Amtrak Doubles Down on False Claims About Regional Rail History to Attack Through-Running
Amtrak just released its report a week and a half ago, saying that Penn Expansion, the project to condemn the Manhattan block south of Penn Station to add new tracks, is necessary for new capacity. I criticized the Regional Plan Association presentation made in August in advance of the report for its wanton ignorance of best practices, covering both the history of commuter rail through-running in Europe and the issue of dwell times at Penn Station. The report surprised me by making even more elementary mistakes on the reality of how through-running works here than the ones made in the RPA presentation. The question of dwell times is even more important, but the Effective Transit Alliance is about to release a report addressing it, with simulations made by other members; this post, in contrast, goes over what I saw in the report myself, which is large enough errors about how through-running works that of course the report sandbags that alternative, less out of malice and more out of not knowing how it works.
Note on Penn Expansion and through-running
In the regional discourse on Penn Station, it is usually held that the existing station definitely does not have the capacity to add 24 peak trains per hour from New Jersey once the Gateway tunnel opens, unless there is through-running; thus, at least one of through-running and Penn Expansion is required. This common belief is incorrect, and we will get into some dwell time simulations at ETA.
That said, the two options can still be held as alternatives to each other, even as what I think is likeliest given agency turf battles and the extreme cost of Penn Expansion (currently $16 billion) is that neither will happen. This is for the following reasons:
- Through-running is good in and of itself, and any positive proposal for commuter rail improvements in the region should incorporate it where possible, even if no dedicated capital investment such as a Penn Station-Grand Central connection occurs. This includes the Northeast Corridor high-speed rail project, which aims to optimize everything to speed up intercity and commuter trains at minimal capital cost.
- The institutional obstacles to through-running are mainly extreme incuriosity about rest-of-world practices, which are generations ahead of American ones in mainline rail; the same extreme incuriosity also leads to the belief that Penn Expansion is necessary.
- While it is possible to turn 48 New Jersey Transit trains per hour within the current footprint of Penn Station with no loss of LIRR capacity, there are real constraints on turnaround times, and it is easier to institute through-running.
The errors in the history
The errors in the history are not new to me. My August post criticizing the RPA still stands. I was hoping that Amtrak and the consultants that prepared the report (WSP, FX) would not stick to the false claim that it took 46 years to build the Munich S-Bahn rather than seven, but they did. The purpose of this falsehood in the report is to make through-running look like a multigenerational effort, compared with the supposedly easier effort of digging up an entire Manhattan block for a project that can’t be completed until the mid-2030s at the earliest.
In truth, as the August post explains, the real difficulties with through-running in the comparison cases offered in the report, Paris and Munich, were with digging the tunnels. This was done fairly quickly, taking seven years in Munich and 16 in Paris; in Paris, the alignment, comprising 17 km of tunnel for the RER A and 2 for the initial section of the RER B, was not even finalized when construction began. The equivalent of these projects in New York is the Gateway tunnel itself, at far higher cost. The surface improvements required to make this work were completed simultaneously and inexpensively; most of the ones required for New York are already on the drawing board of New Jersey Transit, budgeted in the hundreds of millions rather than billions, and will be completed before the tunnel opens unless the federal government decides to defund the agency over several successive administrations.
The errors in present operations
The report lists, on printed-pp. 40-41, some characteristics of the through-running systems used in Paris, Munich, and London. Based on those characteristics, it concludes it is not possible to set up an equivalent system at Penn Station without adding tracks or rebuilding the entire track level with more platforms. Unfortunately for the reputation of the writers of the report, and fortunately for the taxpayers of New York and New Jersey, those characteristics include major mistakes. There’s little chance anyone in the loop understands the RER, any S-Bahn worth the name, or even Crossrail and Thameslink; some of the errors are obviously false to anyone who regularly commuted on any of these systems. Thus, they are incapable of adjusting the operations to the specifics of Penn Station and Gateway.
Timetabling
A key feature of S-Bahn systems is that the trains run on a schedule. Passengers riding on the central trunk do not look at the timetable, but passengers riding to a branch do. I memorized the 15-minute off-peak Takt on the RER B when I took it to IHES in late 2016, and the train was generally on time or only slightly delayed, never so delayed that it was early. Munich-area suburbanites memorize the 20-minute Takt on their S-Bahn branch line. Some Thameslink branches drop to half-hourly frequency, and passengers time themselves to the schedule while operators and dispatchers aim to make the schedule.
And yet, the report repeatedly claims that these systems run on headway management. The first claim, on p. 40, is ambiguous, but the second, on the table on p. 41, explicitly contrasts “headway-based” with “timetable-based” service and says that Crossrail, the RER, and the Munich S-Bahn are headway-based. In fact, none of them is.
This error is significant in two ways. First, timetable-based operations explain why S-Bahn systems are capable of what they do but not of what some metros do. The Munich S-Bahn peaks at 30 trains per hour, with one-of-a-kind signaling; major metros peak at 42 trains per hour with driverless operations, and some small operations with short trains (like Brescia) achieve even more. The difference is that commuter rail systems are not captive metro trains on which every train makes the same stops, with no differentiation among successive trains on the same line; metro lines that do branch, such as M7 and M13 in Paris, are still far less complex than even relatively simple and metro-like lines like the RER A and B. The main exception among world metros is the New York City Subway, which, due to its extensive interlining, must run as a scheduled railroad, benchmarking its on-time performance (OTP) to the schedule rather than to intervals between trains. In the 2000s and 10s, New York City Transit tried to transition away from end-station OTP and toward a metric that tried to approximate even intervals, called Wait Assessment (WA); a document leaked to Dan Rivoli and me went over how this was a failure, leading to even worse delays and train slowdowns, as managers would make the dispatchers hold trains if the trains behind them were delayed.
