Prioritizing Rail Expansion in New England
New England rail activist Kenny Uong talked about some New England rail lines that should be built. The proposals are not bad in theory, and remind me of longstanding advocate demands, but in practice, the prioritization is all wrong. In truth, further investment in regional rail in New England – by which I mean RegionalBahn-style service to small towns like Westerly and Manchester, not core commuter rail service in Boston to be turned into an S-Bahn – is a waste of money in the current situation. Activists and railfans like closing gaps in the network of the service that exists but isn’t used, such as the outer tails of commuter rail in Rhode Island and Connecticut, but in truth it cannot be expected to have meaningful ridership until there’s better intercity rail, and in some cases it can even be counterproductive through lading high-speed tracks with slower traffic.
This is not an attack on Kenny, who did good advocacy for better buses and rail in his home region of Los Angeles as a teen and who keeps doing the same now that he lives in Providence. Rather, it’s a showcase, I think, of how railfan wishcasting can turn into actual proposals by advocates that look good but can never perform well.
The proposals
Kenny proposes five lines:
- An extension of Shore Line East to the Rhode Island border at Westerly
- A rail line going inland from New London to Norwich via Mohegan Sun
- An extension of MBTA Commuter Rail in Rhode Island to Westerly to meet Shore Line East
- An extension of MBTA Commuter Rail into New Hampshire to serve Nashua and Manchester
- An extension of Amtrak Downeaster service deeper into Main, from Brunswick to Rockland
Long-time readers may remember that the second and fourth both appear in a post I wrote in 2020 about New England high- and low-speed rail coordination. So obviously I don’t think they are bad. I do, however, think they depend on other investments, outside the low-speed regional rail paradigm.
A rail line to Mohegan and Norwich works if and only if there is high-speed rail from New York to New London, without which it is uncompetitive with driving or with buses to the casino. I can be convinced that a rail line might work if an extensive upgrade of the New Haven Line to cut 30-45 minutes from train trips (like 30-30-30, reducing New York-New Haven trip times to an hour; this is also in the no-bypasses version of our Northeast Corridor proposal). At current trip time, unfortunately, rail is not competitive with the transfer time – New York-New London is 2.5 hours today, and New York-Mohegan/Norwich would be around 3 hours, whereas Google right now, at 10 pm New York time, gives me a 2:20 driving time to the casino. Rail is more competitive at rush hour, but a casino with midnight buses does not generate particularly peaky traffic. The Northeast Corridor proposal’s schedule is 1:12 New York-New London every half an hour, which makes a connecting regional train competitive; otherwise, it’s not worth it.
Similarly, an extension of commuter rail into New Hampshire is best saved for after the MBTA system extensively modernizes its core service, with electrification of the Lowell Line and high platforms. The Lowell Line could potentially be fast – it was built in 1834, before rail builders figured out that sharp curves could be built without derailing the trains. But it isn’t now, and it’s still designed as a strictly unidirectional system, bringing in suburban commuters to Boston in the morning and back home in the late afternoon. For example, the Route 128 stop on the line, Mishawum, is barely served and not really connected to the nearby office parks. Then the lack of electrification and the low platforms hurt reliability and raise operating costs, and so far the MBTA is buying battery-trains only on the Fairmount Line and at extremely high costs, the agency’s managers still feeling allergic to hanging catenary wires. No outer extensions should be entertained under the current paradigm.
The Westerly connection
The most interesting – and flawed – bits in the proposal come from the idea of connecting Shore Line East with MBTA Commuter Rail service at Westerly. There are feasibility studies from both ends, with results that are trumpeted in the media as portending great demand but actually prove the opposite (the Connecticut study estimates 160,000 riders/year, which is a bit more than 500/day).
The issue is that today, one can chain commuter rail trips from south of Wilmington (technically Newark, Delaware) to New London, but there are gaps past both ends, between New London and Wickford Junction and between Delaware and Perryville. Railfans see the gaps and want them closed with commuter rail extensions so that they can take the entire Northeast Corridor without using Amtrak. These railfans then advocate to study such extensions – for example, the Rhode Island Association of Rail Passengers is involved.
And those extensions are largely useless. There is a mode of transport for connecting different city regions in the Northeast: intercity rail. One can take Amtrak between New Haven and Providence today, at competitive trip times. The fares are high, but that’s because operating costs are high; regional rail is if anything more expensive to operate, and raises questions of whether subsidizing this specific trip is a good use of Connecticut and Rhode Island’s money. What’s more, people take these high-fare trains – the trip times on that segment are competitive, and buses struggle to serve a thin market, lacking the ability of trains to easily serve multiple cities and piggyback on the much thicker New York-Boston market.
Germany has parallel intercity trains that run fast and regional trains that run slow but are free to ride with the Deutschlandticket. When the free tickets on regional trains were introduced with the 9€ monthly of summer 2022, people rode them for the novelty, and then stopped, because nobody actually needs to string regional trains between cities, averaging maybe 60 km/h, just for the free trip. Trains that are not time-competitive are not getting ridership, and this includes any attempt to get passengers to connect at Westerly between regional trains to New Haven and regional trains to Providence.
