Foreigners to a country often get a warped idea of what its infrastructure is like. Most infrastructure is used for day-to-day domestic travel, for commuting to work or school, for visits to family and friends, for social gatherings, for business travel within the national internal market. Foreign travelers make use of this infrastructure when they visit, but they use it differently, and can make erroneous assumptions about how locals use it and what it means for transportation in general. This has two policy implications: one concerns American misconceptions about European rail travel; the other concerns pan-European misconceptions about European rail travel, which is almost entirely domestic, based on domestic networks, and planned and debated in the local language and not in English.
The Europe of the tourists
To estimate how foreign tourists may view Europe, we need some information on tourist travel within the bloc. The best I have is lists of the most visited cities in the world, and unfortunately, the only lists I have that go beyond the global top 10 are from before corona. But 2019 should not be too different to first order from the present. Here are international arrivals, from the global top 50:
City
Millions of arrivals (2019)
London
19.55
Paris
19.08
Istanbul
14.71
Rome
10.31
Prague
9.15
Amsterdam
8.83
Barcelona
7.01
Vienna
6.63
Milan
6.6
Athens
6.3
Berlin
6.19
Moscow
5.96
Venice
5.59
Madrid
5.59
Dublin
5.46
Notably, there’s almost no intersection with any of the busiest intercity rail links in Europe. The top two are the trunk from Paris on the LGV Sud-Est to the bifurcation between Dijon and Lyon, and the Frankfurt-Mannheim trunk line. Paris is a huge international tourist draw, but nothing on the LGV Sud-Est and its extensions is; the top department outside Ile-de-France in tourism overnight stays is Alpes-Maritimes, a 5.5-6 hour trip from Paris by TGV. Germany has little tourism for its size, especially not in Mannheim – foreigners come to Berlin or Munich, or maybe Frankfurt for business trips. Only two city pairs in Europe with solid high-speed rail links appear in the table above, Milan-Rome and Madrid-Barcelona.
The upshot is that the American tourist who comes here and marvels at the fact that even in Germany the trains are faster and more reliable than in the United States isn’t really experiencing the system as most users do. If they take the TGV, it’s much likelier that they’re taking Eurostar and dealing with its premium prices and probably also with its security theater if they’re going to London rather than Brussels or Amsterdam. They have nothing to do in Lyon or Bordeaux or Strasbourg or Lille, so it’s unlikely they see the workhorse domestic lines. It’s even more unlikely they take the train to the smaller cities with direct TGVs, such as Saint-Etienne, Chambéry, and others that beef up the ridership of the LGV Sud-Est without serving Lyon itself; there were considerable errors made by American analysts in the Obama era about high-speed rail coming from looking only at the million-plus metro areas and not at these secondary ones.
By the same token, the American tourist in question is much likelier to be riding Spanish trains with their brand and price differentiation by speed than to be riding the workhorse regional and intercity trains anywhere in Northern Europe. ICEs charitably average 160 km/h on a handful of lines when they’re on time, which isn’t often, and on key corridors like Berlin-Cologne or Berlin-Frankfurt are closer to 120 km/h. The reason Germany is close to even with France on ridership per capita and well ahead of Italy and Spain is that these trains have decent connections with one another and with slower regional trains, so that people can connect to those secondary cities better. Trips from Berlin to Augsburg with a connection in Munich are not hard to plan, or trips to city cores in the Rhine-Ruhr and other polycentric regions. These are largely invisible to the foreign tourist, who doesn’t have anything to do in a city like Münster.
This also applies to the European tourist, not just the American or Asian or Middle Eastern one. A German who visits France is interested in trains from Germany to Paris, and those are not that good, but will probably not be taking TGVs between Paris and Rennes or Lille. From that, they’ll conclude the TGVs aren’t that useful in general.
The Europe of the typical intercity rail traveler
In contrast with the tourists’ picture of the countries of Europe, the typical intercity rail traveler uses the system in a way that the table above doesn’t really capture. All of the following characteristics are likely:
They are traveling domestically since cross-border rail within Europe is practically never good.
They are traveling based on domestic business, leisure, and social networks: if French, they can be going between Paris and anywhere else in France, and very occasionally even between two places outside Ile-de-France; if German, they are likely going between two major cities or maybe between a major and a midsize city.
They are a regular traveler, which implies good knowledge of the system and its quirks, experience with large complex stations allowing getting between the train and the street within minutes, and probably also some kind of discounted fare card such as the BahnCard 25 in Germany or the half-fare card of Switzerland.
They have the disposable income to drive, and choose to take the train because of a combination of speed, fares, and convenience rather than because they truly can’t afford a car or because they are ideologically opposed to travel modes with high greenhouse gas emissions.
The upshot is that finicky systems like the TGV and ICE are useful to their current travelers, even if foreigners and people who move in pan-European networks find them unreliable for various reasons. Any kind of EU-wide policy on rail has to acknowledge that SNCF and DB may have problems but are the main providers of solid intercity rail within Europe and are not the enemy, they just focus on city pairs that reflect their domestic travel needs.
And any attempt to learn from Europe and adapt our intercity rail successes has to look beyond what a tourist visiting for a few days would notice. It’s not just the wow effect of speed; Eurostar has that too and its ridership is an embarrassment, with fewer London-Paris trips per day than Paris-Lyon even though metro London is around six times the size of metro Lyon. It’s other details of the network, including how far it reaches into the longer tail of secondary markets.
The secondary markets require especial concern, first because they form a large fraction (likely a majority) of European high-speed rail travel, second because they’re invisible to tourists, and third because they require careful optimization.
One issue is that secondary markets are great for cars, decent for trains, and awful for planes. The TGV owns them at distances where cars take too many hours longer than the train, which helps extend the trains well past the three- to four-hour limit that rail executives quote as the upper bound for competitive train trip time. At shorter range, high-speed rail competes with cars more than with planes, and so the secondary markets lose value.
Another issue is that it’s easy to overdo secondary markets at the expense of compromising speed on the primary ones. This is usually not because of tourists, who almost never ride them, but rather because of domestic travelers who are atypically familiar with and dependent on the system and will use it not just on city pairs like Berlin-Augsburg or Berlin-Münster but also things like Wismar-Jena, on which most people will just drive. In the United States, groups of users of Amtrak trains outside the Northeast Corridor like the Rail Passengers’ Association (RPA, distinct from the New York-area planning organization) routinely make this mistake and overrate the viability of slow night trains. I bring this up here because it is possible to overcorrect from the principle of “don’t rely on tourist reports too much, and do pay attention to the secondary markets” and instead pay too much attention to the secondary markets.
This doesn’t mean that reverse-branches, in this case the split from the Görlitzer Bahn trunk toward the Stadtbahn via S9 and the Ring in two different directions via S45/46/47 and S8/85, are good. It would be better if Berlin invested in turning this trunk into a single trunk into city center, provided it were ready to build a third through-city line (in fact, it is, but this project, S21, essentially twins the North-South Tunnel). However, given the infrastructure or small changes to it, the current situation is unavoidable.
