Category: Regional Rail
Organization and Electronics vs. Concrete in Washington
There’s a discussion going on at Greater Greater Washington about future expansions of the Washington Metro, adding more coverage and capacity; read both the posts and the comments, because there are great debates about just how much concrete really is needed. The post itself mentions various possibilities Metro has been looking into, a few good and many really awful.
Part of it is that the nature of such discussions favors concrete – it’s much easier to discuss a fantasy map than schedules and organization. Indeed, on my three regional rail posts on The Transport Politic, most comments concerned the proposed through-routing map and infrastructure to be built rather than schedule integration. The reason the comments on the GGW post are so good is that many eschew this and instead talk about other things. Even the idea of separating the Blue Line from the Orange Line in the city, which looks sound to me and is not yet another outbound extension to the exurbs, is suspect and there’s a serious suggestion to build light rail to relieve the capacity problem instead.
Discussed in the comments but not by Metro is the possibility of converting the commuter lines to rapid transit. Only one, the Penn Line running along the Northeast Corridor to and beyond Baltimore, is even electrified, and the rest are owned by CSX and Norfolk Southern. This would be far superior to adding more outbound Metro extensions, which have very high costs: the Dulles extension is $180 million per km despite being predominantly above ground.
The Washington Metro, and even more so BART, is more an S-Bahn or RER system than a subway. The stop spacing is very wide, and the lines branch out and go deep into suburbia. Unlike BART, Metro sometimes gets it right and has good transit-oriented development, though it too has its share of parking lot stations. The main difference is that due to poor organization (FRA regulations, pure agency inertia), the Washington Metro exclusively uses greenfield alignments, whereas S-Bahn and RER systems use predominantly existing commuter lines, with strategic tunnels built to provide service to the urban core.
There are two potential problems with relying on legacy commuter lines, aside from organizational difficulties that should be the first to be tackled. First, those lines may have capacity problems; this is not true for the Penn Line, but may be true for the other, lesser-used lines, because of freight conflicts. Second, the lines may not run to the desired destinations. Both concerns can be mitigated at much lower costs than pouring concrete on new lines.
First, the Penn Line is 64 km long from Baltimore to Washington, has 8 stations, and has no sharp curves except at the Baltimore and Potomac Tunnels, a $750 million replacement for which has already been studied. A 160 km/h train with the acceleration profile of the FLIRT and 30-second dwell times at intermediate stations (easy with level boarding) could do it in 36 minutes. Add Swiss-standard 7% schedule padding and about 30 seconds for slowdown through the B & P replacement and this is a total of 39 minutes end-to-end. A speed boost to 200 km/h would save maybe 2.5 minutes, since regional trains accelerate slowly at high speed. Local trains currently do the trip in an hour.
The Acela, a substandard train, is currently scheduled at 38 minutes, so all trains would travel at about the same speed, eliminating all capacity problems. (Current peak throughput is 7 tph, so the slight unevenness in the travel speed is a non-issue.) A mild Acela speedup, involving trains running at 200 km/h with no slowdowns, would speed the train to 22 minutes, and require just one mid-line overtake if peak traffic is to be 4 tph each for Acela and commuter trains. 6 tph each would require two overtakes and a lot of discipline, but would be doable given the capabilities of ERTMS. Full-fat high-speed rail in the Northeast would do the same trip in about 16.5 minutes, and require the line to be fully four-tracked; this is already part of MARC’s long-term plan. There is in other words no real problem with capacity as far as conflicts with intercity trains go.
Second, one often-overlooked point about S-Bahn/RER networks is that they have a fair amount of greenfield track, often in tunnel, constructed strategically to connect to important destinations off the existing rail network. For example, tunneled alignments bring regional trains to Charles de Gaulle and Zurich Airports. If there’s an important suburban destination not reached by Metro or a rapid transit system based on the five existing commuter lines, it should be fine to construct a spur – for example, the extension of Metro to Tysons Corner is a great idea. However, such spurs should be kept as short as possible, especially airport spurs, since airport connectors tend to underperform.
Look again now at the suburban lines proposed by Metro in the link. The Brown Line is a duplicate of the Red Line, which has no serious capacity issues except at its center. The Beltway Line skips the major centers that a circumferential should hit (for example, Arlington/Alexandria), defeating the entire purpose of a greenfield alignment. The outbound extensions would just create more transit-oriented sprawl, with people driving to stations and taking trains only at the peak. And it would all cost much more than electrifying track, purchasing good rolling stock, and running it with high schedule discipline.