So any extension to Westerly from either end has to live purely on regional traffic. Last time Rhode Island paid for an MBTA extension to the south, it got parking lots at T. F. Green Airport and Wickford Junction, and massive ridership shortfalls. Wickford Junction, in the middle of nowhere in northern South (Washington) County, has a parking garage with 1,100 spots, which drove up the construction costs of the station to $44 million in early 2010s prices. Ridership in the fall 2024 counts was 157 inbound boardings, or 314 total trips, compared with a ridership projection of about 3,500; the cost per daily trip in today’s prices is about $200,000. This is not a corona artifact – the MBTA recovered all corona ridership shortfall, alone among major American commuter rail agencies. It’s just what happens when commuter rail is extended to a place with few commuters to Boston; Providence is not a strong enough city center to hold a peaky commuter rail system as a destination (the Superman Building is still empty and seeking financing for a residential conversion). Westerly is not going to do any better than Wickford Junction.
But what such an extension would do, in lieu of getting any ridership, is interfere with intercity trains. The fastest parts of the Northeast Corridor are in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. A system of timed overtakes is used right now to let Amtrak share the corridor with slow diesel trains; Attleboro has four tracks for that. South of Providence, this is obviated by the fact that there’s almost no commuter traffic, but the more there is, the more one has to worry about timetabling, which would complicate schedules and reduce reliability for the intercity trains that get ridership in service of regional trains that would not.
Some of this would improve if service on the Northeast Corridor in general improved. However, the issue of interference with intercity trains would only get worse if intercity service were sped up and ran more frequently. In theory, it should be possible to run a stopping train between New Haven and Providence on the legacy line, with intercity trains running on a bypass in Connecticut, but the timetabling in Rhode Island would still be difficult and the ridership would not be particularly strong. Other than Mohegan Sun, towns like Mystic and Westerly aren’t destinations, and for origins, the train would struggle to beat driving to New London to take the train from there to New York.
Railfan prioritization
Taking a broader view of this, railfans tend to prioritize the wrong lines, and not just in the United States; Germany has the same problem with rail advocacy. To the person who’d ride the train even if driving were faster, the most important priorities are where train service does not exist, such as across the gap between New London and Wickford Junction. But to the civil servant deciding how to prioritize infrastructure money, it’s more important to invest in trains that can get more riders than just the railfans; taking a line from 0% to 5% modal split is less important than taking it from 20% to 40%, it’s just less important to the sort of people who are already in the 20% of rail users and would be in the 5% if service and modal splits deteriorated.
In truth, the priority in the Northeast should be high-speed rail, in coordination with some specific urban and inner-suburban commuter rail investments; I keep pushing grade separation of Hunter and Shell Interlockings just south and north of New York respectively for a reason. On the commuter rail system, the priority must likewise be making the system usable by more than suburban 9-to-5 commuters, and investing in making it unrecognizable to the American traditionalist and recognizable to the European RER or S-Bahn user. Regional rail is in the best cases a lower priority, and in many not worth it even as a lower priority.
Pedestrian Observations 
Mishawum is not legally open. The mini-highs were scavenged for use elsewhere and thus the station is out of ADA compliance and cannot legally be served.
Railfans often prioritise what looks good on a map instead of asking for service that will be broadly useful to a large proportion of the population (which is the criterion to get ridership). Gaps on a map are easy to point out, but understanding how much ridership such extensions will get is a more difficult exercise. Describing service improvements to already “serviced” corridors is also more difficult than crayoning new lines (or abandoned lines). Proper, socially beneficial proposals require consideration to existing conditions and what potential is possible with improvements, something that is difficult to grasp by just looking at a map.
I think it just so happens that bad proposals like this are just broadly appealing to the lowest common denominator of railfans so they get pushed. Perhaps more education in this space is necessary but less people are interested in understanding what a useful service in the developed world should look like instead of foaming at Big Boy.
In my opinion, if you have difficulty grasping something with a map you may be better served by refining the map rather than or in combination with trying a different approach to understand the data.
For example, Minard’s famous map of Napoleon’s retreat from Russia with its innovative combination of line widths, simplified geometry, and the accompanying temperature graph. If I were to add just one piece to this masterpiece, it would be some way to show the reasons for casualties — disease &c.
For transit, Harry Beck’s station ticks vs interchange station circles are another great example.
I’ve been trying to tell people for years (including here) that if rail fans want rail they need to focus. CAHSR isn’t a bad idea (the costs are a different story), but if every rail fan in the US told their congressman that DC->NYC->Boston was the top priority we could get something there, and that would be a success we could build on. However by fragmenting efforts we allow the status quo of almost nothing. Worse when something does happen the goal isn’t only rail service, many are supporting it for some other goal that makes for worse rail (It has to serve the disadvantaged even if they live in a hard to serve area and won’t use it. It has to have lots of expensive parks. It has to have an art museum station. It has to use lots of union labor. It has to use lots of expensive consultants). If everyone would focus we could get something that is compelling and use that in our argument for the next step – those who want service to Iowa should fight for service to Chicago, while those looking for service to Alabama should be looking at service to Atlanta next, but at least an example of success means we can get those, and those should both be successful no matter which we built next, thus giving us a chance of getting service elsewhere (and both the above marginal places can’t possibly be successful without the line I mentioned anyway)
I think the problem with this is that you end up not benefiting enough of the states.
Certainly DC-Boston should be stage one, and perhaps Chicago-New York and/or an extension to Atlanta should be phase 2, but you need to touch the other states with phase 3 or 4.
Even if Brightline goes bust tomorrow it is getting non-terrible ridership in a non-traditional railway state.