Moreover, the current situation is not the end of the world. The reasons such reverse-branches are not good for the health of the system are as follows:
They often end up creating more frequency outside city center than toward it.
If there is too much interlining, then delays on one branch cascade to the others, making the system more fragile.
If there is too much interlining, then it’s harder to write timetables that satisfy every constraint of a merge point, even before we take delays into account.
All of these issues are more pressing on a metro system than on a commuter rail system. The extent of branching on commuter rail is such that running each line as a separate system is unrealistic; tight timetabling is required no matter what, and in that case, the lines could reverse-branch if there’s no alternative without much loss of capacity. The S-Bahn here is notoriously unreliable, but that’s the case even without cascading delays on reverse-branches – the system just assumes more weekend shutdowns, less reliable systems (28,000 annual elevator outages compared with 1,800 on the similar-size U-Bahn), and worse maintenance practices.
So, on the one hand, the loss from reverse-branching is reduced. On the other hand, it’s harder to avoid reverse-branching on commuter rail. The reason is that, unlike a metro (including a suburban metro), the point of the system is to use old commuter lines and connect them to form a usable urban and suburban service. Because the system relies on old lines more, it’s less likely that they’re at the right places for good connections. In the case of Berlin, it’s that there’s an east-west imbalance that forces some east-center-east lines via S8, which was reinforced by the context of the Cold War and the Wall.
In the case of New York, consider this map:
The issue is that too much traffic wants to use the Northeast Corridor lines in both New Jersey and Connecticut. Therefore, it’s not possible to segregate everything, with lines using the preexisting North River Tunnels and the new Gateway tunnels having to share tracks. It’s not optimal, but it’s what’s possible.
A recent discussion about the Nuremberg U-Bahn got me thinking about the issue of transfers from infrequent to frequent vehicles and how they can disrupt service. The issue is that driverless metros like Nuremberg’s rely on very high frequency on relatively small vehicles in order to maintain adequate capacity; Nuremberg has the lowest U-Bahn construction costs in Germany, and Italian cities with even smaller vehicles use the combination of short stations and very high frequency to reduce costs even further. However, all of this assumes that passengers arrive at the station evenly; an uneven surge could in theory overwhelm the system. The topic of the forum discussion was precisely this, but it left me unconvinced that such surges could be real on a driverless urban metro (as opposed to a landside airport people mover). The upshot is that there should not be obstacles to pushing the Nuremberg U-Bahn and other driverless metros to their limit on frequency and capacity, which at this point means 85-second headways as on the driverless Parisian lines.
What is the issue with infrequent-to-frequent transfers?
Whenever there is a transfer from a large, infrequent vehicle to a small, frequent one, passengers overwhelm systems that are designed around a continuous arrival rate rather than surges. Real-world examples include all of the following:
Transfers from the New Jersey Transit commuter trains at the Newark Airport station to the AirTrain.
Transfers from OuiGo TGVs at Marne-la-Vallée to the RER.
In 2009, transfers from intercity CR trains at Shanghai Station to the metro.
In the last two cases, the system that is being overwhelmed is not the trains themselves, which are very long. Rather, what’s being overwhelmed is the ticket vending machines: in Shanghai the TVMs frequently broke, and with only one of three machines at the station entrance in operation, there was a 20-minute queue. A similar queue was observed at Marne-la-Vallée. Locals have reusable farecards, but non-locals would not, overwhelming the TVM.
In the first case, I think the vehicles themselves are somewhat overwhelmed on the first train that the commuter train connects to, but that is not the primary system capacity issue either. Rather, the queues at the faregates between the two systems can get long (a few minutes, never 20 minutes).
In contrast, I have never seen the transfer from the TGV to the Métro break the system at Gare de Lyon. The TGV may be unloading 1,000 passengers at once, but it takes longer for all of them to disembark than the headway between Métro trains; I’ve observed the last stragglers take 10 minutes to clear a TGV Duplex in Paris, and between that, long walking paths from the train to the Métro platforms, and multiple entrances, the TGV cannot meaningfully be a surge. Nor have I seen an airplane overwhelm a frequent train, for essentially the same reason.
What about school trips?
The forum discussion brings up two surges that limit the capacity of the Nuremberg U-Bahn: the airport, and school trips. The airport can be directly dispensed with – individual planes don’t do this at airside people movers, and don’t even do this at low-capacity landside people movers like the JFK and Newark AirTrains. But school trips are a more intriguing possibility.
What is true is that school trips routinely overwhelm buses. Students quickly learn to take the last bus that lets them make school on time: this is the morning and they don’t want to be there, so they optimize for how to stay in bed for just a little longer. Large directional commuter volumes can therefore lead to surges on buses: in Vancouver, UBC-bound buses routinely have passups in the morning rush hour, because classes start at coordinated times and everyone times themselves to the last bus that reaches campus on time.
However, the UBC passups come from a combination of factors, none of which is relevant to Nuremberg:
They’re on buses. SkyTrain handles surges just fine.
UBC is a large university campus tucked at the edge of the built-up area.
UBC has modular courses, as is common at American universities, and coordinated class start and end times (on the hour three days a week, every 1.5 hours two days a week).
It is notable that Vancouver does not have any serious surges coming from school trips, even with trainsets that are shorter than those of Nuremberg (40 meters on the Canada Line and 68-80 meters on the Expo and Millennium lines, compared with 76 meters). Schools are usually sited to draw students from multiple directions, and are usually not large enough to drive much train crowding on their own. A list on Wikipedia has the number of students per Gymnasium, and they’re typically high three figures with one at 1,167, none of which is enough to overwhelm a driverless 76 meter long train. Notably, school trips do not overwhelm the New York City Subway; New York City Subway rolling stock ranges from 150 to 180 meters long rather than 76 as in Nuremberg, but then the specialized high schools go as far up as 5,800 students, and one has 3,000 and is awkwardly located in the North Bronx.
Indeed, neither Vancouver nor New York schedules its trains based on whether school is in session. Both run additional buses on school days to avoid school surges, but SkyTrain and the subway do not run additional vehicles, and in both formal planning and informal railfan lore about crowding, school trips are not considered important. So school surges are absolutely real on buses, and university surges are real everywhere, but not enough to overwhelm trains. Nuremberg should not consider itself special on this regard, and can plan its U-Bahn systems as if it does not have special surges and passengers do arrive continuously at stations.
A new high-speed line (NBS) between Hamburg and Hanover has received the approval of the government, and will go up for a Bundestag vote shortly. The line has been proposed and planned in various forms since the 1990s, the older Y-Trasse plan including a branch to Bremen in a Y formation, but the current project omits Bremen. The idea of building this line is good and long overdue, but unfortunately everything about it, including the cost, the desired speed, and the main public concerns, betray incompetence, of the kind that gave up on building any infrastructure and is entirely reactive, much like in the United States.