The second consequence of the error is that the report does not get how crucial timetable-infrastructure planning integration is on mainline rail. The Munich S-Bahn has outer branches that are single-track and some that share tracks with freight, regional, and intercity trains. The 30 tph trunk does no such thing and could not do such thing, but the branches do, because the trains run on a fixed timetable, and thus it is possible to have a mix of single and double track on some sporadic sections. The Zurich S-Bahn even runs trains every 15 minutes at rush hour on a short single-track section of the Right Bank of Lake Zurich Line. Recognizing what well-scheduled commuter trains can and can’t do influences infrastructure planning on the entire surface section, including rail-on-rail grade separations, extra tracks, yard expansions, and other projects that collectively make the difference between a rail network and crayon.
Separation between through- and terminating lines
Through-running systems vary in how much track sharing there is with the rest of the mainline rail network. As far as I can tell, there is always some; near-complete separation is provided on the RER A, but its Cergy branch also hosts Transilien trains running to Gare Saint-Lazare at rush hour, and the Berlin and Hamburg S-Bahn systems have very little track-sharing as well. Other systems have more extensive track sharing, including Thameslink, the RER C and D, and the Zurich S-Bahn; the RER E and the Munich S-Bahn are intermediate in level of separation between those two poles.
It is remarkable that, while the RER A, B, and E all feature new underground terminals for dedicated lines, the situation of the RER C and D is different. The RER C uses the preexisting Gare d’Austerlitz, and has taken over every commuter line in its network; the through-connection between Gare d’Orsay and Gare d’Invalides involved reconstructing the stations, but then everything was connected to it. The RER D uses prebuilt underground stations at Gare du Nord, Les Halles, and Gare de Lyon, but then takes over nearly all lines in the Gare de Lyon network, with the outermost station, Malesherbes, not even located in Ile-de-France. Thameslink uses through-infrastructure built in the 1860s and runs as far as Petersborough, 123 km from King’s Cross on the East Coast Main Line, and Brighton, the terminus of its line, 81 km from London Bridge.
And yet, the report’s authors seem convinced the only way to do through-running is with a handful of branches providing only local service, running to new platforms built separately from the intercity terminal; they’re even under the impression the RER D is like this, which it is not. There’s even a map on p. 45, suggesting a regional metro system running as far as Hicksville, Long Beach, Far Rockaway, JFK via the Rockaway Cutoff and Queenslink, Port Washington, Port Chester, Hackensack, Paterson, Summit, Plainfield, New Brunswick, and the Amboys. This is a severe misunderstanding of how such systems work: they do not arbitrarily slice lines this way into inner and outer zones, unless there is a large mismatch in demand, and then they often just cut the outer end to a shuttle with a forced transfer, as is the case for some branches in suburban Berlin connecting to S-Bahn outer ends. Among the above-mentioned outer ends, the only one where this exception holds is Summit, where the Gladstone Branch could be cut to a shuttle or to trains only running to Hoboken – but then trains on the main line to Morristown and Dover have no reason to be treated differently from trains to Summit.
Were the report’s authors more informed about just the specific lines they look at on p. 41, let alone the broader systems, they’d know that separation between inner and outer services is contingent on specifics of track infrastructure, including whether there are four-track lines with neat separation into terminating express trains and through locals. But even if the answer is yes, as at Gare de Lyon and Gare d’Austerlitz, infrastructure planners will attempt to shoehorn whatever they can into the system, just starting from the more important inner lines, which generate more all-day demand. There don’t even need to be terminating regional trains; the Austerlitz system doesn’t, and the Gare de Lyon and Gare de l’Est systems only do due to trunk capacity limitations. In that case, they’d recognize that there is no need to have two commuter rail systems, one through-running and one not. Penn Station’s infrastructure already lends itself to allowing through-running on anything entering via the existing North River Tunnels.
Branching
S-Bahn systems usually try to keep the branch-to-trunk ratio to a manageable number. Usually, more metro-like systems have fewer branches: Crossrail has two on each side, the RER A has two to the east and three to the west, the Berlin Stadtbahn has two to the west plus short-turns and five to the east, the Berlin North-South Tunnel has three on each side. The Munich S-Bahn has five to the east and nine to the west, and the combined RER B and D system has three to the north and five to the south, but the latter has more service patterns, including local and express trains on the branches. Zurich has so much interlining that it’s not useful to count branches, and better to count services: there are 21 S-numbered routes serving Hauptbahnhof, of which 13 run through one of the two tunnels, as do some intercity trains.
If there are too many branches, then they’re usually organized as sub-branches – for example, Munich has seven numbered routes through the central tunnel, of which two have two sub-branches each splitting far out. Zurich has fewer than 13 branches on each side, but rather there are several services using each line, with inconsistent through-pairing – for example, the three services going to the airport, S2, S24, and S16, respectively run through to two separate branches of the Left Bank Line and to the Right Bank Line.
The table on p. 41 gets the branch count mildly wrong, but the significant is less in what it gets wrong about Europe and more in what it gets wrong about New York. A post-Gateway service plan is one in which New Jersey has 12 branches, but some can be viewed as sub-branches (like Gladstone and the Morristown Line), and more to the point, there are going to be two trunk lines. The current plan at New Jersey Transit is to assign the Northeast Corridor and North Jersey Coast Lines to the North River Tunnels alongside Amtrak, which is technically two branches but realistically four or even five service patterns, and the Morris and Essex, Montclair-Boonton, and Raritan Valley Lines to Gateway, which is four branches but could even be pruned to three with M&E divided into two sub-branches. The Erie lines have no way of getting to Penn Station today; to get them there requires the construction of the Bergen Loop at Secaucus, with an estimated budget of $1.3 billion in 2020, comparable to the total cost of all yet-unfunded required surface improvements in New Jersey for non-Erie service combined.
If the study authors were more comfortably knowledgeable of European S-Bahn systems, they’d know that multi-line systems, while uncommon, do exist, and divide branches in a similar way. The multiline systems (Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Zurich, and London) all have some reverse-branching, in a similar manner to how New York is soon going to have the New Haven Line reverse-branch to Penn Station and Grand Central. The NJT plan is solid and stands to lead to a manageable branch-to-trunk ratio, even with every single line going to Penn Station via the existing tunnel running through.
