Arborwayfan wrote: ↑Fri Apr 02, 2021 4:07 pm
How frequent would you say service needs to be to
1. justify building and maintaining a separate passenger line
2. give enough freedom that a big chunk of the population will come to think of the train as being a reasonable, or even the obvious, way to make a certain trip ("frequency is freedom" is a great line; so many kinds of trips are easier with frequent public transp than they are by car, even some kinds of hiking trips)
3. make rail travel seem important in its own right to ordinary people, rather than having it always appear as some kind of sop to poor people, people with certain disabilities, environmentalists, and railfans?
The flatland parts of the western routes have plenty of space to add parallel tracks along much of their routes, Frontrunner style, which is just as good as rebuilding a separate parallel route, or even better, because the cost of things like grade crossing signals, drainage, etc., can be shared. In the mtns, not so much.
That's a good question and I've been pondering it.
First of all, let me make sure to give credit for "Frequency is Freedom" to where it is deserved. I came to it through the writings of Jarrett Walker, a transit planning professional in Portland:
https://humantransit.org/2011/12/how-fr ... eedom.html
More about Jarrett.
I think there is an inverse relationship between appropriate frequency and the distance (or time traveled). A couple of analogies:
- An airline might have one or two flights a day overseas, but will not do well without having a flight during every hub pulse (maybe 3-4 per day) to a major city 500 miles away.
- In public transit there is a general rule of thumb that a bus route that operates every 15 minutes or less is frequent, but that's not frequent enough for shorter trips and may be more than passengers expect for an express bus or a commuter train.
- A cruise line might send out a boat per day from a busy terminal, but a ferry, such as the Mackinac Island Ferries in Michigan are going to be every 30 minutes or so.
So I think the answer to the question is what is the likely travel distance on that route?
In my opinion, appropriate minimum train frequency for any service
should be at least two trains per day at a given point on the route. What the state on Minnesota is doing with the Empire Builder should be replicated nationwide because I don't think one departure per day in each direction makes for very marketable service (especially if it is at 3 am). That is
not a service that deserves a fully-dedicated passenger infrastructure.
But I don't think there are many places in the country that this type of service should be the goal or expectation. The Empire Builder route between Grand Forks and Spokane is probably a good example where that makes sense. The Overland Route through WY is another. Salt Lake City to Reno is pretty devoid of people too. There are others; but even the people who live in the wide open spaces in the west deserve better train service.
Taking MT, for instance, the
North Coast Limited was a 2300 mile transcontinental train taking almost 2 full days. It might make sense to operate another long distance train on that that route, but to me its a no-brainier to offer day-time service between Billings, Bozeman, Butte, and Missoula. That's a total distance of 355 miles. The schedule linked above averaged 46 mph through that stretch (about 7:45 total trip time). The nearest cities are 95 to 140 mile apart.
I'm going to assume that a passenger only line with modern equipment could make that trip at an average of 55 mph. If departures were offered every 3 hours, only five passing sidings would be needed along the entire route. This sketch yields a 6:27 end to end schedule and four full-corridor round trips and an additional 2 trains per day in each direction starting from the middle cities of the corridor. It would take 6 sets of equipment (with pretty crappy utilization and extremely long turns).
Shifting the schedule to 2.5 hours between departures allows the same 6 sets of equipment to provide an additional full-corridor round trip and have more efficient turns (~1 hour) and would also require five sidings. (Though in different locations: One would be very close to Butte; I think it is ideal to have the passenger train meets be at or near stations.).
Note that by starting with 5 hours between departure and only 3 trainsets, you can get about half of this service with only two sidings. That might be a good incremental start while some of the infrastructure is being finished.
The type and amount of traffic on a corridor should set the equipment type, and there is no reason that some of these trips can't start or end further west (Spokane?) or east (Bismark?). A lower density corridor like this might be a good candidate for a DMU, but then again, most modern DMUs aren't set up to be as comfortable for longer journeys.
By now, you're probably thinking I've lost my marbles because I'm advocating for high frequency corridor service in Montana. In terms of priority you are absolutely right! This service wouldn't and shouldn't be the highest priority. But is was a simple example to illustrate how passenger-only tracks can provide a lot of service with largely single-track operations.
I also realize as I finish this that the more active rail line today goes through Helena rather than Butte, but I don't think that substantially changes the illustration. (oops)
In the case of a low traffic line in the west somewhere, it
might be possible to run trains of this average speed that frequently without having passenger-only tracks, but trying to replicate something similar in the east (say between Toledo and Pittsburgh) would not be possible without dedicated tracks--not to mention that by getting out of the mountains, average train speed can be much higher (70+ mph including stops), making the capacity problem of mixed speeds much worse.
To boil all of this down to a direct answer to your question, for rail journeys between 1 and 6 hours, I think that 3 hours between departures is a workable minimum that both justifies the infrastructure and makes the service a viable first transportation option. Better frequency (just like higher speeds) should be the goal, but that seems like a good point to aim a corridor service at.
Furthermore, I believe it should be the plan in the US and Canada to implement this type of clock-face service everywhere cities and towns are within these distances and where rail lines exist (or can easily be built). