Market Frankford and NHSL

While I am sure there are more than a few good reasons (history, guage, voltage, station size, single tracked bridge into Norristown etc.) why the Norristown High Speed Line and the Market Frankford El haven't been combined into one service, I was wondering if there had ever been such a combination considered in the past.

It would seem to make sense as I would doubt most NHSL customers end thier journey at 69th street and probably nearly all transfer to head downtown. I would assume such a combination of service would entail extending the MF line as the small trains from the NHSL wouldn't be very good for the larger loads on the rest of the line.

Anyone ever heard of such a proposal? Any other reasons the two services couldn't be combined?

Main Line Nimby's for one.

A connection's been talked about on and off (mostly off) for decades but can't be done at any reasonable cost. One line or the other would have to essentially be rebuilt from the ballast up. For starters as you noted, the gauges are different: the MFL is 5' 2.5" "Pennsylvania gauge" while the NHSL is standard. That 6" difference precludes mixed-gauge operation - just as the steam RR owners intended at the end of the 19th century. But even if the rails and power supplies on one line were completely redone platform lengths and clearances along with curve radii are all different too. Converting the NHSL to broad gauge would preclude any future connection to other standard-gauge lines. (OK, not likely any time in the next 40 years but why create even potential incompatibilities?) Finally there's the question of providing alternate service during reconstruction. Back when the line was closed for a few months following the demise of the Bullets, ridership took a long time to recover. A full rebuild would potentially shut it down for as much as a couple of years.

About the only change that could be made without a physical modification would be to run different-length consists on the El. The current 6-car trains could end at 69th St. while shorter ones could continue on to Norristown. But even there, the NHSL would probably lose its ability to run single-car locals which is one of its great efficiencies.

The MFL and BSS have very similar incompatibilities which is why there's never been any serious effort to connect them. The need to change lines at City Hall is part of the landscape, and the connection at 69th St. is only slightly less convenient. Even first-class operations like The Tube or the Paris Métro have interchanges, which I guess have to be considered as a cost of the network model.

FWIW at its inception the PSTC specifically designed its trolley lines for eventual interoperability, but even that less-complicated connection never happened.

... and if everything else weren't enough, there's a significant difference in elevation at 69th St. which would take some expensive land acquisition to overcome.

A related question:

From what you all have said there are good reasons to not just do the construction for through-running. Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but is there currently any degree of coordination between the schedules or the MFL and NHSL? Does either one hold for the other's connection? What about the other trolleys, or even buses? I imagine the inconvenience of transferring would be much less if the layovers were scheduled to be short.

I know similar systems are in use in scheduling trains in Europe, Japan, and increasingly at airline hubs. I'm curious if it's ever been considered or used at 69th St.

The MFL runs frequently enough that it doesn't need timed connections.

Depends how you define "frequently enough". If it's off-peak, having to wait around for an MFL train can add an additional 10 minutes, and off-peak is when driving is most attractive due to reduced traffic. Timed connections would also be useful going from MFL to NHSL, since that runs less frequently an untimed connections would add a lot more time than in the reverse direction. Plus there's the other trolleys and buses, but I suppose that's a separate topic.

JT and FEQ:

The Market-Frankford Line operates frequently enough during peak periods in which one should not have any
problems transferring to the Norristown High Speed Line taking note of the time of the run to 69th Street and to
allow a few minutes to go up the stairs from the MFSE platform out to the NHSL boarding location. With the fare
collection change to "pay enter" one has a better shot at making a tight connection depending on how long the car
is open before boarding and if there is a line outside the boarding car of passengers waiting to pay their fares.

I have learned when the MFSE is operating on the "printed" timetable in which each run has a distinct scheduled
time at each station 5 to 6:30 am and after 8 pm weekdays; Saturday and Sunday before 8 am and after 7:30 pm
you can time your connections by using both the MFSE and NHSL timetables to co-ordinate how long the transfer
at 69th Street will be - to be on the safe side allow 5 or more minutes to go between platforms at 69th Street.

At times when the MFSE uses more frequent service as noted in the timetable "Every 6 min or less until 6:00 pm
and then every 10 minutes until 8:00 pm" the running time to 69th Street can be calculated by noting where you
board and then knowing the running time to 69th Street. MFSE trains run every 10 minutes weekends beginning
at 8:42 am westbound until 8:17 pm - and 8:00 am eastbound until 7:32 pm.

Going from the NHSL to the MFSE is easier because the NHSL always runs on a distinct schedule - what you need
to know is when your NHSL train is due into 69th Street and a good idea at least when the MFSE train will leave.
This is easier to plot during the times that the MFSE is on the printed schedule showing exact eastbound leaving
times. On a related matter I use these timetables especially when I connect to buses to allow ample transfer time.

MACTRAXX

Another factor helping riders make the MFL to MFSE connection at off-peak times is that NHSL operators often (granted, not always) will hold their car if they see an El train pulling in on the lower level.

ferroequinologist wrote:Plus there's the other trolleys and buses, but I suppose that's a separate topic.

I'd say it is a related topic here. The late, much-missed Ron DeGraw worked on a timed-transfer scheme at the Norristown Transportation Center. NTC is served by the RRD, NHSL, and 8 bus lines which makes it roughly analogous to but less complex than 69th Street. He told me they were able to make some fairly significant improvements but still fell far short of keeping all wait times to a minimum. There were just too many uncertainties, especially because bus timings are less dependable than rail*. Coordinated connections at 69th Street would be at least as problematic and quite possibly could become political. At a minimum they'd also have to account for the 101 and 102 whose combined passenger-mile load is nearly comparable to the NHSL. Right there you have four degrees of freedom. Adding buses to the mix would be problematic no matter what; it would be far more difficult to coordinate all of them than at the NTC, but it's doubtful SEPTA could single out only certain routes for coordination without raising riders' hackles on the others.

Having used network-based transit systems in over a dozen different cities around the world, my semi-naive takeaway is that there are really only two ways to address the problem: either offer service sufficiently frequent to make wait times a non-issue for most riders, or sigh and recognize that sometimes waiting is unavoidable. What I've seen from Berlin to Sydney is that well-run systems try to maximize the first and minimize the second, but no one's ever able to reach complete success.

* But we railfans already know that, ha!

Interesting points. NHSL operators holding when a MFL train gets in are the sorts of things I'm thinking of--even if timing connections doesn't make sense, at least you can try to make sure people don't just miss a connection. I guess I hadn't realized how long it takes to connect at 69th St anyway. If it takes 4 minutes to get from NHSL to MFL anyway, there's no point in even trying to time them from a schedule perspective. In Japan where they do time like that I think it's usually for cross-platform interchanges, which is more how I imagined things (and they don't do it with buses, so I don't think a similar system would be feasible). When they do this sort of thing at airports and in Europe they're not working with service frequencies anywhere near the ones the MFL has, usually it's hourly trains or buses.

I guess it might make more sense with timing buses to meet trolleys, but buses aren't scheduled reliably enough to matter with trolley frequencies, and I'm not sure how much demand there is for faster connections between bus routes and trolleys there. The main application I could think of is timing an express bus to the airport with trolleys. That'd provide a much better option to get to the airport than currently exists (RRD with a layover at 30th St, which makes any trip to the airport take an hour, or a slow bus from 69th St).