Amtrak’s Failure
An article in Streetsblog by Jim Mathews of the Rail Passengers Association talking up Amtrak as a success has left a sour taste in my mouth as well as those of other good transit activists. The post says that Amtrak is losing money and it’s fine because it’s a successful service by other measures. I’ve talked before about why good intercity rail is profitable – high-speed trains are, for one, and has a cost structure that makes it hard to lose money. But even setting that aside, there are no measures by which Amtrak is a successful, if one is willing to look away from the United States for a few moments. What the post praises, Amtrak’s infrastructure construction, is especially bad by any global standard. It is unfortunate that American activists for mainline rail are especially unlikely to be interested in how things work in other parts of the world, and instead are likely to prefer looking back to American history. I want to like the RPA (distinct from the New York-area Regional Plan Association, which this post will not address), but its Americanism is on full display here and this blinds its members to the failures of Amtrak.
Amtrak ridership
The ridership on intercity rail in the United States is, by most first-world standards, pitiful. Amtrak reports, for financial 2023, 5.823 billion passenger-miles, or 9.371 billion p-km; Statista gives it at 9.746 billion p-km for 2023, which I presume is for calendar 2023, capturing more corona recovery. France had 65 billion p-km on TGVs and international trains in 2023.
More broadly than the TGV, Eurostat reports rail p-km without distinction between intercity and regional trains; the total for both modes in the US was 20.714 billion in 2023 and 30.89 billion in 2019, commuter rail having taken a permanent hit due to the decline of its core market of 9-to-5 suburb-to-city middle-class commuting. These figures are, per capita, 62 and 94 p-km/year. In the EU and environs, only one country is this low, Greece, which barely runs any intercity rail service and even suspended it for several months in 2023 after a fatal accident. The EU-wide average is 955 p-km/year. Dense countries like Germany do much better than the US, as do low-density countries like Sweden and Finland. Switzerland has about the same mainline rail p-km as the US as of 2023, 20.754 billion, on a population of 8.9 million (US: 335 million).
So purely on the question of whether people use Amtrak, the answer is, by European standards, a resounding no. And by Japanese standards, Europe isn’t doing that great – Japan is somewhat ahead of Switzerland per capita. Amtrak trains are slow: the Northeast Corridor is slower than the express trains that the TGV replaced, and the other lines are considerably slower, running at speeds that Europeans associate with unmodernized Eastern European lines. They are infrequent: service is measured in trains per day, usually just one, and even the Northeast Corridor has rather bad frequencies for the intensely used line it wants to be.
Is this because of public support?
No. American railroaders are convinced that all of this is about insufficient public funding, and public preference for highways. Mathews’ post repeats this line, about how Amtrak’s 120 km/h average speeds on a good day on its fastest corridor should be considered great given how much money has been spent on highways in America.
The issue is that other countries spend money on highways too. High American construction costs affect highway megaprojects as well, and thus the United States brings up the rear in road tunneling. The highway competition for Amtrak comprises fairly fast, almost entirely toll-free roads, but this is equally true of Deutsche Bahn; the competition for SNCF and Trenitalia is tollways, but then those tollways are less congested, and drivers in Italy routinely go 160 km/h on the higher-quality stretches of road.
Amtrak itself has convinced itself that everyone else takes subsidies. For example, here it says “No country in the world operates a passenger rail system without some form of public support for capital costs and/or operating expenses,” mirroring a fraudulent OIG report that compares the Northeast Corridor (alone) to European intercity rail networks. Technically it’s true that passenger rail in Europe receives public subsidies; but what receives subsidies is regional lines, which in the US would never be part of the Amtrak system, and some peripheral intercity lines run as passenger service obligation (PSO) with in theory competitive tendering, on lines that Amtrak wouldn’t touch. Core lines, equivalent to Chicago-Detroit, New York-Buffalo, Washington-Charlotte-Atlanta, Los Angeles-San Diego, etc., would be high-speed and profitable.
But what about construction?
What offends me the most about the post is that it talks up Amtrak’s role as a construction company. It says,
Today, our nationalized rail operator is also a construction company responsible for managing tens of billions of dollars for building bridges, tunnels, stations, and more – with all the overhead in project-management staff and capital delivery that this entails.
The problem is that Amtrak is managing those tens of billions of dollars extremely inefficiently. Tens of billions of dollars is the order of magnitude that it took to build the entire LGV network to day ($65.5 billion in 2023 prices), or the entire NBS network in Germany ($68.6 billion). Amtrak and the commuter rail operators think that if they are given the combined cost to date of both networks, they can upgrade the Northeast Corridor to be about as fast as a mixed high- and low-speed German line, or about the fastest legacy-line British trains (720 km in 5 hours).
