Category: Amtrak

Why Moynihan Station Has Negative Transportation Value

Amtrak has been making noises again about the need for Moynihan Station as a replacement concourse for Penn Station for Amtrak travelers, but makes it clear it does not want to pay almost anything for it. While former Amtrak President David Gunn withdrew from the project on the grounds that it would not increase track capacity, and another former president criticized the project for the same reason, today’s Amtrak is interested in the prospects of not sharing concourse space with commuter trains.

The irony is that what Amtrak perceives as the value of Moynihan Station is actually negative value. Penn Station already has a problem with concourse integration – different concourses have different train arrival boards, and different ticket-vending machines. The need to change concourses lengthens access time, in my experience by a minute or two. Right now, Amtrak has just gotten $450 million to increase top speed in New Jersey from 135 mph to 160 mph for a 24-mile stretch (150 under current regulations), for a time saving of 100 seconds (64 if only 150 mph is possible) minus acceleration and deceleration time. From my perspective as a passenger, the minute or two I lose every time I need to change concourses at Penn Station is worse than a minute or two spent on a train.

Separating the concourses completely is even worse when it comes to access and egress times. In comments on Second Avenue Sagas, Jim (who comments here as well) says that the move one block to the west is not too bad for intercity travelers, because to get to Midtown hotels, people would take the E anyway. However, people who live in New York and wish to travel elsewhere, or people who visit but do not stay at Midtown hotels, are likelier to take the 1/2/3, and Amtrak as well as local Moynihan Station boosters want them (us) to need to travel an extra crosstown block to travel. That’s 3 extra minutes of access time; at current costs, how many extra billions would have to spent to save them on the train?

Even the stated purpose of Moynihan Station, bringing people to the city in grandeur, fails. The building is a former post office rather than a train station; its former main entrance (still leading to the post office – thanks to Jim for the clarification) requires people to climb stairs. There are planned to be step-free entrances, but those remove much of the neo-classical grandeur.

From the perspective of intercity rail passengers, the biggest problem with Penn Station is the tracks and track access. The platforms are narrow, and visibility is obscured by columns, staircases, escalators, and elevators. But even what exists is not used to its fullest extent. Although Amtrak checks all passengers’ tickets on board, it also conducts a prior check at the station, funneling all passengers through just one access point and lengthening the boarding process. It’s possible to go around the check by boarding from the lower concourse, but Amtrak trains are not posted there, requiring passengers to loiter on the upper concourse, see what track the train arrives on (information which is typically posted only 15 minutes before departure), and scramble. As a result of the convoluted boarding process, Regional trains dwell 15 minutes at Penn Station, and Acela trains dwell 10 minutes. Many of those minutes could be saved by just better station throughput.

If more infrastructure is needed, it is not a separate passenger concourse, but better platforms and platform access. Some of the platforms – namely, the southern ones, hosting New Jersey Transit trains but not Amtrak trains – have too few access points, and require additional staircases and escalators.

More radically, platforms may need to be widened, at the expense of the number of tracks. This is one of the advantages of regional rail through-running, though in reality, even today clearing a full rush-hour commuter train is fast enough (about 1.5-2 minutes on the LIRR) that at least the LIRR could stand to have tracks paved over and still have enough terminal capacity for its current needs; New Jersey Transit, which has fewer tracks and trains with worse door placement and smaller vestibules, may have problems, but Amtrak doesn’t use its regular tracks because they do not connect eastward.

Amtrak’s history with Moynihan Station is especially telling about the company’s priorities. Clearly, Moynihan is not a priority – that’s why Amtrak says it has no money for it, and that’s why Gunn removed it from the company’s list of projects. The biggest supporters of Moynihan are local boosters and developers, who want the extra retail space. The planned expenditure on the project is $14 billion: $2 billion in public money for the train station, the rest in private money for development around it. The family of Daniel Moynihan is a strong backer of a monument named after the late Senator. It is not surprising that a project whose benefit goes entirely to power brokers and not to transportation users is backed by the locals the most: Amtrak and federal agencies may be dysfunctional, but they are models of efficiency compared to the local governments in the US.

However, Amtrak is incapable of saying no to monuments and megaprojects that it thinks will benefit it. More crucially, it will argue for their construction. Its symbiotic relationship with local governments seems to be, we’ll support your boondoggles if you support ours. Today’s Amtrak is not Gunn’s Amtrak, but the Amtrak that fired Gunn for refusing to defer maintenance in order to boost on-paper profitability.

Moynihan Station represents a failing of not only transportation planning, but also urban planning. More than any other project in New York, it brings back my original analogy between today’s urban boosterism and the modernist suburbanism of the first two-thirds of the 20th century. The project’s backers tell us a story: Penn Station was a magnificent edifice destroyed by thoughtless planners, and now we must repair the damage and restore style to passenger railroad travel. Since they base their conception of infrastructure on moral and aesthetic claims, which always seem to coincide with what gives them more money and kudos, they do not care whether the project is beneficial to users, and find the preexisting situation self-evidently bad.

Because the argument for Moynihan is entirely about the need for a grand, morally good projects, the backers spurn incremental improvement of what already exists, finding it so repulsive that it must be replaced no matter what. This is quite similar to how some proponents of suburbanization opposed improving tenements on the grounds that it would detract from the purpose of razing them and sending their residents out to single-family houses.

