For Walkability and Good Transit, and Against Boondoggles and Pollution
Devin Wilkins and I are still working on coming up with a coordinated timetable on the Northeast Corridor, north to south. Devin just shared with me the code she was running on both routes from New Haven to New York – to Grand Central and to Penn Station – and, taking into account the quality of the right-of-way and tunnels but not timetable padding and conservative curve speeds – it looks like intercity trains would do it in about an hour. The current code produces around 57 minutes with 7% timetable pad if I’m getting the Penn Station throat and tunnel slowdowns right – but that’s an if; but at this point, I’m confident about the figure of “about an hour” on the current right-of-way.
I bring this up to give updates on how the more accurate coding is changing the timetable compared to previous estimates, but also to talk about what this means for future investment priorities.
First, the curve radii I was assuming in posts I was writing last decade were consistently too optimistic. I wrote three months ago about how even within the highest speed zone in southern Rhode Island, there’s a curve with radius 1,746 meters (1 degree in American parlance), which corresponds to about 215 km/h with aggressive cant and cant deficiency. At this point we’ve found numbers coming straight from Amtrak, Metro-North, and MBTA, letting us cobble together speed zones for the entire system.
But second, conversely, I was being too conservative with how I was setting speed zones. My principle was that the tightest curve on a section sets the entire speed limit; when writing commuter rail timetables, I would usually have each interstation segment be a uniform speed zone, varying from this practice only when the interstation was atypically long and had long straight sections with a tight curve between them. When writing intercity timetables, I’d simplify by having the typical curves on a line set the speed limit and then have a handful of lower speed limits for tighter curves; for example, most curves on the New Haven Line are 873 meters, permitting 153 km/h with aggressive high-speed rail cant and cant deficiency, and 157 km/h with aggressive limits for slower trains, which can run at slightly higher cant deficiency, but those sections are punctuated by some sharper curves with lower limits. Devin, using better code than me, instead lets a train accelerate to higher speed on straight sections and then decelerate as soon as it needs to. Usually such aggressive driving is not preferred, and is used only when recovering from delays – but the timetable is already padded somewhat, so it might as well be padded relative to the fastest technical speed.
The upshot of all of this is that the speed gains from just being able to run at the maximum speed permitted by the right-of-way are massive. The trip time today is 1:37 on the fastest trains between New York and New Haven. Commuter trains take 2:10, making all stops from New Haven to Stamford and then running nonstop between Stamford and Manhattan; in our model, with a top speed of 150 km/h, high-performance regional trains like the FLIRT, Talent 3, or Mireo should do the trip in about 1:15-1:20, and while we didn’t model the current rolling stock, my suspicion is that it should be around six minutes longer. The small difference in trip time is partly because Penn Station’s approach is a few kilometers longer than Grand Central’s and the curves in Queens and on the Hell Gate Bridge are tight.
What this means is that the highest priority should be getting trains down to this speed. In the Swiss electronics-before-concrete schema, the benefits of electronics on the Northeast Corridor are massive; concrete has considerable benefits as well, especially on sections where the current right-of-way constrains not just speed but also reliability and capacity, like New Haven-Kingston, but the benefits of electronics are so large that it’s imperative to make targeted investments to allow for such clean schedules.
Those investments do include concrete, to be clear. But it’s concrete that aims to make the trains flow more smoothly, in support of a repetitive schedule with few variations in train stopping patterns, so that the trains can be timetabled in advance not to conflict. At this point, I believe that grade-separating the interlocking at New Rochelle, popularly called Shell Interlocking and technically called CP 216, is essential and must be prioritized over anything else between the city limits of New York and New Haven Union Station. Currently, there’s very high peak traffic through the interlocking, with a flat junction between trains to Penn Station and trains to Grand Central.