The rail operations are where Amtrak is doing something that approximates good rail work – lots of extraneous spending, driving up Northeast Corridor operating costs to around twice the fares on German and French high-speed trains, probably around 3-4 times the operating costs on those trains. But capital construction is a bundle of bad standards for everything, order-of-magnitude cost premiums, poor prioritization, and agency imperialism leading Amtrak to want to spend $16 billion on a completely unnecessary expansion of Penn Station. The long-term desideratum of auto-tensioned (“constant-tension”) catenary south of New York, improving reliability and lifting the current 135 mph (217 km/h) speed limit, would be a routine project here, reusing the poles with their 75-80 meter spacing; an incompetent (since removed) Amtrak engineer insisted on tightening to 180′ (54 m) so the project is becoming impossibly expensive as the poles have to be replaced during service. “Amtrak is also doing construction” is a derogatory statement about Amtrak.
Why are they like this?
Americans generally resent having to learn about the rest of the world. This disproportionately affects industries where the United States is clearly ahead (for example, software), but also ones where internal American features incline Americans to overfocus on their own internal history. Railroad history is rich everywhere, and the relative decline of the railway in favor of the highway lends itself to wistful alternative history, with intense focus on specific lines or regions. New Yorkers are, in the same vein, atypically provincial when it comes to the subway’s history, and end up making arguments, such as about the difficulty of accessibility retrofits on an old system, that can be refuted by looking at peer American systems, not just foreign ones.
The upshot is that an industry and an advocacy ecosystem that both intensely believe that railroad decline was because government investment favored roads – something that’s only partly true, since the same favoring of roads happened more or less everywhere – will want to learn from their own local histories. Quite a lot of advocacy by the RPA falls into the realm of trying to revive the intercity rail system the US had in the 1960s, before the bankruptcies and near-bankruptcies that led to the creation of Amtrak – but this system was what lost out to highways and cars to begin with. The innovations that allowed East Asia to avoid the same fate, and the innovations that allowed Western Europe to partly reverse this fate, involve different ideas of how to build and operate intercity rail.
And all of this requires understanding that, on a basic level, Amtrak is best described as a mishmash of the worst features of every European and East Asian railway: speed, fares, frequency, reliability, coverage. Each country that I know of misses on at least one of these aspects – Swiss trains are slow, the Shinkansen is expensive, the TGV has multi-hour midday gaps, German trains barely run on a schedule, China puts its train stations at inconvenient locations. Amtrak misses on all of those, at once.
And while Amtrak misses on service quality in operations, it, alongside the rest of the American rail construction industry, practically defines bad capital planning. Cities can build the right project wrong, or build the wrong project right, or have poor judgment about standards but not project delivery or the reverse, and somehow, Amtrak’s current planning does all of these wrong all at once.
Pedestrian Observations 
Much of this does come down to poor leadership by Amtrak but a decent amount of it comes down to poor policy imposed on construction by the feds and states, particularly ROW problems, and poor investment and planning by the U.S. (and states) pre-Amtrak and after the roll-up of the failing passenger rail operations.
But in no world does Amtrak or its obstructors deserve *praise* for their efforts. There is nothing about how Amtrak has been run that deserves praise for overcoming a silly restriction imposed upon it. They either deal with things in a mediocre way or they react to restrictions with extremely bad service + mind-boggling expenses just to keep it going. In so many cases they’re not competitive with parallel-route buses, in speed or reliability, and those buses tend to be shabbier than Amtrak’s 40-year-old Amfleet stock & have to sit in urban traffic to get places.
That’s a feature not a bug. We owned most of the ROW in the Midwest and Northeast. The private industry fetishists made us sell it off. It could have been structured better but it wasn’t. So we get to pay bazillions or have to carve new ROW.
That’s a feature too. Make everything other than driving your private automobile, terrible, people will drive their private automobile. The private automobile fetishists can then claim that making any effort other than roads is silly because everybody drives everywhere.
Agreed
Like sure if the urban sections have been sold off then it’s tougher for sure. But that doesn’t really apply on the north east corridor.
Certainly for British level spending on the east or west coast mainlines the US should be able to get British level service on the north east corridor.
Most of the NEC is urbanized. That’s the problem.
How much of the NEC route doesn’t support 125mph running with tilting trains and super elevated tracks to British standards?
Bearing in mind British standards are much safer than Americas and are close to Japanese/Chinese.
That is a good question on a very technical topic where I’m personally not in a position to give a complete answer. But as an answer that generally covers the situation: Amtrak has improved tilting tech coming up on the new Acela trainsets. No reason for Amtrak to ignore superelevation, but NEC north of Philadelphia is a lot of shared track with local commuter trains that sometimes run local service on express tracks with platform extenders (they allow too much of that as a regular thing, particularly between New Haven and New Rochelle). Lots of track segments curvy enough where the speed cap is ~60mph/90kph, going through urbanized areas, where combined tilt and superelevation are not solving the problem of having to pull back from 125mph. The only realistic solution is a change of alignment in some sections, totally new ROW that is straight and uncomplicated for high speeds. In New Jersey they can get it up to high speed but there are a few curves south of Newark preventing a clean acceleration/deceleration into the NY area. There’s a tight curve in North Philadelphia that already had a calamitous fatal derailment at non-HSR speeds, and it’s nothing but 10 minutes of slog into 30th Street south of there even though it’s just 5 or so miles. So on and so forth. I think things are a bit easier south of Philly but there are still upgrades to be made along the ROW, and there is freight-sharing that impacts what Amtrak is allowed to plan.
