Subsidize the Class 1s directly to run Passenger Service?

[daveklepper]

I will agree, up to a point.   And it is possible to improve NY-Philly.  Up-to-date catenary on the existing PRR line so Acela can run at 150 where track is straight.   Increase capacity by electrifying West Trenton to Newark and run additional service via West Trenton, with the time lost by the slower service made up by not having to change at 30th Street to reach the center of the City at Market East and Broad Street.   But then modern catenary on the whole NY - Washington line is long overdue. Acela should be able to run 150 Monmouth Junction to Trenton and Wilmington - Baltimore except for the tunnels and bridges.  Also much of the run between Baltimore and Washington.

Of course, improving corridors in spots also improves long-distanc timekeeping, such as the benefit to the Crescent and Florida trains by corridor improvements.

If money can be spent on long distance, in some cases there are "choke points" where a modest length of double-tracking could benefit both freight and passenger service.   Certainly, once the UP finishes double tracking the Sunset route we can expect a dramatic improvement in on-time performance.

[blue streak 1]

I agree with Paul. Starting out on the corridors will improve the long distance trains using them. All NY - Wash long distance trains operating at viewliner and amfleet capable speeds would cut that transit time by 1 hour. That is at least 70 Crew hours a day for 7 LD round trips and maybe as much as 200 HRS a day. Big savings over a year.

The North Carolina DOT work from Selma to Charlotte is getting good on time and reduced time the last time I checked.

[JT22CW]

Should. Ought. Must.

I wasn't disputing that the railroads had "common carrier" responsibilities to the "common good" and to "public purposes" -- see my remarks about electric power regulation. But that the freight railroads ought to make Amtrak run on time, that and 35 cents (probably a lot more now) used to get you a train ride underneath the Hudson River from Hoboken to Lower Manhatten (sic) on the Port Authority Trans Hudson.

PATH one way full fare is $1.75 at present; at certain stations, the MTA Metrocard can be used. But what does that have to do with the priorities of freight railroads? or commuter railroads, for that matter, who also put Amtrak in the hole (biggest example Metro-North Railroad)?

There are many dimensions to Amtrak, and one of them is that many of their trains outside the NEC don't run on time. How do we correct that concern? By having rail advocacy meetings where we sit around and gripe about how late trains are the fault of railroad management?

You don't provide an answer. Do you have one? You don't like the "more public investment" answer, even though it applies to non-rail modes and you countenance that. It's too late in the game to keep hanging onto circular arguments; the long-predicted fuel squeeze is on. What should be the next move?

In getting from Point A to Point B, the thing that trains need that airplanes don't is a set of tracks. We can feel good about ourselves in our advocacy meetings talking "Oh yeah, well airports are built with public money too!" Indeed they are, but airports are built in specific places while the tracks need to span the entire distance. The cost advantage goes to aviation if the distances are long enough and the route is sparse enough that one simply flies over the intervening space instead of building tracks across the landscape.

The Amtrak approach to the problem of the expense of building tracks across long distances is to share the tracks with freight. Outside the NEC, Amtrak pays a nominal fee to the host railroads to allow the trains to use the tracks. Amtrak gets access at a "reasonable" cost, but in most places they are not getting a reasonable level of service.

Being condescending won't help you. I suspect that it is universally known on a forum like this that railroads are land-bound transportation modes that require tracks over land.

As for "cost advantages", note that the fuel costs for aircraft have been continually rising and that the airlines have been slowing their planes down to conserve fuel. That eats into their speed advantage, so-called. There's also the risk of being blown out of the sky by being struck by positive lightning (which has far higher wattage and amperage than the more frequent negative lightning). And there's those nice benzopyrenes, benzofluoranthenes, NOx gases, sulfur gases and carbon monoxide coming out of the thrust nozzle.

There is this NARP factoid that a track has the capacity of 20 freeway lanes. It may have that capacity if you have a two-track subway line, you have the proper signals, have same-speed trains with EP brakes, long enough trains with enough seats in them, and so on. If you are trying to thread a 50 MPH average Amtrak train over a 30 MPH freight train single-track-with-sidings line, it may be another story

Right, and (parallel main lines were never abandoned) yes they were. They're all over the place, either rotting into nonexistence, given "second lives" as slow-as-snail written-order Class III short lines (yes, so many main lines exist in this form; I live near the former DL&W), or turned into rail trails, which are the ultimate waste of taxpayer dollars (you don't ever recoup tax revenue from bicycles like you can road vehicles). Of course, instead of selling these lines to Amtrak for the purpose of converting them to higher-speed passenger operation, such ignominious, and comparatively useless, fates befall them. Is this excusable?