On the electronics side, the timetables must become more regular. There are currently 20 peak trains per hour on the New Haven Line into Grand Central; of those, four go to branches and 16 are on the main line, and among the 16, there are 13 different stopping patterns, on top of the intercity trains. It is not possible to timetable so many different trains on a complex system and be sure that everything is conflict-free, and as a result, delays abound, to which the response is to pad the schedules. But since the padded schedules still have conflicts, there is a ratchet of slowdowns and padding, to the point that a delayed train can recover 20 minutes on less than the entire line. Instead, every train should either be a local train to Stamford or an express train beyond Stamford, and there should only be a single express pattern on the inner line, which today is nonstop between Harlem and Stamford and in the future should include a stop at New Rochelle; this means that, not taking intercity trains into account, the main line should have at most four stopping patterns (local vs. express, and Penn Station vs. Grand Central), and probably just three, since express commuter trains should be going to Grand Central and not Penn Station, as passengers from Stamford to Penn Station can just ride intercity trains.
Also on the electronics side, the way the line is maintained currently is inefficient to an extent measured in orders of magnitude and not factors or percents. Track inspection is manual; Metro-North finally bought a track geometry machine but uses it extremely unproductively, with one report saying it gets one tenth as much work done as intended. Normally these machines can do about a track-mile in an overnight work window, which means the entire four-track line can be regraded and fixed in less than a year of overnights, but they apparently can’t achieve that. Whatever they’re doing isn’t working; the annual spending on track renewal in Connecticut is what Germany spends on once-in-a-generation renewal. The endless renewal work includes a plethora of ever-shifting slow zones, and at no point is the entire system from New York to New Haven clear for trains, even on weekdays. The excessively complex schedule, on tracks that constantly shift due to segment-by-segment daytime repairs, is turning a trip that should be doable on current rolling stock in perhaps 1:23 into one that takes 2:10.
The billions of dollars in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that are dedicated to the Northeast Corridor and have not yet been spent can reduce trip times further. But the baseline should be that the bucket of money is a few hundreds of millions smaller and the base case trip time from New York to New Haven is an hour and not 1:37; this is what the system should be compared with.
Matthew Hutton
If the journey time is about an hour, then you are probably going to end up with a 2.5 hour round trip – or perhaps a 3 hour round trip if your reliability is low – although the Swiss would probably do a 3 hour round trip in general to be honest.
The borders railway in Scotland currently has a journey time of about an hour and does a 2.5 hour round trip between Tweedbank and Edinburgh.
And to be honest high speed tilting trains are also a very strong option. In Britain north of Preston/Leeds there is no way we are going to be able to justify building a new high speed line from either to Scotland. Far better to move the freight onto the Settle Carlisle line and reopen the line from Carlisle to Tweedbank. You could probably also electrify both and upgrade the Borders Railway with more capacity for a back of the envelope £2 billion, whereas a new dedicated line would cost at least £10 billion.
So really either we need to persuade the Japanese to sell us some high speed tilting trains for a sensible price, or we need to get the Germans/Spanish/Italian manufacturers to build us some.
The US is already getting tilting trains, at very high cost. But the impact of tilt on the trip time is moderate. Our example schedules assume Velaro Novo performance, which does not include tilt; at medium speeds, the Avelia Liberty can do 9″ (=230 mm) cant deficiency whereas we’re assuming 150 mm (which is high-end; 130 is more common, especially as speed goes up), so with 180 mm cant, this is an 11.5% speedup on curves. But then the Avelia accelerates more slowly, and doesn’t gain any speed boost on non-geometric speed limits like those of tunnels with limited free air, so the gain there is limited.
The journey time is not an hour end-to-end – no intercity train does just New York-New Haven. The commuter trains do, and there, trying to hit 1:20 so that it’s a three-hour roundtrip with short turnarounds is desirable but requires new rolling stock. But bear in mind that the desired frequency is very high anyway – probably 20 minutes to New Haven off-peak (it’s currently half an hour and the trains are a lot slower) – so that the numbers are pretty granular and if it’s 1:24 one-way and the roundtrip is 3:20 then it’s really not a big deal.
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Matthew Hutton
Fair enough. I guess tilting trains make more sense for express service with the negative of having more kinds of train.