The NEC is 150-year-old ROW built through Colonial America without any concern for going faster than 70mph, and something big has to change to get trains going at 125mph on a meaningful percentage of the trip between DC and Boston. Tilting and superelevation deliver modest gains on a route that has problems that no greenfield ROW would have today.
Alon has already done calculations on this, and for a reasonable amount of the alignment south of NYC it is possible to go at around 150mph, parts may be able to support up to 200mph with upgrades and slight reliagnments. The PRR actually made a remarkably good alignment for their time but due to bad infrastructure investment those high speeds cannot be achieved right now.
Why would any one want “things to British standards”? North American trains are almost the same loading gauge as Shinkansen and the signalling involves electronics.
You can’t run local services on the express tracks. There aren’t any local platforms. Whatever you are imagining it doesn’t involve platform extenders.
Even before there was regular steamship service across the Atlantic, news from the old country arrived regularly on sailing ships. Much happened in the 1830s including service between Washington D.C. and Baltimore
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellicott_City,_Maryland#Rail
or between Philadelphia and New York. Well, suburban Philadelphia and Jersey City for ferries to Manhattan. … 190-ish years because there have been some realignments over the years. The New Englanders were quite busy too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_Viaduct
Stop. Just stop. Stop right there.
Nobody is forcing you to type (self-admittedly) uninformed gibberish. Nobody!
You don’t have to do it.
It’s ok if you don’t.
It’s ok to quietly step away from the laptop.
It’s ok. It’s all ok.
Amtrak will continue being Amtrak without your keyboard warriorship. They’re doing just fine. They don’t need you. (But, hey, thanks anyway. Here’s $0.00 for your contribution.)
It’s ok. You can take a break.
We understand. We’ve seen it all before.
@Richard
Even 34 years into using the Internet, that is a surprisingly anti-social and insulting comment. It is more of a shock performance than an actual comment; I’m not even sure what you found disagreeable.
In any case, what I said was accurate. It goes over the issues that limit speeds with everything status-quo, including the upcoming delivery of new trainsets with compensating features to achieve speed gains.
To the extent that it could be improved, there are people in the rail industry or in research/reporting circles who could give a more granular answer, or could clarify why Amtrak can’t get DC-Philly at 125-150mph speeds.
My info comes from researchers like Alon. His archives are in the sidebar.
If I said anything that you know to be factually incorrect, the floor is yours…
Even if it isn’t quite possible to do New York to Washington DC in 2 hours like Alon suggests in that linked post, certainly hitting 2.5 hours and probably close to 2 hours should be very achievable for single digit billions that is competently spent.
Even if it isn’t quite possible to do New York to Washington DC in 2 hours like Alon suggests in that linked post, certainly hitting 2.5 hours and probably close to 2 hours should be very achievable for single digit billions that is competently spent.
I mean hitting 5 hours to cover the 450 miles of the full NEC is hit every day in Britain on lines with a top speed of 125 miles an hour and in-line upgrades but little if any modern routing.
@Matthew Hutton
So, to start, the route between NY Penn and Union DC is ~226 miles.
Let’s pretend there are no curves and no interim stops, and acceleration to the full 125mph takes 4 minutes and deceleration takes about the same time. That is 1:52 as a baseline right there.
There are six interim stops on the Acela route. Each stop adds six minutes. We’re at 2:28 now.
There are places where the alignment doesn’t support 125mph but there’s moderately-priced real estate that can be taken to fix that. You’re saying single-digit billions could support that initiative. I agree. So we spend the money and our trip time isn’t impacted by those segments anymore.
I can name at least three places on the alignment, in really inconvenient places, that would eat up another $10B in buying the real estate (including the costs of holdouts and opportunists taking it all to court) and doing a rebuild of the ROW while the full (or close to it) intercity AND commuter train schedule is run on it. If you don’t spend that specific $10B it’s going to cost about 15 minutes in travel time. We’re at 2:43 now.
The current fastest schedule is 2:45.
@Brian, Darlington to London is 232 miles and is scheduled to take as little as 2h19 – albeit with only one stop.
There are only 4 stops on the North East Corridor with more than a million passengers a year: Boston, New York Penn, Philadelphia and Washington DC. So your fastest express trains should only stop at those places. Then you can have a semi-fast train that calls at the smaller stations and takes a bit longer, perhaps taking 4-5 minutes extra per additional stop.
Yes this is roughly in line with what we’ve both said so far. Amtrak could take its speed-problem spots, chop off the most expensive 3 to fix, and probably fix most of the rest with <$10B and gain 15-20 minutes on their schedule.
I’d add Baltimore, and you should consider the corporate importance of Wilmington(DE) beyond its population. None of the other stops are crucial.
