One of the dirty secrets of my (and ETA’s) New York commuter rail through-running proposal is that it barely connects Long Island to New Jersey. The later lines with the longer greenfield tunnels do, but the base proposal only through-runs the Port Washington Branch to New Jersey, and with some work it can also through-run some branches to the Hudson Line via Penn Station.
Credit: Kara Fischer, ETA; Flushing is not depicted on the map and is on the Port Washington Branch
It’s long been a criticism of the plan in comments and on social media that it doesn’t do anything to connect Newark with Jamaica. I’d like to address this briefly, since changes in work geography over the last decade have made the Port Washington connection more valuable relative to the Jamaica connection.
Job counts
For the main secondary centers that are or could be on this system, here are the job counts within 1 km of the station, in the business cycle peak years of 2007 and 2019:
Jamaica and Flushing both grew rapidly in the 2007-19 business cycle, but Flushing both started bigger and grew faster, to the point of approaching the job count near Newark Penn Station.
Long Island City has seen booming development, as the only near-center neighborhood in New York with significant construction rates; the number of residents has grown even faster, from 4,502 to 12,183 employed residents over the same period, but with a jobs-to-employed-residents ratio higher than 5, it is a business district first. Plans for an infill station at Queens Boulevard are on the MTA’s wishlist in the 20 Year Needs Assessment, at typically extreme MTA costs; this is separate from Sunnyside Junction, somewhat to the east, which has less development but could be a cross-platform transfer with East Side Access-bound trains.
Non-work trips
Flushing is a booming ethnic center for Chinese-New Yorkers. Jobs there serve the community wherever its members live, and so do non-work destinations, including cultural centers and well-regarded Chinese restaurants. This generates not only work trips, but also consumption trips. Without fast transit to Flushing, it’s a special occasion to go there for food, especially if one does not live on the subway; with fast transit, Flushing restaurants are capable of outcompeting more local alternatives for people arriving from inner New Jersey, and people from suburbs farther out may choose to take a more frequent LIRR than to drive.
Jamaica is not a regional center of much. There is one big trip generator there, other than the growing job center: JFK, via the AirTrain. Airport connections are valuable, but also overrated. The unlinked (likely total) ridership on the AirTrain in the first three months of 2024 was 1.924 million, or 21,143/day (not weekday), slightly higher than in 2019. This is not a high modal split, but airport arrivals are disproportionately going to Manhattan already, and the frequency between Penn Station and Jamaica is high enough that through-running and other modernization elements would only mildly increase this figure.
I can’t quite compare the two figures, since leisure trips, especially routine ones like going out to restaurants, are hard to measure. But Jamaica’s airport trips coming from better commuter rail are just not going to be significant in volume by the standards of the work trips of Long Island City or Flushing.
Through-running schemas
The reason I’ve advocated for through-running from New Jersey to the Port Washington Branch and no other LIRR line is operational. There is only enough capacity for at most 12 trains per hour, because the trains have to share tracks with Penn Station Access local trains to Stamford and with intercity trains. Connecting to an LIRR branch serving Jamaica would create complex branching, with the same line in Queens reverse-branching to different destinations, reducing reliability. It was hard enough to timetable the reverse-branched New Haven Line in our Northeast Corridor project. The Port Washington Branch, running completely separately from the rest of the system, sharing tracks only on the approach to and within Penn Station, is an ideal candidate.
It is a happy coincidence that the through-running schema for the LIRR that is easiest to implement also happens to serve the larger Queens business center between the two traditional ones. It would also be a great opportunity to build infill in Long Island City, which has emerged in the last few decades to be a much larger center. Another happy coincidence is that, while New Haven Line timetabling has been difficult, there is room in the schedule for two infill stations in Queens without upsetting the delicate track sharing between Penn Station Access local commuter trains and intercity trains within the East River Tunnels to Penn Station. Anything involving mainline rail through legacy cities is necessarily going to have to rely on tricks, waivers, and happy coincidences like this to cobble together a good system out of a region that had no reason to be built in 1900-30 around the commuter rail technology of the 1970s-2020s.
This is the second part of my series about the Regional Plan Association event about expanding capacity at Penn Station. Much of the presentation, at least in its first half, betrays wanton ignorance, with which area power brokers derive their belief that it is necessary to dig up an entire block south of Penn Station to add more station tracks, at a cost of $16.7 billion; one railroad source called the people insisting on Penn Expansion “hostage takers.” The first part covered casual ignorance about the history of commuter rail through-running in Europe, including cities that appear in the presentation. This part goes over the core claim made in the presentation regarding how fast trains can enter and exit Penn Station. More broadly, it goes over a core claim made in the source the presentation uses to derive its conclusion, a yet-unreleased consultant report detailing just how much space each train needs at Penn Station, getting it wrong by a factor of 5-10.
The issue is about the minimum time a train needs to berth at a station, called the dwell time. Dwell times vary by train type, service type, and peak traffic. Subways and nearly all commuter trains can keep to a dwell time of 30 seconds, with very few exceptions. City center stations like Penn Station are these exceptions; the RER and the Zurich S-Bahn both struggle with city center dwell times. The Berlin S-Bahn does not, but this is an artifact of Berlin’s atypically platykurtic job density, which isn’t reproducible in any American city. That said, even with very high turnover of passengers at central train stations, the dwell time is still usually measured in tens of seconds, and not minutes. In the limiting case, an American commuter train should be able to dump its entire load of passengers at one station in around two minutes.
The common belief among New York-area railroads is that Penn Station requires very long dwell times. This is not made explicit in the presentation; Foster Nichols’ otherwise sober part of the presentation alludes to “varying dwell times” on pp. 23 and 26, but documents produced by the railroads about their own perceived needs go back years and state precise times; for through-running, it was agreed that the dwell times would be set at 12 minutes in the Tri-Venture Council comprising Amtrak, the LIRR, and New Jersey Transit. The consultant report I reference below even thinks it takes 16 minutes. In truth, the number is closer to 2-3 minutes, and investments that would precede Penn Expansion, like Penn Reconstruction, would be guaranteed to reduce it below 2 minutes.
Dwell times in practice
Before going into what dwell times should be, it is important to sanity-check everything by looking at dwell times as they are. It is fortunate that examples of short dwell times abound.
As mentioned in my previous post, I have just returned from a trip to Brussels and London. My train going out of Berlin was late, so at Hauptbahnhof, the dwell time was just three minutes. The train, which had departed Ostbahnhof almost empty, filled almost to seated capacity at Hauptbahnhof, where there is no level boarding. DB routinely turns trains in four minutes at terminal stations that are located mid-line, like Frankfurt and Leipzig, but this time I observed such dwells at a station with almost complete seat turnover. In Japan, where there is level boarding and two door pairs per car rather than one, the dwell times on the Nozomi are a minute, even at Shin-Osaka, where through-trains transition from JR Central to JR West operation.
On commuter rail, dwell times are shorter, even though the trains are much more crowded at rush hour. The reason is a combination of higher toleration for standees, and higher toleration of mistakes – if passengers get on the wrong train or miss their stop, they will get off at the next stop in a few minutes rather than ending up in the wrong city.
As mentioned in the introduction, Penn Station is a limiting case on commuter rail, since it’s the only station in Manhattan for any possible through-trains today; a future tunnel to Grand Central, studied over 20 years ago as Alternative G and recurrently proposed since in various forms (for example, in the ETA writeup, or in this post of mine from last year), would still leave trains that use the preexisting North River Tunnels running through the East River Tunnels and not making a second Manhattan stop. Thus, the best comparison cases need to be themselves limiting cases, as far as possible.
For this, we need to go to Paris, especially its busiest lines, the RER A and B. The RER B has two central stations: Gare du Nord, Les Halles; Gare du Nord isn’t really in the central business district, but is such a large travel hub that its RER and Métro traffic levels are the highest in both systems. The theoretical dwell time (“stationnement”) is 30 seconds on the RER. In practice, at rush hour, it’s higher – but it’s still measured in tens of seconds. In the 2000s, the RER B reached 70-80 second dwell times at Gare du Nord at peak, before new work reduced the average to 55 seconds. I timed dwell times while living in Paris and riding the RER B regularly to IHES, and at rush hour, the two central stations and Saint-Michel-Notre-Dame were usually 50-60 seconds. This is optimized through signaling as well as wide platforms and single-level trains with four door pairs per car, though the internal configuration of the corridor of the RER B rolling stock still leaves something to be desired, especially if there are passengers with luggage (which there often are, as the line serves CDG Airport).
The RER A has four central business district stations: Les Halles, Auber, Etoile, La Défense; a fifth station, Gare de Lyon, is like Gare du Nord a transport hub with very high originating ridership. A report from the early 2010s lamenting that the theoretical throughput of 30 trains per hour was not achieved in practice blames a host of factors, including high dwell times due to traffic, reaching 50 seconds in the central section. The RER A rolling stock is bilevel with three triple-wide door pairs per car, and for a bilevel its internal circulation is good, but it’s still a bilevel train, and getting through a crowded rush hour car to disembark takes a lot of shuffling.
Is Paris a good comparison case?
Yes.
Part 1 of this series goes over the history of the RER, and points out that in 2019, the RER A had 1.4 million weekday trips, and the RER B 983,000. This compares with a combined LIRR and New Jersey Transit ridership of about 600,000 per weekday. About 67% of LIRR ridership is at rush hour; on SNCF-operated Transilien and RER lines, at the suburban stations, the figure is 46%, and my suspicion is that the RER B is somewhat lower than Transilien.
The higher peakiness in New York evens things up somewhat. But even then, peak hourly traffic into Penn Station from New Jersey was 27,223 passengers in 2019, per the Hub Bound report (Appendix III, Section C), and peak hourly traffic from the four-track East River Tunnels was 33,530; in contrast, the RER A’s peak hourly traffic last decade was 50,000.