The route, in some of the flattest land in Germany, is a largely straight new high-speed rail line. Going north from Hanover to Hamburg, it departs somewhat south of Celle, and rejoins the line just outside Hamburg’s city limits in Meckelfeld. The route appears to be 107 km of new mainline route, not including other connections adding a few kilometers, chiefly from Celle to the north. An interactive map can be found here; the map below is static, from Wikipedia, and the selected route is the pink one.
And despite the very high cost, the standards are rather low. The top speed is intended to be 250 km/h, not 300 km/h. The travel time savings is only 20 minutes: trip times are to be reduced from 79 minutes today to 59 minutes. Using a top speed of 250 km/h, the current capabilities of ICE 3/Velaro trains, and the existing top speeds of the approaches to Hamburg and Hanover, I’ve found that the nonstop trip time should be 46 minutes, which means the planned timetable padding is 28%. Timetable padding in Germany is so extensive that trains today could do Hamburg-Hanover in 63 minutes.
As a result, the project isn’t really sold as a Hamburg-Hanover high-speed line. Instead, the presentation above speaks of great trip time benefits to the intermediate towns with local stops, Soltau (population: 22,000) and Bergen (population: 17,000). More importantly, it talks about capacity, as the Hamburg-Hanover line is one of the busiest in Germany.
As a capacity reliever, a high-speed line is a sound decision, but then why is it scheduled with such lax timetabling? It’s not about fitting into a Takt with hourly trip times, first of all because if the top speed were 300 km/h and the padding were the 7% of Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Sweden then the trip time would be 45 minutes, and second of all because Hamburg is at the extremity of the country and therefore it’s not meaningfully an intercity knot that must be reached on the hour.
Worse, the line is built with the possibility of freight service. Normal service is designed to be passenger-only, but in case of disruptions on the classical line, the line is designed to be freight-ready. This is stupid: it’s much cheaper to invest in reliability than to build a dual-use high-speed passenger and freight line, and the one country in the world with both a solid high-speed rail network and high freight rail usage, China, doesn’t do this. (Italy builds its high-speed lines with freight-friendly standards and has high construction costs, even though its construction costs in general, e.g. for metro lines or electrification, are rather low.)
People in my comments and on social media are taking it for granted that investments into modernizing commuter rail predominantly benefit the suburbs. Against that, I’d like to point out how on the modern commuter rail systems I know best – the RER and the Berlin S-Bahn – ridership is predominantly urban. Whereas the typical American commuter rail use case is a suburban resident commuting to a central business district job at rush hour, the typical use case on the commuter trains here is an urban resident going to work or a social outing in or near city center. Suburban ridership is strong by American standards, benefiting from being able to piggyback on the high frequency and levels of physical investment produced by the urban ridership.
Here’s Berlin’s passenger traffic density on the U- and S-Bahn, as of 2016 (source, p. 6):
The busiest section of the S-Bahn is the Stadtbahn from Ostkreuz to Hauptbahnhof, with about 160,000 passengers per weekday through each interstation. The eastern sections of both the north and the south arms of the Ringbahn are close, with about 150,000 each, and the North-South Tunnel has 100,000. These traffic density levels extend into outer urban neighborhoods outside the ring – ridership on the Stadtbahn trunk remains high well into Lichtenberg – but by the time the trains cross city limits, ridership is rather low. All tails crossing city limits combined have 150,000 riders/day, so a little more than a quarter of the ridership density on the city center segments. Of those tails, the busiest, with a traffic density of 24,000/day, is to Potsdam, which is a suburb but is an independent job center rather than a pure commuter suburb like the rest of the towns in Brandenburg adjacent to Berlin.
I don’t have similar graphics for Paris, only a table of ridership on the SNCF-RER and Transilien by station and time of day and a separate table with annual ridership on the RATP-RER and Métro. But the results there are similar. Total boardings on the RATP-RER in 2019 was 399 million, of which 52 million originated in stations in the Grande Couronne, 186 million in the Petite Couronne, and 161 million in the city. If we double the Grande Couronne boardings, to account for the fact that just about all of those riders are going to the city or a Petite Couronne job center like La Défense, then we get just over a quarter of overall ridership, a similar result to the traffic density of Berlin. On the SNCF-RER, the share of the Grande Couronne is higher, around half.
The city stations include job centers and transfer points from mainline rail and the Métro – there aren’t 47 million people a year whose residential origin station is Gare du Nord – so it’s best to view the system as one used predominantly by Petite Couronne residents, with a handful using it as I did internally to the city and another handful commuting in from the Grand Couronne. This is technically suburban, but the Petite Couronne is best viewed as a ring of city neighborhoods that are not annexed to the city for sociopolitical reasons; the least dense of its three departments, Val-de-Marne, is denser than the densest German city, Munich.
The difference in this pattern with the United States is not hard to explain. Here and in Paris, commuter rail charges the same fares as the subway, runs every 5-10 minutes in urban neighborhoods (even less on the city center trunks), and makes stops at the rate of an express subway line. Of course urban residents use the trains, and we greatly outnumber suburbanites among people traveling to city center. It’s the United States that’s weird, with its suburb-only rail system stuck in the Mad Men era trying to stick with its market of Don Drapers and Pete Campbells.
As people on social media compare the German and American rail networks, I’m going to share two graphics from the upcoming Northeast Corridor report, made by Kara Fischer. They are schematic so it’s not possible to speak of scale, but the line widths and colors are the same in both; both depict only lines branded as Amtrak or ICE, so Berlin-Dresden, where the direct trains are branded IC or EuroCity, is not shown, and neither are long-range commuter lines even if they are longer than New Haven-Springfield.
The Northeastern United States has smaller population than that of Germany but not by much (74 million including Virginia compared with 84 million), on a similar land area. Their rail networks should be, to first order, comparable. Of course they aren’t – the map above shows just how much denser the German rail network is than the American one, not to mention faster. But the map also shows something deeper about rail planning in these two places: Germany is two-dimensional, whereas the Northeastern US is one-dimensional. It’s not just that the graph of the Northeastern rail network is acyclic today, excluding once-a-day night trains. More investment in intercity rail would produce cycles in the Northeastern network, through a Boston-Albany line for one. But the cycles would be peripheral to the network, since Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington are collinear on the Northeast Corridor, and the smallest of these four metro areas, Philadelphia, is larger than all those on the branches depicted above, combined.
The most important effect on network planning is that it turns the Northeast Corridor into easy mode. We would not be able to come up with a coherent timetable for Germany on the budget that our program at Marron had. In the Northeast, we did, because it’s a single line, the main difficulty being overtakes of commuter trains that run along subsections.
This, in turn, has two different implications, one for each place.
The one-dimensionality of the Northeast
In the Northeast, the focus has to be on compatibility between intercity and commuter trains. Total segregation of tracks requires infrastructure projects that shouldn’t make the top 50 priorities in the Northeast, especially at the throats of Penn Station, South Station, and Washington Union Station. Total segregation of tracks not counting those throats requires projects that are probably in the top 50 but not top 20. Instead, it’s obligatory to plan everything as a single system, with all of the following features:
Timed overtakes, with infrastructure planning integrated into timetable design so that the places with overtakes, and only the places with overtakes, get extra tracks as necessary.