The Boston/NY segment is incredibly curvy and goes through areas densely settled by property owners for 300-400y. An alignment farther north, or a reroute using some existing CT & MA corridors (which would need improvement), are both seen as much more economical than trying to straighten the New Haven/Providence/Boston ROW used now. The state of Connecticut hasn’t exactly been sympathetic to these concerns, either.
How do you get your spherical cow onto the train? The Pennsylvania Railroad managed to get the super express down to 2:30. Many technical problems revealed themselves. Some are still unresolved.
Acela goes 135 for long stretches in many places. And quite a few of those places are straight enough to allow higher speed. The antique catenary, which was installed before World War II, flops around and bounces enough at speeds higher than 135 that it rips itself to shreds. Fixing that doesn’t require any property negotiations. And likely quick environmental approval. For work they should do anyway because it was installed before World War II. It sags enough on hot days that the speed limit is reduced to 90. That goes away too, if they replace the catenary.
In FIscal Year 2023 more passengers used Penn Station Newark (NJ) than used Wilmington. Which is a big corporate center.
Where do you think the people getting on and off the train in the big cities come from? They aren’t all from the other big cities. And it’s okay for there to be different stopping patterns along a route with high demand.
I think we’re talking past each other on what the stops mean, because I didn’t intend to suggest forever eliminating interim stops. I’ll clarify:
There are eight Acela stops south of NY Penn, inclusive (or, seven not counting Penn). That’s not a lot. The point of raising a super-express possibility was to see how you could further cut the timing within the framework we were discussing. But it’s not a lot. And they should have frequent stops at all the interim stops because they’re not “local” stops & your point about people going, say, Newark to DC or Trenton to Penn is valid.
I have no idea how fast the new trainsets accelerate (I know the first-gen Acelas are among the heaviest trains on the planet intended for top-speed service, even though using the term “HSR” with the current service/speeds is a joke). I was going by rough figures about passenger trains in general + assuming 125mph was the cap. I know they can push the Acelas slightly harder, I would guess most of the track supports it, I know the catenary is a problem (Nolan Hicks had written excellent stuff about this last year, and he somewhat disagrees that it is cheap or easy. But he does know it’s a better near-term investment than Penn South and I agree).
Anything that cuts a few minutes off the DC/NY Acela segment is worth studying. A 15-minute cut gets at least one extra train onto the day’s schedule, costing nothing extra under current staffing levels & picking up a lot more riders. (Even more on the 2nd gen Acelas) That matters more than making the riders’ experience 15 minutes shorter on a 2:45 ride, although a shorter ride is also a win for riders.
Others will know the particulars better than I do. And maybe they know how old Pennsy trains made the 226-mile run in 2:30 using much older technology & without on-train tilting. Did they consistently get up to 125-135mph? How did they compensate for the slow segment between Newark Penn Station and the Elizabeth S-curve, or the speed restrictions in North Philly that slow you down on the last 7-8 miles between 30th Street and that deadly curve? Did they have a different alignment in places (I wouldn’t think so)? It couldn’t be from doing interim stops fast because it was a super-express that didn’t stop.
@Brian, assuming reasonable spare capacity the British/French/Japanese wouldn’t stop at Newark and the other smaller stops with their fastest trains.
I mean sure the London-Glasgow trains do stop at smaller places, but there isn’t enough capacity to do otherwise on a 2 track line for a long stretch and there are capacity constraints at the London end as well.
The retiring Acela have a service speed of 150. And did it on short section of track in Rhode Island, since they went into service. The new ones have a service speed of 165 and supposedly that can be raised sometime in the future. No amount of tilt or realignment fixes bouncy wiring.
More people use the NotAcela than Acela. Most of the reason why the NotAcela takes longer, between NY and DC, is that it makes more stops. Spherical cow calculations say that 225 miles at 135 mph takes 100 minutes and at 125 it takes 108. Two and half hours is 150 minutes. I suspect, that just like today, they had employee timetables showing where the speed restrictions were. In addition to cab signals. It didn’t last long because the Metroliners had problems and attempting to run at 125 revealed others.
The rumor on railroad.net is that there are 94 miles of very straight tracks between NY and DC. 94 miles at 135 is 41 minutes and 94 miles at 165 is 34 minutes. Without realignment or tilting. The NotAcela has a top speed of 125. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out how much faster those passengers would be moving if they were on a train capable of 165.
Which Newark? There’s Newark New Jersey which has more Amtrak passengers than Wilmington and twice as many as Center of the Universe, Stamford Connecticut. Or Newark Delaware? Newark New Jersey is one of the stations with Acela service. And NotAcela service and Keystone service which can replace NotAcela for trips to Philadelphia and long distance services.
Trenton and which Penn Station? There are at least three. For Trenton to Penn Station Newark or Penn Station New York you might want to consider a NotAcela from Amtrak. I’d lean towards using NJTransit. A Trenton express will get you there faster than a Trenton local. I don’t know or care if the railfan videos of a smartphone, showing the speed, on a NJTransit train, above 100, were on the express or the local. Train. At least one of them had the camera positioned to show that it was on the local track.