For example, both Moynihan backers and New Jersey Transit have complained about lack of space for passenger circulation at Penn Station; in reality, IRUM‘s George Haikalis has computed that about half of the lower concourse’s space is used for Amtrak back offices and concessions rather than for passenger circulation. In reality, Penn Station’s low ceilings make the station appear cramped, but the concourses are still fairly functional, and even at rush hour the crowding level is normal by the standards of what I’ve seen at Paris’s Gare de Lyon and at Nice’s main station.

This interplay between bad local governance and federal agencies that coddle it is part of what caused Amtrak’s Vision plan to be so bloated. The single worst component, the new tunnels through Philadelphia, appear to come from Amtrak’s belief that the local officials want strict separation of high-speed and commuter train infrastructure, coming from the fact that the locally-designed Penn plan included such tunnels. And in New York, Amtrak’s proposed its own marked-up version of ARC, one that is not too much better than the cavern plan that was under construction. On a smaller scale, the Harold Interlocking separation, primarily a New York State project benefiting commuter rail riders, made it to Amtrak’s list of desired incremental improvements, and is now receiving funding earmarked to high-speed rail.

The only special trait distinguishing Moynihan from those other unnecessary or bloated projects is that it’s harmful to riders, rather than neutral or insufficiently beneficial. The main backers of the project do not care much for transportation users, but Amtrak should. It seems to believe that its passengers want to spend time sitting at its train stations as if they were airline lounges; nowadays, not even air travelers like spending time at airports, which is why such time-saving features as printing boarding passes at home are so popular. The only positive thing to say about the project is that the cost is so high relative to the effect on passengers that the return on investment is very close to zero, rather than the -4% figures seen for long-distance Amtrak projects. And I don’t think that “This project only has an ROI of -0.2%” is a valid argument for construction.

New York-New Rochelle Metro-North-HSR Compatibility

Let me preface this post by saying that there should not be any high-speed trains between New York and New Rochelle, except perhaps right at the northern end of the segment. However, to provide reasonable speeds from New York to Boston, it’s desirable to upgrade the maximum speed between New York and New Rochelle to 200 km/h or not much less. The subject of this post is how this can be accommodated while also permitting some regional rail service, as proposed by the MTA. There are two reasons to bundle the two. First, some of the work required could be shared: for example, new stations could be done at the same time as rail and tie replacement. And second, the presence of both upgraded intercity rail and regional rail on the line requires some four-tracking and schedule optimization.

The physical infrastructure required for boosting speeds within New York City is fairly minimal by itself. The right-of-way in the Bronx has some curves but they are not very sharp and can be somewhat straightened without knocking down buildings, and even the curves in Queens and on the Hell Gate Bridge, while unfixable without major viaduct modification, are not terrible if superelevation is high and tilting is enabled.

A big question mark is what the maximum speed permitted by the physical layout of the East River Tunnels is. Current speed is 97 km/h (60 mph), but top speed today in other sections of the network are below those achieved decades ago (for example on Portal Bridge), and trains with specially designed noses, as the Shinkansen rolling stock is, could potentially go even faster. Regardless, it is not important for HSR-regional rail integration, since the East River Tunnels have no stops and will be running far under capacity once East Side Access opens. Thus, all travel times in this post are between New Rochelle and Sunnyside Junction, which is notionally considered to be located at 39th Street. This is a 25-kilometer segment.

Another question mark is what the speed limit on the S-curve south of New Rochelle is. Currently the limit is 48 km/h (30 mph). Raising it requires grade-separating the junction between the NEC and the current New Haven Line. It can be raised further via curve straightening, but the question is how much eminent domain can be done. The maximum radius that can be achieved with minimal or no eminent domain is 700-800 meters. Some further eminent domain may be required to have this curve start far enough from the southbound platform that full 200 mm superelevation is achievable without subjecting local train riders to too much cant excess. For comparison, slicing through New Rochelle and the Pelham Country Club allows essentially eliminating the curve and allowing maximum speed through the area, which taking surrounding curves into consideration is about 240 km/h.

Assuming 150 km/h (about 700 meters radius, 200 mm cant, and 175 mm cant deficiency), the technical travel time for a nonstop intercity train between when it passes New Rochelle and when it passes Sunnyside is about 9 minutes; this includes slowdowns in Queens and the Bronx and on Hell Gate. A nonstop M8 with a top speed of 145 km/h would do the same trip in about 11:15. (Amtrak’s current travel time from New York to New Rochelle is about 25 minutes, of which by my observation riding Regional trains 6 are south of Sunnyside.)

Even the above travel time figures require some four-tracking, independently of capacity, in order to limit cant excess. Unlike the Providence Line, the Hell Gate line has some curves right at potential station locations – for example, the Hunts Point stop is located very close to the curve around the Bruckner Expressway, and the Morris Park stop is located in the middle of a curve. The Bruckner curve radius is about 500 meters, and 200 mm superelevation would impose 80 mm cant excess on even a fast-accelerating commuter train (1 m/s^2 to 72 km/h), and an uncomfortable 140 mm on a slower-accelerating one (0.5 m/s^2 to 51 km/h). The Morris Park curve is even worse, since it would impose a full 200 mm cant excess on a stopped train. So we should assume four-tracking at least at the Morris Park station, which is located in the middle of a curve, and Hunts Points, and potentially also at Parkchester.