Simpler commuter rail timetabling, so that the overtakes can be made consistent, and so that trains can substitute for each other as much as possible in case of train delays or cancellation.
Higher-performance commuter rail rolling stock, to reduce the speed difference between commuter and intercity trains; the trains in question are completely routine in German regional service, where they cost about as much as unpowered coaches do in the United States, but they are alien to the American planning world, which does not attend InnoTrans, does not know how to write an RFP that European vendors will respect, and does not know what the capabilities of the technology are.
Branch pruning on commuter rail, which comes at a cost for some potential through-running pairs – trains from New Jersey, if they run through to points east of Penn Station, should be going to the New Haven Line and Port Washington Branch, and probably not to Jamaica; Newark-Jamaica service is desirable, but it would force dependency between the LIRR and intercity trains, which may lead to too many delays.
In effect, even an intercity rail investment plan would be mostly commuter rail by spending. The projects mentioned in this post are, by spending, almost half commuter rail, but they come on top of projects that are already funded that are commuter rail-centric, of which the biggest is the Hudson Tunnel Project of the Gateway Program. This is unavoidable, given the amount of right-of-way sharing between intercity trains and the busiest commuter rail lines in the United States. The same one-dimensionality that makes intercity rail planning easier also means that commuter rail must use the same non-redundant infrastructure that intercity rail does, especially around Penn Station.
The two-dimensionality of Germany
A two-dimensional network cannot hope to put all of the major cities on one line, by definition. Germany’s largest metro areas are not at all collinear. In theory, the Rhine-Ruhr, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Munich are collinear. In practice, not only does this still exclude Berlin and Hamburg, which is not at all like how Northeastern US collinearity works, but also the Rhine-Ruhr is a two-dimensional polycentric region, and Frankfurt is a terminal station oriented in such a way that a Stuttgart 21-style through-running project would allow for through-service from Stuttgart or from Cologne to points east but not from Stuttgart to Cologne. There’s also a tail of regions in the 1-1.5 million population range – Leipzig, Dresden, Nuremberg, Hanover, Karlsruhe – that are collectively larger than the largest single-core region (Berlin), even if they’re still smaller collectively than the eight-core Rhine-Ruhr region. The highest-demand link, Frankfurt-Mannheim, is a bottleneck between many city pairs, and is not at all dominant over other links in frequency or demand.
This makes for a network that is, by necessity, atypically complex. Train delays between Frankfurt and Mannheim can cascade as far as Berlin and Hamburg. There are timed connections, timed overtakes of slower regional trains on shared links (more or less everything in yellow on the map), and bypasses around terminal stations including Frankfurt and Leipzig as well as around Cologne, which is a through-station oriented east-west permitting through-service from Belgium and Aachen to the rest of Germany but not between Frankfurt and Dusseldorf.
The solution has to be reducing the extent of track sharing. The yellow lines on the map should not be yellow; they should be red, with dedicated passenger-only service, turning Germany into a smaller version of China. The current paradigm pretends Germany can be a larger version of Switzerland instead. But Switzerland builds tunnels galore to go around strategic bottlenecks, and even then makes severe compromises on train speeds – the average speeds between Zurich, Basel, and Bern are around 100 km/h, which works for a country the size of Switzerland but not for one the size of Germany, in which even the current 130-150 km/h average speeds are enough to get rail advocates to never take any other mode but not enough to get other people to switch.
In effect, the speed vs. reliability tradeoff that German rail advocates think in terms of is fictional. The two-dimensionality of Germany means that the only way to run reliably is not to have high frequency of both fast and slow trains on the same tracks between Berlin and Halle, between Munich and Ingolstadt, between Hanover and Hamburg, etc. Eliminating the regional trains is a nonstarter, so this means the intercity trains need to go on passenger-dedicated tracks.
In contrast, careful timetabling of intercity and regional trains on the same line has limited value in Germany. The regional trains in question have low ridership – the core of German commuter rail is S-Bahn systems that run in dedicated city center tunnels and have limited track sharing with the rest of the network, much less with the ICEs. If there’s high regional traffic on a particular link, it comes from combining hourly trains on many origin-destination pairs, in which case trains cannot possibly substitute for one another during traffic disturbances, and timetabling with low padding is unlikely to work.
Like Takt-based planning for Americans, building a separate intercity rail network for Germans comes off as weird and foreign. France and Southern Europe do it, and Germans look down on France and Southern Europe almost to the same extent that Americans look down on Europe. But it’s the only path forward. If anything, this combination of speed with reliability means that completing an all-high-speed connection on a major trunk line, like Berlin-Munich or Cologne-Munich, would permit cutting the timetable padding to more reasonable levels, which would save time on top of what is saved by the higher top speed. Germany could have TGV average speeds as part of this system, if it realized that these average speeds are both necessary and useful for passengers.
Herbert in comments has been asking me about urban rail on ring roads; Nuremberg has such a road with an active debate about what to do with it. Ring roads are attractive targets for urban rail, since they tend to be wide commercial throughfares. The one in Nuremberg is especially attractive for a tramway, or possibly a medium-capacity metro if one can be built cheaply; this is an artifact of its circumference (18 km) and the city’s size, reminiscent of the Boulevards of the Marshals hosting Paris Tramway Line 3, and the Cologne Gürtel, most of whose length has a tramway as well. Significantly closer-in ring roads, often delineating the medieval or Early Modern walls, are too small for this.
The history of such rings tends to be that they were built based on the extent of the industrial city. Cologne’s was built in the 19th century to connect growing bedroom communities to one another, where they previously only extended along the radial boulevards connecting them to the historic center. The Boulevards of the Marshals delineated the inner end of the Thiers wall from the 1840s; the Périphérique motorway is where the outer end had been. The upshot is that the construction standards are rather modern – for one, the roads are wide. Another upshot is that those roads are often destinations in and of themselves, so that radial rail lines have stops at them; the Métro has stops at every intersection with the Boulevards of the Marshals, generally named after the nearby gate (for example, I lived near Porte de Vincennes, due east along Métro Line 1).
This contrasts with older rings, including one visible on the screenshot above. Those older rings come from premodern city walls, and may not always have enough width to make it easy to build two tram lanes in the center or to do cheap cut-and-cover without disturbing the residences and businesses too much. Even when they do, they’re so close to the center the time savings from a ring at that radius are moderate. Jarrett Walker has long pointed out that people don’t travel in circles, giving the example of the Vienna Ring Road, which has two U-Bahn lines on different sections of it but no continuous ring, as a 5.3 km circle is too small to have viable long relatively linear sections. In Paris, old boulevards closer in than the ring forming Métro Lines 2 and 6 generally have Métro stops but it’s inconsistent, and there’s no coherent circular route to be built.
The modal question – tram or metro – is complicated by special elements of orbital boulevards, which sometimes cancel out, and can work differently in different cities.