Upgrading some Great Plains lines to 100-125mph or whatever and allowing them to be used for fast freight too isn’t likely to be too expensive as the routes are presumably pretty straight and level. Plus this would definitely benefit the freight companies – and you should be able to manage British style average speeds if not greater ones too.
East of the Mississippi every state has at least one route that would be worth doing, all that is lacking is the political will to get it done for a reasonable price – most people don’t see what could be and so even though they would use and love it they don’t know that today and so oppose it. Some of the states only have a route worth doing there already is a strong network that it connects to, the line alone as a first line would fail. You can get a little ways west of the Mississippi in places, but not very far.
Likewise up the pacific coast CA to Canada is a useful route (and perhaps into Mexico). This could connect to Los Vegas, but there is basically nothing else in a useful range with any population.
There are a bit over a dozen states that are not in the above that are not touched even in phase 5. If the other states worked together they can get a great network. However it means someone needs to accept they only get something in phase 5. Right now I have low confidence that even if we all worked together to make the NEC happen in 2027 (that is it becomes too politically powerful for Trump to stop), that it would even finish – as opposed to stuck in endless delays before it is canceled (as CAHSR is in danger of) – which leaves little hope for phase 2, much less all the way to phase 5. If those only worth doing if the rest of the network is great phase 5 projects see no hope of ever getting done they won’t support phase 1, and in turn we are where we are…
And how many votes in the senate does that get you?
That depends on how united rail-fans are. When it is every state for themselves about 5. However if there is united will that will turn into votes that can buy a lot more. 20-30 are directly lost since no sane plan will get to their state. The rest are up to how united rail fans are about this in ways that turn into votes. When politicians realize voters care they push for and vote for bills in ways that keep their job. So united rail fans who vote based on this single issue could turn into 60 votes in the senate. Rail fans are a minority interest, but there are enough to turn most elections if they agree not to vote for someone because of a single issue.
Realistically, Democrats think the corruption of the democrats is good, it is the Republicans fault when things go wrong. Meanwhile Republicans think the corruption of the republicans is good, anything that went wrong must be a democrat’s fault. And so nothing will change. I can’t help you turn this into something in the real world. I can tell you what it would look like, but I have no clue how to get there.
@henry, I think doing the north east corridor is kinda obvious. Certainly Biden is enough of a rail fan to get that.
I think the bigger challenge is how you benefit most of the country like the TGV, ICE, THSR, Shinkansen, KTX, CRH, Al Boraq Etc do, or at least are planned to.
the problem isn’t figuring out how to benefit most of the country. The problem is paying for it at once. If we had infinite money you could just go DC all the way down to Miami or maybe some other route depending on how you want to hit Atlanta. Then from Boston we go to Toronto (obviously this requires help from the Canadians.) from New York we go to Chicago and then head up towards Minneapolis not to mention from Chicago We should be heading to Kansas City via st. Louis. I’m not sure what the molten passes are like to get from the east coast to to the south but there must be some route that you could get to the southern states Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas into New Orleans and maybe into all the way into Texas. From Columbus and Indianapolis you can trains should be heading south catching states and all the way to the southern route just named. At some point we head north into Michigan. We also finished california high between rail from Mexico all the way up to Vancouver BC.
I didn’t do an analysis of those routes, but just looking at a map and population, it seems likely that every one of those routes should get enough riders to be worth doing as part of the complete network.
of course, it’s easy to type that, but it doesn’t take a genius to realize that even at world-class low prices, the US can’t afford to do all that at once. Which why I said focus on the New England corridor which is so blindfully obvious that the US should be able to pull it off and get the start of a network. From there go on to phase 2 and 3 which is somewhat less useful but makes for a better network. If the US actually got good at building high-speed rail, every road I named seems like it should get reasonable ridership in, in turn, it covers the entire U.S except for states – which sorry you just don’t have the population we’ll never do it
@henry, you are spot on on phase 1 which benefits 9-10 states. The problem is the later stages don’t get you another 20 states.
An extension from New York or to Chicago with branches gets maybe 4, an extensions from DC to Miami and to Atlanta get you another 4. So where do the next 12 come from?
And it’s not about what the railfans think it’s what’s possible to get through the senate that counts. And I’m including DC as a state in my count which it isn’t currently.
there is the problem. The new England states are both small and have a lot of population. So we can get a lot of states very quickly for a modest investment. As you go west or south, your states are going to be larger and the population intensity is smaller. Therefore, every phase after this will get less states.
east of Mississippi, every state has enough population close enough to something else that it’s worth hitting with high-speed rail in the national network. However, the network is important. Some of those small cities are only worth it because they connect to a larger network. The hard part isn’t coming up with all the states needing to give votes in Senate. The hard part is coming up with a way to convince people that your state is in the one of the last phases. You’re asking those people to support the early phases on trust that we will continue investing and they will eventually get high speed rail. That is a very hard problem and I don’t like people being skeptical.
@Henry, I think I didn’t read your last comment properly I am sorry. Yes I agree that if you do all of the lines on e.g https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/02/10/high-speed-rail-for-the-eastern-united-states/ including the yellow ones that you have something workable – especially if you do also do the equivalents in the western half of the country as well.
The challenge is when your plan looks more like https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/28/high-speed-rail-and-the-pacific-northwest/ I am not sure it is enough?
In terms of people not benefiting on day one, well that has been true in all other places that have done high speed rail to be fair. I think that can be dealt with if by phase 4 the whole country gets something.