Now, a local train would be stopping at New Rochelle and four stops in the Bronx, and should be stopping at Sunnyside. Although a FLIRT loses only about 75 seconds from a stop in 160 km/h territory, assuming 30-second dwell times, the M8 is a heavier, slower-accelerating train, and for our purposes we should assume a 90-second stop penalty. This means that, counting New Rochelle and Sunnyside together as a single dwell-free stop (they involve one acceleration and one deceleration in the Sunnyside-New Rochelle segment), local technical travel time is 18:15, about the same as what Amtrak achieves today without stops but with less superelevaiton and inferior rolling stock.

Now, 18:15-9 = 9:15, 9:15 times the schedule pad factor is 9:54, and modern signaling allows 2-minute headways up to 200 km/h; thus we can accommodate 4 tph intercity and 4 tph local Metro-North without overtakes except at New Rochelle and Sunnyside.

There is only one problem with the no-overtake scenario: the MTA plans on a peak traffic much higher than 4 tph, in line with the New Haven Line’s high demand. It’s planning on a peak of 6-8 tph according to what I’ve read in comments on Second Avenue Sagas. This naturally breaks into 4 tph that make local stops and 4 that do not (though my suspicion of MTA practice is that it wants fewer than 4 local tph); if there are fewer than 8 trains, one slot could be eliminated.

Let’s look then at a 4/4/4 scenario. Assume that trains depart Sunnyside in order of speed – HSR first (passing rather than stopping at Sunnyside), then express Metro-North, then local Metro-North. A local train will be overtaken first by the following HSR, and then by the following express. If we could move the overtake point to New Rochelle, the local would not need to wait for trains to pass it. In reality, 4/4/4 means the local departs Sunnyside 4-5 minutes after the HSR train passes it, and has 9 minutes of time penalty before being overtaken again. If the stop penalty could be reduced to 75 seconds, then the overtake could be moved to New Rochelle, demonstrating the use of top-quality rolling stock. But the M8s are good enough for many purposes, and therefore we will not assume a noncompliant replacement, unlike in the case of the MBTA, whose rolling stock is slow and very heavy.

With 9 minutes of time to make up, it’s tempting to have an overtake at a four-tracked Co-op City station. But then the local would have to be overtaken by two trains in a row, and moreover the two trains would become quite separated by then due to differing top speeds, and this would force a penalty on the order of 6 minutes.

I claim that the best would be to four-track a segment between two or even three stations; the right-of-way is wide enough anyway. In addition, the Morris Park curve could be straightened if the Eastchester Avenue overpass were modified, and doing this in conjunction with four-tracking would be cheaper than doing each alone. Under this option, the local would leave Sunnyside much later than 2 minutes after the express, just enough to be overtaken by HSR at Morris Park. It would then keep going to Co-op City until overtaken by an express. This would essentially save about 2.5 minutes out of the 6 in penalty, since the train would be in motion for that time.

Defrauding the Public on European Rail Profits

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) penned an op-ed defending his attempt to strip California high-speed rail of all funding. In the usual litany of complaints about the deficit, he referenced a 2008 study by Amtrak’s Office of Inspector General claiming that European passenger railroads lose money but keep those losses off-books. The study is fraudulent. It does not specify a methodology, which means it’s hard to pinpoint where exactly the numbers don’t match actual reality; however, some hints are provided by the following claim:

1. Public Funding to the Train Operating Companies may be accounted for as revenue, and

2. Public Funding to the Infrastructure Managers enables them to charge “user fees” to the Train Operating Companies that may be significantly lower than the actual infrastructure maintenance expenses.

Ad 1, it is not difficult to separate transport income from public funding. The balance sheets often state the source of income clearly. Most public funding comes from operating regional trains under contract, which SNCF and DB keep separate from their core intercity business, which is profitable. A minority of public funding is subsidies for social services, for example state-mandated discounts to active-duty troops, the elderly, and the unemployed; a libertarian would instantly recognize such mandates as taxes and deduct them from the subsidies. See for example page 30 of SNCF’s books, which clearly shows the majority of public funding (not counting RFF, which is nominally private) is from local sources, for operating commuter rail.

It is true that regional rail is heavily subsidized in Europe, but the same is true in the US. But in the US there’s far less national railroad involvement in commuter rail than in Europe, so comparing Amtrak to every train that has an SNCF logo is disingenuous. Worse, the study picks and chooses which Amtrak trains to compare European trains to: it ignores the long-distance trains, and in one figure (p. 13) only compares the Northeast Corridor to European networks and ignores the state-supported corridors, organizationally the closest thing to the TER or DB Regio in the US.

Ad 2, the choice of how to set the track access fees is a political one, and often the political choice is to set the access fees high. In France, in anticipation of open access RFF has recently raised tolls to far above track maintenance costs, effectively moving all French rail profits from SNCF to RFF and preventing competing companies from making a profit on the popular Paris-Lyon segment. Even in 2006, the toll on Paris-Lyon was €14.60 per train-km, the highest of all European lines although, because it has the most traffic, its maintenance cost should be the lowest per train-km.

A 2008 study of the costs and benefits of HSR in Europe published by the OECD and International Transport Forum finds that the maintenance costs per single-track-km in Europe average €30,000. This is €82 per single-track-km per day; to find the appropriate cost per train-km, divide by the number of daily trains in each direction. The LGV Sud-Est’s 2006 tolls would cover that average maintenance cost in just six daily runs; maximum frequency on the line is ten trains per direction per hour. Of the five or six lines on the list of rail links and their tolls that are HSR, the average toll is €10 per train-km. Of course this excludes depreciation and interest, but at least on the LGV Sud-Est, depreciation is quite low since the line was cheap to construct, and the construction bonds have already been paid. SNCF’s complaint that it’s being milked by tolls far above maintenance costs seems correct.