In favor of light rail, there’s the issue of speed. Normally, the advantage of subways over tramways is that they’re faster. However, on a circumferential route, the importance of speed is reduced, since people are likely to only travel a relatively short arc, connecting between different radials or from a radial to an off-radial destination. What are more important than speed on such a route are easy transfers and high frequency. Easy transfers could go either way: if the radial routes are underground then it may be possible to construct underground interchanges with short walking, but it isn’t guaranteed, and if there are any difficulties, it’s better to keep it on the surface to shorten the walk time. This has in general been an argument used by pro-tram, anti-subway advocates in Germany, but on routes that rely on multiple transfers, potentially three-legged trips, it is a stronger argument than on a radial line from a suburban housing project to city center.
Frequency is especially delicate. It can be high regardless of mode. Driverless metros can reach 90-second headways or even less, but those are achieved on very busy lines, which need that frequency for throughput more than anything, like Lines 1 and 14 in Paris with their 85-second peak headways. In practice, an orbital tram, especially one in a smaller city than Paris, needs to be prioritizing frequency in order to shorten the trip, not to provide very high throughput, which means that the vehicles could be made smaller than full-size metros, to support frequency in the 3-6 minute range. This could be done at-grade with light rail, or underground with very small-profile metros akin to those used in small Italian cities like Brescia, or even some larger ones like Turin.
In favor of metro, there is the cost issue. The same factors that make speed less important and frequency more important also make it easier to build a metro. If the road is wide enough, which I think the one in Nuremberg is, then cut-and-cover is more feasible, reducing costs. The low required capacity permits intermediate-capacity metros (again, as in Brescia or some smaller French cities), with stations of perhaps 40-50 meters, reducing their construction costs. Nuremberg in particular has had some very low U-Bahn construction costs, so its ability to build an orbital U-Bahn should not be discounted. That said, even at Nuremberg costs – around $100 million/km in 2023 PPPs for U3extensions – the extra speed provided by such a line, say half an hour to do a full orbit compared with a little less than an hour on a tram, may not be worth it necessarily, whereas such a speedup on a line that passengers may ride for 10 km unlinked would be extremely beneficial.
I am writing this post riding trains between Brussels and Berlin. My connection in Cologne was canceled as the connecting train was moved to depart earlier than my first train’s arrival time, and somehow, it is faster to stay on the train until Frankfurt and connect there, the trains between Cologne and Berlin are so disturbed this summer. Cologne-Berlin, normally a direct hourly connection in 4-4.5 hours, is slowed to 5.5 hours every two hours this summer. It got me thinking about something Jon Worth said last month about the importance of public transport being there, including at night, because it reminded me of how there are always tradeoffs. Train service cannot literally run 24/7 without changes; maintenance windows are required. So it’s a question of tradeoffs – when service must run less reliably, or not at all. Deutsche Bahn has unfortunately chosen a grossly wrong side of the tradeoff, leading to summertime shutdowns and slowdowns that its French and Japanese peers simply do not have. Those shutdowns, in turn, are, these days, leading to catastrophic levels of popular mistrust in DB.
The tradeoffs
I wrote six weeks ago about the problems of summer maintenance in Germany. But, more generally, there is a tradeoff between span of service on a railway and how consistently service can be delivered. A railway that runs overnight will not have regular maintenance windows, and therefore have to pick some low-traffic period for a special disturbance. On the New York City Subway, this is the weekend: New York City Transit exploits its four-track mainlines and high levels of redundancy in most of the city to shut down individual sections of track on weekends and tell passengers to use alternatives. In Europe, it’s more common for this to be the summer period, when local travel is lower as people go on vacation; unfortunately, in Germany, this extends to intercity rail, during the high season of travel.
Jon says that, “That 5am train with a dozen building workers on it, or the last train home in the evening matter for the trust and reliability of the system, even if those individual trains make heavy losses and are largely empty.” But the point is that knowing that I can book a train in July and have it run as expected without being rerouted onto the slow line is, like the 5 am train, a matter of trust and reliability too. It’s just a matter of which matter of reliability is easier to compromise on.
Then there is a tradeoff of all of this against maintenance efficiency. It is more efficient from the perspective of minimum total gross hours of shutdown to have a long continuous period of shutdown, such as the four-month period planned for the Riedbahn. Nighttime shutdowns require an hour of preparation and disassembly at each end, so that a five-hour nighttime shutdown only yields three hours of maintenance work. Some systems don’t make that work even with regular nighttime shutdowns, such as the London Underground or American systems that are not New York; notably, the Berlin U-Bahn manages to avoid this even with overnight service on weekends.
The situation in Germany
DB’s response to the tradeoffs outlined above is to attempt to run all day, including occasionally at night. There are night trains between Hamburg and southern Germany on the Frankfurt-Cologne high-speed line, so even this line, without any nighttime freight (the grades are far too steep), does not have the regular maintenance windows that LGVs and Shinkansen lines have. As a result, last month, the line was shut for maintenance, and trains were diverted to the old line, taking an hour longer. Right now, the same diversions apply to Cologne-Berlin trains, slowing them by about an hour.
These are not peripheral connections. Frankfurt-Cologne is not quite the busiest intercity line in Germany – that would be the Riedbahn – but it’s a fairly close second, with the same planned traffic level in the Deutschlandtakt of six trains per hour in each direction. It’s the primary connection between the Rhine-Ruhr and not just Frankfurt but also all of southern Germany. Then, Berlin-Cologne connects the two largest metro areas in Germany; the Rhine-Ruhr is close in population to Ile-de-France, while Berlin and Brandenburg have more people than Rhône-Alpes or PACA, which has implications for how much traffic this connection would have if it were fast and reliable, which it is neither (government officials fly between Berlin and Bonn instead of relying on DB).
Is this unavoidable?
No. France has none of these daytime shutdowns on its main lines. Neither does Japan.
German rail advocates sneer at France and ignore Japan, finding all manners of reasons to avoid learning from countries that, on this point, are Germany’s superiors. A common line from within Germany is that its secondary lines are in better shape than France’s, so there is nothing to learn from France. But then, the reason there are routine hour-long delays (or longer) in the summer on the main lines is not that DB runs better service to a city like Siegen or Münster or Jena than SNCF does to their French peers.
The path forward has to be, at the technical level, to institute regular nighttime maintenance windows, and stop trying to make night trains happen. At infrastructure level, it must be to avoid building dual-use infrastructure, and build passenger-dedicated high-speed lines; if freight capacity is needed that the old lines with just slow regional trains can’t provide, then build a separate freight line, based on the needs of freight, at costs that are going to be lower than the long tunnels required for dual-use lines.
But the most important change has to be at the level of governance and culture. Germany believes itself to be at the top of the world. To borrow a joke about Japanese technological stagnation, there is an element here that visiting a German infrastructure system in 2005 had a futuristic vibe like visiting the year 2015, and visiting it today is still like visiting the year 2015. There’s a slew of problems in Germany for which the solution really is “be less German and more French,” and this is one of them, no matter what people who think all French people are unemployed rioters think.