Probably the thing that you do need to do for phase 2 is to get to Chicago as that gets you to the middle of the country.
How was the interstate highway bill conceived? There is obviously no way to benefit all states early in the plan, but I think some low speed rail (for not a lot of spending compared to HSR) should be included. I guess you could electrify the corridors which will benefit in the future with thru running a HSR corridor first.
There must be a mechanism to deal with the freight railroads when addressing low speed rail, and hopefully that will help with improving service where high speed rail cannot be justified.
The plan could also come with local transit funding for states which do not meet the threshold for even upgraded legacy intercity rail service. This would probably bloat the cost of the plan a lot without a clear focus but that might be required for this to get enough support at least.
Chicago as phase 2 probably does make sense because it could benefit a lot of states at the same time, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and plus the NEC and the NE, as well as other Eastern Seaboard states might just be enough.
@Sia, looks like the initial legislation was for 41,000 miles of highway as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_1956
PS I do think if secondary destinations are served with slower lines with a 90mph-100mph top speed or something that is still better than driving.
Real estate speculation plus racism.
Same as everything, always, in the USA. Works every time.
I think generally I am tending to agree but not fully – non-metropolitan regional service in the US is genuinely often hard to get right to the point that it is rarely worth pursuing. Even SLE is disgraceful and stretching that line even thinner is meaningless. Though I did also check something like Arrow which seems to run all-day clockface, which while worse than what would be expected there in an ideal world, is a good mentality and makes it not-useless, though I doubt it gets the next step of timed bus integration right. So really everyone ought to be extremely skeptical of trains for the sake of trains in this context. There are enough WESes and not enough good small or peripheral city bus systems.
Where I would disagree is the miscellaneous service extensions. Yes, they should not be an overall priority at all, but, for example of the state of Maine wants Downeaster extended to Rockland and are willing to pay for doing it without reducing service on the existing route, so be it. It’s the same for taking the Lowell line out into New Hampshire or something like the Bourne Line, and I would even go as far to say that for rural state-supported services. The problem with the Providence Line past Providence is that it is useless for people doing anything other than going to Boston, not that these trains do go to Boston or that it is part of the CR.
South Coast Rail I am on the fence about, its own execution kills a lot of its merits and makes it hard to call it a good service, I like to joke that it was designed on the principle of the bare minimum that is “better than nothing”. Anything less and it would have been worse than nothing. Given that the same money could have instead, say, given us Worcester line upgrades or EMUs for Providence (and in a world where the MBTA is competent, probably both) – going forward this is really only something which should be done on somebody else’s money rather than not done at all.
On some level I get what you’re saying, but just because the money is coming from Maine rather than Mass or Amtrak or the FRA or whoever doesn’t mean it’s the best use of that money, even to improve intercity rail in Maine.
Accidentally posted the comment before I meant to, I was going to say that improving Boston – Portland service would do more for intercity rail in ME.
Definitely, I would like to correct though, I was missing a single “if” there, I don’t think Maine wants the Downeaster going up to Rockland, as far as I know they and NNEPRA have been trying to get whoever the state contracts freight on the line to to run passenger service as well to connect with the Downeaster, but I haven’t been following it closely at all and the line just keeps churning through different operators so evidently it is not going well.
I suspect the specific reason they want to do it like that is exactly so they don’t stretch the Downeaster too thin, and from the way Downeaster improvement projects get presented and talked about I think everyone understands that it is what really matters.
In my opinion just extending the Downeaster to Rockland would be the best as long as it doesn’t harm the existing service, and if they can’t do that then they really shouldn’t try to run a separate service, it is evidently not going well either.
Re: “somebody else’s money” – Of course it would be a better use of money to upgrade existing service from adequate to good-great, but one cannot always prioritise the most effective use of money – especially when it comes to anything dispersing over a geography. In the US this may be attached to funding sources and grantwriting, in other places to local political organisation, &c. And I don’t think it’s a tendency to be fought exactly for a variety of reasons.
For frothing railfans working up a head of foam. Normal people aren’t going to take the high speed train, change to shuttle train to change to a shuttle bus. it assumes building a high speed rail station in Ye Olde Historik Downtowne New London is possible.
The destinations in southeast Connecticut are the casinos – plural – and a station that gives people a short shuttle bus ride might attract a few Manhattanites. Which won’t be in the parking desert around the existing New London train station.
I think the problem in New England, and specifically CT, of prioritization stems from the fundamental issue of a lack of state capacity.
I’ve had a few chances to meet with some legislators and individuals with transit experience here, on topics such as rolling stock procurement, scheduling and maintenance practices, and electrification. In these meetings one thing’s been made clear to me: there will be no improvement beyond the marginal in services or capital project execution until responsibility for railways are separated from CTDOT and a new organization, staffed by outsiders with functional passenger railway experience, is created to manage the the state’s railway assets, services, and policies.
Many stories have been shared with me of the department’s obstructionist, anti-transit culture. Some I was able to verify with research; others I take on faith due to the experience and credentials of the gentlemen I spoke to. This culture is the biggest obstacle to good rail transit operations and future expansion. The FTA, FRA and Amtrak hate working with CTDOT due to its adversarial nature. The well is poisoned and has been for some time.