@adirondacker12800, the Acela Newark station has 600k passengers a year, it’s a small stop.
New York Penn has 10 million, so a big stop, Philadelphia has 4 million and DC has 5 million. Baltimore is the biggest other stop at 1 million, but still much less than the big three. All the others are comfortably less than a million. All deserve semi-fast service for sure but not your quickest express.
The NEC is 150-year-old ROW built through Colonial America without any concern for going faster than 70mph
The British lines Matthew Hutton is referring to (East Coast Main Line, West Coast Main Line, etc.) are 175-190 years old, built through medieval England, at a time when trains couldn’t go much faster than 35 mph and averaged as low as 10 mph in service (with stops, loading coal, depending on grade, etc.). But today those lines all support service at 125 mph and express trains average just under 100 mph. This would be 2.25 hr DC-NY and 4.5 hr DC-Bos (30 min and 2 hr faster than today, respectively). A test train once averaged 112 mph in 1991, which would be 2 hr DC-NY and just over 4 hr DC-Bos. Britain does this on Victoria-era ROW and it has all been done in the past 60 years as the first lengthy section of 100 mph track on the ECML opened in 1965 (demonstration trains had gone this fast on sections before). There are plans to upgrade the ECML (at 393 mi about the distance from DC to Kingston, just short of Providence) to 140 mph.
There is no reason, and no excuse, that Amtrak has not done at least the same by now.
So, to start, the route between NY Penn and Union DC is ~226 miles.
…
We’re at 2:43 now.
The current fastest schedule is 2:45.
Your analysis is very poor, and very incorrect.
As a most basic logical test, the Acela does not travel at a constant 125mph today, so if today’s fastest speed is 2:45 but your Acela-at-125-mph time is 2:43 you are clearly very wrong, as increasing speed to 125 everywhere would save more than 1 minute every 113 miles.
As to specifics, it would not take 4 minutes to accelerate to 125 mph / 200 kph. A 4 min acceleration time is needed to get to 300-350 kph. Modern EMUs can accelerate at about 2kph/s. Reaching 200 kph would take about 100 sec, not 240 sec. This cuts 2.5 min from the run time. Next, stop penalty at this speed is not 6 min. Again, deceleration/acceleration takes 1.5 min each, which adds 1.5 min to journey (since the train would take 1.5 min to cover that distance if it didn’t slow down, stop and speed up again). Time spent at stop only needs to be ~ 1 minute. So total penalty for a stop is 2.5 min, which over six stops would add 15 min, not 36. But an express train would not make the six intermediate stops Acela does, it would only stop at Baltimore and Philadelphia. So stop penalty time is only 5 minutes.
Including your 15 minutes of “too difficult/costly to fix” leaves us with a time of 2:10, or 35 minutes faster than today, at an average speed of 104 mph, and in line with the performance Britain achieves today on upgraded legacy lines. This would be an enormous improvement, a 20% reduction in trip time, and would probably lead to so much new ridership that the cost of the more expensive upgrades would be easy, either because of debt you could take on with the new profit or because political will/funding tends to be there for things that are popular.
The first HSR line in Europe (LGV Sud-Est from Paris to Lyon) averaged 97 mph when it opened in 1981. The line was rated for 260kph at the time. The reality is that DC-NY time for a 125mph/200kph line would be a bit more than what I show above – almost nowhere do trains maintain exactly maximum speed aside from stops, and there is a need to include schedule pad to recover from disruptions, so the added time over the technical time would be more than 15 minutes. Still, bring the southern NEC to a more or less general 125 mph speed would have enormous benefits.
Senators from flyover states who think trains are Commmmmmmmmmunist. Who don’t want to spend money on a plot to sap and impurify the precious bodily fluids of Real Americans(tm).
And it would be spending money on those coastal poindexters. Less to spend on Real Americans in the heartland.
This is the stuff that should pay for itself.
I don’t think the Senators in the states in the middle of America are against that.
Why? If valiant subsidy sucking heartlanders want to have a conversation about what should pay for itself ……. they realllly don’t want to have those conversations. Really really really don’t.
That’s a feature not a bug. We owned most of the ROW in the Midwest and Northeast. The private industry fetishists made us sell it off.
The entire NEC is publicly owned. Amtrak alone owns probably 75% of it. ROW issues are not the problem.
Had to look up what I was referring to, and I was referring to problems Amtrak has with the freight railroads with current service/expansion on their tracks.
It’s a lot of problems. Not the same problems as speed limits, curves, and fragile catenary on the NEC. More like the kind of problems where freight railroads either won’t make routes available for suspended/discontinued service (the Gulf Coast situation) or they want a ransom to maintain a basic ROW (the $200M Pennsylvania is giving to NS to allow one more train a day Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, the money Amtrak had to cough up to CN Railway to get the Adirondack to serve anything north of Saratoga in warm weather because CSX won’t even let trains turnaround south of Quebec)…
Spiritually our policy is to get deals done for a fair amount of money & bind the railroads to cooperate.