The Regional Plan Association ran an event 2.5 days ago about New York commuter rail improvements and Penn Station, defending the $16.7 billion Penn Station Expansion proposal as necessary for capacity. The presentation is available online, mirrored here, and I recommend people look at the slides to understand the depth of the ignorance and incuriosity of area decisionmakers about best practices displayed in the first half of the presentation; the second half, by Foster Nichols, is more debatable. I hope to make this a series of two or perhaps three posts, focusing on different aspects of why this is so bad. But for now, I’d like to just talk about what the presentation gets wrong about the history of commuter rail improvement in Europe, on pages 17-19. Suffice is to say, the extent of error that can be crammed into a single slide with little text astounded me. With such incuriosity about best practices, it’s not surprising that regional power brokers are trying to will the unnecessary Penn Expansion project into being, never mind that it has no transportation benefits despite its extravagant cost.
The rub is that the presentation on pp. 18-19 says that commuter rail through-running is really hard. Here is page 18:
Regional metro systems comprise a targeted portion of regional rail networks centers of population, employment, business or major attractions like airports that support frequent, fast service
Regional metro systems typically do not operate within original historic train sheds
They operate in new tunnels, shoulder stations adjacent to existing major stations, and separate, simpler interlockings that facilitate frequent service
Then, page 19 shows maps of the RER, Munich S-Bahn, Elizabeth line, and Thameslink, quoting the length it took to build them as, respectively, “30 years,” “46 years,” “2001-2022,” and “1970s-80s, 2009-2020.” The conclusion is “Systems take decades to implement, usually in stages.”
And all of this is a pack of lies.
In fact, commuter rail through-running systems routinely reuse legacy stations, even fairly major ones: both Berlin and Munich Ostbahnhof were incorporated into their respective S-Bahns, and several Parisian train stations were reused for the RER, for example Gare d’Invalides or Luxembourg, with varying levels of modification. New stations are built from scratch underneath surface stub-end terminals like Gare du Nord and Gare de Lyon as depicted in the presentation, but if the station already has through-tracks then it can be used as-is, like Munich Ostbahnhof, and in some cases even stub-end stations are at such grade that their infrastructure can be used. If Boston chooses to build the North-South Rail Link, then, since North and South Stations are both large at-grade terminals, the link will have to include new underground platforms at both stations. But Penn Station is an existing through-station below grade; Amtrak already runs through, and so could commuter rail, without adding platforms.
And as for the lines about the systems having taken 30 and 46 years to build, this is so painfully wrong that it is perhaps best to go over their actual histories. The actual length of time it took depends on one’s definitions, especially for Paris, but the maximum one can support for Paris is 16 years; for Munich, it is seven years.
The history of the RER
The RER and Transilien are, together, the largest commuter rail network in Europe by ridership, with around 1.1 billion annual riders. Globally, only four systems surpass them: Tokyo, Seoul, Osaka, Mumbai; the first two are integrated metro-commuter rail networks to the point that it’s hard to distinguish which mode they are, Osaka is several competing companies none with the ridership of the combined Paris system, Mumbai runs with practically no metro accompanying it. The RER’s history, as I will shortly explain, also makes it a good prototype for modern commuter rail operations, of the same type that is called S-Bahn in Germany. New Yorkers would do especially well to understand this history, which has some parallels to the administrative situation in New York today.
The topline of this is that since the 1960s, Paris has connected its legacy commuter and intercity rail terminals with new through-tunnels, called the RER, or Réseau Express Régional. There are five lines, dubbed A through E. Métro operator RATP runs most of the RER A, and the RER B south of Gare du Nord; national railway SNCF runs the rest plus commuter train networks stub-ending at most of the historic terminals, called Transilien, signed with letters from H to R.
But the history of the RER goes back further – and none of it can be said to have taken 30 years. In short: the Métro was built, starting in the 1890s and opening in 1900, to be totally incompatible with mainline rail – for one, where mainline trains in France run on the left, the Métro runs on the right. This was on purpose: city residents in the Belle Epoque already looked down on the suburbs and worried that if the Métro were compatible with the mainlines, then it might be used to connect to the suburbs and bring suburbanites to their city. The stop spacing, separately, was very tight, even tighter than on New York local subway trains, let alone the London Underground. By the time the system reached the inner suburbs in the 1930s, it was clear that it could not by itself connect the growing suburbs to the city, it would be too slow.
Various proposals for investment in commuter rail go back to the 1920s, but little happened, with one exception: the Ligne de Sceaux, shown as the blue line on the first image entering the city from the south, was acquired by the forerunner of RATP, CMP, in 1938, as the rest of the French mainline network was nationalized. CMP was attracted to the line because of its atypically good penetration into the center of Paris – the other lines terminated farther from the historic center, for example at Gare du Nord or Gare de Lyon. The line was also not useful for SNCF as it was being formed, due to its isolation from the rest of the network. The line was electrified as it was acquired, and run as a regional line, still isolated from all others.
More serious plans for commuter rail through-running began in the 1950s, as postwar growth and suburbanization put more pressure on the system. Gare Saint-Lazare was especially under pressure, first because of growth in the western suburbs, and second because the Paris CBD had been creeping west, making its location more attractive for commuters. In 1956, Marc Langevin proposed an eight-line network; in 1959, RATP and SNCF began collaborating, planning east-west and north-south lines. As late as 1966, there were still plans for two separate north-south lines (for example, see here, p. 244), of which only one has been built and the other is no longer seriously proposed.
In the 1960s, the plans got more serious. Construction began in 1961, starting with the east-west axis, still with an uncertain alignment. Eventually, RATP would take over the Ligne de Vincennes (the eastern red line in the before map) in 1969 and the Ligne de Saint-Germain-en-Laye (the southernmost of the western red lines) in 1972, and connect them with a new tunnel, opening in 1977. Over the 1960s, the plans still had to be refined: it was only in 1963 that it was confirmed that the Ligne de Vincennes’ Paris terminal, Bastille, was too small to be used for this system, and therefore the new tunnels would have to begin farther east, to Nation, which opened in 1969 and is thus already depicted on the before map.
The Ligne de Vincennes was simultaneously modernized, starting in 1966. The entire systems had to be redone, including new platforms and electrification. Nation had to be built underground, starting 1965, complete in 1967 and opening with the rest of the line in 1969.
On the west, the cornerstone was laid in 1971, and construction began shortly later, starting with La Défense. Shuttle trains run by RATP opened between La Défense and Etoile in 1970, and extended to Auber in 1971. In 1972 the line was connected to the Ligne de Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
At the same time, deepening SNCF-RATP integration meant that the planned alignment within the city would need to change to connect to SNCF’s train stations better. Originally, the east-west axis was supposed to run as an express version of Métro Line 1, stopping at Etoile, Concorde, and Châtelet; this was modified to have it swerve north, replacing Concorde with Auber, which is connected to Saint-Lazare. East of Châtelet-Les Halles, the alignment swerves south to connect to Gare de Lyon instead of Bastille.
