by F-line to Dudley via Park
You have to figure that for starters you shouldn't be thinking beyond Portland. For one, NYP-PTC itself is an extremely tiny Year One demand market. The whole reason you can do it is that by "hiding" it inside the routing of two high-demand routes southwest and north of Boston gives it the protection it needs to get put on a permanent schedule. We are expecting that in Year One the ticketholders doing an end-to-ender on any given train may not number more than a few dozen (and no doubt far less than that on crappy weather days well out-of-season), and that the bulk of the patronage will be using it as semi-express Inlands and semi-express Downeasters with the same near-complete demand turnover around Greater Boston. But it hides those low end-to-ender margins so well that it affords a good, long time to slow-cook that demand until NYP-PTC starts bringing in tangibly lucrative margins of its own. Please don't overestimate this as if there's some demand dam about to burst in Worcester or Springfield or New Haven that's going to stampede on these trains. That isn't there today. It may only be there in middling quantities in 10 years from now. But by getting such an operationally low-profile service established, Maine has all the time in the world to slow-cook that naturally slow-cooking demand build into something significant.
Just don't race ahead of the timetable and try to microwave a slow-cooked meal. These patrons aren't thinking Northern Maine one-seat. The schedules, even with the minimum infrastructure requirements for Day 1 of 1) completed Springfield Line upgrades + 2) completed B&A/Worcester Line upgrades + 3) a rounding error's worth of Grand Junction uprating...are still very long. And that's because the NEC and NH Main/Western Route trunks themselves are still leaving so much infrastructure slack on the table on how they could be performing. You need those New Haven Line restrictions zapped with the bridge replacements and all manner of other mandatory state-of-repair and congestion mitigation moves. You need the underwhelming speeds from Somerville to Wilmington on the NH Main tightened up; going Class 5 there would really bleed some time off the clock on both ends of Anderson and make the DE in Massachusetts about as taut as it's going to get. You need lots of congestion mitigation in the Andover-Bradford stretch of the Western Route where the freights approaching Lawrence Yard from both directions are a big toilet clog...one that's going to get much worse as freight volumes increase. You have dozens of spots on the Western Route in NH and ME where there are still speed restrictions to play whack-a-mole on, still spots underperforming their B&M heyday, and lots of work to do on capacity enhancement to stay ahead of those same freight congestion increases that are starting to rear ugly head in Massachusetts.
^^All of this mainline bolt-tightening is worth dozens of minutes or more on the schedule after baseline NYP-PTC service has initiated, and gives that small seed food for growth. Maine has to understand that there will never be a day where the Western Route main isn't #1 investment priority. Every job of trying to expand their network's one-seat options heightens--significantly--the urgency of a new round of upgrades to the bread-and-butter and triaging with their neighbors on the other bread-and-butter mains. Otherwise the seed doesn't grow fast enough, and they're out too far on a wobbly limb trying to reach further and further north. Maine has limited means of multitasking big-ticket items, so they have to prioritize. If they want to get Augusta, etc. strung up...how much does one-seat from Day 1 matter to them? It increases the non-optional investment in big bucks to get the Western Route to bleed some significant time off the clock. If that north-of-Portland seed-planting involves transfers...maybe you circle wagons first around the intra-staters for planting the flag up there and defer the one-seats until you can throw a full-on moneybomb at the Western Route later. They probably do not have the resources to do it all in one mega moneybomb without falling flat on faces. Prioritization matters.
And I think the trunks matter way more than the stems if you want that slow-cooker to cook a little less-slowly.
As for reverses...yes, both BON and PTC are reverses. Operationally that probably doesn't make a big difference since they are hundreds of miles apart. But if Portland still has aims on eventually getting a union station fully integrated with downtown and off that Mountain wye, then that's another point in favor of strengthening the trunk before overvaluing sending New Yorkers way out on the stems.
Just don't race ahead of the timetable and try to microwave a slow-cooked meal. These patrons aren't thinking Northern Maine one-seat. The schedules, even with the minimum infrastructure requirements for Day 1 of 1) completed Springfield Line upgrades + 2) completed B&A/Worcester Line upgrades + 3) a rounding error's worth of Grand Junction uprating...are still very long. And that's because the NEC and NH Main/Western Route trunks themselves are still leaving so much infrastructure slack on the table on how they could be performing. You need those New Haven Line restrictions zapped with the bridge replacements and all manner of other mandatory state-of-repair and congestion mitigation moves. You need the underwhelming speeds from Somerville to Wilmington on the NH Main tightened up; going Class 5 there would really bleed some time off the clock on both ends of Anderson and make the DE in Massachusetts about as taut as it's going to get. You need lots of congestion mitigation in the Andover-Bradford stretch of the Western Route where the freights approaching Lawrence Yard from both directions are a big toilet clog...one that's going to get much worse as freight volumes increase. You have dozens of spots on the Western Route in NH and ME where there are still speed restrictions to play whack-a-mole on, still spots underperforming their B&M heyday, and lots of work to do on capacity enhancement to stay ahead of those same freight congestion increases that are starting to rear ugly head in Massachusetts.
^^All of this mainline bolt-tightening is worth dozens of minutes or more on the schedule after baseline NYP-PTC service has initiated, and gives that small seed food for growth. Maine has to understand that there will never be a day where the Western Route main isn't #1 investment priority. Every job of trying to expand their network's one-seat options heightens--significantly--the urgency of a new round of upgrades to the bread-and-butter and triaging with their neighbors on the other bread-and-butter mains. Otherwise the seed doesn't grow fast enough, and they're out too far on a wobbly limb trying to reach further and further north. Maine has limited means of multitasking big-ticket items, so they have to prioritize. If they want to get Augusta, etc. strung up...how much does one-seat from Day 1 matter to them? It increases the non-optional investment in big bucks to get the Western Route to bleed some significant time off the clock. If that north-of-Portland seed-planting involves transfers...maybe you circle wagons first around the intra-staters for planting the flag up there and defer the one-seats until you can throw a full-on moneybomb at the Western Route later. They probably do not have the resources to do it all in one mega moneybomb without falling flat on faces. Prioritization matters.
And I think the trunks matter way more than the stems if you want that slow-cooker to cook a little less-slowly.
As for reverses...yes, both BON and PTC are reverses. Operationally that probably doesn't make a big difference since they are hundreds of miles apart. But if Portland still has aims on eventually getting a union station fully integrated with downtown and off that Mountain wye, then that's another point in favor of strengthening the trunk before overvaluing sending New Yorkers way out on the stems.