In practice, it’s been like herding bears
I think off the North East Corridor the privately owned freight railways would be more likely to play ball if you were running a frequent passenger service and therefore paying a larger share of the bills than the freight.
I mean Brightline is genuinely decent actually.
There is life beyond Ninth Ave. Amtrak says it operates over 21,000 route miles. Wikipedia says it’s 21,400. And that Amtrak owns 623 of it.
The former New Haven part of the line, Boston South Station to, let’s say, CP SHELL in New Rochelle, NY, is in 3 parts. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts owns BOS to the Rhode Island state line, but MassDOT (or whatever they call it now) allows the National Railroad Passenger Corp pretty much complete control over it as if the NRPC owned it. The NRPC owns it for realzies from there to New Haven where ownership changes to CDOT. And CDOT doesn’t let the NRPC have any control over the line. CDOT owns the line through SHELL to GCT (or some junction with the line thereto) after which it’s MTA/MNCR. I probably have the MTA limits wrong.
AFAIK, the NRPC owns what was once the New York Connecting RR from SHELL to NYP and beyond all the way to the District of Columbia. MTA/LIRR may own some section of the line east of NYP around Sunnyside Yard maybe? Like Massachusetts though, Amtrak doesn’t seem to need to beg there.
Then Amtrak, of course, owns the former PRR line all the way to Washington.
Amtrak also owns the line from 30th Street to in Philadelphia out to Harrisburg (the properly electrified part of the PRR’s New York – Chicago line). I don’t recall the details, but I believe Amtrak also leases (from CSX) the line to Albany between the end of MTA/MNCR ownership at Poughkeepsie to Albany (or Rensselaer?).
They own a line in Michigan, too, but no one cares. At least they run the trains along there at a decent speed (relative to the rest of their lines off the corridor).
ALL of this trackage was owned by for-profit companies that went bankrupt and were twice bailed out by the US gov’t (Amtrak relieved them of their passenger common carrier responsibilities in 1971 and then Conrail took over the rusted hulks of PennCentral and a bunch of other smaller lines in 1976).
But yeah, private industry is def the way.
The MTA owns the parts of Metro North in New York State or has long term leases on it. I’m not in the mood to go look up the complicated arrangement for Grand Central. Something odd like they have an option to buy it in 2047.
Long term lease to “Hoffman’s” which is a bit west of Schenectady. That is probably in Wikipedia’s estimate of what they own because they have effective control over it.
Michiganders do. Care enough that they’ve upgraded parts of that and what MDOT owns to 110 mph.
Amtrak’s biggest failure is not convincing a state to spend a few billion within a decade to get a Brightline Florida level of service on a major corridor outside the NEC. In Michigan and California with the Pacific Surfliner you have publicly owned right-of-way, so the Class Ones are not an obstacle. Compare to state railways overseas, there has been a lack of initiative, with underfunded and under staff state DOTs in the driver’s seat.
Amtrak was setup to fail and it was ultimately exposed in the press that it was. I’m surprised that isn’t national canon, but the “Amtrak is a failing railroad” narrative won out among not-very-smart publishers and editors.
The only real way out of this is for the government to arrange a significant one-time external “appropriation” of an endowment-like set of assets so that national rail never needs to be involved in yearly state and federal budget cycles again for operating funds. Since rail always succeeded as much as its adjoining real estate did, it could be some form of that… maybe less commercial/retail and more infill housing development in this market. I do think there is still room to develop cities in the U.S., the way the old railroads did, as long as the infrastructure pieces are right.
Capital work has some easier options after you sort out the above matter. Grants, low-interest loans, etc.
And it goes without saying that failures of regulation & the abdication of clear rules facilitating passenger service on well-maintained freight tracks is defeating. I don’t care about the routes crossing the Rockies so much, but you can’t have freight interference all the time in all the places between the Midwest and the East Coast
Amtrak was setup to fail and it was ultimately exposed in the press that it was. I’m surprised that isn’t national canon, but the “Amtrak is a failing railroad” narrative won out among not-very-smart publishers and editors.
The only real way out of this is for the government to arrange a significant one-time external “appropriation” of an endowment-like set of assets so that national rail never needs to be involved in yearly state and federal budget cycles again for operating funds. Since rail always succeeded as much as its adjoining real estate did, it could be some form of that… maybe less commercial/retail and more infill housing development in this market. I do think there is still room to develop cities in the U.S., the way the old railroads did, as long as the infrastructure pieces are right.
Capital work has some easier options after you sort out the above matter. Grants, low-interest loans, etc.
And it goes without saying that failures of regulation & the abdication of clear rules facilitating passenger service on well-maintained freight tracks is defeating. I don’t care about the routes crossing the Rockies so much, but you can’t have freight interference all the time in all the places between the Midwest and the East Coast
Long ago, I was an enthusiastic NARP member. Then there was a super-secret coup d’etat where Ross Capon (and others?) were removed, the name was changed, to RPA, and the focus was changed from modernizing the rail system to ensuring that “Railroad French Toast” was available in Amtrak dining cars. There was a time when I looked forward to their printed newsletter (a think that is an anachronism today, of course) and their weekly news update. It’s where I got most of my (US) passenger train news.