Bad US Rail Practices, and What It Means for FRA Regulations
As I alluded to in the last few posts, although the FRA is the primary obstacle to a passenger rail revival, the old railroader traditions it reinforces are still strong in the commuter railroads. At some, for example the MBTA and the New York-area railroads, practices are even worse in terms of cost and performance than required by the FRA.
Witness the following issues, recurring on almost all US commuter lines:
1. Overstaffing, more than required by the FRA. The MBTA currently has one assistant conductor per two cars, and its proposal for an upgrade to newer rolling stock retains one conductor per two cars. The New York- and Chicago-area commuter trains have 3-6 conductors, punching everyone’s tickets. Caltrain maintains assistant conductors even though it does not punch tickets anymore. And New York’s plan with smartcards is not to institute proof-of-payment, as is normal throughout Europe, but rather to have conductors check every ticket using a smartcard reader, only faster: Jay Walder said as much at the MTA Unconference (it starts at 7:50 into the linked video, and goes into the next part).
2. Poor choice of rolling stock. See the same link above for the MBTA’s present acceleration profile, which is similar to that of the other commuter rail operators in the US using diesel locomotives. During acceleration from 0 to 60 mph, a train loses 70 seconds relative to going the same distance at full speed, and even under the DMU plan, it would lose 43. In contrast, a FLIRT loses about 13 seconds accelerating from 0 to 100 km/h. Despite this, there are no plans to electrify or ask for an FRA waiver.
Electrification alone could solve some problems, even without a waiver. The EMUs used by Metro-North lose 13-15 minutes from 12 intermediate stops on the Harlem Line, which after factoring in 30 seconds of dwell time works out to 35-45 seconds per station counting both acceleration and deceleration. Alternatively, if electrification is out, then an FRA waiver would open the doors to fast-accelerating as well as more fuel-efficient DMUs.
3. Poor use of existing infrastructure, especially at terminals. Even with FRA regulations, commuter trains with push-pull or multiple-unit service turn in about 5 minutes at their outer ends. They dwell for much longer at the downtown terminal, creating the illusion of capacity issues. To solve those capacity problems, railroads propose massive concrete, with no attempt to improve electronics or organization: the ARC cavern, the expensive ESA cavern, track expansion at Boston South.
4. A concrete-before-all-else strategy of investment, in direct opposition with organization before electronics before concrete. Amtrak and the commuter railroads that claim to be at capacity never investigated the possibility of better signaling, such as ERTMS. In addition, Amtrak’s Master Plan proposes extra trackage to avoid capacity problems in Massachusetts and Maryland that could be resolved with timed overtakes. Although organization is not sexy, it’s trivial for the various railroads using a station to share ticket vending machines and concourses, instead of separating into agency turfs; in addition, electronics is capital investment, and can get federal investment as well as good headlines about squeezing more capacity out of infrastructure. There’s no excuse for prioritizing concrete.
5. Poor integration with local transit in terms of fares and schedules. Commuter train stations are usually glorified parking lots; for one especially egregious example, compare Westborough’s train station location with its downtown location. Transit-oriented development is minimal. Best industry practice is to do the opposite, and instead integrate commuter rail with connecting buses at the suburban end, to say nothing of urban rail at the city end. Clipper in the Bay Area and the MTA’s proposals in the New York area have a single card that can be used to pay on both commuter rail and urban transit, but people will still have to purchase tickets separately, being punished first by the inherent inconvenience of transferring and then by being made to pay an extra fare.
6. Indifference to off-peak and reverse-peak riders. Peak ridership can fill trains, but is expensive to provide, because providing for more of it requires additional capital spending as well as additional employees working split shifts. Among the older railroads, the LIRR deserves singular scorn for running trains one-way on its two-track Main Line; although peak traffic on the three lines using the two-track segment is 23 tph, within the capabilities of two tracks under present signaling, the LIRR prefers being able to run express trains than any reverse peak trains. Outside the inner ends of a few very busy lines, such as the New Haven Line, off-peak service is at best hourly, and sometimes much worse. And at the peak, the commuter railroads eviscerate local service on their busiest lines in order to provide trains that make a few local stops and then express to the city, ensuring nobody will be able to use them to get to suburban job centers on the way.
7. Poor timetable adherence. Metro-North and Metra do somewhat better than the rest, but Amtrak only achieves 80% on-time performance even when it owns the tracks, and that’s after counting Northeast Corridor trains that are 20 minutes late as being on time. In contrast, SBB achieves 92% on-time performance by a 3-minute standard.