The consequence of the errors
The lack of familiarity with through-running commuter rail is evident in how the report talks about this technology. It is intimately related to the fact that the way investment should be done is different from what American railroaders are used to. For one, there needs to be much tighter integration between infrastructure and scheduling. For two, the scheduling needs to be massively simplified, with fewer operating patterns per line – usually one, occasionally two, never 13 as on the New Haven Line today. The same ignorance that leads Amtrak and its consultants to assert that the S-Bahn runs on headway management rather than a fixed timetable also leads them not to even know how through-running commuter rail networks plan out their routes and services.
From my position of greater familiarity as both a regular user and a researcher, I can point out that the required investments to make through-running happen in New York are entirely in line with the cheap surface projects done in the comparison cases. New rolling stock is required, with the ability to run on the different voltages of the three networks – but multi-voltage commuter rolling stock is the norm wherever multiple legacy electrification systems coexist, including Paris, London, and Hamburg. Some extensions of electrification and high platform conversions are required – but these are not expensive, and the latter is already partly funded at reasonable unit costs. Some rail-on-rail grade separations are required – but those are already costed and very likely to be funded, potentially out of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Penn Station would be used as the universal station in this schema, without the separation into a surface terminal and a through- underground station seen in Munich and Paris. But then, Paris and Munich don’t even universally have this separation themselves; Ostbahnhof was reconstructed for the S-Bahn but is still a single station, and the same is true of the RER C. In a way, Penn Station already is the underground through-station, built generations before the modern S-Bahn concept, complementing and largely replacing surface terminals like Hoboken and Long Island City because those are not in Manhattan.
None of this is hard; the hard part is the Gateway tunnel and that’s already fully funded and under construction. But it does require understanding that the United States is so many decades behind best practices that none of what American railroaders think they know is at all relevant. It’s obligatory to understand how the systems that work, in Europe and rich Asia, do, because otherwise, it’s like expecting someone who has never learned to count beyond 10 to prove mathematical theorems. The people who wrote this report clearly don’t have this understanding, and don’t care to get it, which is why what they write is not worth the electrons that make up the PDF.
Pedestrian Observations 
The peak arrivals into London Marylebone pretty much all have a different stopping pattern and the overall reliability on the line is typically very high with 99% within 15 minutes, 91% within 3 minutes and 82% within 1 minute. And that is with diesel trains.
https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/search/simple/gb-nr:MYB/2024-10-10/0800/arrivals
I found it “interesting” how the report also sand bagged the “Below Penn Mined Tunnel Alterative” to Penn South — not that as far as I could see in looking through the report, that any comparison was made between Penn South the “Through Running” and “Mined Tunnels” alternatives.
From the report:
“In summary, constructability of the mined tunnels and enlarged caverns is considered feasible; however, additional real estate outside the footprint of Penn Station would be required to support these operations. This concept therefore fails the constructability criterion, because it is not possible to confine all construction impacts within the existing station footprint.”
What? 😦
Well, uh, yes, I can clearly see that the best alterative is rather then acquiring some land outside the existing Penn Station footprint is to instead acquire and level several blocks of Midtown Manhattan outside the Penn Station footprint to build new tracks and platforms at the existing station level, thereby maximizing the construction impact to the surrounding city.
Looking at Penn Station, one can clearly see several large parking garages, a FlixBus surface lot, and the one-story retail and open plaza at both ends of the One Penn Plaza tower north of the station where mining operations could be supported by surface access, and the mechanical and circulation spaces then built, with likely new high-rise buildings ontop, all without having to acquire and demolish apartments buildings (with their surface retail), a historic Catholic church, several Art Deco office buildings and hotels, and the historic Penn Station Service Building.
Diagram I made showing available low-density properties surrounding Penn Station.
https://x.com/BenjaminTuron/status/1845426468811047011/photo/1
The S2 / S8 / S24 situation in Zürich is interesting because S2 and S8 are through running in Zürich HB, and S24 is not, it reverses in HB to get to Oerlikon via Wipkingen (not this year because of construction), so the time from HB to Oerlikon is different.
Amtrak have no incentive to care about practices of any kind. Even MTA only has limited incentives to do so. Their only incentive is to get as large a budget as they possibly can. MTA and Amtrak want to create an empire that gives them power. They want to be ‘too big to fail.’ Some individuals within transit systems and government may care about practices, but in the US, competition is what drives the adoption of practices, best or otherwise. The US isn’t France with a unitary parliamentary government that can actually be held accountable for its actions by voters who use public services. The US is like the EU, a system of distinct societies and cultures held together administratively in which political accountability is not really possible. Individual states might be able to exercise some degree of accountability over a single transit authority creating some modest pressure to care about practices. But in the US as a whole, things only work when private interests are powerful. The only role for government is sustain that competitive dynamic through regulation; sometimes substantial and active regulation; but not ownership and direct control. The practices will come out of the competitive process. The US and individual European nations are apples and oranges. Knowledge of one doesn’t translate to the other.
“But it does require understanding that the United States is so many decades behind best practices that none of what American railroaders think they know is at all relevant.“
NJT seems to be something of an outlier? They planned the surface improvements to go with the tunnel. They have the RiverLine, the closest American approximation to a modern European branch line. I’m not trying to state too strong a case, but where the other agencies are impressively antitalented — if the bar is left lying on the floor, they manage to trip on it anyway (as shown by the article) — NJT has some positive amount of sense, and they can successfully step over said (acknowledgedly low) bar.
Also good to boost a domestic strong performer if you can.
Yeah, NJT has some good surface transit plans, but they’re not exactly based on timetable integration, and at least two of them can be descoped (the Summit yard expansion can be shrunk, and the new bridge over the river to Newark Broad doesn’t need to be there). The plans are good mostly because the situation in Jersey is such that the value of precise timetable integration is reduced – the trunk lines are so busy that rail-on-rail grade separations (i.e. Hunter) are unavoidable, it’s just that NJT is planning Hunter whereas the MTA seems uninterested in doing the same in New Rochelle.
Summit is …. at the summit…. There might be something hiding in there to be able to send trains from Kearny/Meadowlands yards when the next storm surge is coming. And if they are running 40 trains an hour they need someplace to put them overnight. I seem to remember that certain rail advocates bitch, whine, moan and complain that the commuter operators don’t store enough trains at the end of the line.