Of course, RFF’s books are more than just maintenance costs. They’re also debt accumulated by SNCF when it was run far less efficiently than today. Much like with JNR, this debt may have to be absorbed by the state, leading to predictable claims of subsidies. In reality, all this would do would be retroactively subsidize losses from decades ago. This is exactly what happened with JNR: the state absorbed the debt coming from operating losses, but required the JR companies to take over the Shinkansen construction debt, see pp. 46 and 88 of this document on privatization.

That this study has been picked up by Heritage, Reason (p. 7), and others as evidence that high-speed rail will lose money is not surprising – those organizations are paid by industry groups including the Koch Brothers and Reason spreads disinformation about trains – but for Amtrak to mislead the people who are footing its bill is inexcusable. It is probably not a matter of incompetence. Amtrak’s claim that every railroad in the world receives public funds is very unlikely to be an honest mistake. Claiming that Japan absorbed Shinkansen debt could be an honest mistake – I only found the aforementioned privatization document while looking for sources for my privatization post. But claiming that SNCF keeps public funding hidden from view when in fact it clearly states it receives regional funding for regional rail requires actively searching for reasons to tar SNCF. The alternative possibility that Amtrak included commuter rail in the calculation merely turns Amtrak’s claim from an outright lie to intentional misleading.

Amtrak’s Office of the Inspector General most likely knows what it’s doing. Nominally it’s independent of Amtrak, but if Amtrak dies, it will have nobody to supervise. Amtrak is losing money when its peer first-world railroads make money, it’s under siege by Republicans who point to those losses as a reason to private and dismember it, and it has no intention of reforming. The only way out of this conundrum is to defraud the public about peer first-world railroad practices, and I believe that this is exactly what the OIG did here. Amtrak’s existing services are sufficiently well-patronized that they have special interests behind them; therefore, feeding Reason’s propaganda is not an existential threat. But House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica’s calls for fundamental change could resonate with Republicans and moderate Democrats, and this could mean the end of Amtrak. It’s rational to lie to the public that it’s impossible to do better.

What is not rational is public acceptance of this. Heads should have rolled about this document. All involved should have resigned or been fired. Mica should have suspected shenanigans and invited both the authors of the study and officials from SNCF and DB for a hearing. Amtrak proper of course embraces the results and continues along its merry way, but I expect no better from it anymore. What I do expect is that the public in general and rail advocates in particular will be as livid as I am about being defrauded.

Quick Note: Amtrak’s Rolling Stock Shortage

It’s a commonplace that Amtrak can’t expand service frequency or even lengthen consists because it has a shortage of rolling stock. This is usually what is meant by “Amtrak is at capacity,” since there’s ample room to run longer trains. So I’ve been trying to investigate how much rolling stock constraint Amtrak actually has.

The sharpest shortage would be present in the Acela trains, since they have high seat utilization – about 60-65%, vs. 45-50% on the Regional. There are ten daily Acela roundtrips north of New York and fifteen south of New York, so at worst, fifteen consists are sufficient. The maximum frequency is hourly; the Boston-Washington trip time is just over 6.5 hours, so fourteen consists should be enough to provide more service than is available today, and with the current mix of hourly and two-hourly service currently used north of New York, thirteen are enough. There are twenty consists, so there are more than enough spares, and rolling stock does not actually limit capacity.

The New York-Washington trip time is 2:47-2:52, and the turnaround time is 8-13 minutes, which means that six trainsets could provide one extra hourly train. This implies Amtrak could do one of three things with the seven spares:

1. It could increase the frequency south of New York to half-hourly, except in the peak one hour in which the North River Tunnels are at capacity with current signaling.

2. It could couple two trainsets together. It could also mix this with option 1, depending on North River Tunnel capacity – i.e. couple two trains together just during rush hour and run every 30 minutes otherwise, and use the seventh spare to cover the mismatch in peak scheduling if necessary.

3. It could cannibalize the cars of some of the spares to lengthen the other consists from six to eight cars – or even ten if service to Boston is strictly two-hourly, which would require only ten consists.

For the most part, the platforms are long enough for the reconfigurations in options 2 and 3. All platforms are long enough for eight cars, and it’s fairly trivial to lengthen the few Acela platforms that are only eight-car long to ten cars except New London. All from New York south are long enough for twelve cars, used in the Pennsylvania Railroad days; Washington’s long platforms are low-floor, but it suffices to convert just one to high-floor. Option 2 really requires fourteen-car platforms – there are twelve cars but two power cars are in the middle – but the platforms are long enough at New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, and at the other stations people at end cars could walk to an adjacent car, a practice already used at the low-floor Regional stations in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Note that in option 3, it’s in principle possible to make all service north of New York half-hourly, and either run all trains in double or cannibalize trains to create twelve-car consists. The problem with this is not platform length, but the complete lack of spares throughout the day.

There is, in other words, capacity for doubling Acela service south of New York, where the highest demand is. If Amtrak doesn’t provide this service, it could be an artificial shortage meant to keep prices high, or just insufficient demand for the quality of service. And if it cries capacity, it’s just after more money.