The importance of all this is that reform has to come from above, directed from Congress or the White House, or else from below by reform-minded railroads asking for many waivers and creating a template for smaller railroads to follow. Bruce McFarling has written various comments saying the FRA’s problem is one of regulatory capture by the freight railroads, and therefore the solution is to spend money on inferior passenger rail until there’s enough of a lobby for passenger rail-friendlier rules. This is unlikely; passenger rail advocates rarely care, with some positive but small exceptions such as NJ-ARP, and the passenger rail operators depicted in this post are wedded to the old way of doing things.
FRA reform by itself could help some of this, by creating a template for modern operations, consisting of a clockface schedules, short turnaround times, modern rolling stock, and regionally integrated fares and schedules. However, absent it, some forward-thinking railroad has to be the first to propose modernization. The MTA is ideally suited for it because of its high commuter rail ridership, but has no interest. As a result, good transit advocated need to keep harping on commuter operators as well as Amtrak to improve and reform, or propose reforms themselves. Hoping the status quo reforms itself will not cut it.
Bad FRA Regulations
Since many people are linking to my previous post identifying the FRA as the primary obstacle to an American railroad revival, I’m hoisting a comment I wrote on the Infrastructurist detailing some of the FRA regulations that are the most destructive.
The original references for this are from Zierke’s website and the East Bay Bicycle Coalition, but those are a few years out of date, and recently the FRA has made noises about reforming the first two rules, which are the most destructive to intercity rail. Unfortunately, those reforms are not good enough, chiefly because they are designed to preserve the FRA’s bureaucracy, piling more obstacles on any attempt to modernize US trains.
1. 945 tons buff strength for locomotives and end cars and 360 for coaches (link); the maximum that’s even partly defensible is Europe’s 200, and Japan’s 100 is perfectly safe. This is by far the most important: as a result of this rule, the Acela power cars weigh 90 metric tons, vs. 68 for the TGV power cars they’re derived from. Zierke notes that the lighter the train, the higher the FRA weight penalty is.
2. 4″ maximum cant deficiency for non-tilting trains, except 5″ on track connected to 110+ mph rail (derisively called the magic HSR waiver by railfans). The Acela is limited to 7″ despite tilting. Non-tilting TGVs do 180 mm in France (about the same as the Acela) and tilting trains do 250-300 mm in Japan and a bunch of European countries, no special testing required except on actual track. In addition, superelevation is limited by regulation to 7″ minus a safety margin; high-speed lines around the world have 180 mm actual superelevation, and the Tokaido Shinkansen, which has tighter curves, has 200 mm.
Those two regulations are already being somewhat modified. Amtrak seems to believe that the nationwide mandate for positive train control (PTC), passed in 2008 in response to the Chatsworth crash, will allow it to run lighter trains; the FRA has granted Caltrain a waiver from the FRA buff strength rule provisioned upon PTC installation. As for cant deficiency, the FRA has already decided on a revision allowing tilting trains up to 225 mm cant deficiency, and non-tilting trains up to 150 mm by testing.
Unfortunately, those two reforms only look good at first glance. The Caltrain waiver application from the buff strength rule was devised in consultation with the biggest rolling stock manufacturers – Bombardier, Kawasaki, Alstom, and Siemens – which indicates which rules they could comply with and which they could not. This may well lock out smaller vendors, such as Stadler and CAF. Stadler’s FLIRT is the fastest-accelerating, highest-powered regional train on the market; it is also very light, and may well not comply even with regulations Caltrain did not ask out of.
In addition, since such waivers depend on PTC, if the freight railroads succeed in their attempt to delay or water down PTC implementation, which they consider too expensive, then future rolling stock purchases will remain heavy. Indeed, Amtrak’s purchase of new electric locomotives, due to enter service in 2013, is FRA-compliant and more expensive than purchases of similar locomotives in Europe; this despite the fact that they are intended to run on the Northeast Corridor, which has a PTC system.
As for the cant deficiency waiver, it was obtained by testing existing outdated technology in the US, such as Amtrak locomotives and the EMUs used on commuter rail in the Northeast. No attempt was made to use high-cant deficiency European technology, a point also made by Drunk Engineer. Such trains would have to be tested to the FRA’s satisfaction, and not be allowed to run at the same speeds as they do in Europe. In fact the FRA’s proposed rule revision includes a language about higher track standards for cant deficiency higher than 5″, never mind that TGVs run on less than perfect legacy track at 7″ cant deficiency.
