly, I want to see a change in perspective. I want rail projects in this country to become as invisible as road projects are; where we’re doing this kind of small ticket improvement work so often and in so many places that it stops being news and just becomes a matter of course, where passenger rail spending is routine and normalized. And as I’ve said, waiting for the one big project that will redefine the landscape and cause that change to happen overnight hasn’t worked and probably isn’t going to work, so I’ve given up on it. Another way forward is needed, so let’s try it another way: starting small with measured and measurable improvements that can then build momentum to get us to where I want us to be.
Amtrak probably just lied about delays 25 years ago. I mean that’s what the Germans used to do.
Being honest is an improvement even if it is ugly.
You know what runs on “seriously nonstandard” power, seriously worse than 25khz? Nearly the entire rail networks of the entire countries of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden and Norway, that’s what.
Big boy and big girl electrical engineers put on their big boy and big girl pants and just get on with dealing with something extant which may non-optimal but is perfectly feasible for competent (non-US) engineering professionals to work with.
So many levels of whining for so many decades and so much cash disappeared doing fuck-all. Seriously Nonstandard 25khz for sure isn’t the reason that any non-constant-tension overhead is allowed to exist on the NEC in 2024, nor in 2010, nor in 2000, nor was it in 1990 or 1980.
25hz, not 25khz. Oopsie.
You made me drag out my 1956 Official Guide. They had four trains an hour during rush hour. The Philadelphia-New York express trains had a separate page. Non-stop between Newark and North Philadelphia more or less every half hour. If you wanted something other than non-stop there were other trains. Including local service from Trenton….. they managed a lot more traffic across the flat junction back in the day.
Railfans who can only focus on one thing at a time drool over the prospect of sending Chestnut Hill West, formerly Pennsylvania Railroad trains to 30th Street via the former Reading. Railfans who can imagine more than one thing at time point out that would “unbalance” the branches. It might not be a good idea to do that. There are alternatives, supposedly there is a flying junction in the general vicinity on the Broad Street line that could service Chestnut Hill East. And likely Chestnut Hill East too. they could get trains three, four times as often as they do now.
It’s SEPTA they might get around to doing something in 2238.
Why? How does a train taking forever to stop at Maplewood New Jersey on the Morris and Essex line, slow things down on the NEC? It would be nice to have but it doesn’t slow things down on the NEC. It doesn’t slow things down on Montclair-Boonton or Metra Electric or BART or… And putting in level boarding at Maplewood is going to be very complex.
Wikipedia says the first NJTransit multi-levels were delivered in 2006. They are going to be around for while. The ones being delivered now are going to around even longer.
Yeah, M&E stretches the definition of “touches the NEC.” But the NJC Line fully counts because the trains spend time on the NEC from Rahway up and if they miss a slot due to delays at a low-platform station, it messes up the entire line.
shit happens. It does now. They cope.
They cope by having laughably low punctuality, to the point that the timetables are extremely padded, and the track assignments are not known in advance.
I suppose they could all take the bus until all the projects you think should be done can all be funded and STAFFED all at once.
Platform raising doesn’t have to be done all at once. You can raise the platform at one station while the others keep boarding at low platforms until you can move on to them. Alon hs already showed how NJT has been regularity raising platforms right now. There is no reason they could not expand that program and raise all of the others. There is no significant funding or personnel constraint, this isn’t a mega project. And in the meantime everyone can keep using the train they are using now without any need for a bus.
All very true. Also true that there may not be able to raise all the platforms by the time Gateway opens. The stuff they are taking delivery on now will be in service for the next 40 or 50 years. It and it’s stairs can serve those stations until it is done. It’s not connected to tunnels anywhere, floppy catenary the selection of radio frequencies for the signal system or whether or not there is a Dunkin or Starbuck across the street from the station.
It happens more often with low platforms than with high platforms. There is no reason to accept poor performance when a better alternative exists.
Level boarding means:
With these advantages the issue that the “Northeast Corridor needs high platforms at all stations” but that “all rail services need high platforms at all stations.” If you have enough ridership to invest in the expense of rail transport you should automatically invest in level boarding. This applies to many busy bus lines as well, where low floor busses means it is reasonable to install slightly higher curbs for level boarding at bus stops.
Level boarding is very very nice. I even do scary cross platform transfers. And understand that once everybody has gotten off and everybody has gotten on the train can move even though there are people on the platform.