Alon’s written in the past about how some agencies are not just ignorant, but also unwilling to learn. I thought they were being a tad hyperbolic. They were right, and I was mistaken. A far-from-comprehensive list of examples:
Sometimes, the lack of state capacity can be partially backfilled with citizen advocacy, either individually or through groups. But those don’t exist here either. There’s no equivalent to TransitMatters, or ETANY, or any of the other MA-NYC-LI-NJ groups which provide a voice for riders. The Rail Passengers Association, who I also spoke with, doesn’t maintain a presence in CT, although to their credit they pledged to hook me up with some adjacent groups. The purported “independent advisory group” chartered by the state, the CT Public Transportation Council, is not open to private citizens, and is, in practice, a side gig for some elected officials to receive periodic briefings from CTDOT, composed of operational statistics and capital project narratives which should just be published cleanly for public consumption. When rider constituencies are not represented, or cannot educate or pressure legislators, a critical piece of the process is missing.
Until state capacity is legislated into existence and survives bureaucratic attempts at abdication of responsibility and shedding of risk (for instance, employing consultants to manage other consultants, or do all of the planning), CT will always struggle to attract and retain ridership beyond its current commuter and intercity patronage, and to spend reasonably to do so.
Therefore, I’m in violent agreement with the utilitarian point Alon makes here: efforts in CT, and New England more generally, should concentrate on improvements of core services (and, I’d add, governance) which will benefit a larger share of current and potential future riders before considering throwing tails out to the hinterlands.
Same ballpark as Thanet Parkway which has 240m platforms, no facilities other than a lift and doesn’t have canopies.
It was built on a live railway though to be fair.
To be fair Connecticut is very rich like the Bay Area so isn’t going to be as cheap as Europe on PPP. But yes it shouldn’t be more than Caltrain for sure.
Thanet parkway was £40m or $60m PPP.
New Haven to Boston was electrified for $3.82M per route mile in 2000$. This was done in advance of the first Acela services on the Northeast Corridor, with additional benefits of extending Northeast Regional electric service without a locomotive change. This project, typically called Amtrak Northend, comprised 25kV 60Hz along 156 route miles of primarily double track, with complex approaches to Boston South Station concurrent with the Big Dig (Central Artery/Tunnel Project). It also included constant tension catenary for the first time in North America, with the DC to Boston route’s only 150mph stretch at the time in MA and RI.
With some realistic inflation assumptions (no, I have not seen individual transformer invoices, nor should those anecdotes be used in substitution of aggregated construction cost inflation), that gets you to about $13M in 2040. Within that number, I believe there are opportunities for reduction for New Haven-Springfield given the easier topography, fewer bridges, an easier alignment, and single-track stretches, before considering best practices imported from places that know what they’re doing, and soft-cost reduction from better contracting (again, primarily a governance issue).
A projection of $42M per mile would be slightly more believable if it included a Connecticut River bridge replacement (also being studied, supposedly), grade separations, relocation and reconstruction of Hartford Union which would likely require takings and a short stretch of tunneling, double tracking the remaining single track sections of the line, a layover yard, and acquisition of electric rolling stock. Alas, it does not include these items, as over 90% of the cost as briefed on the single slide of publicly available information is OCS.
One of the railway electrification areas I’m not well versed in is interference with signal systems and required clearances to other infrastructures. If anyone has a primer on that, it would be helpful.
This is something network rail have gold plated in the UK.
So if you want to know what’s really required look at some of the older stuff.
Oh boy! This is an absolute text-book case of a black hole of active consultant weaponization of “standards”.
You can’t be too safe! Which means that you can’t listen to foreigners, who don’t understand safety. Because, foreigners. Which means you have to write your own standards. FOR SAFETY! Which drives your costs for doing anything, anything at all, through the stratosphere. But that’s OK, because it’s FOR SAFETY. Which drives your constultant and staff budget percentage skimming off the top of every contract into orbit. Which is perfectly understandable, in the interests of SAFETY.
Which means you basically can’t construct anything remotely normal at all under any circumstance, and you get to deliver shit results, if any, decades late, at nose-bleed costs, because SAFETY. Also, you now need to repeatedly study gadgetbahns (hydrogen, intermittent electrification, something something sustainable renewable) over and over and over instead of doing anything normal.
We’re watching this play out right now at Caltrain in California, where the shit consultant’s self-serving self-dealing self-enriching shit “standards” mean that basically nothing at all that is normal or simple (like, say “a bridge”, or “a turnout”) can be constructed, and nothing at all can be done at any non-science-fiction cost, because the deadly electricities are all going to murder us in our beds. That plus “something something supply chain something something data center something something specialized rail safety something”. JACKPOT!
Anyway, there is a ton of info out there, but not all that much in English. (And the English-language stuff you’ll find is overwhelmingly from the UK, which means out-of-control vendor capture and cost explosion.)
All that negativity aside, do check out Garry Keenor‘s “Overhead Line Electrification for Railways
— An approachable and comprehensive study of OLE for beginners and trainees”. He’s good! (He seems like a good bloke, too.)
My personal go-to is “Contact Lines for Electric Railways: Planning, Design, Implementation, Maintenance” (a good translation of “Fahrleitungen elektrischer Bahnen”) by Kießling, Pushmann and Schneider, which I have as a now-yellowing physical hardback book dated October 2001. I mean, doesn’t everybody own this? One ought to!
Richard, you’re an entertaining and resourceful gentleman. I’ve just downloaded your first reference and started reading.