In 1977, the Nation-Auber section opened, finally offering through-service; the appellation RER A dates only from then. Simultaneously, the north-south axis that was actually built half-opened, connecting the Ligne de Sceaux onward to Les Halles, with cross-platform transfers from the south to the west. On the same date that the central section opened, RATP also inaugurated an entirely greenfield branch of the RER A to the east, initially to Noisy-le-Grand, eventually (by 1992) to the new Marne-la-Vallée development, where Eurodisney was built. Contemporary media reports called Les Halles the biggest metro station in the world, and President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (center-right) spoke of public transport for everyone, not just the poor. The cost of this scheme was enormous: it cost 5 billion francs (update 8-9: see Alain Dumas’s comment below – it’s 5 billion FRF for the entire RER A, not just the Nation-Auber section), which would make it about $1 billion/km $350 million in 2023 prices, inflation since then more or less canceling out the franc:USD exchange rate. The RER B cost 400 million francs between Luxembourg and Les Halles, a distance of 2.3 km, and 1.6 billion to get to Gare du Nord and connect to the SNCF network to the north (opened 1981), a distance of 3.5 km.
The RER C then opened in 1979, as a second east-west line, on the Left Bank. Missing all of the main centers within Paris, it has always had far lower ridership than the RER A; it was also much easier and cheaper to build – all that was required was a short tunnel connecting Invalides on the west, previously a subsidiary commuter rail-only stop on the same lines to Montparnasse and Saint-Lazare, and Gare d’Orsay on the east, a commuter rail-only extension of the line to Austerlitz. This was built quickly – the decision was made in 1973, and the line opened within six years. This required a total rebuild of Gare d’Orsay with new underground platforms; Invalides required reconstruction as well, but could use the same station and track structures.
Subsequently, the system has added new lines and branches – the RER D opened from the north to new Gare de Nord platforms in 1982, was extended in 1987 along the same tracks used by the RER B to Les Halles but serving dedicated platforms at both stations, and was extended along a new tunnel to and beyond Gare de Lyon in 1995; the RER A acquired new western branches in 1988 to be operated by SNCF, requiring dual-voltage trains since those branches use 25 kV 50 Hz AC and not 1.5 kV DC like the RATP lines; the RER C acquired a new branch also in 1988 taking over part of the Petite Ceinture; the RER E was opened as a stub-end extension of lines from the Gare de l’Est network to a new underground station at Saint-Lazare in 1999, and was finally extended to the west with some through-service this year.
So in a sense, it’s taken 63 years to build the RER, starting 1961, and the work is not yet done. But the core through-running service opened in 1977, within 16 years, with some decisions made midway through the works. The total required work greatly exceeded anything New York needs to do – just what opened through 1977 includes 16 km of double-track central tunnel on the RER A, 3 km on the new branch to Noisy plus 6 km of new above-ground line, 2 km of tunnel on the RER B, and around one km of tunnel on the RER C, inaugurating eight new underground stations, all on the RER A. The RER A’s ridership reached 1.4 million per workday by 2019, and the RER B’s reached 983,000 – and a great majority of the work on both was done by 1981.
The history of the Munich S-Bahn
The Munich S-Bahn is not the oldest or busiest S-Bahn system in Germany; Berlin and Hamburg both have prewar systems, and Berlin’s ridership is considerably higher than Munich’s. Nonetheless, precisely because Berlin and Hamburg built so much of their infrastructure in the steam era, some lessons do not port well to cities today. In contrast, Munich’s entire system has been built after the war – in fact, the construction of the S-Bahn took place over just seven years, from the decision of 1965 to opening in 1972, timed with the Olympics.
As in Paris and many other cities, the history of proposals for rapid urban mainline rail in Munich stretches back decades before the decision was made. The first proposal was made in 1928, and there was more serious planning in Nazi Germany, as the Nazi Party had been founded in Munich and was interested in investing in the city due to that history; by 1941, there were plans for a three-line system, comprising a north-south, an east-west, and a circular tunnel. But little was built, and during the war, the resources of Germany toward rail were prioritized in a different direction.
After the war, Munich grew rapidly. It was not much of an industrial city in the early 20th century; early industrialization in Germany was mostly in the Ruhr and Saxony, while the professional services economy was centered on Berlin, whose metropolitan area in the 1930s was of comparable size to that of Paris. After the war, things changed, at least in the West: the Ruhr’s coal and steel economy stagnated, while southern Germany grew around new manufacturing of cars and chemicals; decentralization dispersed the professional services economy, and while most went to Frankfurt and Hamburg, a share went to Munich (for example, Siemens’ headquarters moved there from Berlin right after the war). The city’s wartime peak population was 835,000; it would surpass 1 million in 1957 and is 1.5 million today. The region, Oberbayern, comprising essentially the metro areas of Munich and Ingolstadt, would grow from 2 million at the beginning of the war to 2.8 million by 1960 and 4.8 million today, and is the richest region in the EU at this scale, with per capita income from work approaching that of New York.
This small size of Munich in 1900 means that it never had as extensive a rail network as Paris or Berlin. It had just two major urban stations: Hauptbahnhof, a terminal with a station throat leading to points west, and Ostbahnhof, a through-station with tracks leading east, south, and the west, the western tracks looping back south of city center to reach Hauptbahnhof. To this day, area railfans would like this loop to be incorporated into a regional S-Bahn system avoiding city center – but Munich is still a rather monocentric city. There was no U-Bahn, unlike in Berlin or Hamburg.
By 1961, the number of suburban commuters into Munich reached 114,000. The undersize rail network relative to the city’s current importance and the rapid growth in wealth meant that car ownership was high, leading to traffic congestion. The trams were slowed down by traffic, to the point of not running faster than walking in city center.
To resolve these problems, both an U-Bahn network and an S-Bahn network were planned. Early planning began in the 1950s, with the federal government taking over the wartime plans in 1956, but as in Paris, the extent of the system to be planned was up in the air: both an east-west axis and a north-south line were desired, and only in 1963 was the decision finalized that the north-south axis should be a municipal U-Bahn tunnel and not an S-Bahn. The study period began in 1961, with the plan approved in 1965 for the construction of a single east-west S-Bahn tunnel between Hauptbahnhof and Ostbahnhof, and a separate U-Bahn system with three branched trunk lines.
Construction was done on a tight timeline, since Munich was awarded the 1972 Olympics in 1966, and delays were not considered acceptable; the first U-Bahn line, U3/U6 running north-south, opened 1971, and the S-Bahn opened 1972, in what is described as a “record time.”
During the seven years of construction, other projects had to be done in parallel. Commuter rail lines had to be extensively upgraded: the project included 143 km of electrification, and 115 stations outfitted with new high platforms at a level of 760 mm mostly 210 meters long. Simultaneously, most of what has become the standard for good timetabling was invented, out of necessity on a network that had to share tracks and systems with other trains on its outer margin, most importantly the clockface schedule – the system was designed around a 20-minute Takt on each branch from the outset, with outer tails running every 40 minutes.