Amtrak should get priority! Should, ought, must. People must get to their destinations on time while inanimate freight can chill for a couple hours in a siding to let the passengers go by, leaving aside such considerations of the time value of money tied up in the freight cars, locomotives, and the value of their lading not to say anything of the crew expiring on the hours limitations.

Oh wow, like that was a problem in the past when the traffic volume was far, far higher. Freight companies dispensed with fast freight for reasons unknown (or perhaps because of conflicts of interest, like when they also own[ed] trucking companies). Average speeds are down to lower than when heavy trains were doubleheaded with two Texas-types. Meanwhile, while the rest of the civilized world was speeding up their trains from the 1960s onward, the USA now has passenger trains with average speeds slower than trains hauled by 4-4-2 Camelbacks. And trucking still erodes the freight rail base to this day, so crying the capacity canard rings tremendously hollow.

If you think things are bad out on the road, then yards would drive you utterly mad. You'd be begging to see Amtrak fly past the trains on the main, then, because you might as well, since you can't get your trains out of the yard thanks to yardmasters who work at a pace they alone set.

The rail lines should be double-tracked! Should, ought, must. Amtrak is "underfunded" and if there was more money to be had, Amtrak could pay for the double tracking. Certainly double tracking is cheaper than building all new passenger-only lines. Again, this depends on the amount of traffic and the distance travelled. If the distances are short and the passenger counts are high, building tracks may pay

Not distance-dependent; speed-dependent. Speed sells; that's what attracts passengers. You seem to be pretending that projects like speeding up the Chicago-Detroit corridor between Porter IN and Kalamazoo MI are not in progress.

It's a lot more involved than just adding tracks and upgrading signals; it's also maintaining to FRA standards without definition (what's the difference between Class 4 and Class 7?) and also retrofitting the locomotives of private railroads to operate with these progressive signaling systems.

But really; where the room for the tracks exists, what is the greater cost, to maintain an active track that a frequent passenger service can avail of, or to leave a blank expanse next to the track(s) on the right of way that trespassers on ATVs run up and down instead, kicking up ballast stones all over the place, and that the railroad still has to pay tax on?

All this depends on distance. For the daily Empire Builder, double tracking the whole 2000 miles let alone an HSR line would be cost prohibitive. For a commuter run, short distances, high volume of trains, that commuter agencies would contribute to double tracking or even triple tracking has successfully gotten public money and people are happy with that

Again, it's speed-dependent. If it were distance-dependent, then Deutsche Bahn would not have bothered to ask Siemens to build trains like the ICE 3M, a variant of the Siemens Velaro that has the ability to run on multiple voltages (especially between Germany's 15kV 16.67Hz and France's 25kV 50Hz plus 1500V DC). So clearly DB and SNCF both think that HSR between Paris and Berlin (close to 600 miles) is feasible; and that's going to expand to greater distances across the continent.

How is "cost-prohibitive" defined, anyway? If the service pays for itself instead of requiring subsidy, then would it not be paid off in a number of years instead of decades? Is it more cost-effective to turn mountain railroads into high-altitude rail trails instead of converting them for high-speed service where applicable? Now stuff like rail-trailing is wasteful.

Perhaps the next frontier in passenger trains is the 90-120 mile distance. Think NY-Philly, Chicago-Milwaukee, LA-San Diego. The stats backing up the Vision Report indicate that trains dominate over air as a common carrier mode on those segments. 90-mile hops are really too short for airline service, but the cost of upgrading tracks over that distance is not prohibitive.

I suggest from time to time in our local advocacy group to consider 90-120 mile corridors as the Golden Mean for advancing train service. Those runs could serve as "super commuter trains" to many people who have to frequently travel between such pairs of cities. The stats show that trains clean the clocks of planes in those markets. Every time I say this, someone on cue blurts out "Corridors are up to 400 miles." NARP talking points. Yes, the NEC is over 400 miles end-to-end, but the big market is the NY-Philly city pair.

NARP talking points are so drilled into us that we can't see where the opportunities are

You are describing what I believe are talking points of consultants as "NARP talking points", which is a false citation. (Looking on NARP's website, I saw a chart that refers to 0-399 miles as "short distance" and 400+ miles as "long distance".) Even the FRA, to their credit, have not put specific mileage caps on high-speed corridors.

90-120 miles is commuter rail distance. Unless you are calling services like the Long Island Railroad from NYC to Greenport and Montauk, and NJ Transit/Metro-North joint service from Hoboken NJ to Port Jervis NY "corridor services" (whatever that means)?