Clambering up and down steps in a suburb doesn’t stop the train from pullling into Penn Station New York. And while it’s less than ideal it can be a diesel train at the suburban station that pauses for a moment where the electricity starts and is then an electric train. And level boarding in New Jersey doesn’t make the catenary less floppy in Pennsylvania. Or make the tunnel in Baltimore less old or less curvy. It would be very very nice if all the stations in New Jersey had level boarding. If they don’t they can still go out and buy new high speed trains someday far far in the future. The problems can be separated from one another.
Clambering up and down steps in a suburb doesn’t stop the train from pullling into Penn Station New York.
No, but it does make it slower getting there, both in the extra time spent at each station (15 sec per stop would save NJT commuters 3-4 min per trip, up to 6 min from the end of the Montclair or NJ Coast lines) and in not having to pad the schedule to account for stops that last a few minutes assisting disabled passengers.
The trains already pull into Penn Station, the question is how to make them better. Just because problems can be separate doesn’t mean that multiple problems cannot be addressed at once. Level boarding is an unqualified benefit for all travelers on all transit. There is never a reason to oppose it. It only makes things better with no downside.
If you want to send more trains to Manhattan there MUST be more tunnel. If you want the intercity trains to go faster than 135 there MUST be new catenary. Level boarding is very very nice. It is not necessary. It doesn’t have to be completed to complete other projects. And it’s more than 15 second penalty and I don’t know why the rich people in those distant suburbs put up with it…
Clambering up and down steps in a suburb doesn’t stop the train from pullling into Penn Station New York.
No, but it does make it slower getting there, both in the extra time spent at each station (15 sec per stop would save NJT commuters 3-4 min per trip, up to 6 min from the end of the Montclair or NJ Coast lines) and in not having to pad the schedule to account for stops that last a few minutes assisting disabled passengers.
The trains already pull into Penn Station, the question is how to make them better. Just because problems can be separate doesn’t mean that multiple problems cannot be addressed at once. Level boarding is an unqualified benefit for all travelers on all transit. There is never a reason to oppose it. It only makes things better with no downside.
Why don’t you recommend the Swampoodle Connection? It could be done completely at grade, with no bridges, and thus would likely be much cheaper. It would balance out SEPTA’s service, moving from 4 branches on the tracks going north from 30th St and 2 branches on the local tracks on the Reading side, to 3 branches on each. It would also mean that if service disruptions are required for the work, they would only disrupt the Norristown and Trenton SEPTA lines, rather than the busy Northeast Corridor. I provide a rationale for this in my blog post: How Philadelphia Could Avoid Grade Separating Three Interlockings, which I will summarize here. The conflict an at grade interlocking would cause isn’t a big problem because the at-grade connection between the Norristown line and the Reading Main Line is so close to the swampoodle connection location that they could be treated as one junction for scheduling purposes. If Philadelphia changes the way trains run on the main line so that the tracks run, from east to west, southbound northbound southbound northbound, instead of the current southbound southbound northbound northbound, then all SEPTA schedulers would have to do to resolve conflict at these two interlockings is to ensure that Norristown, Chestnut Hill East, and Chestnut Hill West trains meet trains from the same branch going in the other direction while traveling through the interlocking. At grade junctions reduce capacity, but there probably isn’t demand for more than 6tph on each of the three lines, for a total of 18 tph.
Can you timetable a train every 10 minutes on each of three lines, with flat junctions?
Oher railfans count the branches differently and claim the “unbalance” would get worse. The former PRR branch, Chestnut Hill West, flys over the former Reading. Which tells me there is a enough space for a flyover. Or enough space for a duck under if they want to get rid of the aerial acrobatics in the neighborhood. It’s SEPTA expect something to be considered when someone inspects the existing flyover and abruptly stops service over it because it’s falling apart.
I admit I haven’t worked out a timetable for SEPTA, and I’m not super well informed about timetabling. However:
The London Underground runs 24tph off peak through the flat junction at Baker Street, and I believe the same number at Edgware Road and north of Aldgate.
The circle line is now the second most reliable tube line so it is also very doable to do that reliably with modern signalling which cured the reliability issues.
Alex Cat3:
Alex, this is far harder than you imagine.
Scheduling opposite-direction running meets at a super-precise location (a couple hundred metres of turnouts and crossings) at a super-precise time (you’re talking sub-minute precision here — just route locking, signal reaction time, emergency brake rates, train clear detection, route unlocking take a couple minutes, without the train traversal time, and now you want to do this 20x/hour) is difficult.
All the headaches of hitting a precise spot at a precise time are compounded by doing it in two directions at once, effectively doubling (much more than, in practice) normal distance = speed / time errors.
Yes, some metros do manage this. It’s difficult! (Also, shorter metro trains and usually tighter/shorter (but slower…) turnouts generally mean faster interlocking clearing. And a couple routes, not several interlined.)
My perennial go-to example network, Switzerland, is full of crazy busy flat junctions and full of unfortunate single-track sections on heavy-traffic routes (while continuing to spend massively but strategically to remove them, after heroic timetabling and signalling measures have been exhausted), and I’m struggling to think of how SEPTA, of all the totally dysfunctional basket cases on the planet, might nail something nearly as fraught as the approaches to, say, Luzern HB, many many times an hour, hour after hour.
(I’m sure there are better examples in Japan, but I’m an ignoramus.)
Regardless, Not Easy, Not Remotely.
Switzerland is a better example anyway as the Swiss reliability figures are hit by the better operators across Europe.
C2C and Greater Anglia in Britain for example have 94% of trains arriving within 3 minutes which is better than Switzerland I believe?
And Chiltern and the Elizabeth line manage 91% which isn’t terrible.
The 142 St flat junction between the 2 and 3 supposedly can handle a full 30 tph with CBTC (12 tph 2, 12 tph 3, 6 tph 8 to Wakefield), according to the IRT Capacity Study. Of course, all but the busiest core mainline railways (e.x. RER, Crossrail) will not install CBTC.
I believe there is space in the interlocking for two pocket tracks to store 100m long SEPTA trains. One pocket track would be devoted to the Norristown Line, and one to the Chestnut Hill West line. The diagram below shows the proposed track layout, drawn over a satellite image of the existing interlocking. The color coding is as follows: green tracks are used by the Norristown line, Orange for the Chestnut Hill West line, blue by the Chestnut Hill East line, and purple by the fox chase and Glenside Combined lines.
This doesn’t make sense, not just for the station platform problem mentioned, but because you’re kneecapping reliability and capacity at 30th in a way that completely limits future expansion (because ZOO is fundamentally not solved). Swampoodle is not the only nor the best option for CHW because it was fundamentally a line designed to compete with, not complement existing suburban lines. The status quo of having CHW run directly to 30th while CHE runs to Jefferson is desirable for many people.
With my track plan below, CHW can avoid the main issue of Amtrak merges at LEHIGH. But in the long term, CHW is set up nicely for a BSL conversion for three main reasons: 1) Big infill site at Budd Bioworks, 2) TOD at Chelten Ave, 3) better connections to Chestnut Hill Loop for suburban bus feeders.
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1mkVoIHSHuzx2Xb9bTKlxO6pClnlWOuVo&ll=39.972216791646595%2C-75.19937406173288&z=15
As entertaining as the discussion about feed voltages and frequencies can be, I am puzzled by the lack of conversation about fares. Fundamentally, if you are a family of four going from Miami to Orlando, a $50 per person fare ($200 total) looks uncompetitive compared to driving ($50 total). This is why trains and planes have a tough time competing with cars. I think CAHSR and Brightline West need to publicly discuss fares. A $100 per person HSR fare is going to justify driving when the auto occupancy is above one.
Going from Miami to Orlando costs like $240 return with a small efficient car and probably more like $240 each way with an SUV.
Train companies can also give children discounted, or even free, fares in order to lure in the family market. In Germany travel for under 6s is free, and even 6-14 year old can travel free on ICEs if accompanied by an adult.
There is the motel room at around halfway and unless you want to eat of of a cooler for two days, meals. Tolls.
Silly me I was imagining Midwest or Northeast to Miami. Orlando isn’t $240 away from Miami. At Internal Revenue Service reimbursement rates it would be $150-ish.
Add in $120 for a hotel, and then double that for the return trip – flying is barely competitive vs driving for a couple, for a family you cannot afford to fly. (a family is traveling when the kids are off school and so don’t get discounted fares) That is before we account for bad weather – if you miss a connection a family won’t be able to find enough empty seats to get anywhere before their vacation is gone leaving them stuck in a hub airport city far from where they want to be. One more reason that trains should not do airline style seat management – if the trains are not full they can get you on the next one.
Yet millions of people do it every year. Many of them families. They even have package deals where you spend a few days at Disney and then take a short cruise. Or just do Disney. Or just take a cruise. On major airlines or off brand airlines.
I think Brightline West works better to Vegas since there are a lot more solo and couples travelers there, as opposed to a more family based trip generator of the Orlando amusement parks.
Shell Interlocking/CP 216 Improvement | Would it be viable to reduce the Main Line track between Pelham and New Rochelle from four to two tracks, reconfigure New Rochelle station with two island platform (one for GC trains and one for Penn trains), and construct a flyover in the area between Petersville Rd overpass and Larchmont Station?
https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1LSqM-M2jRMHviANf-oEW5WJVL3uSQgo&usp=sharing