Now, Paris does have multiple central stations, whereas there is only one in Manhattan on the LIRR and NJ Transit. That said, this only evens things up. My table on this only includes the SNCF-operated portion, and only includes boardings at a resolution of four hours, not one hour; thus, all central RER A stations are missing. From the table, we get the following maximum boarding counts between 4 and 8 pm and between 6 and 10 am on a work day:
Station
Line
Trains/hour
Boardings (pm)
Boardings (am)
Penn Station
LIRR
37
73,430
4,920
Penn Station
NJ Transit
20
56,664
7,838
Gare du Nord
RER B (both directions)
20
48,989
54,137
Gare du Nord
RER D (both directions)
12
34,512
28,073
Châtelet-Les Halles
RER D (both directions)
12
28,586
6,877
Gare de Lyon
RER D (both directions)
12
49,392
17,158
Haussmann-Saint Lazare
RER E
16
45,383
10,719
The numbers represent single-line trips, so people transferring cross-platform between the RER B and D at Gare du Nord count as boardings. The reason for including both morning and afternoon peak traffic is that afternoon boardings are largely symmetric with morning alightings and vice versa, and so the sum represents total on and off traffic on the train at the peak.
Peak traffic per train in a single direction occurs at Saint-Lazare on the RER E, which only began through-running in May of this year; the counts are from the mid-2010s, when the station was a four-track underground terminal. At the through-stations, total ons and offs per rush hour train are slightly lower than at Penn Station on NJ Transit and slightly higher than on the LIRR. Even taking into account that at Penn Station, 40% of the peak four hour traffic is at the peak hour, and the proportion should be somewhat smaller in Paris, the difference cannot be large. If Gare du Nord can support 60 second dwell times, Penn Station can support dwell times that are not much higher, at least as far as the train-platform interface is concerned.
Gantt charts
A yet unreleased consultant report for the Penn Station Capacity Improvement Project (PCIP) details the tasks that need to be done for a through-running train at Penn Station. This is shown as a pair of Gantt charts, both for a future baseline, the second one assuming dropback crews and station scheduling guaranteeing that trains do not berth on two tracks facing the same platform at the same time. All of this is extravagant and unnecessary, and could not be done by people who are familiar with best practices in Europe or Japan.
This is said to be turn time in the chart and dwell time in the description. But the limiting factor is the passenger path and not the crew path, and for that, it doesn’t matter if a train from New Jersey then goes to Long Island or Stamford and a train from Long Island or Stamford goes to New Jersey or if it’s the other way around.
To be clear, 16 minutes is insanely long as an unpadded turn time, let alone a through-dwell time. The MBTA can do it in 10; I think so can Metro-North at the outer ends. ICE trains turn in four minutes at pinch points like Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, with extensive rail passenger turnover. So let’s go over how to get from 16 down to a more reasonable number.
Passenger alighting
Alighting does not take 6.5 minutes at Penn Station, even at rush hour, even on trains that are configured for maximum seats rather than fast egress. The limiting factor is not the train doors – the RER D runs bilevels with two door pairs per car and narrow passageways, and would not be too out of place on NJ Transit. Rather, it’s the narrow platforms, which have fewer egress points than they should and poor sight lines. This was studied for the Moynihan Station project, which opened in 2021. The project added new staircases and escalators, and now the minimum clearance time is at most 2.03 minutes, on platform 9, followed by 2.02 minutes on platforms 4 and 5. The expected clearance time, taking into account that passengers prefer to exit near the 7th Avenue end but the egress points are not weighted toward that end, peaks at 4.83 minutes on platform 4 – but passengers can walk along the platform while the train is moving, just as they do on the subway or on the RER.
What’s more, Penn Reconstruction, a project that may or may not happen, but that is sequentially prior to the Penn Expansion project that the slide deck is trying to sell, is required to install additional vertical circulation at all platforms, to reduce the egress times below 2 minutes even in emergency conditions (one escalator out). This is because NFPA 130 requires evacuation in 4 minutes assuming every track that can be occupied is, which given timetabling constraints means both tracks facing each platform other than the single-track platform 9. Responding to Christine Berthet’s questions about through-running, the agency even said that Penn Reconstruction is going to bring all platforms into compliance, but still said dwell times would need to be 8 minutes.
Passenger boarding
Alighting and boarding peak at different times of day. As the above table shows, reverse-peak traffic at Penn Station is only 12% of the combined peak and reverse-peak traffic on NJ Transit, and only 6% on the LIRR. In any circumstance in which the alighting time needs to be stretched to the maximum (again, only somewhat more than 2 minutes), the boarding time can be set at 30 seconds, and vice versa.
Moreover, because the access points to the platforms include escalators, not all running in the peak direction, and not just staircases, reverse-peak traffic consumes capacity that is otherwise wasted. Even the 30 seconds for additional boarding time in the morning rush are generous.
Conductor walk time for safety review
This is not done in Europe. Conductors’ safety review comprises checking whether passengers are stuck in the gap between the platform and the train, which is done after boarding, and takes seconds rather than minutes, using CCTV if the sight lines are obstructed.
Door opening and closing
These do not take 30 seconds each; the total amount of time is in the single digits.
Engineer operating position set-up, and engineer/conductor job briefing
Crews switch out in 1-2 minutes at boundaries between train operating companies in Paris and Shin-Osaka. The RER B is operated by SNCF north of Gare du Nord and by RATP south of it, and they used to switch crews there – and the operating position had to be changed, since the two companies’ engineers preferred different setups, one preferring to sit and the other to stand. It took until the early 2010s to run crews through, and even then it took a few years to unify the line’s dispatching. It does not take 3 minutes to brief the engineer on the job.
Total combined time
On a through-train, using alighting times in line with the current infrastructure at Penn Station, the minimum dwell time is 2-3 minutes, provided trains can be timetabled so that no two tracks facing the same platform have a train present at the same time. If there are four through-platforms, then commuter trains can run every 5 minutes to each platform, which is borderline from the perspective of egress capacity at 7th Avenue but does work.
Intercity trains make this easier to timetable: they have lower maximum capacity unless standing tickets are sold, which they currently are not, and even if Amtrak runs 16-car EMUs, they’ll still have fewer seats than there are seats plus standing spaces on a 10-car NJ Transit train, and not all of them turn over at Penn Station. Potentially, platform 6 can be dedicated to intercity trains in both directions, and then platforms 4 and 5 can run eastbound, alternating, and platforms 7 and 8 can run westbound. Using the timetable string diagram here, the local NJ Transit trains on the Northeast Corridor would have to share a platform, running every 5 minutes, while the express trains can get a dedicated platform running every 10; the local trains are likely to be less crowded and also have more through-passengers, first because usually through-service is more popular in inner suburbs than in outer ones, and second because the likely pairing in our Northeast Corridor plan connects those trains to Long Island City and Flushing while the express trains awkwardly turn into local Metro-North trains to Stamford.
Note that intercity trains can be scheduled to dwell for just 2-3 minutes too, and not just commuter trains. That’s actually longer than Shinkansen express dwell times (involving a crew change at Shin-Osaka), and in line with what I’ve seen with full turnover in Berlin. The Avelia Liberty has better circulation than the ICE 3, since it has level boarding, and any future trainset can be procured with two door pairs per car, like the Velaro Novo or Shinkansen, rather than just one, if dwell times are a concern.
The incuriosity of consultant-driven projects
I spoke to some of the people involved about my problems with the presentation, and got very good questions. One of them pointed out that I am talking about two- and three-minute dwell times in big European cities, and asked, how come experienced international consultants like Arup and LTK, which prepared the Gantt chart above, don’t know this? What’s missing here?
This is a question I’ve had to face with the construction cost comparisons before, and the answer is the same: consultants are familiar with projects that use consultants. Anglo consultants like Jacobs, AECOM, Arup, and WSP have extensive international experience, with the sort of projects that bring in international consulting firms to supervise the designs. The bigger Continental European and East Asian countries have enough in-house engineering expertise that they don’t really bring them in.
This can be readily seen in two ways. First, getting any detailed information about rail projects in France and Germany requires reading the local language. Practically nothing gets translated into English. I almost exclusively use French sources when writing about the RER, which can be readily seen in this post and in part 1. My German is a lot less fluent than my French, but here too I have to rely on reading technical German to be able to say anything about the Berlin or Munich S-Bahn or the ICE at greater depth than English Wikipedia (for one example, compare English and German on switches). A lot of the information isn’t even online and is in railfan books and magazines. This is not an especially globalized industry, and a consultancy that works in English will just not see things that are common knowledge to the experts in France or Germany, let alone Japan.
And second, the few Continental European projects that are more globalized turn into small reference pools for American agencies looking to compare themselves to others. Woody Allen portrays a Barcelona with the works of the only architect his American audience will have heard of. The MTA compares its per-rider costs to those of the not-fully-open Barcelona Metro L9/10, MassDOT uses L9/10 to benchmark the North-South Rail Link (again with the wrong denominator), and VTA uses L9/10 as a crutch with which to justify its decision to build a single-bore San Jose subway. L9/10 is an atypically large project, and atypically expensive for Spain; it also, uniquely, uses more privatization of planning than is the norm in Spain, including design-build project delivery, whence the line from the one of the consultants I’ve had to deal with in the US, “The standard approach to construction in most of Europe outside Russia is design-build” (design-build to a good approximation does not exist in Germany, Spain except L9/10, or Italy, and is uncommon in France and done with less privatization of expertise than in the US).
To take these two points together, then, the elements of foreign systems that are likeliest to be familiar to either American railroaders or English-primary consultants are the biggest and flashiest ones. This can even include elements that are not consultant-driven, if they’re so out there that they can’t be missed, like a high-speed rail network: rail consultants know the TGV exists, even if they’re not as familiar with how SNCF goes around planning and building lines, and can sometimes imitate design standards. Commuter rail infrastructure that’s similarly flashy gets noticed, so the presentation mentions the RER and Munich S-Bahn, even while getting their histories wrong and fixating on the new station caverns that even a tourist on a short trip can notice.
Commuter rail operations are not flashy. The map of RER or S-Bahn lines is neat, which is why rail activists talk about through-running so much – it’s right there posted at every station and on every railcar. But the speed at which people get on and off the train is not as obvious, and it requires looking into detailed reports to do an even rudimentary comparison, none of which in the case of Paris is available in English or easy to find on Google (the word “stationnement” usually means “parking,” in the same manner that the word “dwell” usually means “to live in a place”).