I was not interested in “Railroad French Toast” and stopped giving them my money.
I like to watch the Virtual Railfan camera located at the New Haven’s former SONO tower where the branch to Danbury joins the NEC. The number of Diesel trains that CDOT/MNCR runs under the wire is appalling. Almost as appalling as the dearth of trains passing by (from any railroad). A little work on the switch to the single-track branch has sped up movements but only to about 25 km/h (appears to be about double what it was before the work). But Track 3 of the NEC has been out of service for months and months and months so only three through tracks available and on Track 1 (adjacent to 3 – tracks are, N-S 3124) are usually speed restricted due to the work zone and on the other tracks service is limited to ~70 km/h because the Connecticut portion of the NEC is still controlled by CDOT and that speed seems OK to them for their services to Stamford and Grand Central.
Bah.
I’m sure many of them are deeply disappointed the Heritage Cars have been replaced. Apparently there are other organizations
……other good transit activists…. I don’t know or care what the RPA’s mission statement is. If their hobby is Railroad French Toast, people can have all sort of peculiar hobbies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_reenactment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAN_party
At least the reenactors are getting some exercise and sunlight… RPA members probably do to when they put on some hickory stripped and go trainspotting. There are places where the foam can be especially deep and thick.
If you run electric trains onto unelectrified branches it doesn’t work out well. I’m sure you are aware of that. The alternative to running diesel trains is to not run trains. Waterbury to Hartford for instance. It was Waterbury to Hartford that is lamented isn’t it? If I remember correctly they started running electric M8s to New London so the diesels could go to Springfield. Just awful that people have service instead of none. Terrible.
At least they won’t be running dual modes to Penn Station. There are long long threads on railroad.net about how Penn Station Access will be impossible. Apparently they are going to extend third rail a few hundred feet. Or was it yards? Electric trains to Penn Station, what a concept! I don’t know why they didn’t have this ready to go last year. I don’t know why they aren’t leasing a few ALP-46s and multilevels from NJTransit , since it isn’t ready, to run a few rush hour trains, either. They should have people who are qualified to do that, from their experience running Train to the Game.
If you run electric trains onto unelectrified branches it doesn’t work out well.
Well not if you don’t run wires, no. The Danbury Branch has wires restored for, what? A mile? To that newish layover yard? Run the f(*^%n’ wires to at least the end of current passenger service. Same with the other branches especially given Penn Station Access – the less of the stupid 3rd Rail the better (over-running, under-running, rip it all out).
“But we don’t have service to justify electrification!” – then you don’t run enough service. The answer is not Diesel, it’s “run more trains”.
#JustStringWires
This might be a revelation for you. Passenger trains exist to carry passengers, a.k.a. people. If there aren’t a lot of people and even fewer of them want to go places the train goes there aren’t going to be many passengers. If there aren’t a lot of people there isn’t much reason to run a lot of trains. Because they run to carry passengers. Not to give railfans a cheap thrill.
Tearing out third rail would require replacing both third-rail-only fleets. Which wouldn’t be cheap. Hanging the wire, which wouldn’t be cheap, would cause a lot of service disruptions. Which would be painful. For something normal people don’t care about.
All fleets need eventual replacing regardless of propulsion. Had CDOT strung wires on the branches when Amtrak updated their east end of the NEC, this would be history instead of wishful thinking. Imagine – a fleet of trains that can run on any line because all lines have proper catenary and the whole fleet has pans. Yes, Park Ave is a problem, but not an insurmountable one.
If there is 1/2 hourly service everywhere and it’s over a decent span of the day (0500-0100 the next day, at least) lots of folks will take the train.
Naturally, LIRR needs to do the same.
This is 100+ year old tech – get it done.
Convince normal people that billions and billions of dollars should be spent to indulge your railfannery. And years and years of service disruptions while they hang wire.
Hanging wire does not cause meaningful service disruptions. Caltrain just did exactly this when electrifying between San Francisco and San Jose; there were days when there was a bus bridge over a closed section of track, a few weeks where a couple dozen trains a day were cut or trains stopped an hour early, at the end a weekend where the entire line was shut down for final testing. This is similar to the disruptions that happen during operations anyway (for track replacement, etc.)
Caltrain ridership rose steadily during the entire time of electrification work (both before and after the huge drop due to Covid) – see https://caltrainridership.com/. After electrification was finished in Sep 2024 ridership shot up in October – this appears to be the only time that October ridership went up instead of being lower or stagnant in relation to Sep. After the big, yearly, drop in December due to the holidays, ridership in Jan 2025 was higher than in Sep, the only time that this has ever happened.