Interestingly, in one of the conversations I had with a rail transport professional about New Haven-Springfield electrification, he made an opportunity-cost argument against because of timeline, ridership, and schedule (I sympathized and respectfully agreed to disagree), but as an aside, he brought up interference in a built-up area. I didn’t know how to refute that, and admitted so; but then I retreated to “if densely populated cities in Europe and Asia can do it, I don’t see why it’s not solvable here.” He turned to another participant and said “He sounds like those blog posts you always email me.” 😀
With this reference in my hands I hope to have more ammunition to educate policymakers about what is and is not a true engineering obstacle.
They’ve had those scary electrik wires hanging over the railroad tracks in the far off exotic suburbs of Greenwich and Cos Cob since 1907. It worked out so well it was extended to New Haven since 1914 and alllllllllllllllllllllllllll the way to Rhode Island since 2000.
Did you exchange contact information with the other participant, J.G.?
On interference: as Adirondacker points out, there’s high-voltage electrification in Connecticut right now, so what is this person on about. I’ll add that some Haifa NIMBYs were making up something similar (“high-voltage catenary may cause cancer”) to delay the Israeli rail electrification project, and obviously the state told them to fuck off, but eventually they did find something, namely a demand to trench the tracks through the city to facilitate pedestrian access to the beach, and now the project is further delayed.
Alon, I’d be happy to share more of the details privately including participants of these meetings. I’ll send you a note.
With respect to interference, I don’t want to speculate further as I’m not comfortable with the level of my knowledge on this subject. Once I read the reference Richard Mlynarik kindly provided, hopefully I can establish the context.
In any case, it was a secondary concern. This person’s primary argument that the cost and timeline didn’t justify the project. My reply of what it should cost and how long it should take (in which I am more well-versed, thanks to you and many others) then led into a discussion of governance and state capacity, the rationalization mechanism.
Interference can be a concern and signaling is often upgraded during French electrifications. I did not mention it when comparing Caltrain and Nogent-Troyes costs because the KVB signaling upgrade represented less than 2% of the overall budget (3.1 million out of 190 mE on this 56 km double track). KVB originated in Sweden. It is comparable to ECTS level 1. It is described in English on the Wikipedia page Contrôle de Vitesse par Balises.
The platform costs are not outrageously high, but still a bit on the high side when compared to peer projects. But this should not cause the entire branch to shut down, that’s rather ridiculous.
An informed citizens’ initiative can only do so much. If the state capacity keeps on failing, and releases nothing to inform the public because it wants to hide its own incompetence there is not much we can do but look in from the outside.
The platform costs are not outrageously high, but still a bit on the high side when compared to peer projects. But this should not cause the entire branch to shut down, that’s rather ridiculous.
An informed citizens’ initiative can only do so much. If the state capacity keeps on failing, and releases nothing to inform the public because it wants to hide its own incompetence there is not much we can do but look in from the outside.
The Waterbury branch modernization is great. Returning part of the beautiful Waterbury Union Station to its original purpose as a waiting area is a nice touch. However the cost, $193 million for six 105 meter platforms, is outrageous. Let’s not forget we are almost in toy train territory. Ridership is growing, in part because of the enhanced facilities, but altogether the six stations receive less than 270 000 passengers annually.
Warwick Parkway station was built from the ground up and on a busy line in 2000 for 3 million Pound. That is slightly less than 6 million Pound or $8 million in today’s money. The two platforms are 240 m long. Last year’s ridership was 493 000. It was financed by the railroad company and the town who had to fight NIMBYs and Railtrack to gain approval. In this location, the Chiltern Main Line runs on an embankment. The builders wanted to use an existing cattle creep to access the opposite side platform but Railtrack objected because the passage was 3 inches too narrow, preventing two wheelchairs to pass each other. Railtrack eventually relented but even its own plan for a 12 million Pound station was affordable by US standards.
To be completely fair to CTDOT, as much as I don’t want to be, part of the reason for the shutdown and the cost is new track alignments to accommodate the longer, level-boarding platforms. But then I’d question the necessity. Ridership is up, but not by that much. We need not over-spec stations to be comfortable at peak. Sometimes places have to be crowded.
J.G, in the Valley, the only crowding issue I am aware of occurs southwards in the morning and northwards in the evening on Route 8. The Waterbury branch has the ridership of a bus route and manages with bus stop-like 40 feet/12 meter low platforms at Naugatuck and Beacon Falls. The new 105 meter ADA compliant platforms and improved parking and waiting facilities will be great but may be somewhat overbuilt.
In my opinion, the priority here is spending money in a way few can object to. Per the bipartisan 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, $24 billion is available and about $4 billion authorized to partially rebuilt the North East Corridor. In CT, these federal grants help finance the WALK and Devon Bridges replacements and stations upgrades on the Waterbury branch as well as in Darien, Stamford, East Norwalk and New Haven.
Step-free access and enclosed waiting areas are great but are the priorities of an aging society. Accordingly, the 2021 law also established a $1.75 billion All Stations Accessibility Program (ASAP). Railfans may rejoice because $4 billion are available for rail expansion outside the NEC but I agree with Alon, the priority should be high speed rail. Lowering trip duration is a proven way of increasing rail ridership and lowering costs by improving productivity, showering money at conventional rail not so much. Elasticity is around -1, meaning a 10% cut in trip duration or fare begets a 10% patronage uptick but Amtrak and Metro-North Railroad are not good at it. The Acela is only about 4 minutes faster than the 1970’s Metroliners between NY Penn and Washington, and about 2 minutes faster in average than the best NY-New Haven services offered by the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad in 1938. Arrival and departures from Grand Central Terminal are still painfully slow. Fares cannot go down either. Amtrak NEC average fares/km are high by international standards with the Regional tickets costing twice as much as the TGV, and the Acela three times as much because productivity is low.