In addition, for high-cant deficiency operation, it’s important to regulate both cant deficiency and the rate at which it changes. The muscles can adjust to lateral acceleration, given enough time; thus the jerk, or the rate of change of acceleration, must also be prescribed. With a proper superelevation ramp and change in cant deficiency based on the abilities of existing trains, high speeds and high cant deficiencies can combine well, as found in a Swedish study about the feasibility of very high-speed trains on legacy track.
Additional FRA regulations, which hamper regional rail more than intercity rail, seem to be here to stay. These include the following:
3. Two employees per train; regional trains should have one. But, bear in mind, many regional operators have multiple conductors, and the limit to lower staffing is antiquated trains or managerial incompetence rather than the FRA. For example, the MBTA believes it needs one conductor per two cars.
4. Brake tests at every turnaround. Intercity trains can enter a stub-end station and back away in 3-4 minutes, and do every day in Germany; regional trains turn around in 3-4 minutes in Japan. However, Amtrak makes Keystone trains dwell 10 minutes at Philadelphia.
5. Four-quadrant gates required for quiet zones; these make quiet zones expensive, and as a result trains have to blare loud horns at grade crossings, alienating neighbors and creating NIMBYism.
6. No regulations encouraging high-performance lightweight cars and good signaling. The FRA should mandate a modern system, preferably ETCS, which permits a throughput of up to 37 trains per hour at standard speeds. This is 12 tph more than currently can run between New Jersey and New York, and would be about $13 billion cheaper than Amtrak’s Gateway tunnel proposal, which would add 21 tph.
The multitude of bad regulations is why I think FRA reform has to be intensive, without any half-measures. The new rail regulations in the US should as much as possible be based on UIC (predominantly European) and Japanese regulations, with the present status quo ignored.
The only role of American regulators should be to devise a coherent system to allow European and Japanese trains to interact with each other. In some places, such as PTC and jerk, it requires greater regulation, based on best industry practices in the rest of the developed world. But in most other areas, the rule should as far as possible be that everything that’s legal in Europe or Japan is legal in the US.
I’ll repeat my exhortation in my post on Mica’s privatization plan: please contact the relevant Congressional representatives and let them know that any real reform must include extensive FRA reform. Organization and electronics should come before concrete, and such deregulation of rolling stock could jive well with the conservative mood in Congress that Mica is channeling. And if it does not, then never mind – the Democrats could seize FRA reform, too, as a good-government issue. It’s more important than whether future railroads are run publicly or privately.
Boston South Station’s Supposed Capacity Limit
I don’t have much to add to Yonah Freemark’s post about Boston’s proposed Fairmount Line infill; as Yonah correctly notes, this is a good idea in principle, but in practice it also requires operational integration, especially unified fares. The current federal aid system gives agencies a large incentive to install concrete, some incentive to install electronics, and none to improve organization.
What I want to discuss in this post is the myth that Boston’s South Station has capacity problems, a myth almost as pernicious as the same myth about New York’s Penn Station. While South Station can’t immediately solve all of its capacity problems with through-running (P.S. note the cost estimates for 2.4 km of tunnel in Boston are $3-9 billion), it still has enough tracks for service increase. Thus the 20-minute frequency limit mentioned in the comments to Yonah’s post is not as binding as the MBTA may think.
South Station has 13 tracks. These naturally separate into a group of 4-5 to the east and a group of 8-9 to the west. The eastern tracks are fed by a four-track bridge serving the Fairmount Line, the Old Colony Lines, and the Greenbush Line. The western tracks curve 90 degrees (with radius, I believe, 250 meters, limiting approach speeds) west and become a four-track line reaching Back Bay, and fanning out to the Worcester, Providence, Needham, and Franklin Lines; the Providence Line also hosts Northeast Corridor intercity trains, while the Worcester Line hosts a single daily Amtrak train.
For all intents and purposes, the two sets of tracks should be treated separately, for the following reasons. First, any train, any track is good to have as a contingency, but should not be done regularly, in order to make service as predictable as practical. Second and more importantly, the capacity of a terminal is far higher when the trains are completely interchangeable, as they are to the east. If slight schedule irregularities create conflicting terminal moves, the run can be done from any track.
In the simplest case, that of a two-track line hitting a two-track terminal with (short) tail tracks, the turning capacity can approach 30 trains per hour, the same as that of a running line; see for example the schedule, satellite view, and station map of the Chuo Rapid Line. This is uncommon, but many other commuter lines in Japan turn 12-15 tph on two tracks.