As for "cleaning clocks", Amtrak is beating the airlines between New York and Washington DC even with a comparatively-low average speed of 82 mph, held down due to continued deferred maintenance. If the NEC were brought to the fabled "state of good repair" (phrase coined by David Gunn), even a train like the Acela Express could stretch its legs to at least a 105-mph average speed, which would be a NYP-WAS journey of 2 hours 8 minutes. Tilt trains have hit average speeds of 120 mph in revenue service, which is highly competitive even with the "dedicated HSR alignment" in certain cases.

[Paul Milenkovic]

In getting from Point A to Point B, the thing that trains need that airplanes don't is a set of tracks. We can feel good about ourselves in our advocacy meetings talking "Oh yeah, well airports are built with public money too!" Indeed they are, but airports are built in specific places while the tracks need to span the entire distance. The cost advantage goes to aviation if the distances are long enough and the route is sparse enough that one simply flies over the intervening space instead of building tracks across the landscape. The Amtrak approach to the problem of the expense of building tracks across long distances is to share the tracks with freight. Outside the NEC, Amtrak pays a nominal fee to the host railroads to allow the trains to use the tracks. Amtrak gets access at a "reasonable" cost, but in most places they are not getting a reasonable level of service.

Being condescending won't help you. I suspect that it is universally known on a forum like this that railroads are land-bound transportation modes that require tracks over land.

If my remark was condescending, what was the remark in this advocacy newsletter with regard to the Illinois trains that "the ridership would be that much higher were the trains to run on time?"

The advocacy community in Illinois as in many other places had been frustrated that the Midwest Regional Rail Initiative never got funded, but at least in Illinois they achieved a kind of breakthrough to get state funding for those new trains.  What they were able to do was corridor service on the cheap, scrounging up cars from Amtrak instead of buying their own as California has done, essentially imposing the higher frequency of trains on the host railroad rather than coming up with money for track upgrades at choke points, also as California has done.

You get what you pay for -- Illinois has its new trains, but the host railroad isn't happy about the arrangment and doesn't make them run on time.  Now the remark quoting a person in the Illinois advocacy community about on-time trains making the service even better is innocent enough on the face of it.  Illinois has done its trains on the cheap, they don't always run on time, but for the money spent, people ride those trains, and if we could spend more money to improve the service, perhaps more people would ride.

But that is not how this is expressed in advocacy meetings, and I can tell you I have been there.  If the attitude was, "The Illinois service is OK for a phase one, but it has time keeping problems owing to freight train interference, lets figure out a phase two and see what it would take to eliminate choke points and develop a better relationship with the host railroad."  The attitude is more along the line that it is the fault of the Big Bad Railroad for not having their heart in moving the new trains.

I do indeed have a proposal as to how to move forward on achieving the congestion-relief and energy-saving attributes of trains: concentrate on the 90-120 mile distance.  I am told that constitutes "commuter service."  Well, it has been remarked somewhere else that the Amtrak network is essentially a NY-Philly commuter service along with "everthing else."  By this benchmark, the Pacific Surfliner is a mere "commuter service" as is the Hiawatha. 

Commuter service has been successful from a political standpoint of getting public funding in a way that Amtrak has struggled.  Commuter agencies are able to run their trains on time in a way that Amtrak has not been able to -- these agencies may have a better working relationship with their host railroads, and the shorter distances of track make upgrades to the track to support the traffic more affordable. 

[CSSHEGEWISCH]

Amtrak has been fairly successful in 90-120 mile shorthauls, prime examples being Pacific Surfliner, Capitol Corridor and Hiawatha Service.  Fortunately, Amtrak has been able to build on existing services on each of these routes.  The downside is that there aren't too many of these shorthaul corridors around that have even a minimal service.  Starting from scratch would be almost impossible since your main competition is individual automobiles, even for business purposes.

[gardendance]

90-120 miles is commuter rail distance. Unless you are calling services like the Long Island Railroad from NYC to Greenport and Montauk, and NJ Transit/Metro-North joint service from Hoboken NJ to Port Jervis NY "corridor services" (whatever that means)?

My understanding is 'corridor' originated when John Kneiling and a few other folks were looking at a Washington-Boston map and commenting that the Amtrak main with a bunch of branches to Paoli, Princeton, Bound Brook, White Plains, etc... looked just like a corridor with a bunch of office doors along it. So the corridor would feed to and get fed from the individual offices. Using that long ago original definition, Greenport and Montauk to Jamaica-NYP, and Port Jervis to Seacaucus are pat of the overall corridor service.