It’s slower than Acela schedules have been in the past. Picking a date next week the fastest train takes 2:55. It was consistently 2:40, on the fastest trains, years ago. Fastest Metroliner – that only stopped in Philadelphia – took 2:30.
They may be extending summer schedules because the wires over the tracks get floppy when it’s hot. They rip themselves apart if the trains go too fast too. They’ve know about this since the Pennsylvania Railroad and Budd did tests. They never get any money to fix it. Even though there are very long stretches between New York and Washington that are straight enough for higher speeds.
Amtrak got money to replace the obsolete catenary. The Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act (4R Act) of February 5, 1976 provided $1.75 billion and envisioned half-hourly service from 0600 to 2200 on the Washington-NYC market with a 2h40 schedule with 5 stops, and hourly service between NYC and Boston on a 3h40 schedule with 5 stops. A few weeks later, SNCF obtained the Déclaration d’Utilité Publique for the LGV Sud-Est. The two schemes were supposed to complete by 1981, and cost about the same. While Amtrak and the Federal Railroad Administration had money and no plans, SNCF had a plan and no money. However, its plans were good enough to convince investors and the LGV opened in part in 1981, in full in 1982.
Meanwhile, according to a Congressional report, the coconcurrency policy of concurrent planning, design, and construction adopted on the NEC achieved inefficiencies, schedule difficulties and many other problems. Amtrak’s 1977 track work was not only incomplete and over budget but “may have a detrimental impact on the total program since additional program funds may be needed to redo some of the 1977 work.” The DeLeuw, Cather/Parsons consultant “summed up Amtrak’s 1978 track work performance as having been characterized by cost overruns, schedule delays and poor quality of work. Amtrak has not demonstrated the ability to plan, supervise and execute work with even a remote semblance of good management.” Three years into the five-year program, the Federal Railroad Administration overseeing the works was still preparing the fundamental documents. There was however a lot of micromanagement. During the 1978 work season about 1700 people were performing project management duties while only about 1300 were actually doing construction work. In the end, the money ran out and the New York-Washington re-electrification and the New Haven-Boston electrification were postponed.
Lyndon Johnson and the PRR proposed 2 hours NY to DC in the High Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965. Congress hallucinates some stuff, railfans get all foamy and the money gets spent replacing stuff that fell apart since the last paroxysm of spending. We then elect people who think trains are a Communist plot and don’t fund anything. On fairly regular cycles. The wires that limit speeds to 135 when the weather cooperates are still hanging over the tracks. Or limit the speed to 90 when the weather doesn’t cooperate.
Sometimes with these proposals I wonder why transit improvement always seems to mean building rail. New England has better bus coverage than most of the US, but even there, there is definitely scope for better local and intercity bus service to make it more possible to get around comfortably and relatively quickly without a car and to grow travel markets so that they are better able to justify bigger, more intrusive investments later.
I’m in Central Maryland which, again, is better than most of the country, but coverage and service are still pretty bad. Our parallel to the Westerly gap here is between Perryville and Newark DE. In other countries I have lived in, there would be a bus service covering this gap, but there isn’t one here (there doesn’t appear to be one between New London and Westerly or Westerly and Wickford Jct either) – you have to go back to Baltimore and get an intercity bus or train. I would love to see a better statewide bus network connecting places like Baltimore-Frederick/Hagerstown, Annapolis and the Eastern Shore, not to mention better connections to neighboring states and a bus station that isn’t hidden behind a casino off a highway. These journeys are essentially impossible at the moment, requiring multiple transfers and long waits with poor frequencies. They often are hugely expensive too – it can be cheaper to go to New York on Amtrak than Frederick on the bus. But there is very limited advocacy or even interest in basic, cheap, quick upgrades that would enable people to get around without a car without huge the infrastructure projects that always tend to go sideways in the US.
I think railfan planning has parallels to the tendency of American alternative analyses to lump corridors and modes together. That’s not to say that the corridors discussed in this post specifically are bad or shouldn’t be rail (though Alon has outlined some reasons some of them are), but that American transit advocacy would benefit from being a bit more focused on mobility and less wedded specifically to rail projects, which we don’t seem to be able to build competently anyway. Organization before electronics before concrete, right?
Agree with that take in general. Places like Utah should invest in an intercity/inter-region bus network instead of trying to revive old rail routes to remote destinations like Moab. They can connect to the already existing (and good) Bustang network in Colorado. Said Bustang already offers 6 daily roundtrips from Denver to Grand Junction, a 6 hour bus trip (4 hours by car). This is remarkably competent for a publicly funded bus network, which rail will never match. For places with low population density, a high-quality and public-funded bus network can be a great mobility enhancer for those who do not wish to or don’t want to drive.
We have to be honest that these places will never be ideal for shared transportation to displace the private car because of the geography. We can however provide good enough alternatives. I wish this concept could get through to the railfans who support the Rio Grande Plan and those who think that a state-wide rail network is a worthwhile investment.
In the east coast, the higher population density and the higher prevalence of traffic jams, as well as the higher density of existing rail infrastructure makes a case by case evaluation of each corridor important. Under any scenario however, a coordinated mobility plan involving all modes, Train, bus, ferry, etc, will be more effective than being pigeon holed into rail only.