Moving it to Cleveland would be quite unhelpful. I’m going to assume you think it doesn’t need to be replaced. It was built in 1903. Apparently things last forever in Railfanlandia. Here on Planet Earth they need to be replaced eventually. Arithmetic rears it’s ugly head again. 2024 minus 1903 equal 121. It’s quite reasonable to replace a bridge that old.
The Canton Viaduct is even older.
Chunks of granite age at much slower rate than steel. I suppose they could just wait for it to rust through, fall down and bustitute for the decade or so it would take to rebuild it.
….. ask google the right question. They’ve been plotting replacing it for decades.
https://www.njtransit.com/press-releases/newark-drawbridge-engineering-study-approved
They don’t need to simulate anything. Metro North and NJTransit ran trains between New Haven and Trenton. With a ten minute dwell in Penn Station. Amtrak and NJTransit change engineers all day everyday – the trains going to and from Sunnyside are operated by Amtrak employees. It’s likely the Amtrak ones are too. Rumor on places like railroad.net is that they exchange crews in four minutes.
Yeah, and 10 is weak-ass; the limiting factor is the narrow platforms with insufficient egress, and even they clear the stragglers in five (and honestly, the train can be driving off before the last straggler goes upstairs).
Which subway/metro systems have the train loiter until the platform is clear?
The limiting factor probably is that it’s on a Sunday when they are running a single track schedule.
Arithmetic keeps rearing it’s ugly ugly head. 40 trains an hour in each direction going to ten island platforms with 20 tracks is 15 minutes from the time it enters the interlocking on one side to the time it departs the interlocking on the other side. It’s not going to take 15 minutes to get from Sixth Ave to Tenth Ave. Even with the doors open for 60 or even 90 seconds.
Wot?! Non, non, c’est pas possible … I have been hit over the head by the baseball bats of numerous highly credentialed, well, highly opinionated, railfans for suggesting such a thing. We all know that double-deck transit is death to transit, non? Non.
Arithmetic is hard. It is also a cruel cruel mistress. Some day far in the future, when there are 40 trains an hour from New Jersey to Manhattan, if you send six of them throoooooooooooough to the New Haven line that leaves 34 to go someplace else. If you send 30 of them to Long Island that leaves 4 to go to Grand Central. Those four trains will be very very crowded. Assuming people are willing to wait around for them. And the vast majority of them will be changing trains. If you send more of them to Grand Central they can’t go to Long Island.
People who want to go to the East Side don’t need to loiter around in Penn Station, on the West Side. Send East Side Access trains to Newark. It can operate like PATH…. Squint at Penn Station Newark there is future proofing.
6 tph NJ NEC express-Stamford local
6 tph NJ NEC local-Port Washington
6 tph NJCL local-Port Washington
6 tph intercity
(“Port Washington” mostly means Great Neck or even Flushing; only 3-4 tph get to go to Port Washington most likely)
M&E, Montclair-Boonton, RVL use the new tunnel and don’t through-run unless there’s a Penn-Grand Central tunnel, but if there is such a tunnel, they all through-run, Metro-North terminals undecided.
Then that’s not running through is it? Arithmetic is a really cruel mistress in other ways. Like most of the LIRR passengers pass through Jamaica. …. Really you want to make a living doing this, you have to put down the crayons and use a pencil.
As a casual reader, I found this post incredibly hard to follow. I know it must feel tedious to start at the beginning, but I need some introduction here to understand the basics before being able to follow the intricate disputes.
Watch RMTransit’s explainer videos on the relevant cities, look at the last post on this subject, the transit costs project NYC case study, and the through running website. I think that should be enough, but not 100% sure.
Not really. I’ve watched those videos, read the study and so on. However I was 3 the last time I was in NYC and so I don’t have a feel for the city. I know high level things, but the city is large and has a lot of people. Both of those mean it isn’t possible to make a simple transit system – I suspect even locals will get something wrong if you gave them a quiz. That said, having read Alon’s blog and others (which often contradict each other) for a few years I’m starting to get things and why some are good/bad.
Locals everywhere tend not to explore their transit systems much — they use what they need for the most part. I really doubt a typical New Yorker will get this post either. I think being in a location for a couple weeks as a transit enthusiast is actually better experience than living in a place and taking the same line(s) everyday in some ways (more breadth, less depth).
As for the system not being simple — sure, but the NYC transit system could sure stand to be substantially simpler. Through running would help with that, much like Paris.
What would make changing the destination of the eastbound train from “Penn Station New York” to “Speonk” made it simpler? Or the destination of the west bound train from “Penn Station” to “Bay Head”.
As for the locals getting things wrong…. that’s what maps for. And trip planners that are accessible from the computer welded to you hand.
Having taken the RER B past Gare du Nord and the Marmaray past Sirkeci, it was way easier with through running. Much shorter stops at Gare du Nord or Chatelet or Sirkeci vs a transfer at Penn; no need to look at the departures board and run to a platform; no need to transfer to a metro line to continue in the same direction.
When you are on an RER R train and want to go to Jamaica it works out. Almost any place else, RER G for instance, it won’t because there isn’t going to be lot of route sharing beyond a stop or two outside of Manhattan. Unless you follow Alon’s plan which sends everything to Flushing and you won’t be able to get to Jamaica without changing trains.
The New York system is the most complex one I have used.
Perhaps Tokyo is more complex.
The beneficiaries of through running are mainly the reasonably populous (couple hundred thousand IIRC) trans Manhattan commuters, tourists (including ball games — cut one transfer off NYC/LI to Meadowlands, NJ to Mets, and maybe NJ to Yankees and Bronx/CT to Meadowlands with a Penn-GC connection), and New Yorkers going to EWR + Jersey going to JFK. Also, even if you need to transfer with through running it becomes easier with fewer, larger platforms.
No there aren’t. There are a few hundred thousand that commute to Manhattan. People outside of Manhattan are not STUPID. When they go looking for a job they don’t look in places far away from home. They look places that are easy to get to quickly. Which is why a few hundred thousand of them work in Manhattan not Jamaica.