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Matthew Hutton
Also off peak I think a 15-30 minute frequency with express and stopping service sounds good I suspect at peak times that some semi-express service will also be necessary.
Always going to be hard to slow down individual journey times even if it’s for the greater good – and if reduced padding speeds up most trips it is probably possible to have 3-4 stopping patterns without too much harm.
There already have to be more than two stopping patterns, because of the reverse-branch to Penn Station or Grand Central.
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Magnus
Long-term travel time goals should be really ambitious in such a populated global city.
Not only 75 minutes to New Haven including some stops, but also 75 min to Hamptons via Hempstead, Atlantic City via Brick and 90 min to Wilmington via Princeton & Philadelphia
Wilmington is on the intercity mainline already :).
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Reedman Bassoon
In US units: New York to New Haven is ~81 miles, so to do this in an hour means averaging 81 miles per hour.
On the Hudson Line, New York to Poughkeepsie is about the same distance. Can it be done in an hour?
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anonymouse
By Metro North’s mileposts it’s about 72.5 miles to New Haven and 73 to Poughkeepsie, I think a 73 mph average should be doable even with padding and stops, but fixing the GCT approach is key, the last mile from 59th to 42nd is limited to 10 mph and accounts for 6 minutes of travel time.
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Matthew Hutton
Fastest London-Banbury service with a 100mph top speed, DMU trains and one intermediate stop manages an average of 74.5mph over 69 miles.
So 73mph average should be doable with that as a baseline.
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Matthew Hutton
If you run a train every 20 minutes with a 3h20 round trip you need 10 trains to do it, if you have a train every 30 minutes with a 5 hour round trip you also need 10 trains. So the cost increase to improve the service as Alon is proposing will be pretty small, just the marginal wear and tear and the fuel etc.
Basically if you can get that level of improvement you might double the number of trips without increasing costs much at all. That should allow you to pay for fairly significant capital improvements to achieve – maybe 10x the current total passenger fare revenue on a given line.
That might well allow you to improve service on all these other lines as well – subject of course to being able to deliver capital projects for a sensible budget.
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Matthew Hutton
Stage one on some of these branch lines is just to run a 2 car service every 30-60 minutes all day and to see what happens. If you do that does the extra service cover its own running costs?
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adirondacker12800
<i> passengers from Stamford to Penn Station can just ride intercity trains.</i>
Then you have to run empty seats between Boston and Stamford.
You don’t, because Boston -> New York and Stamford -> New York peak at different times.
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adirondacker12800
They have radically different demand all day long.
The Stamford local to Grand Central can meet the New Haven express to Penn Station at New Rochelle, everybody can have merry cross platform transfers without screwing up long distance services. The next batch can be another combination of local and express having merry cross platform transfers. You need amenable platforms at New Rochelle to do that. Larchmont maybe easier.
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Matthew Hutton
The number of passengers you need to justify running a train is very small – especially if it allows you to have consistent all-day service which helps ridership.
So to be fair if there are 75 people on the train from Boston to Stamford and then 1000 from Stamford to New York that is OK.
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adirondacker12800
And why would anybody but a crazed railfan do something like that? The intercity trains don’t have to participate in this AT ALL. The Metro North train going to or from Grand Central can meet the Metro North train going to or from Penn Station. Just like an intercity train could.
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Onux
Is this comment supposed to be a joke? You do realize that Acela, the Regionals, and even the Vermonter all stop in Stamford today, right?
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adirondacker12800
Yes Amtrak does run trains through Stamford. If someone who wants to go from New York to Boston is sitting in a seat someone who wants to go from Stamford to New York cannot sit in it. Or New Rochelle to Hartford or New Haven to Philadelphia or Providence to Trenton or ….. Or there are a lot of empty seats between Stamford and Boston.
Metro North is proposing to someday run six trains an hour from the New Haven Line to Penn Station. It’s unclear what the service pattern will be. There can be merry cross platform transfers at select stations between Metro North trains to or from Grand Central and Metro North trains to or from Penn Station. Along with trains that go alllllllllllllllll the way to Boston via Providence and other trains that go to Boston via Springfield and an occasional train to Vermont.