The upshot is that consultant reports written by serious people who absorb the knowledge of the railroaders of the Northeastern US with some British sanity checks can still say things that are so wrong to make the entire report useless. The same process that produces the whopper that the Munich S-Bahn, built 1965-72, took 46 years to build, can produce a Gantt chart that has a combined boarding and alighting time with conductor check that’s more than five times longer than what Penn Station in its current configuration is capable of and more than 10 times longer than what Gare du Nord achieves with similar peak ridership. Based on this false belief regarding dwell times, the agencies are then convinced that through-running is difficult and, separately, many additional tracks at Penn Station are required to fully use the capacity of the under-construction Gateway tunnel, building which would waste $16.7 billion.
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.
Between New York and New Haven, a distance of 120 km (from Penn Station) or 116 km (from Grand Central), the two fastest intercity trains of the day take 1:35 to travel, an average of 75 km/h. Most do the trip in about 1:40, averaging about 72 km/h. Commuter trains to Grand Central do it in about 1:40 three times a day, averaging 70 km/h, but the vast majority of even the rush express trains are slower, a few doing it in 1:52 and most in about two hours, averaging 58 km/h. This is not normal for a primary intercity corridor; the Acela averages about 120 km/h between New York and Washington and between New Haven and Boston, which is typical for non-high-speed intercity lines in Europe, while high-speed ones usually average 200 km/h or more. I’ve been asked by some big names in online transit content creation why this is so, and hope to explain why the trains are slow, and what it would take to reduce 40 minutes from the one-way trip time.
The contrast should be with the high-speed rail proposal that I’m working on at Marron, which cuts the intercity trip time between New York and New Haven to about 52 minutes, on the existing right-of-way, and the express commuter rail trip time to Grand Central to about 1:16. The result is not high-speed rail, but is a fast upgraded intercity rail line, on a par with the faster British and Swedish lines. Changes in right-of-way geometry, including buyouts of houses in expensive suburbs in Connecticut, could reasonably cut the intercity trip time to about 45 minutes; these are mapped here, the 52-minute trip corresponding to the alternatives that stay on the existing right-of-way and the 45-minute one to the alternatives that use the bypasses where they exist.
The primary culprit for the slow trip times today is poor scheduling practices. Those practices, in turn, come from mutual abuse between Amtrak and the commuter rail operators, in this case Metro-North and the Connecticut Department of Transportation, both of which display terminal incompetence on all matters related to rail. The state of the tracks contributes to the slowness, and thus the second most important issue is poor maintenance practices leading to unreliable infrastructure, which then feeds into poor scheduling. Metro-North and CTDOT are again especially bad even by American standards. Physical infrastructure problems add minutes here and there, but the most important interventions are cheap and for the most part can only work with better timetabling rather than on their own.
Of note, it is common to blame the low speeds on curves. However, the curves are not especially onerous – few restrict trains to slower speeds than about 150 km/h given good operating practices. In fact, the Northeast Corridor gets if anything curvier east of New Haven until after it crosses into Rhode Island, but the speed there is higher, as there is less dense commuter traffic complicating the schedule, and Amtrak’s level of incompetence is bad but less bad than that of CTDOT.
Timetable padding
Every rail timetable has to include contingency or buffer time. This takes into account primarily the need for trains to recover from delays, and secondarily suboptimal driver behavior, such as starting to brake a little too early. Switzerland pads its timetables 7%; the TGV network can only do about 10-13%, and the ICE network about 25%. What I and others have seen on Amtrak and Metro-North trains as well as what train drivers have told me suggests that the buffer time between New York and New Haven is 25% or even maybe 30%.
More complex networks require more padding, since delays on one train cascade to others. The ICE network mixes intercity trains together with much slower regional ones on the same tracks, all over Germany, and delays can cascade across the entire country, to the point that some people have begun to advocate that Germany build a separate high-speed rail network, not for speed (which activists here don’t care much about), but for the reliability of having a fast network and a slow network rather than one mixed network. The more segregated TGV network thus does better; the almost entirely dedicated-track Shinkansen system does even better, and JR East suggested 4% padding in its review of California High-Speed Rail. Switzerland is like Germany in having a single mixed-speed network, but it has more systematic processes for avoiding delays, such as strategic investment in bypasses around known bottlenecks.
The Northeast Corridor is not an especially complex network. It is a single line with branches, rather than a two-dimensional mesh like the German rail network. There is little freight traffic, which makes it possible to control freight through regular slots, with the number of potential slots greatly exceeding actual traffic so that if a train misses its slot, it can wait 10 or 15 minutes for the next one. Passenger traffic is high on all lines serving the corridor, and thus there is no need to cut corners on reliability (such as signals, or platforms) on any of the branches. It is a mixed-speed line, but nearly all of it has four tracks, and where commuter trains share tracks with intercity trains, they run express and the speed difference is not large. In the timetables we developed at Marron with Devin Wilkins, express commuter trains do Stamford-Grand Central in 28 minutes if they run as today, stopping only at Harlem-125th, and in 29 if they also stop at New Rochelle; intercity trains do Stamford-Penn Station in 25 minutes, on a marginally longer route into New York. Slotting intercity and express commuter trains on the same tracks between Stamford and New Rochelle is annoying, but is not an objectively hard scheduling problem.
This does not mean that Amtrak and Metro-North could just shave minutes off of the existing timetables, change nothing else, and run trains to the faster schedules. Other elements of the schedule would make the trains too unreliable. But it is possible to realign the schedules appropriately and cut the trip time by a factor of about 1.3/1.07 = 1.2.
Timetable complexity
The ideal schedule is one with as few variations as possible. This way, planners can write one schedule, ensure that it works, and, if there are problems with it, then develop an infrastructure program that builds around the bottlenecks. Switzerland, as usual, sets the standard, with its all-day repeating clockface timetable, or Takt. Swiss trains repeat regularly every hour, and on the busy lines every half hour; planners need to make sure one pattern works and then repeat it all day. It’s the planning equivalent of economies of scale in manufacturing.
New York planning, relative to the ideal, represents the list of what not to do, and it’s worse on busier lines such as the New Haven Line than on less busy lines. In effect, the New Haven Line schedule is the planning equivalent of rules for writing prose that illustrate each rule by breaking it – remember to not split infinitives, the passive voice should be avoided, eschew obfuscation, and so on – except that it is meant to be taken seriously. It has all of the following problems:
Where good planning begins with one peak hour and repeats it all day, the New Haven Line has few repeating patterns, and practically none at the peak.
Where good planning aims to have trains make consistent stops for legibility and for ease of planning around bottlenecks, the New Haven Line has bespoke stopping patterns – not counting branches, there are 16 trains entering Grand Central at the peak hour, which make 13 distinct stopping patterns.
Where good regional rail planning keeps the peak-to-base ratio low – Switzerland is almost 1:1, and even very large cities that need a huge volume of commuter trains at rush hour like Paris or Tokyo do not exceed 2:1 (and London is well below it) – the New Haven Line has, with branches, 20 trains entering Grand Central at the peak hour and 4 entering each off-peak hour.
Where good planning runs more or less the same service on weekends as in the off-peak on weekdays, the New Haven Line’s midday off-peak and weekend schedules are different even as they run the same number of trains (two express and two local per hour).
Where good planning aims to use the timetable for a prolonged period of time to reduce the need to redo the schedule, for example updating annually as in Switzerland, New York-area practice is to update several times a year, in what looks like a 3-6 month period.
Where good planning keeps the trains spaced far enough based on signal system constraints by default, Metro-North timetables somehow have trains on the shared trunk between Harlem and Grand Central sometimes arriving within less than the 2 minute minimum on the same track, requiring special speed restrictions, even with unimpressive traffic levels by urban commuter rail trunk standards.
Where good maintenance is done when trains are not running, that is, at night, in order to avoid disturbing weekday traffic, American planning assumes that daytime maintenance will always take some track out of service; the New Haven Line’s track renewal program has been so mismanaged that at no point since it began in the 1990s have all four tracks between New York and New Haven been operable along the entire line – some section is always shut down. Daytime maintenance is also a problem in Germany, and is a factor behind the poor schedule reliability here.
The constant tweaks to the timetable are also a feature of the New York City Subway, with its substantially simpler stopping patterns. There, the services are consistent, and change at a rate of a handful per decade (most recently, when Second Avenue Subway opened; the previous time was during the 2010 service cuts). However, frequency is micro-targeted based on crowding guidelines, so the planners never have time to optimize one schedule; moreover, with 24/7 service, daytime closures for maintenance are unavoidable. This way, where planners at healthy railroads write schedules, planners at American passenger railroads write service changes. The New York City Subway at least has the partial excuse of 24/7 service; Metro-North has no such excuse. The maxim that the Northeast Corridor is held together with duct tape, and is managed by people who are unfamiliar with any more advanced tools than duct tape, also applies to timetabling.
In contrast with today’s morass, the schedule we’ve been writing aims to simplify whenever possible. Branches are slotted into windows that could be used by local or express main line trains depending on the desired service pattern. From New Haven south, everything is on a repeating 10-minute Takt. The New Haven Line is reduced to four stopping patterns – local Stamford-Grand Central, local Stamford-Penn Station, express New Haven-Grand Central, intercity New Haven-Penn Station – each running every 10 minutes. It took weeks to find a pattern that worked with all the constraints of the right-of-way and allowed some future desired infrastructure changes, and even that required some track changes detailed below. Off-peak, the commuter train patterns could run every 20 minutes instead, using every other slot; the timetable should not be tweaked further.
It is particularly important to avoid timetable complexity beyond local and express trains east of Stamford. The line has four tracks, and could be run with commuter trains on the local tracks, making all stops before transitioning to the express tracks at Stamford, and intercity trains on the express tracks, running nonstop between Stamford and New Haven. In theory, this means this section could be run with less than 7% schedule padding, for example the Shinkansen’s 4%, but in practice, I suspect it cancels out with the more complex situation between Stamford and New Rochelle, so 7% is the best that can be squeezed with maximally simple schedules.