Get a grip. There are no inter-city or inter-region anywhere in Utah. There is Salt Lake CIty, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake City and a bunch of desolate wide places along the very long road trip to something very very far away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_statistical_areas
I would like to point to the same “inter-region” buses that already exist in Colorado to akin to places that you describe as desolate plains. It seems the desolate plains attract a lot of tourists for some reason.
The desolate plains are in places like Kansas and Nebraska that cluelees railfans think have people that can become passengers. Grand Junction is in the mountains.
Utah is too dry for plains. That doesn’t change that the second biggest metropolitan area in Utah is an extra wide place in the road. That has air service to major hubs and Greyhound service. But then if had a clue you would have checked this kind of stuff. And that Salt Lake City has train service Colorado rail fans would plotz over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FrontRunner
You don’t need to be much of a region to support bus service. 30k often only needs a couple bus routes along the uncongested roads they already have to get good service and local mode share. It is a given that the state is already building highways to those tiny cities, so the additional cost to bus service is the cost of a few buses, drivers, and overhead (bus maintenance, management…). Adding shelters and such for people to get on is a nice to have, but not needed.
The above is about local service. For inter-city similar applies. Price Utah (A city I picked at random) is on US highway 6 and should support regular bus service to Salt Lake city. There are a bunch of other wide spots on this road. While it may not fill a bus, it should be enough to have affordable trips with minimal subsidies, and people will use it. There is also I15 with a bunch of wide spot cities that should support a bus.
The above is why Grey Hound has been able to run service to small cities in Utah. They don’t pay for a large part of the costs of running a road system. If those small cities have local bus service that was good enough to not need a car the intercity bus becomes even more useful (if you need a car when you get there why not drive your own the whole way)
Trains require tracks, which you either need to build, or kick off some existing user of the track. (in many cases they can just be kicked to a different time on the tracks but still this is an issue, particularly if something breaks while on the tracks). This makes a train a lot more expensive than a bus – you have to pay for a lot more costs, a bus can ignore a large part of the costs because you are paying for the highway anyway.
When the topic is DC-NYC-Boston there is enough population that congestion becomes a problem, building a train track is cheaper than all the additional lanes you would need to handle this many people. This is because trains scale up much better than roads. A single lane on a road can transport at most around 3000 people per hour (one direction, and low speeds), typically they will do less (if the lane is bus only it can do a lot more). A single track can handle 30000 people per hour (one direction, low speeds).
Plus trains can run much faster than a car, people always care about time making high speed rail is better it for longer trips. The population in New England (unlike Utah) is large enough to support high speed rail at reasonable prices. I’d love to give the people of small town Utah high speed rail, but the ticket prices would have to be unaffordable and so it wouldn’t be used.
Maybe an intercity bus network with 2 hourly service is the compromise you do to give nationwide service beyond the 10 states in the north east corridor and the 10 extra states that further high speed rail can serve on a pure commercial basis?
Price, Utah can piggy off a Moab-SLC intercity bus. Given Moab is already struggling with congestion in the adjacent National Parks, forcing drivers to park at the entrance and take shuttles in, I think such a bus would support at least 2-hourly frequencies per day, at least during the summer high season. The Grand Junction bus from Denver could be extended to Green River or Moab so a through bus trip from Denver would be possible to SLC.
Brigham City/Logan probably could support hourly or 2-hourly service to SLC by themselves, and places like St. George/Cedar City could get the same treatment as Moab (being outside Zion NP), with another bus line originating from Las Vegas.
You simply need 3-5 bus lines to cover practically all of the state, and I’m sure this would be a better idea than trying to increase California Zephyr frequency or other rail ideas. Given Colorado already found some success in this I don’t see why this same model can’t be replicated in Utah.
It’s not the DOT’s purpose to indulge the masochistic tendencies of trainspotters on a bus. If you want to take the bus from Denver to Salt Lake City, Greyhound is available. You can take a train too.
https://www.canyonspirit.com
Colorado thinks otherwise. They’ve already done it.
You whined that Utah should do something. Utah doesn’t need to do anything because there is existing bus, train and plane service. a few wide places in the roads leading to places outside of the state, that are far far far away.
Why stop at buses, trains and planes? Why not canal boats and stagecoaches too? There is a sightseeing train from Denver to Salt Lake City, why not dirigibles, the views would be spectacular.
Lmfao sure, lets make do with the status quo since it’s the best that the lord promised to the sacred land of zion.
Utah, after spending a multiple seconds typing some search terms into a search engine, has what you think Colorado has. Be more specific – what’s wrong with Utah’s service – or quit whining.
mostly I agree, but I do want to point out that rail can do one thing a bus can not do. That is 300 kilometers an hour. For the vast majority of Americans, when they’re going inter city at highway speeds, why would you take a bus when you could just drive your own car and then you have your car when you get there?
And Zion, Bruce, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef and Arches national parks plus places like Monument Valley – and they might have a low population but definitely have much higher potential ridership.
Unimaginative railfannery. Through places that would probably be better servved by dial-a-ride services for the few people who don’t have access to a car. It’s unimaginative railfannery because extending Worcester trains to Springfield does the same thing. Gives foaming railfans another way to take a masochistic ride to or from New Haven. Why not revive the Air-Line while they are at it? It cuts miles and miles off the trip between Boston and New Haven. And goes through places with even less people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_and_New_York_Air-Line_Railroad