I’ll bite. I’m on the line that runs local from Summit New Jersey to Great Neck Long Island. I want to go to a Yankee game and my neighbor wants to go to JFK. I’m going to assume to catch one of twice weekly flights to Nowheristan because people are not STUPID and they fly out of the nearby airport unless there is a good reason not to. Both of us have to change trains. To different ones.
Or I’ll bite. I’m on the line that runs express between New Haven and Trenton because railfans think there is great demand for Bridgeport to Newark. I can’t get to JFK, Citifield, Yankee Stadium or Larchmont because the train uses the express tracks in Larchmont and doesn’t stop there. Shall I go on? I will. Metro North someday perhaps maybe wants to run Hudson Line trains to Penn Station along the same route Amtrak uses to get from the Hudson Line to Penn Station. Why, except perhaps in some railfan’s especially frothy fantasy would they run Hudson Line trains through Grand Central to Penn station? Since they won’t that screws up getting from New Jersey to Yankee Stadium. And since the Metro North Station is a reallllly long hike from the stadium taking the A train from Penn Station and changing to a D train would be faster.
Pesky pesky arithmetic rears it’s ugly head. If you want to run trains from New Jersey to Long Island they can’t go to Grand Central too. They can’t go over the Hell Gate Bridge and to Long Island either. Metro North is proposing to run six trains an hour from the New Haven Line to Penn Station. And someday the LIRR wants to run 30 an hour to Penn Station. That’s 36. NJTransit wants to someday perhaps run 40. 40 minus 36 is 4. Taking the subway would be faster than waiting a quarter of an hour for the next train to Grand Central. I’m not sure spending billions and billions for four trains an hour is worth it.
Re: 200k — I count 190k on Alon’s post here: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2022/11/24/who-through-running-is-for/
But you’re welcome to post an alternative source.
As for taking alternate airports, yes this is obviously a thing, especially for people who have rewards loyalty (for personal or corporate reasons) or who are price sensitive. And again, through running should come with a rationalisation of the currently ridiculous transfer situation at Penn (and GC for that matter).
How does running express have to do with New Haven to JFK/Citi/Yankee? Obviously you still have to transfer at GC for those. NY does need an orbital line, but that’s not the topic at hand.
I think Metro North Hudson line to Penn is a dumb idea compared to Penn-GC, but I’m not in charge of Metro North.
Re: Yankee, Google says it’s a 6min walk from the Metro North station on the Hudson line and 15 from Melrose, not bad really.
I also don’t think how many trains the railroads want to run to Penn is an important consideration for through running, as it would be a completely different paradigm.
Reality. Just because the arrows swoop across Manhattan doesn’t mean people travel that way. Or that they live near a train station. Or that their job is near one. For instance the masochists who commute between Connecticut and New Jersey likely drive across the Tappan Zee Bridge.
If my employer is sending me someplace I want to know which limousine company will be calling for directions to my house. Limo rides from New Jersey to JFK or from Long Island to EWR are expensive.
Something sinks in. Transferring at Grand Central isn’t running through, is it?
Metro North runs trains from the Harlem and New Haven lines to Yankee Stadium. Not that suburbanites are going walk through Melrose after a event. Or before one for that matter. 6 minute walk from the Metro North station is a longer walk than talking the A train to change for a D train – on the same platform moments after the A train departs. And using the subway would likely be faster.
It’s the most important one. Running trains through Penn Station involves having them ARRIVE at Penn Station so they can depart.
If running through Penn Station from the New Haven line is such a fantabulous idea why isn’t one for the Hudson? Manhattan is the country’s largest central business district. If someone is on a train to Penn Station that means they are NOT on a train to Grand Central. It also means they are NOT on the shuttle to get to the west side. Which means someone else can get on a train to/from Grand Central whether it’s a Metro North train or a subway train.
Arithmetic is cruel cruel mistress. If Metro North ran the Hudson line trains through to the New Haven line that would be less trains running to New Jersey. Or Long Island. The odds of getting a one seat ride from New Jersey to Citifield are getting smaller and smaller. Alternately run the Hudson Line trains through to Long Island frugal masochists could get a one seat ride to Jamaica and their cheap flight at JFK. It still mean less trains from New Jersey to Long Island. Pesky pesky arithmetic. And even for the lucky people who have a one seat ride from New Jersey to Citifield it means they don’t have a one seat ride to UBS or Jamaica and those alluring trips possible from JFK.
Okay, nice source.
I’d rather pay for a nice meal using a per diem than pay for a limo, but that’s your prerogative I suppose.
Obviously not, and through running from the Bronx/CT to LI would be good but it’s not in the context of this discussion. Never did I say that Penn through running or Penn-GC would enable one seat CT-LI trips. That said, a transfer at Sunnyside yard or therabouts would be nice for some trips.
I’d rather walk for 6 minutes than walk for 2 minutes and have to transfer 1-2 additional times, but that’s up to you. And how on earth would the A to D be faster than the ride from GC (or Penn with Penn-GC) to Yankee?
Nice reductio ad absurdum. Of course trains are important, but a through running train is different in capacity characteristics than a terminating train.
Because Penn-GC would handle all of Metro North, while Hudson line to Penn is only for the Hudson line and misses some important stops (Yankee for one) while adding a less useful Upper West Side station next to the Hudson.
Ugh, this is why NYC has too many reverse branches. This line of thinking is a huge waste of resources.
Never did I say that through running means a high tph between anywhere and anywhere else.
And yours is swoops on a map. It doesn’t say if they use trains. Or a bus. Or bicycle or walk or throw a kayak in Long Island sound and paddle to New Jersey. Or Connecticut. Or that they go through Manhattan. People can get across places without going through Manhattan. Mine is using I-287 to get from New Jersey to Connecticut without going anywhere near Manhattan or from New Jersey on I-78 to get to Brooklyn and the rest of Long Island, without going anywhere near Manhattan. I know of people who use the ferry between Connecticut and Long Island, there is more than one on different routes, to avoid traffic in Queens and the Bronx.