Speed zones and curves
The New Haven Line is rather curvy, having been built in the 1840s. But its speed limits are still too low for its curves. I wrote here about cant and cant deficiency, and am not going to repeat myself too much. But, in brief, the speed on curves is governed by the formula
where v is speed, a is lateral acceleration in the horizontal plane, and r is curve radius. The value of a is usually expressed not in units of acceleration, but in units of distance, scaled so that, on standard-gauge track, 150 mm (of cant) correspond to 1 m/s^2 lateral acceleration. Typical maximum regulatory limits on cant range between 160 and 180 mm; the US permits 7″, but nowhere is more than 6″ used, and the New Haven Line’s curves mostly range between 3″ and 5″ cant. Cant deficiency limits depend on the train – regular passenger trains typically do 130-150 mm at the relevant speeds, but in the US, the normal practice is to limit commuter trains to 3″ cant deficiency, and only use 5″ on Amtrak Regional trains (the Acela tilts and is capable of 7″ today, with the new trains rated for 9″).
The curves on the New Haven Line are, for the most part, built to a standard of 2° radius, or, in metric units, r = 873. The most aggressive common cant and cant deficiency limits, 180 and 150 mm respectively, allow a = 2.2, and thus v = 43.82 m/s = 157.77 km/h; our timetables limit commuter trains to 150 km/h, and there are surprisingly few curves with tighter limits. In contrast, current practice restricts a to about 1.2, which means trains take the same curves at a speed of about 116 km/h, which is rounded down to 70 mph.
The slowdowns also affect intercity rail more than is required. While Amtrak trains are cleared for 5″ cant deficiency, Metro-North prefers to timetable all trains at its own trains’ speed on curves. Then, because there are so few opportunities under current standards for trains to run faster than 70-75 mph within CTDOT territory, the entire line from the state line to New Haven is maintained to those standards, and thus even on relatively straight sections, there is no opportunity to gain speed. East of New Haven, the curves are if anything tighter, but Amtrak dominance means the tracks are cleared for 100-125 mph, cant is higher, and cant deficiency is higher as well.
All of these restrictions can be lifted. The work required to redo a line from 110 km/h to 160 km/h or even more is rather routine, as long as it can be done within the right-of-way. The standards for track irregularity get tighter as speed increases, but all of this can be handled with track laying machines, which use the track itself to do the work, at a pace of about 0.5 km/h, or about 1.5 km in a three-hour nighttime work window; the entire New Haven Line can be regraded in about a year this way.
Unfortunately, Metro-North is used to manual track inspections rather than modern machinery. It finally bought a track laying machine on the model of Amtrak, but appears not to use it very well; the productivity I hear quoted is one tenth what was expected. But what is hard for Metro-North and CTDOT is not objectively hard, and even other Northeastern American railroads are often capable of it.
Supportive infrastructure
Infrastructure construction and timetabling work in tandem normally. Swiss practice is to use insights from the timetable in theory and in practice to inform where to build new tracks. American practice does no such thing – for one, Metro-North is allergic to systematic track improvement, so over the generations, the timetable has diverged from the infrastructure that could support it.
In fact, a very high-frequency peak schedule requires eliminating at-grade conflicts whenever it is even remotely feasible. Shell Interlocking at CP 217, just south of New Rochelle, is a flat junction on which trains from the north can go to either Grand Central or Penn Station. Grade-separating the junction was occasionally on the wishlist for Northeast Corridor improvements, but Metro-North is not currently asking for it, even though it is especially important as Penn Station Access is about to open. The junctions with the branches farther north – New Canaan, Danbury, Waterbury – are flat as well, for which the solutions can be a forced transfer (as is sometimes practiced with Waterbury, the weakest of the three) or grade-separation. This does not cost a large amount of money – New Jersey Transit is applying for money for its equivalent of Shell, Hunter Flyover connecting the Raritan Valley Line to the Northeast Corridor, and the budget is $300 million in the plan and, I’ve been told, $400 million with recent inflation and perhaps some small cost overrun.
Then there is the issue of the Grand Central approaches. The current throat limits trains to 10 mph on the last mile into the station. In other words, the last mile takes six minutes. It should take about two, based on actual throat and turnout geometry; the turnouts are #12 until around 700 meters from the end of the platform, and in Germany, a 1:12 switch is 60 km/h, and closer to the platforms, the turnouts are #7 and (on one cluster of tracks) #6.5, where in a Germany, a 1:7 is 40 km/h. Even with bumper tracks, the last mile has no reason to take longer than two minutes, saving all Metro-North travelers to Grand Central four minutes. The turnouts would need to be regraded to tangential standards, but this can be done within their existing footprint; the cost of a new turnout in a selection of European countries and also on American freight railroads is around $250,000 in the prices of the 2010s, whereas Metro-North’s switches cost perhaps five times much in the same era.
Finally, the movable bridges impose certain speed restrictions. Those are the biggest projects currently in planning for speeding up the New Haven Line. In truth, the slowdowns imposed are secondary (though our timetables still assume they are fixed). They are also extremely expensive – one of them is currently slated for in situ replacement for $1 billion, for a span of 220 meters from tower to tower, on a river about 100 m wide. CTDOT rail projects are generally absurdly expensive even by American standards – infill stations on the Hartford Line are coming in at $50 million or more, twice the cost of suburban Boston and more than twice that of suburban Philadelphia – for which the culprit must be poor project management and lack of in-house expertise.
Conclusion
The New Haven Line is a busy railroad at the peak, but nothing about it is special. It is old, but no older than faster sections of the Northeast Corridor or fast legacy intercity main lines in parts of Europe, especially the United Kingdom. It is busy, but its total ridership is unimpressive by European S-Bahn standards – the single trunk line in Munich with its seven branches on each side generates about 900,000 daily riders, perhaps a bit more than all three New York-area commuter railroads combined. It is branched, but the branching is simpler than on the busier systems, and the graph of the Northeast Corridor overall is acyclic, simplifying planning.
The reason the trains are slow is not the infrastructure. The elements of the infrastructure that need to be fixed to shorten the trip times from about 1:35 intercity and 2:00 commuter to 0:52 intercity and 1:16 commuter are cheap. Rather, the reason is that the line is managed not just by Americans, which is usually bad enough, but specifically by Metro-North and CTDOT. The schedules are designed not to work; the maintenance is designed not to work either and is too expensive.
Devin and I have draft timetables for intercity and commuter trains on every segment of the Northeast Corridor; what is left is to merge the segments together and see how they interact, tweak based on further constraints, and look at some alternatives. The good news is that in New Jersey, the last area we looked at, sharing tracks turns out to be easy. It’s a happy accident of how the Northeast Corridor has been designed that, with 21st-century train specs, the places where fast trains need to overtake slow ones already have long sections with additional tracks. Work is still required on grade-separating some junctions (chiefly Hunter Interlocking) and fixing some curves largely within the right-of-way, but it’s rather minor. The upshot is that local commuter trains can do New York-New Brunswick in 38 minutes and would do New York-Trenton in an hour, the express commuter trains can do New York-Trenton in 51 minutes, and the intercity trains can do New York-Philadelphia in 45 minutes, all with new rolling stock but few expensive investments in infrastructure beyond what’s already funded as part of the Hudson Tunnel Project for Gateway.
Three speed classes
The Northeast Corridor near New York presents two planning difficulties. First, there is a very large volume of peak commuter traffic into Manhattan, which forces agencies to build infrastructure at the limit of track capacity. And second, there is a long stretch of suburbia from Manhattan, which means that some express commuter rail service is unavoidable. This means that both the New Haven Line and the NJ Transit Northeast Corridor Line have to be planned around three speed classes: local commuter, express commuter, and intercity; moreover, the total volume of trains across these classes must be large, to accommodate peak demand, reaching 24 peak trains per hour. This is why the Hudson Tunnel Project is being built: the existing tunnels run 24 trains per hour already split across many different commuter rail branches, and all of the trains are crowded.
The difficulties in New Jersey and in Metro-North territory are different; for a taste of what is needed for Metro-North, see here. In New Jersey, the quality of the right-of-way is high, and the outer stretches are already cleared for a maximum speed of 160 mph, and with if the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) had more faith in the quality of rolling stock windows they could run much faster than this. The inner stretches are slower but still straight enough for fairly high speed – there are long stretches straight enough for 250 km/h and one section where trains could even briefly reach 300 km/h. Thus, the express commuter trains are noticeably slower than the intercity trains on these segments despite running nonstop from Newark to Metropark.
All trains are significantly faster than today. Little of the speedup comes from any curve modification; rather, it comes from reduced timetable padding (down to Swiss-standard 7%), plus about 1.5 minutes of speedup in the Penn Station throat from better switch geometry.
Six-track overtakes
The Northeast Corridor is largely quad-track, but two sections have six tracks, both in New Jersey: around Newark Airport, and from just south of Elizabeth to just south of Rahway, where the North Jersey Coast Line branches off. The four-track section through Elizabeth is annoying, and I was hoping that it would not be necessary to delicately schedule around it. It is fortunate that my hopes have proved correct.
Below is a rough line chart. For one, it does not have any schedule padding. For two, there are still some additional slowdowns not coming from right-of-way geometry not incorporated into it, and in particular there’s a minute of Penn Station and tunnel delay not yet depicted for the intercity train and another 30 seconds of same for the commuter trains. For three, all station dwell times are set at 30 seconds, whereas the intercity needs a minute. In total, the last two factors delay the intercity by a minute relative to all commuter trains by when they depart Newark. All of these factors figure into the trip times above, but not the line chart below.
The blue lines are intercity trains, the red lines are express commuter trains, the green lines are local commuter trains to New Brunswick or Jersey Avenue, the purple lines are local commuter trains branching to the North Jersey Coast Line, and the gold lines are SEPTA trains.
Of note, the intercity trains do not share tracks with the local commuter trains except in the tunnel to Penn Station; the current plan after the Hudson Tunnel Project is finished is for the above-depicted trains to use the old tunnel and for other lines (Morris and Essex, Montclair-Boonton, Raritan Valley) to use the new tunnel. This provides just enough separation that there isn’t much interlining to worry about. The express commuter trains are the only ones with any surface track-sharing with trains of different speed classes.
As the line chart shows, the red/green overtake occurs at Elizabeth, where the express commuter trains then need to be on the inner express tracks. Just south of Elizabeth, the line widens to six tracks, and the express commuter trains can be kept separate from both local trains and intercity trains; all that’s required is installing switches to allow this, for a very small number of millions of dollars for high-speed switches or hundreds of thousands for slower switches. By the time the intercity and express commuter trains are within the signal system’s two-minute limit of each other, the express commuter trains don’t need to return to the inner tracks again. Past Rahway, the express and local commuter trains need to use the same tracks, but are adequately separated from each other.
Robustness check
We are still looking at options for how to match this segment with other segments, in particular how this could through-run east of Penn Station. Most likely, the local trains would run through to the Port Washington Branch of the LIRR and the express commuter trains would become local commuter trains to Stamford via Penn Station Access.
The upshot is that the train most likely to be delayed from the north is the express commuter train. It can afford to be about two minutes behind schedule before it messes up the order of trains using the tunnel; the schedule padding up to Elizabeth can recover one of these two minutes, and then, with the extra minute of slowdown of intercities not depicted in the line chart, the express commuter trains are still well clear of the intercities where they share tracks at Elizabeth.
Five years ago, I wrote a blog post about frequency-ridership spirals, mentioning as a side comment that the impact of mass transit frequency on ridership can be lumped together with the trip time. I’d like to develop this point here, and talk about how it affects various kinds of public transportation, including intercity trains.
The rule of thumb I’ve advocated for in ETA reports (for example, on commuter rail) is that the maximum headway should be no more than half the trip time. Untimed transfers reset the clock, since passengers have to wait another time every time they make such a transfer; timed transfers do not, but are rare enough that local public transportation doesn’t usually need to consider them in service planning. Intercity transportation can follow the same rule of thumb, but can also get away with worse frequency since passengers time themselves to arrive shortly before the train does; in particular, hourly trains between cities that are three hours apart are frequent enough that increasing service is valuable only insofar as it provides more capacity, and is unlikely to lead to higher ridership through shorter waits.
Wait and transfer penalties
In the literature on modeling public transportation ridership, it is universal that passengers prefer spending time on board a moving vehicle to waiting for a vehicle, walking to the station, or walking between platforms. This preference is expressed as a factor, called the waiting or transfer penalty. different models have different levels for these penalties; passengers also likely have different penalties depending on circumstances, such as familiarity with the route or how much luggage they’re carrying.
The papers I’ve seen have penalties ranging from 1.75 (in the MTA’s model) to 3 (the higher end cited in Lago-Mayworm-McEnroe). I usually model with 2, in Teulings-Ossokina-de Groot. The factor of 2 has the advantage of consistency with an assumption that passengers don’t have a wait penalty but do assume a worst-case scenario for waits, so that the generalized travel time is equal to the maximum headway plus the in-vehicle travel time.
Update 4-19: I was just alerted to a new study by Yap-Wong-Cats using London ridership, finding an out-of-vehicle penalty factor of 1.94 pre-pandemic and 1.92 post-pandemic.
The impact of frequency relative to trip time
If the elasticity of ridership with respect to the generalized travel time, summing the headway and in-vehicle travel time but not walking time to and from the station, is e, then we can compute the elasticity of ridership with respect to frequency as a fraction of e. If the current headway is a proportion r of the in-vehicle trip time, that is to say a fraction r/(r+1) of the generalized travel time, then the elasticity is er/(r+1).
In Lago-Mayworm-McEnroe, the value of e appears to be 0.8. This means that if r = 0.5, the elasticity of ridership with respect to frequency is 0.267. The paper doesn’t quantify elasticities relative to different levels of r but only relative to absolute frequencies, but 0.267 is within the range it finds for different frequencies, dipping to 0.22 for high-frequency lines. Other papers have different figures of e, often higher in the long run as passengers adjust, but those go up to around 1 or, reasoning backward from a VTPI report, a little higher.
Of notes:
The value of r is not constant across different uses of the same line. A commuter traveling from near the outer end of a subway line to city center faces much lower r than a traveler going a short distance, within city center or within a large outlying neighborhood. In particular, r is generally lower for commutes than for non-commute trips, which is why the latter are more sensitive to frequency.
Systems that rely on extensive transfers can have very high values of r with short in-vehicle trips. New York averages 13.5 minutes per unlinked subway trip, with many trips facing an effective off-peak headway of 10 or even 12 minutes, at which point e is high enough that increasing off-peak frequency could pay for itself through higher paying ridership (see analysis in a blog post and an ETA report). This, again, depends on the type of trip – commuters may pick an apartment or a job based on ease of travel, reducing the need to transfer, but their non-commute trips are usually a collection of irregular trips to various destinations and are likelier to involve a transfer.
The cost of higher frequency depends on mode (it’s higher on buses than trains) and time of day (it’s very low on off-peak trains until it matches peak frequency). Together with points 1 and 2, this argues in favor of raising the off-peak frequency on urban and inner suburban trains, potentially to the point of matching peak frequency. On longer-range commuter trains, the impact of frequency on ridership is lower, and thus the marginal cost may be such that a ratio of peak to off-peak service larger than 1 is desirable.
Intercity trains
The papers I’m citing aim to fit elasticity factors to observed ridership on local and regional public transportation. Intercity rail has its own set of models, with different assumptions. Frequency again matters, but because passengers time themselves to arrive at the departing station shortly before the train leaves, its impact is reduced.
I don’t know the elasticity of intercity rail ridership with respect to frequency; Cascetta-Coppola have the elasticity of ridership with respect to in-vehicle trip time as about -2, while Börjesson has it at -1.5 for business travel and -1 for non-business travel with a rough rule of thumb trying to approximate the impact of frequency. At the level of the sanity check, the low frequency of TGV services is not visible in TGV ridership between the provinces and Paris, compared with Japan (which charges higher fares) and as far as I can tell from a few data points Germany. TGV ridership between the provinces is bad, but that involves trains with service gaps that are much larger than the trip times, reaching six hours between Marseille and Lyon. In contrast, those three-hour gaps in service between Paris and cities three hours away by TGV don’t seem to impact ridership visibly.
What this means is that intercity trains do need a certain baseline frequency. The German system of a train every two hours on every city pair is wise, in light of the typical intercity rail travel distances in a large country with slow trains. Higher frequency is warranted if the cities are bigger and therefore require more service, or if they are closer together in time through either a short geographical distance or higher speeds. New York and Philadelphia are about 1:10 apart by rail, and high-speed rail could cut this to about 45 minutes; half-hourly frequencies in the current situation are sufficient that more service would have a second-order effect, and even with high-speed rail, a train every 15 minutes is more than enough for all purposes except capacity (the current offer is 3-4 trains an hour with irregular spacing). Frequency is freedom, but this depends on trip times; what works for four-station subway trips is not what works for trips between cities 140 km apart, let alone 360 km, and vice versa.
An argument in my comments section is reminding me of a discussion by American transit advocates 15 years ago, I think by The Overhead Wire, about the tension between funding local transit and high-speed rail. I forget who it was – probably Jeff Wood himself – pointing out that the argument in 2008-9 about whether the priority was local transit or intercity rail didn’t make much sense. There are separate questions of how to allocate funding for intercity transportation and how to do the same for local transportation, and in both cases the same group of activists can push for a more favorable rail : car funding ratio. Jeff was talking about this in the sense of political activism; the purpose of this post is to explain the same concept from the point of view of public transportation connectivity and network effects. This is not an obvious observation, judging by how many people argue to the contrary – years ago I had a debate with Noah Smith about this, in which he said the US shouldn’t build high-speed rail like the Shinkansen before building urban rail systems like those of Japanese cities (see my side here and here).
I’ve written about related issues before, namely, in 2022 when I recommended that countries invest against type. For example, France with its TGV-centric investment strategy should invest in connecting regional lines, whereas Germany with its hourly regional train connections should invest in completing its high-speed rail network. It’s also worthwhile to reread what I wrote about Metcalfe’s law for high-speed rail in 2020, here and here. Metcalfe’s law is an abstract rule about how the value of a network with n nodes is proportional to , and Odlyzko-Tilly argue strongly that it is wrong and in fact the value is ; my post just looks at specific high-speed rail connections rather than trying to abstract it out, but the point is that in the presence of an initial network, even weaker-looking extensions can be worth it because of the connections to more nodes. Finally, this builds on what I said five days ago about subway-intercity rail connections.
The combined point is that whenever two forms of local, regional, or intercity public transportation connect, investments in one strengthen the case for investments in the other.
In some edge cases, those investments can even be the same thing. I’ve been arguing for maybe 12 years that MBTA electrification complements Northeast Corridor high-speed rail investment, because running fast electric multiple units (EMUs) on the Providence Line and its branches instead of slow diesel locomotive-hauled trains means intercity trains wouldn’t get stuck behind commuter trains. Similarly, I blogged five years ago, and have been doing much more serious analysis recently with Devin Wilkins, that coordinating commuter rail and intercity rail schedules on the New Haven Line would produce very large speed gains, on the order of 40-45 minutes, for both intercity and commuter trains.
But those are edge cases, borne of exceptionally poor management and operations by Amtrak and the commuter railroads in the Northeast. Usually, investments clearly are mostly about one thing and not another – building a subway line is not an intercity rail project, and building greenfield high-speed rail is not a local or regional rail project.
And yet, they remain complements. The time savings that better operations and maintenance can produce on the New Haven Line are also present on other commuter lines in New York, for example on the LIRR (see also here, here, and here); they don’t speed up intercity trains, but do mean that people originating in the suburbs have much faster effective trips to where they’d take intercity rail. The same is true for physical investments in concrete: the North-South Rail Link in Boston and a Penn Station-Grand Central connection in New York both make it easier for passengers to connect to intercity trains, in addition to benefits for local and regional travel, and conversely, fast intercity trains strengthen the case for these two projects since they’d connect passengers to better intercity service.
Concretely, let’s take two New York-area commuter lines, of which one will definitely never have to interface with intercity rail and one probably will not either. The definitely line is the Morristown Line: right now it enters New York via the same North River Tunnels as all other trains from points west, intercity or regional, but the plan for the Gateway Tunnel is to segregate service so that the Morris and Essex Lines use the new tunnel and the Northeast Corridor intercity and commuter trains use the old tunnel, and so in the future they are not planned to interact. The probably line is the LIRR Main Line, which currently doesn’t interface with intercity trains as I explain in my post about the LIRR and Northeast Corridor, and which should keep not interfacing, but there are Amtrak plans to send a few daily intercities onto it.
Currently, the trip time from Morristown to New York is around 1:09 off-peak, with some peak-only express trains doing it in 1:01. With better operations and maintenance, it should take 0:47. The upshot is that passengers traveling from Morristown to Boston today have to do the trip in 1:09 plus 3:42-3:49 (Acela) or 4:15-4:35 (Regional). The commuter rail improvements, which other than Gateway and about one unfunded tie-in do not involve significant investment in concrete, turn the 4:51 plus transfer time trip to 4:29 plus transfer time – say 5 hours with the transfer, since the intercities run hourly and the transfers are untimed and, given the number of different branches coming in from New Jersey, cannot be timed. High-speed rail, say doing New York-Boston in 2 hours flat (which involves an I-95 bypass from New Haven to Kingston but no other significant deviations from the right-of-way), would make it 2:47 with a transfer time capped at 10 minutes, so maximum 2:57. In effect, these two investments combine to give people from Morristown an effective 41% reduction in trip time to Boston, which increases trip generation by a factor of 2.87. Of course, far more people from Morristown are interested in traveling to New York than to Boston, but the point is that in the presence of cheap interventions to rationalize and speed up commuter rail, intercity rail looks better.
The same is true from the other direction, from the LIRR Main Line. The two busiest suburban stations in the United States are on 2000s and 10s numbers Ronkonkoma and Hicksville, each with about 10,000 weekday boardings. Ronkonkoma-Penn Station is 1:18 and Hicksville-Penn Station is 0:42 off-peak; a few peak express trains per day do the trip a few minutes faster from Ronkonkoma by skipping Hicksville, but the fastest looks like 1:15. If the schedule is rationalized, Ronkonkoma is about 0:57 from New York and Hicksville 0:31, on trains making more stops than today. I don’t have to-the-minute New York-Washington schedules with high-speed rail yet, but I suspect 1:50 plus or minus 10 minutes is about right, down from 2:53-3:01 on the Acela and 3:17-3:38 on the Regional. So the current timetable for Ronkonkoma-Washington is, with a half-hour transfer time, around 4:45 today and 2:57 in the future, which is a 38% reduction in time and a factor of 2.59 increase in the propensity to travel. From Hicksville, the corresponding reduction is from 4:09 to 2:31, a 39% reduction and a factor of 2.72 increase in trip generation. Again, Long Islanders are far more interested in traveling to Manhattan than to Washington, but a factor of 2.59-2.72 increase in trip generation is nothing to scoff at.
The issue here is that once the cheap upgrades are done, the expensive ones start making more sense – and this is true for both intercity and regional trains. The New York-Boston timetable assumes an I-95 bypass between New Haven and Kingston, saving trains around 24 minutes, at a cost of maybe $5 billion; those 24 minutes matter more when they cut the trip time from 2:24 to 2:00 than when the current trip time is about 3:45 and the capacity on the line is so limited any increase in underlying demand has to go to higher fares, not more throughput. For suburban travelers, the gains are smaller, but still, going from 5:00 to 4:36 matters less than going from 3:21 to 2:57.
Conversely, the expensive upgrades for regional trains – by which I mean multi-billion dollars tunnels, not $300 million junction grade separations like Hunter or the few tens of millions of dollars on upgrading the junction and railyard at Summit – work better in a better-operated system. Electronics before concrete, not instead of concrete – in fact, good operations (i.e. good electronics) create more demand for megaprojects.
At no point are these really in competition, not just because flashy commuter rail projects complement intercity rail through mutual feeding, but also because the benefits for non-connecting passengers are so different that different funding mechanisms make sense. The North-South Rail Link has some benefits to intercity travel, as part of the same program with high-speed rail on the Northeast Corridor, and as such, it could be studied as part of the same program, if there is enough money in the budget for it, which there is not. Conversely, it has very strong local benefits, ideal for a funding partnership between the federal government and Massachusetts; similarly, New York commuter rail improvements are ideal for a funding partnership between the federal government, New York State, New Jersey, and very occasionally Connecticut.
In contrast, intercity rail benefits people who are far away from where construction is done: extensive bypasses built in Connecticut would create a small number of jobs in Connecticut temporarily, but the bigger benefits would accrue not just to residents of the state (through better New Haven-Boston and perhaps New Haven-New York trip times) but mostly to residents of neighboring states traveling through Connecticut. This is why there’s generally more national coordination of intercity rail planning than of regional rail planning: the German federal government, too, partly funds S-Bahn projects in major German cities, but isn’t involved in planning S21 S15 or the second S-Bahn trunk in Munich, whereas it is very involved in decisions on building high-speed rail lines. The situation in France is similar – the state is involved in decisions on LGVs and on Parisian transit but not on provincial transit, though it helps fund the latter; despite the similarity in the broad outlines of the funding structure, the outcomes are different, which should mean that the differences between France and Germany do not boil down to funding mechanisms or to inherent competition between intercity rail funds and regional rail funds.
Amtrak wants to extend three daily Northeast Corridor trains to Long Island. It’s a bad idea – for one, if the timetable can accommodate three daily trains, it can accommodate an hourly train – but beyond the frequency point, this is for fairly deep reasons, and it took me years of studying timetabling on the corridor to understand why. In short, the timetabling introduces too many points of failure, and meanwhile, the alternative of sending all trains that arrive in New York from Philadelphia and Washington onward to New Haven is appealing. To be clear, there are benefits to the Long Island routing, they’re just smaller than the operational costs; there’s a reason this post is notably not tagged “incompetence.”
How to connect the Northeast Corridor with Long Island
Map of the Northeast Corridor and LIRR Main Line; the Northeast Corridor is depicted with extensive bypasses in Connecticut and small curve modifications in New Jersey and Pennsylvania
The Northeast Corridor has asymmetric demand on its two halves. North of New York, it connects the city with Boston. But south of New York, it connects to both Philadelphia and Washington. As a result, the line can always expect to have more traffic south of New York than north of it; today, this difference is magnified by the lower average speed of the northern half, due to the slowness of the line in Connecticut. Today, many trains terminate in New York and don’t run farther north; in the last 20 years, Amtrak has also gone back and forth on whether some trains should divert north at New Haven and run to Springfield or whether such service should only be provided with shuttle trains with a timed connection. Extending service to Long Island is one way to resolve the asymmetry of demand.
Such an extension would stop at the major stattions on the LIRR Main Line. The most important is Jamaica, with a connection to JFK; then, in the suburbs, it would be interesting to stop at least at Mineola and Hicksville and probably also go as far as Ronkonkoma, the end of the line depicted on the map. Amtrak’s proposed service makes exactly these stops plus one, Deer Park between Hicksville and Ronkonkoma.
The entire Main Line is electrified, but with third rail, not catenary. The trains for it therefore would need to be dual-voltage. This requires a dedicated fleet, but it’s not too hard to procure – it’s easier to go from AC to DC than in the opposite direction, and Amtrak and the LIRR already have dual-mode diesel locomotives with third rail shoes, so they could ask for shoes on catenary electric locomotives (or on EMUs).
The main benefit of doing this, as opposed to short-turning surplus Northeast Corridor trains in New York, is that it provides direct service to Long Island. In theory, this provides access to the 2.9 million people living on Long Island. In practice, the shed is somewhat smaller, because people living near LIRR branches that are not the Main Line would be connecting by train anyway and then the difference between connecting at Jamaica and connecting at Penn Station is not material; that said, Ronkonkoma has a large parking lot accessible from all of Suffolk County, and between it and significant parts of Nassau County near the Main Line, this is still 2 million people. There aren’t many destinations on Long Island, which has atypically little job sprawl for an American suburb, but 2 million originating passengers plus people boarding at Jamaica plus people going to Jamaica for JFK is a significant benefit. (How significant I can’t tell you – the tools I have for ridership estimation aren’t granular enough to detect the LIRR-Amtrak transfer penalty at Penn Station.)
My early Northeast Corridor ideas did include such service, for the above reasons. However, there are two serious drawbacks, detailed below.
Timetabling considerations
Under current plans, there is little interaction between the LIRR and the Northeast Corridor. There are two separate routes into Penn Station from the east, one via 32nd Street (“southern tunnels”) and one via 33rd (“northern tunnels”), each a two-track line with one track in each direction. The North River Tunnels, connecting Penn Station with New Jersey and the rest of the United States, face the southern tunnels; the Gateway tunnels under construction to double trans-Hudson capacity are not planned to pair with the northern tunnels, but rather to connect to stub-end tracks facing 31st Street. For this reason, Amtrak always or almost always enters Penn Station from the east using the southern tunnels; the northern tunnels do have some station tracks that connect to them and still allow through-service to the west, but the moves through the station interlocking are more complex and more constrained.
As seen on the map, east of Penn Station, the Northeast Corridor is to the north of the LIRR. Thus, Amtrak has to transition from being south of the LIRR to being north of it. This used to be done at-grade, with conflict with same-direction trains (but not opposite-direction ones); it has since been grade-separated, at excessive cost. With much LIRR service diverted to Grand Central via the East Side Access tunnel, current traffic can be divided so that LIRR Main Line service exclusively uses the northern tunnels and Northeast Corridor (Amtrak or commuter rail under the soon to open Penn Station Access project) service exclusively uses the southern tunnels; the one LIRR branch not going through Jamaica, the Port Washington Branch, can use the southern tunnels as if it is a Penn Station Access branch. This is not too far from how current service is organized anyway, with the LIRR preferring the northern (high-numbered) tracks at Penn Station, Amtrak the middle ones, and New Jersey Transit the southern ones with the stub end:
The status quo, including any modification thereto that keeps the LIRR (except the Port Washington Branch) separate from the Northeast Corridor, means that all timetabling complexity on the LIRR is localized to the LIRR. LIRR timetabling has to deal with all of the following issues today:
There are many different branches, all of which want to go to Manhattan rather than to Brooklyn, and to a large extent they also want to go on the express tracks between Jamaica and Manhattan rather than the local tracks.
There are two Manhattan terminals and no place to transfer between trains to different ones except Jamaica; an infill station at Sunnyside Yards, permitting trains from the LIRR going to Grand Central to exchange passengers with Penn Station Access trains, would be helpful, but does not currently exist.
The outer Port Jefferson Branch is unelectrified and single-track and yet has fairly high ridership, so that isolating it with shuttle trains is infeasible except in the extreme short run pending electrification.
All junctions east of Jamaica are flat.
The Main Line has three tracks east of Floral Park, the third recently opened at very high cost, purely for peak-direction express trains, but cannot easily schedule express trains in both directions.
There are solutions to all of these problems, involving timetable simplification, reduction of express patterns with time saved through much reduced schedule padding, and targeted infrastructure interventions such as electrifying and double-tracking the entire Port Jefferson Branch.
However, Amtrak service throws multiple wrenches in this system. First, it requires a vigorous all-day express service between New York and Hicksville if not Ronkonkoma. Between Floral Park and Hicksville, there are three tracks. Right now the local demand is weak, but this is only because there is little local service, and instead the schedule encourages passengers to drive to Hicksville or Mineola and park there. Any stable timetable has to provide much stronger local service, and this means express trains have to awkwardly use the middle track as a single track. This isn’t impossible – it’s about 15 km of fast tracks with only one intermediate station, Mineola – but it’s constraining. Then the constraint propagates east of Hicksville, where there are only two tracks, and so those express trains have to share tracks with the locals and be timetabled not to conflict.
And second, all these additional conflict points would be transmitted to the entire Northeast Corridor. A delay in Deer Park would propagate to Philadelphia and Washington. Even without delays, the timetabling of the trains in New Jersey would be affected by constraints on Long Island; then the New Jersey timetabling constraints would be transmitted east to Connecticut and Massachusetts. All of this is doable, but at the price of worse schedule padding. I suspect that this is why the proposed Amtrak trip time for New York-Ronkonkoma is 1:25, where off-peak LIRR trains do it in 1:18 making all eight local stops between Ronkonkoma and Hicksville, Mineola, Jamaica, and Woodside. With low padding, which can only be done with more separated out timetables, they could do it in 1:08, making four more net stops.
Trains to New Haven
The other reason I’ve come to believe Northeast Corridor trains shouldn’t go to Jamaica and Long Island is that more trains need to go to Stamford and New Haven. This is for a number of different reasons.
The impact of higher average speed
The higher the average speed of the train, the more significant Boston-Philadelphia and Boston-Washington ridership is. This, in turn, reduces the difference in ridership north and south of New York somewhat, to the point that closer to one train in three doesn’t need to go to Boston than one train in two.
Springfield
Hartford and Springfield can expect significant ridership to New York if there is better service. Right now the line is unelectrified and runs haphazard schedules, but it could be electrified and trains could run through; moreover, any improvement to the New York-Boston line automatically also means New York-Springfield trains get faster, producing more ridership.
New Haven-New York trips
If we break my gravity model of ridership not into larger combined statistical areas but into smaller metropolitan statistical areas, separating out New Haven and Stamford from New York, then we see significant trips between Connecticut and New York. The model, which is purely intercity, at this point projects only 15% less traffic density in the Stamford-New York section than in the New York-Trenton section, counting the impact of Springfield and higher average speed as well.
Commutes from north of New York
There is some reason to believe that there will be much more ridership into New York from the nearby points – New Haven, Stamford, Newark, Trenton (if it has a stop), and Philadelphia – than the model predicts. The model doesn’t take commute trips into account; thus, it projects about 7.78 million annual trips between New York and either Stamford or New Haven, where in fact the New Haven Line was getting 125,000 weekday passengers and 39 million annual passengers in the 2010s, mostly from Connecticut and not Westchester County suburbs. Commute trips, in turn, accrete fairly symmetrically around the main city, reducing the difference in ridership between New York-Philadelphia and New York-New Haven, even though Philadelphia is the much larger city.
Combining everything
With largely symmetric ridership around New York in the core, it’s best to schedule the Northeast Corridor with the same number of trains immediately north and immediately south of it. At New Haven, trains should branch. The gravity model projects a 3:1 ratio between the ridership to Boston and to Springfield. Thus, if there are eight trains per hour between New Haven and Washington, then six should go to Boston and two to Springfield; this is not even that aggressive of an assumption, it’s just hard to timetable without additional bypasses. If there are six trains per hour south of New Haven, which is more delicate to timetable but can be done with much less concrete, then two should still go to Springfield, and they’ll be less full but over this short a section it’s probably worth it, given how important frequency is (hourly vs. half-hourly) for trips that are on the order of an hour and a half to New York.
In the Bronx, the Metro-North Harlem Line runs north-south, west of the 2/5 subway lines on White Plains Road and east of the 4 on Jerome Avenue and the B/D on Grand Concourse. It makes multiple stops, all served rather infrequently, currently about every half hour, with some hourly midday gaps, at premium fare. The north-south bus lines most directly parallel to the line, the Bx15 and Bx41, ranked #20 and #24 respectively in ridership on the New York City Transit system in 2019, though both have lost considerable ground since the pandemic. Overall, there is serious if not extremely high demand for service at those stations. There is already a fair amount of reverse-peak ridership: while those half-hourly frequencies can’t compete with the subway for service to Manhattan, they are the only non-car option for reverse-peak service to White Plains, and Fordham gets additional frequencies as well as some trains to Stamford. A city report from 2011 says that Fordham has 51 inbound passengers and 3,055 outbound ones boarding per weekday on Metro-North. Figuring out how to improve service in the Bronx requires a paradigm shift in how commuter rail is conceived in North America. Fordham’s reverse-peak service is a genuinely hard scheduling question, which we’re having to wrestle with as we’re proposing a (much) faster and smoother set of timetables for Northeast Corridor trains. Together, they make for a nontrivial exercise in tradeoffs on a busy commuter line, in which all options leave something to be desired.
Harlem Line local service
The bulk of demand from Fordham is local service, mostly toward Manhattan. The area is a bedroom community: within 1 km of the station at Park and Fordham there are 35,338 employed residents and only 22,515 jobs as of 2019; the largest destination is Manhattan (12,734 commuters), followed by the Bronx (7,744), then the rest of the city (8,069 across three boroughs), and only then Westchester (2,207), Long Island (1,660), and Connecticut (220). But to an extent, the station’s shed is larger for reverse-commute service, because people can connect from the Bx12 bus, which ranked second in the city behind the M15 in both 2019 and 2022; in contrast, Manhattan-bound commuters are taking the subway if they live well east or west of the station along Fordham. Nonetheless, the dominance of commutes to city destinations means that the most important service is to the rest of the city.
Indeed, the nearest subway stations have high subway ridership. The city report linked in the lede cites ridership of 11,521 on the B/D and another 12,560 on the 4 every weekday, as of 2012; both stations saw declines by 2019. The West Bronx’s hilly terrain makes these stations imperfect substitutes for each other and for the Metro-North station, despite the overlap in the walk sheds – along Fordham, Park is 600 meters from the Concourse and 950 from Jerome. Nonetheless, “roughly the same as either of the Fordham stations on the subway” should be a first-order estimate for the ridership potential; better Metro-North service would provide a much faster option to East Harlem and Grand Central, but conversely require an awkward transfer to get to points south, which predominate among destinations of workers from the area, who tilt working-class and therefore peak in Midtown South and not in the 50s:
Adding up all the Bronx stations on the line – Wakefield, Woodlawn, Williams Bridge, Botanical Garden, Fordham, Tremont, Melrose – we get 170,049 employed residents (as always, as of 2019), of whom 62,837 work in Manhattan. The line is overall in a subway desert, close to the 4 and B/D but along hills, and not so close to the 2/5 to the east; several tens of thousands of boardings are plausible if service is improved. For comparison, the combination of Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess Counties has 115,185 Manhattan-bound commuters, split across the Harlem Line, the Hudson Line, and the inner New Haven Line. The Bronx is thus likely to take a majority of Manhattan-bound ridership on the Harlem Line, though not an overwhelming one.
To serve all this latent demand, it is obligatory to run more local service. A minimum service frequency of a train every 10 minutes is required. The current outbound schedule is 20 minutes from Grand Central to Fordham, and about four of those are a slowdown in the Grand Central throat that can be waived (the current speed limit is 10 miles per hour for the last mile; the infrastructure can largely fit trains running three times that fast almost all the way to the bumpers). Lower frequency than this would not really make use of the line’s speed.
Moreover, using the track chart as of 2015 and current (derated) M7 technical performance, the technical trip time is 18 minutes, over which 20 minutes is not too onerously padded; but removing the derating and the four gratuitous minutes crawling into and out of Grand Central, this is about 14 minutes, with some pad. The speed zones can be further increased by using modern values of cant and cant deficiency on curves, but the difference isn’t very large, only 40 seconds, since this is a section with frequent stops. It’s fast, and to reinforce this, even higher frequency may be warranted, a train every 7.5 or 6 or even 5 minutes.
There is room on the tracks for all of this. The issue is that this requires dedicating the local tracks on the Harlem Line in the Bronx to local service, instead of having trains pass the platforms without stopping. This, in turn, requires slowing down some trains from Westchester to make more local stops. Current peak traffic on the Harlem Line is 15 trains per hour, of which 14 run past Mount Vernon West, the current northern limit of the four-track section, and 13 don’t stop in the Bronx at all. The line has three tracks through past Crestwood, and the stations are set up with room for a fourth track, but a full 10 trains per hour, including one that stops in the Bronx, run past Crestwood. In theory it’s possible to run 12 trains per hour to Mount Vernon West making all stops, and 12 trains past it skipping Bronx stops; this slows down the express trains from White Plains, which currently skip seven stops south of White Plains to Mount Vernon West inclusive, but higher speeds in the Bronx, speeding up the Grand Central throat, higher frequency, and lower schedule padding would together lead to improvements in trip times. However, this introduces a new set of problems, for which we need to consider the New Haven Line too.