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Onux
You are making less sense than before. Are you saying that a Stamford-NY customer is trying to take a seat that a Bos-NY or NH-Phila or Prov-Trenton would have? Because by your own logic the train shouldn’t be stopping in NH or Prov – to give those customers a seat means you are “a lot of empty seats” between NH or Prov and Boston.
The fact is that there are more travel patterns than just Bos-NY. Trains work well by linking multiple stops on a linear route, so that a single vehicle can serve multiple journeys (like Bos-Stamford, Stamford-NY, NH-NY, Prov-Trenton, etc.) The NEC is large and busy enough that there should be a Nozomi/Express service only making the big stops (DC-Balt-Phila-NY-NH[for transfers more than size]-Bos). Your primary Bos-NY traffic goes there. As a second tier Limited/Acela stop, Stamford can absolutely take traffic to NY without huge effects on passenger load; a person who went Bos-New London can see their seat filled again in Stamford, as an example.
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adirondacker12800
You do understand the convention is that only one person occupy a seat at a time?
And that the population of Connecticut isn’t evenly distributed. Neither is demand.
Or grasp the concept that Metro North will be running trains between New Haven and Penn Station. Someday, six of them an hour?
The train to Boston leaves Penn Station with 1,000 people and 300 of them get off at Stamford, 100 of them a Bridgeport and 200 of them at New Haven there will be 600-ish empty seats between New Haven and Boston. Metro North will be running more frequent service than Amtrak. A Metro North train can leave Penn Station with 600 people on it and terminate at New Haven. Why is that concept so difficult to grasp? Instead of attempting to coordinate frequent commuter trains with infrequent intercity trains Metro North can do cross platform magic where the local to Grand Central meets the express to Penn Station at New Rochelle and lots of people change trains. Without running lots of empty seats long distances because Metro North is originating and terminating trains mostly in Stamford or New Haven.
Transit Hawk
adirondacker12800, do you understand that if the train to Boston leaves Penn Station with 1000 people and 300 of them get off at Stamford but 100 different people get on at Stamford, 100 get off at Bridgeport but 50 more get on at Bridgeport, 200 get off at New Haven but 350 get on, the number of empty seats on the train when it leaves New Haven is in fact… 0?
Do you understand that travel demand actually functions in multiple directions? That people who get off the train are likely to be replaced by different people getting on the train? That this is, in fact, one of the key functions of a train? Or is the world according to adirondacker12800 one where nobody should ever seek to travel between New York and New London or if they must then they should be forced to swap trains three times? How about between New Haven and Providence? Stamford and Trenton? Heavens forbid that a Hartford resident take the train to Newark Airport.
In fact, why even bother having a scheduled intercity train service at all? Clearly we should just have perfectly synchronized transfers up and down the line with a single Nozomi train that waits patiently in Boston, only to depart once all 1000 seats are filled, and operate directly to Penn Station with no stops. No empty seats! Just as planned!
adirondacker12800
Hartford residents can take the train to Newark Airport now. Pity the Vermonter doesn’t stop at Newark Airport, they would have to change trains somewhere. Take your pick. I’d be inclined to use Penn Station New York. Less loitering. Hartford has an airport with service to major hubs. People can achieve the same goals that way too.
There can be more than one kind of train. The people who want to get to or from Manhattan to stations Metro North services can use a Metro North train to get to them. Without changing trains if they look at the smartphone welded to their hand and check the schedule.
The people who want to get from Newark to New London can get on the train that goes from Washington DC to Boston. Or someday the train from Detroit to Boston via Philadelphia. If they are sitting in a seat all the way, someone who wants to take that train to get from Manhattan to a station Metro North services, cannot sit in the same seat. Or if it is someone who wants to go from Philadelphia to Providence, is sitting in it. Or Baltimore to New Haven. Or …
There are multiple destinations and origins. There aren’t going to be 350 people getting on at New Haven. Because it is NEW HAVEN not Manhattan. It is unlikely there will be 350 people in the whole state of Connecticut getting on the train to Rhode Island and Massachusetts. BECAUSE IT’S CONNECTICUT. And it is going to the rest of New England, not the rest of the continent.