The central tunnel itself, the Stammstrecke, comprises six stations from Hauptbahnhof to Ostbahnhof of which all except Ostbahnhof are underground, and three have Spanish platforms. Ostbahnhof itself is used as a pinch point for some trains, reversing direction depending on branch. The Stammstrecke in total was built for 900 million DM, or $2.8 billion in 2023 PPPs; the overall line included 4.1 km of tunnel and about 7.3 more km of above-ground connections. (Update 8-9: cost fixed – I originally stated it to be 900 DM.)
There has been further investment adding new branches and upgrading the system. The new signal system LZB was installed in the central section experimentally when it opened in 1972, but it was not used on all trains, and was taken out of service in 1983, only returning in 2004 when its capacity was needed, boosting throughput from 24 trains per hour to 30. However, as in Paris, the core of the system’s high ridership, now about 900,000 per workday, comes from infrastructure that was there from the start, and thus it’s most correct to say that the system took not 46 years to build but seven.
Some lessons for New York
By the standards of Paris and Munich, New York has practically everything it needs to run through-service. The electrification systems on its three commuter railroads are not compatible, but multivoltage trains not only are routine, but also already present in New York; the current configurations all have one problem or another, but fundamentally, ordering multivoltage trains is a solved problem. Only a handful of outer branches need to be electrified, and all can be deferred, running with forced transfers until they are wired as is current practice on the Raritan Valley Line and for the most part also the outer Port Jefferson Branch. The LIRR and Metro-North are entirely high-platform and New Jersey Transit’s Manhattan-facing lines only have 68 low-platform stations of which 26 are already funded for high platform conversions.
By far the biggest missing element for New York by cost is the Gateway Program and its Hudson Tunnel Project, which is budgeted at $16 billion and is funded and beginning construction, with the New Jersey land tunnel contract just awarded. Even before the new tunnel opens, it can run some through-service after Penn Station Access opens from the Hell Gate Line, pairing it with some New Jersey Northeast Corridor trains.
On top of that, some surface improvements are prudent, such as some grade separations of rail junctions, the most expensive costing on the order of hundreds of millions (Hunter is $300 million on the budget, maybe $400 million by now); much of that is already getting funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law or likely to get them in the near future, since the infrastructure is also used by Northeast Corridor intercity trains.
But it does not need to do anything that area railroaders have convinced themselves they need, especially not new tracks at Penn Station. Nor are decades of prep work needed – rapid installation of high platforms is completely feasible, as was done not just in Munich in the 1960s and 70s but also in suburban New York in the same period and in the 1980s and 90s, converting the LIRR and Metro-North to full high-platform operations and doing the same on the Northeast Corridor in New Jersey.
All that is needed is a modicum of curiosity about the world, curiosity that is not seen in the presentation with its whoppers about the timelines of the RER and Munich S-Bahn, or its belief that new underground tracks are always required as if Penn Station is the same as the surface Gare du Nord. I find myself having to explain to journalists who interview me that all of this can be done, but the people in charge of the railroads around New York cannot do it.
When I was visiting New York in June-July, I was stricken by how hard it was to figure out when the next train would come. Every subway station is equipped with countdown clocks, the A Division (numbered lines) and L trains having older installations than the rest of the B Division (lettered lines). However, the B Division stations that I used did not have many countdown clocks, and I found myself having to walk long distances along hot platforms to figure out which train to take. I counted the number of clocks at a few stations, and asked ETA members to do the same; now back in Berlin, I’ve done some counts here as well, confirming that it’s not just me – New York’s B Division platforms have fewer and harder to find countdown clocks than the standard on the Berlin U- and S-Bahn platforms, even though New York’s more complex subway network requires if anything more clocks as passengers have multiple options. Based on what I’ve seen in Berlin, I recommend that New York install a minimum of four overhead clocks per B Division platform, with the screen going in both directions.
The situation in Berlin
The U-Bahn platforms seem standardized to me. The traditional norm was that stations were built cut-and-cover, right underneath a major street, with an entrance at each end of the central island platform. Nowadays almost all stations have elevators and there are plans for retrofitting the rest, which BVG estimates will be completed in 2028, the date having been pushed later over the years I’ve lived in the city. The elevators always connect two levels, with opposite side doors for the two levels, so that wheelchair users don’t have to turn.
There are, at the stations I use, two overhead countdown clocks for each platform face. Nearly all platforms are islands, and each direction has separate countdown clocks. The clocks display the times on both sides, and are typically located at the quarter points of the station, so that passengers are never more than a quarter of the platform length from a clock, with good sight lines; the platforms are 100-110 meters long.
The S-Bahn is less standardized. A full-length eight-car train is 150 meters is long. The countdown clocks are double-sided and overhead as on the U-Bahn, and each platform face has a separate clock even when the tracks are in the same direction (as at Ostbahnhof), but the number is inconsistent; there are stations with just one, but Friedrichstraße on the North-South Tunnel has three.
The situation in New York
The A Division has overhead countdown clocks, connected to the train control system (automated train supervision, or ATS), installed in the early 2010s; the L has countdown clocks of the same provenance. The number of clocks per station is not fixed, but ranges between two and four per track. The B Division’s train control system let the control center know where trains were but not which train was which – that is, which train on the same track is an A, which is a D, and so on – and therefore the same system was not installed at the time. Years later, a different system was installed, with nicer graphics and a different connection to the control center, which is sometimes less accurate.
This newer system on the B Division has a combination of overhead clocks, often single- rather than double-sided, and floor-mounted clocks facing sideways, toward the tracks rather than toward the front and back of the platforms. The floor-mounted clocks are difficult to read unless I’m standing right there. The platforms are obstructed so it’s hard to tell from a distance where the clock is. Worse, many floor-mounted installations look identical from a distance to the clocks, but instead display advertisements or service changes but no information about the next train.
What’s more, there just aren’t a lot of these clocks. At 2nd Avenue on the F, heading downtown toward Marron, I counted a single clock, but six boards displaying system maps or ads. ETA’s Alex Sramek checked several stations in Lower Manhattan, including Chambers on the A/C/E and on the J/Z, Fulton Street, Cortlandt Street on the R/W, and Broad Street, and found one to three clocks, always a mix of overhead and floor-mounted – and the floor-mounted clocks sometimes would only show the next train and not the subsequent ones, even for platforms serving multiple routes.
There should be more clocks in New York than in Berlin. The platforms are much longer – the A Division platforms are 155 meters, the L and J/Z platforms are 145 meters, the other B Division platforms are 185 meters. The extensive branching means that even while waiting on the platform, regardless of what information is displayed outside the station, it is important to know when each service using the station will come, to plan out which line to take. I made mistakes on trips from Brooklyn to Queens just because I wasn’t sure what to do when transferring at West 4th, where, having just missed the E, I needed to make a decision on whether to wait for a delayed F or try to make the B/D and transfer to the E at 53rd, opted for the latter, and missed the E at 53rd.
If a Berlin U-Bahn station has two double-sided clocks, and a major S-Bahn station has three, then New York should have four per B Division platform. These should be overhead and double-sided – the floor-mounted screens are difficult to see from a distance along the direction relevant to most passengers, and easily confused with ads, ensuring that their utility is marginal.
Pedestrian Observations 