The four-track eastern segment of South Station can be split without revenue conflicts into two western tracks serving Fairmount and two serving the other lines, and such capacities become realistic. Since total peak traffic on the Old Colony and Greenbush Lines is currently 6 tph, and total peak traffic on the Fairmount Line is 2 tph (should be 6 tph for good urban service), capacity there is a non-issue. Although there are no tail tracks at South Station, all platform tracks except the easternmost are long enough that they could attach to platforms a few tens of meters longer than an eight-car commuter train, which with modern rolling stock should suffice.
The western tracks pose a bigger problem, for two reasons. First, the trains are not perfectly interchangeable, and do not separate neatly into two two-track lines running alongside each other. Second, Amtrak should be planning on 400-meter trains, and although the platforms could be lengthened to accommodate them, tail tracks become impossible, forcing even slower approach speeds than required by the curve.
Regardless, South Station has enough capacity even for trains serving Back Bay. With completely non-interchangeable intercity trains and dwells that are long by regional rail standards, the Tohoku Shinkansen turns a peak of 14 tph using four station tracks at Tokyo. While the Tohoku Shinkansen does not have the sharp turn of South Station, the MBTA can turn trains faster (trains already turn in about 5 minutes at the outbound terminals), and all services but one use the same equipment. So the capacity for South Station West is at a minimum 28 tph; current peak traffic excluding Amtrak is 12 tph.
It goes without saying that the operating assumption I’m using is that service is run well, better than is currently possible under the FRA-regulated regime. Among the FRA’s sins is brake tests at every terminal, forcing longer dwell times than are routine in Japan, France, and other countries with a much safer rail record than the US, to say nothing of American rapid transit (which outside Washington D.C. is very safe). While all of the above examples of high turn capacity use EMUs with high acceleration and deceleration, the separation between maximum capacity and current MBTA traffic is high enough that large service increases are possible without either more concrete or more electronics; with better electronics, even more increases are feasible.
I am going to return to this issue, specifically the Providence Line, because one way to save some money on Northeast Corridor improvements is to speed up the Providence Line, using existing electrification and new rolling stock; this would permit the line to remain two-tracked with one mid-line four-track passing segment around Sharon, obviating the need for Amtrak’s proposed third track, even with large increases in ridership.
New York-Area Track Maps
The original purpose of this blog was to give me a domain name to upload things related to transit. The resource I was uploading was track maps of the New York area due to Rich E Green, whose site unexpectedly vanished last month without caching the maps on Google. Here are the maps I’d saved or gotten from helpful commenters:
LIRR
NJT/SEPTA
Metro-North
NEC in Maryland and DC
If you have any of the rest of the maps, please send them over so that I can make them publicly available again.
Update: all links scrubbed 12/7 by the author’s request, due to copyright issues.
Suburban TOD
Hicksville is located 43 kilometers east of Penn Station on the LIRR Main Line. It’s a major job center of eastern Nassau County, with 25,000 jobs and a rather large shopping center adjacent to the train station. The station itself gets about 8,000 weekday boardings, more than any other suburban LIRR station except Ronkonkoma.
However, the station has no TOD. The shopping mall is transit-adjacent, but the route to it from the station passes through parking lots at both ends. The station is surrounded by thousands of parking spaces; a recent reconstruction of a parking garage cost $364 $36.4 million for 1,400 spaces, which at $26,000 per space is more than the per-rider cost of such expensive transit lines as Second Avenue Subway. As a result, the total number of people getting off at Hicksville in the AM peak is 700, for a rail share of 3%.
Such failure is quite common in the US. Leaving aside stations explicitly configured as park-and-rides, such as Metropark or Ronkonkoma, off-CBD stations have to have at least some retail and office space usable by reverse commuters, on the pure financial grounds that reverse-peak service is nearly free to provide. Otherwise, light rail and subway trains run empty in the reverse-peak, and commuter trains park downtown, leading to outsized costs for CBD railyard expansions.
For a comparison of how good TOD looks like, see this industry presentation about Tokyo’s Tsukuba Express. As is normal in Tokyo, the line is very expensive: $140 million per km for a line that’s just 26% in tunnel, though the tunnel percentage is much higher within the central city. But per rider this is not too bad, because as the images in the presentation demonstrate, intense TOD followed construction. Stations are surrounded by high-density office and residential buildings and not parking lots.
A theme I am going to revisit is that high construction costs should not be an excuse to scale down service levels. It may be expensive to develop on the parking lots adjacent to the station, but the ridership is always worth it.