The empirical evidence is pretty conclusive that service disruptions due to hanging wire are not “painful” and do not cause ridership to drop, but the benefits of electrification (better speed, etc.) do cause ridership to rise. Thus electrification is justified. With the current state of battery technology it may be more cost effective to procure BEMUs for service on low use branches, or electrify them only partway (the trains would charge under wire on the mainline or the electrified part, then use batteries for the outlying part) – but this is a cost-benefit analysis not a “should we electrify” analysis.
They have EXISTING electrification. That works well enough for suburban service. That doesn’t need to be replaced. Not replacing something is a lot less painful and much much much cheaper than reconfiguring the two busiest commuter railroads in the country to make railfans happy.
They have EXISTING electrification. That works well enough for suburban service. That doesn’t need to be replaced.
@plaws0 very specifically referenced the Danbury Branch. The Danbury Branch connects to the New Haven Line. The New Haven line EXISTING electrification is overhead catenary from Pelham to the east, including at Norwalk, where the Danbury Branch starts. The discussion is extending that EXISTING overhead wire so electric trains can use the Danbury Branch (again, it was originally electrified in the 1920s).
He said
What part of “all” was difficult you to understand? the A part, the L part or the second L part?
“I don’t know or care what the RPA’s mission statement is”
It’s more trains, to more places, for more people.
The South End catenary poles are mostly 87 m apart, not 75-80 m. The point still stands of course, but it does need the newer Sicat SX tech.
According to Siemens (https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:4fa06ed9-cbbb-40ab-acb1-93928c2f915a/elektryfikacja-sicat-sx-en-.pdf) Sicat SX can handle spans of up to 102m, wind dependent.
More relevant is that it can only handle a running speed of 250kph. If you are going to put in all new catenary why wouldn’t you put in wire that can handle 300-350kph? Otherwise all of this money is wasted in a few years if you get serious about upgrading DC-NY to true HSR.
Because the ROW can’t handle much more than that. Sicat SX handles up to 102 and 112 m (I’ve seen both), so hopefully Siemens could adjust things so you could do 87 m at 300 kmh? That should be sufficient for NEC ROW speeds. If you built a new 350 kmh ROW, it’d need new catenary anyways. And I think that’s very unlikely on the south end always. For NYC to Kingston, there are more benefits, and it’s pretty doable for New Haven to Kingston, but only the south end is still variable tension, and they already made the straightest section in NJ constant tension.
There are long stretches outside of Connecticut’s former fishing villages that are very very straight and could support high speeds.
The only places you could maybe get to 300+ kmh on the South End are New Brunswick to Trenton, which they already redid, and a few punctuated stretches between Wilmington and Baltimore: Stanton-Elkton (19 km flanked by 220 kmh curves), Charlestown-Havre de Grace (10 km flanked by 250 kmh curves), Aberdeen-Gunpowder River (20 km flanked by a 220 and a 200 kmh curve). You’d only be able to get above 300 kmh for short periods here, much less 350 kmh, which I don’t think you could reach, so the time savings would be pretty minimal. Plus if you go 350 kmh, you’ll need ballastless track and even wider track centers, which would be even more expensive for not that much gain. So if you can modify Sicat SX for 300 kmh at 87 m spans (about in the middle of Sicat SX at 250 kmh with 112 m spans and Sicat HA at 350 kmh with 70 m spans), I think that’s good enough for the remaining variable tension catenary on the South End.
Sounds like a plan. Spend a gazillon dollars but not spend a few hundred million to straighten curves.
About replacing diesels. Recent shift to fully EMU operations on Caltrain San Francisco-San Jose trains has attracted increased ridership according to Caltrain press releases. Looking at a different geographic area, apparently CSX (and maybe NS) required Virginia to promise not to put up wires even though in theory the state is acquiring ownership of new 3rd, someday 4th, tracks between DC and Richmond. That deal needs to be renegotiated. When done and there WERE wires over the ‘Long Bridge in PRR days wires need to go back up. Among other advantages, EMUs or electric loco hauled could simply run through Union Station with a brief stop for crew changes but a one seat ride from Baltimore to Fredericksburg and later Richmond. Unfortunately, they seem to have drunk the dual power kool aide damning the trains to slower performing engines hauling tons of dead weight and fuel while under wires.
Do you have any actionable recommendations beyond insults and vague “HSR is always profitable” shibboleths?
I think the obvious learning recommendation is to copy one of the better performing European railway systems.
Likely given the urban constraints the most sensible one to copy would probably be Britain, but plenty to learn from France, Germany and Switzerland – especially the stuff we are weaker at such as construction costs, fares and reliability.
Somehow I do not think “just copy another country” is that simple.
If you read through this blog you will find that Alon has a wealth of actionable recommendations on transit generally, HSR in more detail and a number of very specific posts on the Northeast Corridor/Amtrak that go down to the detail of specific curves at times and schedules timetabled to the minute.
To my knowledge Alon has never said that HSR is always profitable, just that it always is under the population/distance conditions found on the NEC.
Now, now. Don’t let facts get in the way of a good contrarian rant.