Harlem Line express service and the New Haven Line
Currently, the New Haven Line runs 20 trains per hour into Grand Central at the peak. This number will go down after Penn Station Access opens in 2027, but not massively; a split of 6-8 trains per hour into Penn Station and 16-18 into Grand Central, with the new service mildly increasing total throughput, is reasonable.
Today, New Haven Line locals stop at Fordham, and nowhere else in the Bronx. This is inherited from the trackage rights agreement between the New York Central and the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, allowing the latter to make only one stop in the Bronx on the former’s territory; it used to be Woodlawn, the branch point, but has been moved to Fordham, which has busier reverse-peak traffic. The two railroads merged in 1969, and all service is currently run by Metro-North, but the practice persists. This is not necessarily stupid: the New Haven locals are long – Stamford is 53 km from Grand Central, 50% farther than White Plains – and a system in which the New Haven trains are more express than the Harlem trains is not by itself stupid, depending on other system constraints. Unfortunately, this setup introduces all manners of constraints into the system:
Fordham is a local-only station, and thus New Haven locals have to use the local tracks, using awkwardly-placed switches to get between the express and the local tracks. In fact, all stations up to and including Woodlawn are local-only; the first station with platforms on the express tracks is Wakefield, just north of the split between the two lines.
If there are 12 Harlem Line trains per hour expressing through the Bronx, then the New Haven Line is limited to about 12 trains per hour as well unless the local trains make all the Bronx local stops.
The Hudson Line has a flat junction with the Harlem Line at Mott Haven Junction, which means that any regular schedule has to have gaps to let Hudson Line trains pass; current peak Hudson Line traffic is 11 trains per hour, but it was 14 before corona.
This leads to a number of different options, each problematic in its own way.
Maximum separation
In this schedule, all Harlem Line trains run local, and all New Haven Line trains run express in the Bronx. This is the easiest to timetable – the junction between the two lines, unlike Mott Haven, is grade-separated. This also requires splitting the Hudson Line between local and express tracks, so delays will still propagate in any situation unless the Hudson Line is moved to the Empire Connection (6-8 trains per hour can stay on the current route); but in a future with Penn Station Access West, building such service, it does allow for neat separation of the routes, and I usually crayon it this way in very high-investment scenarios with multiple through-running tunnels.
But in the near future, it is a massive slowdown for Harlem Line riders who currently have express service from White Plains to Manhattan. The current peak timetable has a 15-minute difference between local and express trains on this section; this figure is padded but not massively so, and conversely, higher speeds on curves increase the express train speed premium.
It also severs the connection between the Bronx and the New Haven Line, unless passengers take east-west buses to the Penn Station Access stations. It is possible to add infill at Wakefield on the New Haven Line: this is north of the junction with the Harlem Line, but barely, so the separation between the lines is short, and a transfer station is feasible. But it wouldn’t be a cross-platform transfer, and so Fordham-Stamford service would still be degraded.
Locals run local
The New Haven Line locals can make local stops in the Bronx. It’s a slowdown of a few minutes for those trains – the current outbound timetable is 18 minutes from Grand Central to Fordham, two minutes faster than on Harlem Line locals while skipping Melrose and Tremont. Overall, it’s a slowdown of around six minutes; the current speed zones are 60 and 75 mph, and while raising the speed limits increases the extent of the slowdown (most of the track geometry is good for 160 km/h), getting new trainsets with better acceleration performance decreases it, and overall it’s likely a wash.
From there, the service pattern follows. New Haven Line locals to Grand Central have little reason to run more frequently than every 10 minutes at peak – the local stations are 30-60 minutes out of Grand Central today, and this is massively padded, but with the timetables Devin produced, fixing the Grand Central throat, New Rochelle would still be 20 minutes out on a local train (stopping at Fordham only as is the case today) and Stamford would be 45 minutes out. What’s more, there will be some local trains to Penn Station starting in three years, boosting the effective frequency to a train every five minutes, with a choice of Manhattan station if express trains can be made to stop at New Rochelle with a timed connection.
Now, if there are six local trains per hour in the Bronx going to Stamford, then the Harlem Line locals only take six trains per hour of their own, and then 12 trains should run express from Wakefield to Harlem. What they do to the north depends. The simplest option is to have all of them make all stops, which costs White Plains 7-8 minutes relative to the express stopping pattern. But if the line can be four-tracked to Crestwood, then half the trains can run local to White Plains and half can run nonstop between Wakefield or Mount Vernon West and White Plains. Two local stations, Scarsdale and Hartsdale, are in two-track territory, but timetabling a local to follow an express when both run every 10 minutes and there are only two local stops’ worth of speed difference is not hard.
The New Haven Line, meanwhile, gets 12 express trains per hour. Those match 12 express Harlem Line trains per hour, and then there’s no more room on the express tracks; Hudson Line trains have to use the local tracks and somehow find slots for the northbound trains to cross both express tracks at-grade.
Status quo
The status quo balances Bronx-Stamford connectivity with speed. Bear in mind, the New Haven Line today has truly massive timetable padding, to the point that making trains make all six stops in the Bronx and not just Fordham would still leave New Rochelle locals faster than they are today if the other speedup treatments were put into place. But the status quo would allow New Rochelle, Larchmont, Rye, and Greenwich to take maximum advantage of the speedup, which is good. The problem with it is that it forces New Haven Line locals to take slots from both the express tracks and the local tracks in the Bronx.
In this situation, the New Haven Line still runs six locals and 12 express trains to Grand Central per hour. The Harlem Line is reduced to six express trains through the Bronx and has to run 12 trains local. Transfers at Wakefield allow people in suburbs south of White Plains to get on a faster train, but this in effect reduces the effective peak-of-peak throughput from the suburbs to Manhattan to just six trains per hour.
Express Fordham station
Rebuilding Fordham as an express station means there’s no longer any need to figure out which trains stop there and which don’t: all would. Then the New Haven Line would run express and the Harlem would either run local or run a mix.
The problem is that Fordham is in a constrained location, where such a rebuild is hard:
The line is below-grade, with a tunnel from Fordham Road to 189th Street. The platforms are short and narrow, and partly overlap the tunnel. Any conversion has to involve two island platforms north of the tunnel, where there is room but only if the right-of-way is expanded a little, at the expense of some parkland, and possibly a lane of Webster Avenue. The cost would not be pretty, independently of the inability of the MTA to build anything on a reasonable budget.
That said, the timetables on the Northeast Corridor require some infrastructure intervention to smooth things, like grade-separating some junctions for hundreds of millions of dollars each. New Rochelle, which has only a local platform southbound, should almost certainly be rebuilt as a full express stop. So rebuilding Fordham is not out of the question, even if the cost is high (which it is).
In this situation, all New Haven Line trains should use the express tracks. Thus, as in the status quo alternative, the Harlem Line gets six express trains, the other trains having to run local. Potentially, there may be a schedule in which the New Haven Line runs 16 trains to Grand Central and eight to Penn Station, and then the Harlem Line can get eight local and eight express trains; but then the local trains have to be carrying the load well into Westchester, and four-tracking the line to Crestwood is likely obligatory.
The New Haven Line and intercity trains
The above analysis elides one important factor: intercity trains. The current practice in the United States is a three-way separation of urban rail, suburban commuter rail, and intercity rail, with fares designed to discourage riders from taking trains that are not in their sector. However, in much the same way the best industry practice is to charge mode-neutral fares within cities, it is also valuable to charge mode-neutral fares between them. In other words, it’s useful to look at the impact of permitting people with valid commuter rail tickets to take intercity trains, without seat reservations.
To be clear, this means that at rush hour, there are going to be standees on busy commuter routes including Stamford-New York and Trenton-New York. But it’s not necessarily bad. The intercity trip time in our timetables between Stamford and New York is around 29 minutes without high-speed bypasses; the standing time would be less than some subway riders endure today – in the morning rush hour the E train departs Jamaica Center full and takes 34 minutes to get to its first Manhattan stop. And then there’s the issue of capacity: commuter trains on the New Haven Line are eight cars long, intercity trains can be straightforwardly expanded to 16 cars by lengthening the platforms at a very small number of stations.
And if the intercity trains mop up some of the express commuter rail traffic, then the required service on the New Haven Line at rush hour greatly decreases. An intercity train, twice as long as a commuter train (albeit with somewhat fewer seats and less standing space per car), could plausibly displace so much commuter traffic that the peak traffic on the line could be reduced, say to 18 trains per hour from today’s 20. Moreover, the reduction would be disproportionately at longer distance: passengers west of Stamford would not have any replacement intercity train unless they backtracked, but passengers east of Stamford would likely switch. This way, the required New Haven Line traffic shrinks to 12 local trains per hour and six express trains; half the locals run to Penn Station and half to Grand Central, and all express trains run to Grand Central.
In that situation, we can rerun the scenarios for what to do about Fordham; the situation generally improves, since less commuter traffic is required. The maximum separation scenario finally permits actual separation – the Hudson Line would run on the express tracks into Grand Central and have to cross the southbound Harlem Line locals at Mott Haven Junction, with predictable gaps between trains. The locals-run-local scenario gives Harlem Line express trains more wiggle room to slot between New Haven Line express trains. The status quo option lets the Harlem Line run six local trains and 12 express trains, though that likely underserves the Bronx. Converting Fordham to an express stop straightforwardly works with zero, six, or 12 express Harlem Line trains per hour.
Or maybe not. It’s fine to assume that letting passengers get on a train that does Stamford-Penn Station in 29 minutes and New Haven-Penn Station in 57 for the price of a commuter pass is going to remove passengers from the express commuter trains and put them onto longer intercity trains. But by the same token, the massive speed improvements to the other stops could lead to an increase in peak demand. The current trip time to Stamford is 1:12 on a local train; cutting that to 45 minutes means so much faster trips to the suburbs in between that ridership could increase to the point of requiring even more service. I’m not convinced on this – the modal split for peak commutes to Manhattan is already very high (Metro-North claimed 80% in the 2000s), and these suburbs are incredibly NIMBY. But it’s worth considering. At the very least, more local service is easier to add to the timetable than more express service – locals to Grand Central don’t share tracks with intercities at all, and even locals to Penn Station only do on a controllable low-speed section in Queens.
Pedestrian Observations 