The Internal Revenue Service frowns on that. I don’t know or care what the penalties are for expense account hanky panky.
It would be nice if I had a personal helicopter to ferry me over the traffic too.
They can do the same thing today without building anything anywhere. By changing trains in Penn Station New York.
Because here on Planet Earth it takes time to get from Penn Station to Grand Central and it takes time to get from Grand Central to Yankee Stadium. And it takes time to take a long long walk from Metro North station to the stadium. The subway stop is right at it.
No it wouldn’t. Arithmetic rears it’s ugly ugly head in many many ways. If you send all of the Metro North trains to New Jersey they have to go back. If they are going back they can’t go to Long Island too. Or to cut and paste it in AGAIN. If you want to run trains from New Jersey to Long Island they can’t go to Grand Central too. They can’t go over the Hell Gate Bridge and to Long Island either. Metro North is proposing to run six trains an hour from the New Haven Line to Penn Station. And someday the LIRR wants to run 30 an hour to Penn Station. That’s 36. NJTransit wants to someday perhaps run 40. 40 minus 36 is 4. Though considering as a geometry problem might work too. You can’t make triangles with one line. Or wye shapes depending on how you want to look at it.
I don’t know why railfans think all of the trains have to go to all of the stations and stop at all of the platforms. People along the Hudson line, ( and the rest of the world where it’s not the Toonerville trolley meeting every train ) can look at this wondrous thing called a schedule or a timetable and select the train that does stop at Yankee Stadium. Or use the trip planner. Or the telephone number. or ask someone. …. Just like they do now to get on the train that makes local stops and not the express train that doesn’t stop anywhere in the Bronx. Just like they cope, today, right now, this minute, without getting on the Amtrak train and expecting it to go to Grand Central or stop in the Bronx.
And you have no friggin’ clue about the scale. Getting people out of Grand Central is means other people can get there.
It’s already high frequency. I thought the magical mystical through running was going to encourage all sorts of people to take long trips across the metro area to shop in the same chain stores that are closer to home. Which would mean even more passengers.
>And yours is swoops on a map
Ah, your vibes are better than my vibes. I see.
>The Internal Revenue Service frowns on that. I don’t know or care what the penalties are for expense account hanky panky.
Obviously you use the per diem while traveling.
>changing trains in Penn Station
Yes, because spending another half hour plus to change in Penn instead of Sunnyside is a great use of time.
>time to get from Penn Station to Grand Central and it takes time to get from Grand Central to Yankee Stadium
The context of this is Penn-GC through running as established long ago. Obviously Penn-42nd shuttle-Metro North is same number of transfers as Penn-A-D.
>all of the stations and stop at all of the platforms
Never said that. Reread.
>And you have no friggin’ clue about the scale. Getting people out of Grand Central is means other people can get there.
Metro North runs about 10 tph from 7-9am, compare with RER A at about 25 tph in the same interval. That leaves plenty of capacity.
>I thought the magical mystical through running was going to encourage all sorts of people to take long trips across the metro area to shop in the same chain stores that are closer to home.
Nice strawman.
The real question isn’t about what people will do today, but what they will be doing in 20 years after the changes have been around long enough to make changes in their behavior. Right now people know how to get places they are going, you wouldn’t take a job (without moving) in places that are hard to get to now that will be easy with through running. If there are more trains because of through running you would consider a job even though you sometimes have to go home mid day to take care of a sick kid. I can come up with dozens of other situations where today that someone wouldn’t find the train a useful option, but after through running it is. All of those will take a few decades though as current habits are already in place and so a change won’t make much difference. (other than if there is a negative effect on someone who suddenly can’t ride)
Mine is actually having used the Tappan Zee Bridge to get from New Jersey to Connecticut. For work. Or the Verrazano Narrows. For work. Along with all the other people who use them. For work. Which is why the traffic is slow during rush hour. People going to… work..
I don’t know or care how much your government lets you fuck around with your expenses. The Internal Revenue Service frowns on it. Interest, fines, jail if it’s especially egregious.
It doesn’t take half an hour to change trains. If the train is in Sunnyside how does it get to Yankee Stadium? The magical mystical quick transfer in Sunnyside assumes the origin train is followed by the destination train. The chances of that happening are low, considering the amount of branches on either side of Manhattan. And it assumes that the train stop in Sunnyside. They aren’t all going to stop in Sunnyside.
There are approximately 40 an hour between Grand Central and 125th Street. In other words they can’t run more. Unless you want to start canceling standing room only Harlem line trains. Or New Haven line trains. Life is a bitch when you have to consider more than one thing and bring out the third crayon.
They shouldn’t get four more trains an hour because it offends your sensibilities? They shouldn’t get shorter trips, to the West Side, because you find being able to get more than one place confusing? 40 percent more service and shorter one or two seat rides instead longer two or three seat…. well it’s rush hour they are likely on standing room only trains….. Nope they should have longer trips because you find it unaesthetic.
I realize Yonkers isn’t, insert a long plaintive sigh here, Sunnyside, they could do things like have cross platform transfers in Yonkers between the express from Poughkeepsie to Grand Central and the local from Croton to Penn Station !! !! !! Imagine that people exchanging places on trains so the capacity gets spread around.
The MTA publishes schedules. I’ve looked at them. You are imagining things…… And if the train is going to, insert a long plaintive sigh here, Sunnyside, it can’t go Yankee Stadium. If it’s going to Yankee Stadium it can’t go to Sunnyside.
Yes, and probably more people would commute trans Manhattan if it were easier, i.e. not requiring a long traffic bound car journey or multiple transfers.
Hm, I figured that was included when you mentioned a limo. Looking at the US IRS website, yes no travel expenses are included in per diem. As for getting your work to cover a limo, I doubt any of my past employers would.
It takes 10min from GC to Harlem 125th, and 20min from GC to Jamaica. I figure Sunnyside would be about in between. So Sunnyside to GC, and then GC back to Sunnyside is 30min.
Not all trains will go to Yankee Stadium, of course. Or Sunnyside.