Amtrak’s Role in Regulatory Reform

In my previous post, I focused on the FRA’s self-justifying bureaucratic approach to regulation. However, the other main institute of intercity rail in America, Amtrak, too doesn’t come out of the comments looking very well. Unlike the FRA, Amtrak is not actively malevolent, and on the narrow issues it raised, it’s in the right. However, its choice of what to comment on betrays a warped sense of priorities.

On pages 35-36 of the document detailing the comments to transportation regulatory changes and the agency responses, Amtrak effectively asks the FRA to permit it to operate trains at up to 160 mph, rather than 150 mph as is the limit today. Says Amtrak,

The National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak) states that regulations governing high-speed track are duplicative and overlapping.  Amtrak notes that one set of regulations for track Class 8 governs speeds from 125 mph up to 160 mph, and yet another provision in this section states that operations at speeds above 150 mph are currently authorized by FRA only in conjunction with a rule of particular applicability (RPA) that addresses the overall safety of the operation as a system.  Amtrak believes that the speed threshold for an RPA should be 160 mph, to be consistent with the class track speeds.

This is a sensible request, within the boundaries set by accepting the rule of particular applicability in principle. The FRA is wrong to brush it off. However, Amtrak’s decision to make this its stand about speed while neglecting to ask for a waiver from the static buff strength rule shows it’s more interested in pizzazz than in performance.

Amtrak trumpets its 24-mile catenary upgrade, permitting trains to plow the tracks between New Brunswick and Trenton at 160 mph, up from 135 mph today. The time saving from this move is 1:40 minutes, minus a few seconds for acceleration; the time saving from going at 160 mph rather than 150 as the FRA currently permits is 36 seconds, again minus a few seconds for acceleration. The sole purpose of this is to let Amtrak brag about top speed, as it already does. The literally hours that could be saved by higher cant deficiency and higher acceleration are not on Amtrak’s radar, for they do not by themselves let Amtrak write press releases about its top speed.

Although the FRA is unwilling to repeal its regulations preventing unmodified European or Japanese trains from running on US track, it also practically begged agencies to request waivers. The process is sure to be onerous and frankly masochistic, but if Amtrak is willing to make a comment to try to cut the Acela’s travel time by 36 seconds, it ought to be willing to go through the motions of submitting a waiver request to cut it by 2 hours.

Quick Note: Zombie Myths About Amtrak And Profitability

Greater Greater Washington has a post up invoking almost every myth Amtrak and its backers use to argue that the National Railroad Passenger Corporation is actually doing okay. Of those, the single worst is about finances: “Amtrak nevertheless covers over 80% of its total costs through revenue from passengers, whereas most of the world’s passenger train operators fall in the 50% to 60% range.” The link sends us to an Amtrak page that states revenue and expense numbers leading to a 67% operating ratio and contains the following lie:

In FY 2010, Amtrak earned approximately $2.51 billion in revenue and incurred approximately $3.74 billion in expense. No country in the world operates a passenger rail system without some form of public support for capital costs and/or operating expenses.

Until Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore are erased from the face of the Earth, this statement is trivially false even in its weakest reasonable form; in those countries the government constructs many lines but then charges the private operators market rent. The JRs get no slack from the government: recall that the notion that the government wiped their Shinkansen construction debt is a myth. But even in Europe, intercity rail is profitable. Those profits are net profits, counting depreciation and interest on capital (often obliquely, e.g. SNCF’s LGV construction interest shows up as tolls to infrastructure owner RFF), which Amtrak prefers not to in order to boost its farebox recovery numbers.

The GGW post has worse whoppers than the Amtrak page does, but the one about profitability is the worst: not even Amtrak dares claim it has better finances than the world’s major passenger railroads. But there are others. One is about seat occupancy: the blog claims “Amtrak still manages to fill most of the seats it carries between Washington, New York, and Boston on both on Acela Express and Northeast Regional services”; in reality, while Acela seat occupancy is 60-65%, Regional seat occupancy is about 45%, both figures coming from comparing per-passenger-mile and per-seat-mile finances in Amtrak’s monthly reports. Another is a general claim that Amtrak is at capacity because Penn Station is; in fact, Penn Station itself has ample unused capacity, and even the North River Tunnels could support a few more trains per hour with better signaling.

The only myth missing from the post is the one that states Amtrak has majority share of travel in the Northeast Corridor; in fact, Amtrak only has majority share of the air/rail market, and its Vision claims 89% of present travel is by road. This myth I believe is a product of honest confusion; it’s simply easier to talk about mode share without specifying that it’s just air/rail, and there’s much more literature about air-rail competition than competition with roads, leading people to conflate the two. Here Amtrak is actually more honest than JR Central, which only states air/rail shares and ignores highways. My own preference is to make it clear which share I’m talking about, to prevent such misunderstanding.

EMUs Versus Locomotives

I keep getting pushback from Amtrak defenders about my article about its locomotive order. I think I addressed most points, but one that I didn’t that keeps coming up is whether electric multiple units are really better for train service than locomotives hauling unpowered cars. The answer is in Amtrak’s case an unambiguous yes, but it requires more argument.

Ordinarily, the cost tradeoff between multiple units and locomotives is that unpowered cars are less expensive and lower-maintenance than EMUs while locomotives are much more expensive and higher-maintenance. EMUs have definite advantage in performance; they accelerate faster, and, when the consists are short their energy consumption is much lower, since most modern locomotives are optimized for longer freight trains. Because the advantage is the most pronounced for short consists, Amtrak asked Vermont to buy US Railcar’s FRA-compliant DMUs for the Vermonter train, replacing the current diesel loco-hauled setup; Vermont itself puts the breakeven point between DMUs and locos at 4-5 cars, but the DMUs in question have just one vendor and are extraordinarily expensive by global standards.