Onux
“It is unlikely there will be 350 people in the whole state of Connecticut getting on the train to Rhode Island and Massachusetts.”
New Haven Union Station is usually the 9th or 10th busiest Amtrak station in the whole country. It gets about 50% of the ridership of Boston South Station. Total Amtrak ridership in CT in 2022 was 20% higher than Bos South Station. You can absolutely give people in MNRR territory the option of riding Amtrak to Manhattan because ridership in the state is very robust and allowing those riders to actually use the train (isn’t there someone on this board who is always complaining about ignoring “pesky riders” who want to get on a train???) won’t detract from or prevent other ridership to/from Boston or anywhere else.
If there are not 350 people getting on a given train in CT going east, then there also won’t be 600 people getting off a given train in just Stamford/Bridgeport/NH either, and your concern about a 1000 seat train being 60% empty to Boston is moot.
adirondacker12800
I suspect there won’t be because they aren’t stupid and will take the Metro North train from Penn Station that stops at their station instead of waiting around for an Amtrak train and changing trains. Why do you find this concept so difficult to understand? That the commuter agency caters to the local traffic?
adirondacker12800
<i>there are 13 different stopping patterns</i>
Which allows them to run more trains with the existing electricity supply.
That’s not at all the limiting factor. Eisele’s papers proposing the zonal express system don’t mention electricity as a limiting factor requiring more express trains and fewer locals; his arguments are fast service to Manhattan and simplifying ticket collection by conductors when the zonal expresses align with fare zones. On the LIRR, the limiting factor to running more trains now that ESA is open is not electricity either, but rather rolling stock.
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adirondacker12800
Does it mention electricity at all? Railfans have lots of difficulty with volts time amps equaling watts.
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Tom M
That works on the DC third rail but then changes to absolute value of volts squared divided by absolute value of the load impedance squared multiplied by load resistance equalling watts when you move to AC power.
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adirondacker12800
Anything other than a purely resistive load gets complicated. I’m going to assume there is a lot of power factor correction going on all over the place.
It seems most railfans think there are an infinite number of watts available. There aren’t. Volts times amps equaling watts is a good place to start.
Why on earth haven’t you banned this worthless troll?
(Ok, not “worthless” – large negative value to the planet.)
henrymiller74
Why are watts not essentially infinite? Just call your local utility and get another connection to the grid. Sure we are taking a few hundred thousand dollars, but that is a line item on your train order.
If you are running a standard 25kv (overhead wire) this shouldn’t be a big deal – 25kv wires are good for a long distance and a lot of watts. If you need more power it should only be a few more grid connections and split the wires in half.
If you are running lower voltage DC (ie third rail) then it is more expensive. The AC to DC converters are not as readily available and the short distance DC is good for means if you need more you need a lot more and so while the watts from the grid are essentially infinite, the cost to get them is not cheap.
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adirondacker12800
It’s very likely that the answer from the utility will be “We don’t have any 138kV lines near there. We can’t do that. Would you like our engineers to call your engineers?”
Onux
“It’s very likely that the answer from the utility will be “We don’t have any 138kV lines near there.”
Except it is completely unlikely that a utility will every say this to Metro North. SW Connecticut is one of the most densely populated parts of the country and is absolutely covered with high voltage power lines. A most cursory web search for something like “New England power map” would immediately provide you:
138kV?! Give me a break, there is a 345kV line paralleling the track route from Devon to Norwalk. New Haven appears to have about half a dozen or more substations connected by multiple 138/115kV lines. There are substations in Devon, Bridgeport, Norwalk, Darien, Greenwich, and Cos Cob, just from eyeballing the substations with the same names as Metro-North stations. Worried about the branches? Don’t, there are also substations in Wilton, Ansonia, (South) Naugatuck and Waterbury – again just going by substations with the same name as a stop. Given that all of these substations are connected by a spaghetti of 138/115kV lines, it is a certainty that the tracks will be crossed in multiple locations by these high voltage services, providing lots of opportunities for MNRR to connect to the grid (like the “Devon RR” private substation already on the map).
henrymiller74
A hundred thousand dollars seems to be about the cost to get the utility to run a new line a mile. Yes engineers should call each other, trains have a lot of leeway as to where the line corrects.