So what I did is look on the timetables for trains that don’t stop at Harlem 125th, then add those to the trains on the app when I look up Harlem 125th to GC on a weekday morning. If there’s a better way other than counting all the trains individually let me know. As for 40 being the maximum, it looks like Metro North has 4+ tracks approaching GC, whereas RER A has 2 tracks in Châtelet. That should be a 50tph maximum using RER A as an example.
Weren’t you just saying that people shouldn’t get shorter, easier trips from NJ to Yankee? Anyways, the West Side station would be bad because half the walk and bike shed is in the Hudson.
Sure they could, it’s a decent idea. I just don’t think it makes up for the downsides of Hudson line to Penn.
Both of them. When the car is in the shop. Because commuting from suburb to suburb rarely if ever involves living at the train station and working at one. Which is why there is rush hour traffic other places than Manhattan. Even with the magical mystical through running if I’m on the line that runs from Trenton to New Haven and my job is on the line from Suffern to Long Beach I still have to change trains. You are imagining things that won’t exist for the vast majority of masochists who commute long distance across the metro area.
Though why I or anyone else would be stupid enough to pass up good jobs closer to home or better paying jobs in Manhattan is a very very good question that railfans never answer.
They do all the time because it’s a business trip and the employee isn’t making money sitting on bus to the train to get to the people mover to the terminal. Assuming there is a bus. If it’s more than an overnight trip the limo can be cheaper than mileage and parking. The point of business trips is to make money. Which is why they are business trips. That people go on to make money. Not watch scenery pass by from a bus or train window. Because that doesn’t make money.
The LIRR trains from Grand Central can’t get to Sunnyside, I have no clue what you are imagining. Unless you are imagining the long hike from the Sunnyside LIRR station to the subway. I doubt that is what you have in mind.
I know this may come as a shock but Grand Central isn’t the RER.
Railfans who really need to get laid count up all the trains arriving and departing and it’s somewhere around 40 depending on the season and how much money the MTA has.
I said they should use the faster way which is using the A train to change to…. the train providing local service on the Grand Concourse… because Yankee Stadium is a local stop. The A train and the D train are express trains.. So is the 4 train. Which would get you to Yankee Stadium faster, from the East Side, from almost anyplace except maybe the Oyster Bar. That doesn’t require consulting a schedule to determine when the Hudson line train will be departing. I know this because I actually looked at schedules. Not imagined that the train from New Jersey that goes to Connecticut via Woodlawn would stop at Yankee Stadium too. And pass through Sunnyside.
It’s been the like since 1849. That the Hudson line is along.. wait for it.. the Hudson, isn’t a surprise.
Um Um Um, the trains would be going to Penn Station. Just like the Amtrak trains do today. Which means those people aren’t on trains to Grand Central, in Grand Central or on the shuttle between Grand Central and Times Square. Which leaves space for other people to go to Grand Central and NOT get on the shuttle to the West Side because they were bright enough to figure out if they want to get to the East Side getting on train to the West Side isn’t a good choice.
>Because commuting from suburb to suburb rarely if ever involves living at the train station and working at one.
Walk/bike/train sheds can be pretty big, and given sufficient bus frequency bus sheds are also helpful.
>Though why I or anyone else would be stupid enough to pass up good jobs closer to home or better paying jobs in Manhattan is a very very good question that railfans never answer.
There are many reasons, mostly to do with hyper specialisation (academia, healthcare) and family situations (eldercare, schooling, spousal job, commitment to a particular neighborhood for whatever reason).
>If it’s more than an overnight trip the limo can be cheaper than mileage and parking
Sure, but all my past employers would balk at it costing more than an Uber equivalent.
>The LIRR trains from Grand Central can’t get to Sunnyside, I have no clue what you are imagining. Unless you are imagining the long hike from the Sunnyside LIRR station to the subway. I doubt that is what you have in mind.
You would take a LIRR train from Penn, not GC. GC is relevant as a transfer point because that’s where you transfer without a Sunnyside transfer point. So thanks for pointing out another reason Sunnyside transfers are good; they double the options that CT-LI commuters would have in terms of LIRR trains.
>Railfans who really need to get laid count up all the trains arriving and departing and it’s somewhere around 40 depending on the season and how much money the MTA has.
Hah, I’ll take your word for it. Still less than 50 though. I’m definitely sure there are 4 tracks but it looks on Google Maps like there may be more.
>That the Hudson line is along.. wait for it.. the Hudson, isn’t a surprise.
Sure, that doesn’t mean we should repeat the mistakes of the past.
>Which leaves space for other people to go to Grand Central and NOT get on the shuttle to the West Side because they were bright enough to figure out if they want to get to the East Side getting on train to the West Side isn’t a good choice.
People definitely can do this, but it would be less friction IMO if Hudson-Penn was skipped and that money spent on Penn-GC.
I want your dealer’s number because he’s got really good shit.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been in academia, but I’ve known many people whose commutes are trans-downtown or circum-downtown. People aren’t all atomised independent economic actors, they have contexts.
Thanks. And, I think good persuasive public writing should make itself readable by someone who has read about the subject a fair bit, without requiring hours of prep—or else warn off casual readers.
As a side comment: next month Amtrak will begin to close one East River tunnel at a time (there are four single-track tunnels) for three years, to refurbish them from Hurricane Sandy damage. Skanska won the contract to do the work. Amtrak has announced reductions to Albany – NYC service because of capacity limits for these years. [I think the three year estimate is optimistic…] [I assume the logistics at Penn Station are the reason for the cutbacks.]
Makes sense. Please provide a link to the referenced NJT plan.
Question from the aficionado: I can see in the maps of Paris or Madrid cases where there’s decisions to not through-run some lines, sometimes even diverting to some other terminal. In Paris for example, lines E and P come together, P is an express line, but it finishes in Gare de l’Est. Or K is an express B, but it finishes in Gare du Nord. Or in Madrid, all lines of Cercanías (except C-5) look like they are funneled through the two tunnels between Atocha and Chamartín. But those Cercanías are rather short, when you look at anything longer than that, the “Media distancia” trains mostly don’t through run, they finish in Chamartín or Atocha before entering. In Barcelona, instead, everything through-runs, even a far-fetched trans-regional train that throws off everybody’s timetables has to run through either Catalunya or Passeig de Gràcia.