Conversely, locomotives require much more track maintenance than EMUs, because of their higher axle load. Road wear is proportional to the fourth power of axle load, so the less even the weight distribution is, the higher the road wear is. Track wear does not satisfy such a neat formula; all old comments of mine stating the contrary should be ignored. However, for freight traffic such a formula does hold, and locomotives have axle loads comparable to those of freight trains. One could also observe that in Japan, railroads make every effort to keep axle load low, and therefore avoid articulated bogies; furthermore, almost all Shinkansen axles are powered to keep weight distribution even, whereas European high-speed EMUs only power about half the axles (Siemens’ Velaro has a maximum axle load of 17 t, and an average load of 14 t).

Generally, the trend in countries with well-run passenger rail systems is away from locomotives and toward EMUs. The exceptions come from three cases:

1. Some technologies, most notably the Talgo tilting wheels, can’t be used with powered bogies. The same is true of the tilting TGV test train.

2. Some railroads ignore track maintenance costs and focus on train maintenance. This includes SNCF, since the tracks are the responsibility of RFF.

3. Cultural inertia may make railroads too used to separate power cars. This again includes SNCF, which needed power cars for the TGV because of the technological limitations of the 1970s and 80s, requiring very large transformers.

In the specific case of Amtrak and the Northeast Corridor, not only are reasons 1-2 not an issue, but also the cost question favors EMUs. Look again at Vermont’s report, which seriously posits unpowered coaches costing up to $5.5 million each, more than a standard off-the-shelf EuroSprinter loco; Amtrak’s recent order is much cheaper, at $2.2 million per car, but still comparable to the FRA-compliant M7 EMU and not much less per meter of car length (and more per car) than the Coradia Nordic EMUs used in Sweden or the FLIRTs used in Finland.

In comments elsewhere, I’ve heard that one reason to keep the locomotives is that they can be detached and replaced with diesels on through-trains to unelectrified territory. This is pure cultural inertia; EMUs, and even power cars that are permanently coupled to unpowered coaches, can be attached to a diesel locomotive, as the TGV did to reach Sables d’Olonne. More cynically, the cost of Amtrak’s locomotives is $466 million, which, at Northeast Corridor electrification cost (about $3 million/km), could electrify 155 km of route, almost all the way from Washington to Richmond. At the cost of electrifying the line to Sables d’Olonne (about $1.2 million/km), it could electrify nearly 400 km. Amtrak’s insistence on locomotives is reducing flexibility here rather than increasing it.

But in general, the move toward EMUs is not about flexibility; railroads around the world deprecate it and have semi-permanently coupled trains. It comes from the fact that, outside Amtrak’s uniquely bad experience with Metroliner EMUs, they work better. I’ve already mentioned higher acceleration. In addition, all else being equal, they’re more flexible, and can be scaled to any length: the M7s are married pairs. I’ve seen commenters that claim the exact opposite, by looking only at EMUs with articulated bogies; those have nothing to do with the question at hand (the TGV has articulated bogies, too), and indicate that the operator cares about other things more than about flexible length, for example a walk-through train or reducing the number of bogies.

Another problem with locomotives, besides inferior performance, is limited capacity. A single-deck 200-meter long AGV has 466-510 seats, compared with about 350 for a single-deck TGV and 545 for a double-deck TGV. SNCF is still eschewing the AGV because its capacity limit is so great it needs double-deck trains, but Alstom is developing a train with standard, unarticulated bogies that it claims can reach 600 seats with one deck.

Although Amtrak does not have the capacity problems of the LGV Sud-Est, it too is capacity-constrained, in another way. The limiting factor to Amtrak’s capacity is the lack of cars; as a result, buying EMUs instead of locomotives and coaches would add more capacity per dollar spent. It’s brutal, but true. Even the slightly more expensive Nordic EMUs would be an improvement; they’re still cheaper than coaches plus a single locomotive for all train lengths up to 14 cars (if the loco is an Amtrak Cities Sprinter) or 9 cars (if it’s a TRAXX or Prima).

In reality, the reason Amtrak uses locomotives is entirely cultural inertia. It was burned with the Metroliners, and thinks that unpowered cars last longer because, well, they have to. The reality that the M7, or the average European EMU, lasts 40 years, the same as Amtrak’s coaches; however, that idea was not invented by Amtrak, and is therefore out. It thinks that unpowered coaches are cheaper, while buying coaches that cost the same as EMUs. And so on. This is yet another bad US rail practice, hindering rail revival by making it too expensive and reducing performance.

Followup on the FRA and Amtrak

My posts about the FRA and American railroad incompetence are getting a lot of traction nowadays, thanks to links from Aaron Renn and Stephen Smith, of which the latter has been relinked by Matt Yglesias. The comments to those posts have often brought up the question of why I believe that come 2015, the buff strength requirement will be gone. They also sometimes propose that FRA regulations are useful in the unique circumstances of American railroads. Let me address both concerns right now.

In 2009, Amtrak published its first document proposing higher-speed trains in the Northeast. In this document Amtrak states that,

Subsequent analysis by Amtrak suggests achieving 2 hour and 15 minute service between New York and Washington in the long-term by 2030 will require modifications to existing equipment, or deployment of next generation rolling stock, to allow required speeds through curves, as well as expansion of capacity into and through Manhattan, NY. Table 2 includes estimates of costs required to replace Amtrak’s existing NEC fleet with next generation equipment. As discussed above, this next generation of equipment has the potential to be lighter, and thus faster, than the current generation. However, performance specifications for such equipment will need to be developed and will depend in part on emerging standards for positive train control (PTC) and crash avoidance systems.

My reading of this is that the Amtrak believes the FRA will indeed waive buff strength requirements once PTC comes online; this is buttressed by the fact that Caltrain got a waiver, based in part on a requirement that it install PTC first. The PTC discussed doesn’t seem to be heading anywhere good – note the discussion of developing performance specifications rather than using the emerging worldwide standard that is ERTMS – but it does indicate that Amtrak’s new premium-cost locomotives could be much lighter.

As an aside, this document is what first clued me in to Amtrak’s incompetence. For example, immediately below the paragraph quoted above, Amtrak proposes to raise cant deficiency (“underbalance”) on Metro-North territory from 3″ to 5″; the Acela trainsets can do 7″, and Pendolino trainsets close to 11″. Based on this rather low standard, Amtrak claims “an additional five minutes of trip time reductions are potentially available with the deployment of modified or new equipment.” (Try half an hour.)

As for the second concern, usually the arguments in favor of FRA regulations hinge upon exaggerated claims that the US railroad system is unique. One commenter claims that railroaders call cab cars coffin cars because of the possibility of grade crossing accidents. In reality, lightweight trains safely cross roads at-grade abroad, to say nothing of light rail networks in the US.

There are still plenty of old-time railroaders who believe that in crashes, FRA compliance offers extra protection. It does not. Please read Caltrain’s structural report and compliance assessment for the FRA waiver, which include a technical explanation of the mechanisms for accident survivability used in Europe. Caltrain’s simulations show that high buff strength is only relevant at relative speeds between 15 and 25 mph, and that European EMUs and compliant cars are equally safe in grade crossing accidents. The FRA seems convinced of the safety of European EMUs; it is reportedly harassing Japanese manufacturers about compliance with European survivability regulations (for example, in collisions with a 6-kg steel ball) rather than American ones. Finally, high weight is a liability as much as it is an asset: at Chatsworth, the loss of life came from the fact that the first passenger car telescoped into the heavy locomotive.

Update: the Business Alliance for Northeast Mobility, an organization supporting Amtrak’s NEC Master Plan, published an article claiming Amtrak made the right choice to buy the aforementioned locomotives, claiming that Amtrak is underfunded. Recall that the Master Plan is the document that came out of the report referenced above, complete with the same laconic assumptions on train performance, as well as false claims about capacity constraints. The Business Alliance’s article’s greatest sin is the claim at the end that,

Smith also ignores the question of funding when he suggests that Amtrak should purchase Electric Multiple Units (EMUs) for the NEC. Unlike locomotives and non-motorized passenger cars, currently in use on the NEC, EMUs have smaller engines on each passenger car. The debate between investing in EMUs vs. locomotives + cars is beyond the scope of this post. Still, what’s clear is that EMUs would need a significantly higher up-front investment and require an even larger amount of government support, which is highly unlikely at this time.

In reality, a new unpowered Amtrak coach costs $2.2 million, about the same as a decent FRA-compliant EMU on the LIRR and Metro-North. And the three European EMU orders in Railway Gazette’s April 2011 compilation cost between $1.3 and $2 million per car.

Premium Cost, Substandard Quality Locomotives

I’m a little late to the game here, but let me just say that Amtrak’s just-funded contract for new electric locomotives is supremely expensive: $560 million for 70 locos, or $8 million each, $466 million for 70 locos, or $6.7 million each (see comment by aw with this link). The locomotives are an FRA-compliant version of Siemens’ EuroSprinter product, which has recently been sold in Europe for €3.7–4 million per unit, as has Bombardier’s competing TRAXX locomotive (in fact, the TRAXX even sold for €3.2 million). Amtrak is paying a premium of about 60-80% 35-50% for these locomotives, depending on exchange rates.

It gets worse. The new locos will enter service in 2013, just two years before the national mandate for positive train control goes in effect, allowing trains to be lighter and avoid the most onerous FRA regulations (in fact, the Northeast Corridor, where most of the locos are to run, already has a PTC system). The special modifications and design are what caused an increase in both weight, from 86-87 metric tons for the standard EuroSprinter to 97 for the Amtrak Cities Sprinter, and cost.

To put things in perspective, Sweden recently bought 180 km/h EMUs for €1.6 million per car. And the 700 Series Shinkansen cost $2.5 million per car. In other words, Amtrak could have gotten 3 EMUs for the price for one locomotive. (Amtrak’s new single-deck coaches cost $2.3 million per car, the same as EMUs abroad.)

The US Department of Transportation is announcing that “Siemens Industry USA is adding 250 new manufacturing jobs in order to design and build 70 new energy-efficient locomotives for Amtrak.” The cost premium works out to about $200-250 million $100-150 million, or $800,000-1,000,000 $400,000-600,000 per job added; the total cost is $2.2 million $1.9 million per US manufacturing job. Needless to say, most of this money is not going to American manufacturing workers, but to consultants and Siemens’s train designers.

Bad US Rail Practices, and What It Means for FRA Regulations

As I alluded to in the last few posts, although the FRA is the primary obstacle to a passenger rail revival, the old railroader traditions it reinforces are still strong in the commuter railroads. At some, for example the MBTA and the New York-area railroads, practices are even worse in terms of cost and performance than required by the FRA.

Witness the following issues, recurring on almost all US commuter lines:

1. Overstaffing, more than required by the FRA. The MBTA currently has one assistant conductor per two cars, and its proposal for an upgrade to newer rolling stock retains one conductor per two cars. The New York- and Chicago-area commuter trains have 3-6 conductors, punching everyone’s tickets. Caltrain maintains assistant conductors even though it does not punch tickets anymore. And New York’s plan with smartcards is not to institute proof-of-payment, as is normal throughout Europe, but rather to have conductors check every ticket using a smartcard reader, only faster: Jay Walder said as much at the MTA Unconference (it starts at 7:50 into the linked video, and goes into the next part).

2. Poor choice of rolling stock. See the same link above for the MBTA’s present acceleration profile, which is similar to that of the other commuter rail operators in the US using diesel locomotives. During acceleration from 0 to 60 mph, a train loses 70 seconds relative to going the same distance at full speed, and even under the DMU plan, it would lose 43. In contrast, a FLIRT loses about 13 seconds accelerating from 0 to 100 km/h. Despite this, there are no plans to electrify or ask for an FRA waiver.

Electrification alone could solve some problems, even without a waiver. The EMUs used by Metro-North lose 13-15 minutes from 12 intermediate stops on the Harlem Line, which after factoring in 30 seconds of dwell time works out to 35-45 seconds per station counting both acceleration and deceleration. Alternatively, if electrification is out, then an FRA waiver would open the doors to fast-accelerating as well as more fuel-efficient DMUs.

3. Poor use of existing infrastructure, especially at terminals. Even with FRA regulations, commuter trains with push-pull or multiple-unit service turn in about 5 minutes at their outer ends. They dwell for much longer at the downtown terminal, creating the illusion of capacity issues. To solve those capacity problems, railroads propose massive concrete, with no attempt to improve electronics or organization: the ARC cavern, the expensive ESA cavern, track expansion at Boston South.

4. A concrete-before-all-else strategy of investment, in direct opposition with organization before electronics before concrete. Amtrak and the commuter railroads that claim to be at capacity never investigated the possibility of better signaling, such as ERTMS. In addition, Amtrak’s Master Plan proposes extra trackage to avoid capacity problems in Massachusetts and Maryland that could be resolved with timed overtakes. Although organization is not sexy, it’s trivial for the various railroads using a station to share ticket vending machines and concourses, instead of separating into agency turfs; in addition, electronics is capital investment, and can get federal investment as well as good headlines about squeezing more capacity out of infrastructure. There’s no excuse for prioritizing concrete.

5. Poor integration with local transit in terms of fares and schedules. Commuter train stations are usually glorified parking lots; for one especially egregious example, compare Westborough’s train station location with its downtown location. Transit-oriented development is minimal. Best industry practice is to do the opposite, and instead integrate commuter rail with connecting buses at the suburban end, to say nothing of urban rail at the city end. Clipper in the Bay Area and the MTA’s proposals in the New York area have a single card that can be used to pay on both commuter rail and urban transit, but people will still have to purchase tickets separately, being punished first by the inherent inconvenience of transferring and then by being made to pay an extra fare.

6. Indifference to off-peak and reverse-peak riders. Peak ridership can fill trains, but is expensive to provide, because providing for more of it requires additional capital spending as well as additional employees working split shifts. Among the older railroads, the LIRR deserves singular scorn for running trains one-way on its two-track Main Line; although peak traffic on the three lines using the two-track segment is 23 tph, within the capabilities of two tracks under present signaling, the LIRR prefers being able to run express trains than any reverse peak trains. Outside the inner ends of a few very busy lines, such as the New Haven Line, off-peak service is at best hourly, and sometimes much worse. And at the peak, the commuter railroads eviscerate local service on their busiest lines in order to provide trains that make a few local stops and then express to the city, ensuring nobody will be able to use them to get to suburban job centers on the way.

7. Poor timetable adherence. Metro-North and Metra do somewhat better than the rest, but Amtrak only achieves 80% on-time performance even when it owns the tracks, and that’s after counting Northeast Corridor trains that are 20 minutes late as being on time. In contrast, SBB achieves 92% on-time performance by a 3-minute standard.

The importance of all this is that reform has to come from above, directed from Congress or the White House, or else from below by reform-minded railroads asking for many waivers and creating a template for smaller railroads to follow. Bruce McFarling has written various comments saying the FRA’s problem is one of regulatory capture by the freight railroads, and therefore the solution is to spend money on inferior passenger rail until there’s enough of a lobby for passenger rail-friendlier rules. This is unlikely; passenger rail advocates rarely care, with some positive but small exceptions such as NJ-ARP, and the passenger rail operators depicted in this post are wedded to the old way of doing things.

FRA reform by itself could help some of this, by creating a template for modern operations, consisting of a clockface schedules, short turnaround times, modern rolling stock, and regionally integrated fares and schedules. However, absent it, some forward-thinking railroad has to be the first to propose modernization. The MTA is ideally suited for it because of its high commuter rail ridership, but has no interest. As a result, good transit advocated need to keep harping on commuter operators as well as Amtrak to improve and reform, or propose reforms themselves. Hoping the status quo reforms itself will not cut it.