Can you point at some resources on the track geometry cars? Like what exactly they are and how other agencies around the world use them more effectively
So is the main takeaway that if some revenue trains have inspection equipment, you don’t have to waste capacity or crew time running a dedicated inspection train? Which allows you to lift speed restrictions faster since theoretically you can do the maintenance work and then one of the ensuing revenue trains will just inspect and validate that for you?
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Onux
Given that Alon states track inspection is manual and references the machine performing one mile of work overnight, what Alon called a track “geometry car” is most likely referring to a track renewal machine, i.e. a piece of repair/construction equipment that can automatically grid and re-profile rails, replace worn sleepers, re-compact ballast, etc. to adjust track geometry back to where it should be (in terms of cant, rail straightness, etc., etc.)
The modern versions of these machines are like inverted assembly lines that can continuously perform multiple track work functions from front to rear while traveling at walking pace. The largest versions have a truss bridge section between two ends that allows the rails to be lifted and spread apart so every sleeper can be removed and replaced while ballast is lifted, cleaned and re-compacted, before the rails are pushed back together and reattached with very high accuracy. In this way continuously welded rail track can be serviced without every cutting the rail.
What most people would refer to as a “geometry car” is a measurement car/inspection that takes readings of the position and wear of rails, overhead wire, loading gauge, etc. These trains normally (even preferentially) operate at full speed during gaps in the schedule during the day, not at a mile a night. Usually these trains are run on a regular schedule that allows them to inspect all track once every 2-4 weeks. The results of the inspection inform where the track renewal units are sent to rehabilitate the line.
Do you have any any sources for the fact that railways are moving away from dedicated inspection trains? The Google translate is of course not perfect, but from what I gathered from the Japanese wiki article, inspection equipment in revenue sets was only being used on the Kyushu lines that are disconnected from the wider network. From what I can tell Dr. Yellow is still running on the Tokaido/Sanyo, “East i” is still being used on other lines, France still has TGV Iris, Britain is still using the Flying Banana, etc.
JR East is regularly using modular track geometry devices mounted on revenue rolling stock. It began with trials back in 2013~15 on the Keihin Tohoku Line.
Ok interesting, so a modern one is like these videos
And MetroNorth is still doing it like this video?
Or do they have a more modern machine and just use it ineffectively? Because to Alon’s point, the Union Pacific people saying they can do 1.8-2 miles a day implies it’d be easy to renew the entire 4 tracks of New Haven line in a year
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xh
The TLMs are rather similar across railroads, given that most such machines are from, or at least derived from Plasser & Theurer. To maximize their efficiency, you’ll need standarized track components. One thing that frustrates me a lot is MNR’s decision to replace concrete ties with wood ones, while the rest of the world is doing vice versa.
They’re traditional in the US, so whenever there’s any problem with a concrete sleeper project, the railroad decides that wood is the only way that works (if there’s a problem with wood, it’s treated as normal).
Onux
@xh, @Andrew in Ezo
Those were good informative links, thank you. The trend makes sense. In the original “Dr. Yellow” type trains each car had a different function (one measured voltage and current, one analyzed the rails, etc.) but in the most recent version I believe that all of the measurement equipment is in one or two cars, and the rest of the consist is just to ensure proper weight and braking force. With miniaturization of all kinds of sensors there is no reason not to put the measurement tools on regular revenue consists.
@joekusters
Yes, those are the types of machines. I have no idea what MNRR has or how they are using it, but as you note there is no reason they can’t keep all of their track at a very high quality using modern equipment. Even if they get slower production than UP (who can schedule ahead to close a line for a week by re-routing or just telling customers no deliveries then) because they can only work overnight, track does not need full renewal every year.
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