What would be the way to choose on what to through run and what not to through run? Intuition tells me that it would be expected train punctuality, but this brings making political trade-offs like receiving the complaints from the rural users saying “you treat us as second class citizens”. Maybe politically it’s more comfortable to just say everybody that everything reaches the very city center, and when the timetable goes to the trash every day, just blame the trains that don’t run on time?
It depends on the infrastructure. If there are four-track lines, then it usually makes sense to through-run the local tracks before the express tracks. In addition to the Paris examples you bring up, Crossrail connects to the local (“relief”) tracks of the Great Western Main Line, and in Tokyo, the Chuo local tracks through-run as Chuo-Sobu while the rapid tracks terminate at Tokyo Station and the Tokaido and Tohoku Main Lines have only started through-running recently while their local tracks have been doing so for generations.
But then the London and Tokyo contexts above have limited branching. The GWML has the Heathrow branch, but beyond that it’s very weakly-used branches, so there’s no need to choose – any branch that could plausibly run frequent local service, which I don’t think any currently can, would be connected to the Elizabeth line. The Tokaido Main Line has little branching, and over time the branches have been spun off as entirely separate trunks (Negishi to Keihin-Tohoku, Yokosuka into its own trunk). In contrast, the Gare du Nord network has a lot of branches, so SNCF has had to pick and choose which ones get connected to the RER B and D and which don’t; setting aside K as a very lightly-used line, it’s remarkable that the organization of branches is that from east to west there are the RER B branches, then the RER D, then the Transilien H branches.
Though there are quite a few instances in Tokyo where the local trains terminate at the city-centre terminal while the limited-stops run through…
The Elizabeth line service is pretty weak West of Paddington and there are a number of perfectly sensible things you could do. For example it could replace the local Great Western service to Didcot or Newbury or the Chiltern semi-fast service to Oxford via High Wycombe. Perhaps if the freight services be removed from the Great Western mainline slow tracks it could go from Maidenhead to High Wycombe via Bourne End and even maybe go via Aylesbury to Milton Keynes.
For someone who complains about other people’s understanding of history, that’s glaring. Especially since you wrote
“….Gladstone Branch could be cut to a shuttle or to trains only running to Hoboken”
or implicit knowledge of Hoboken’s existence in
“The Erie lines have no way of getting to Penn Station today.. “
Yes, this is why I said “Largely.” LIC still has a handful of LIRR trains, but nearly all go to Penn; Hoboken has more than LIC, but a large majority of NJT trains run to Penn, and Hoboken is all that’s left of the complex of Hoboken, Pavonia, Exchange Place, Communipaw, etc.
Silly me, when I read “Penn Station already is the underground through-station, built generations before.. ” ….I though you meant, ya know, …..generations ago…. NJTransit wasn’t able to send trains from Broad Street Newark to Penn Station New York until 1996. Which isn’t “generations ago”.
….. and while lots of trains went to the ferries in Long Island City, Queens, Nassau and Suffolk were mostly farmland when Penn Station New York opened. The main terminal was still in Brooklyn because that’s where the people were. And the new subway to the jobs south of Chambers St. in Manhattan.
Or in other words stop moving the goalposts. You are the one trying to make a living at this. Write clearly.
Adirondacker is correct. You could say that Penn Station replaced Exchange Place (the old PRR ferry terminal in Jersey City) in a “surface/underground” paradigm, but trains to Hoboken, Pavonia, etc. never went to Penn when it opened, not as Adi notes for many decades after if at all. Hoboken is 2km from exchange place, twice as far as Euston to Kings Cross or about the same as St Lazare to Gare du Nord/Est; it was never part of the same “complex” as Exchange Place.
It was back around the same time the Liverpool and Manchester was wowing the populace in the U.K. Everything went to the ferry between Jersey City and Manhattan. That had been operating since 1764. And was converted to steam in 1812… thought that was generations BEFORE Pennsylvania Station New York opened.
Exchange Place is two subway stops away from Hoboken…. The Erie terminal had it’s own subway stop. It was where Newport is today. It’s why the top of the columns, on the platform, have an E in them. They never realized the grand plans to four track it, go to Grand Central Terminal, Central of New Jersey terminal and maybe even extend out into the suburbs.
Alon, there is another possibility, and I think . I think it highly likely that the authors of the Amtrak report started with their desired conclusion and then reconstructed facts and history as necessary to generate enough noise to BURY ALTERNATIVE POLICIES IN NOISE, particularly any based on objective facts and real analysis. As one of the principal sources of thoughtful analysis based on objective facts in this area of study, you correctly perceive what they did as a direct affront to you and an attempt to marginalize thoughtful policy making. But, it has to be fought with better tactics than by just pointing out where specific facts are in error.
As an analyst, I can’t understand the institutional advantage to Amtrak of propagating religious fervor against through running, much less the benefit of spending large sums on Penn Station expansion. What is Amtrak’s perceived benefit as an institution: Given the lunacy of the policy, what is the benefit to the authors and their superiors of intentionally obfuscating both the facts and the analytic framework so as to support the policy? Given actionable hypotheses as to Amtrak and the authors perceived benefits, one can build a strategic and tactical approach not only to win the policy choice, but also to reduce the likelihood of similar Goebbels-esque analyses coming out of Amtrak in the future.
Chris, the sad fact is that “Amtrak” here isn’t a public agency that has any agency to act in the public interest, but is merely a hollowed-out host body for the consultant-industrial parasite.
The parasite can direct the host to attach its imprimatuer and act in whatever ways (including appearing to be alive!) best direct sweet sweet nutrients that all it to grotesquely swell and metastasize.
“Amtrak” of course doesn’t get anything out of this. It’s a category error to believe that it is supposed to.
Amtrak is mostly a jobs program, not a serious attempt at providing the most public service for the amount of funding. Public service is a nice side effect. Nevermind that being more cost effective would generate more jobs in the long run, the US federal government is run on a 2 year time horizon.