If there’s to be a transit revival, it’s imperative to increase mode share at major suburban centers. The transit mode share for people working in Manhattan is 75%, while the auto share is only 14% – and the auto mode share is dominated by the suburbs that use the GWB, rather than Long Island. There’s some room to expand Manhattan employment, but not enough to make a dent in the region’s car use. It’s critical to instead make it easier to use transit and harder to drive to work in such secondary downtowns as Flushing and Jamaica, and in such major suburban centers as Mineola and, yes, Hicksville.
Yes, Transit is Green
I’ve just found a post by Brad Templeton arguing that US mass transit is less green than high-efficiency cars, at least when compared per passenger-km. (He agrees that transit is overall better because it is more efficient when used more extensively, as in Europe and especially East Asia.) The analysis of how this can be given the numbers is cogent, but the numbers themselves are suspect, and are worse for transit than other numbers I’ve seen.
Better numbers can be found in this FTA presentation, on pages 10-11; the data is sourced to the National Transit Database. They’re expressed in pounds of CO2 per passenger-mile; if you’re more used to thinking in terms of passenger-miles per gallon of gasoline equivalent, then convert x pounds per passenger-mile to 19.374/x passenger-miles per gallon. The New York City Subway gets the equivalent of 114 passenger-mpg, versus 47 on Templeton’s page. Even FRA-regulated commuter rail does significantly better than cars – the low efficiency of the trains cancels out with the fact that there’s almost no off-peak traffic.
Another piece of evidence Templeton’s transit numbers are too low: he lists JR East’s energy use as equivalent to about 78 passenger-mpg. In reality, JR East claims much lower emissions, about 13 grams per passenger-km (400 passenger-mpg equivalent) or 19 (280), depending on whether one counts the emissions of the company’s buildings or just transportation emissions. It could be that Japanese power generation is that efficient; but given that Japan’s overall per capita emissions are not low by non-US developed country standards, I doubt it.
Finally, although it appears as if technology is about to make cars much more efficient, in reality technology is expensive if you’re a driver and cheap if you’re a transit agency. Take hybrids: the market share of new hybrid car sales is in the single digits, about 300,000 out of 8 million light vehicles sold in the US in 2008, but the market share of new hybrid bus orders was 22% in 2007. Electrified trains are also gaining efficiency, perhaps more slowly but the important thing for them is to transition to low-carbon power generation; if their emissions are nontrivial thirty years from now, then we have bigger problems than transportation to worry about.
New York’s Awful Grade Separation
After Rick Scott rejected the Florida high-speed rail funds, a bunch of states as well as Amtrak applied for the redirected funds. The money has just been redistributed – see breakdown here. New York State applied for $300 million to grade-separate a junction between Amtrak and the LIRR, which it spins as an important capacity upgrade and which some online commenters have misinterpreted as a speed upgrade. Let me dispel the myth here.
The track map of the LIRR (link scrubbed for copyright reasons) shows clearly that, in the westbound direction, the junction has no conflicts. Amtrak trains (blue) using the northern tunnel pair to Penn Station have no conflicts with any other trains, except for other trains using the same tunnels. This is not a grade crossing, but a simple switch. In the eastbound direction, trains using the northern tunnels do have an at-grade junction with LIRR trains (purple) – but only trains going to a track farther north than the tunnels to Penn Station, and those all stub-end at Hunterspoint Avenue or Long Island City.
There aren’t a lot of trains going to Hunterspoint or Long Island City: at the peak, only 5 per hour, and of those one uses the Montauk Line, so we’re really talking about 4 trains per hour; Amtrak never runs more than 2 trains per hour to New York from the east. To put things in perspective, the 3 and 5 train on the subway have more than 10 trains per hour each and have a similar conflict in Brooklyn. What’s more, Hunterspoint’s main use is that it has an easy subway connection to Manhattan’s East Side, so once East Side Access opens and LIRR trains can go to Grand Central, traffic there will go down even more, making the flat junction even less relevant than it is today.
So the $300 million the state applied to has no relevance to either Amtrak or LIRR traffic. The only use is to let Amtrak use the southern tunnel pair to Penn Station without conflicts. Since Amtrak can already use the northern tunnels without any conflict apart from the one mentioned above, it is a pure nice-to-have. It would be good for operational flexibility if the tunnels were at capacity, but they aren’t: total LIRR plus Amtrak traffic into Penn Station peaks at 37 trains between 8 and 9 am, where the capacity of the tunnels is about 50 – and as with Hunterspoint traffic, Penn Station LIRR traffic will go down once East Side Access opens.
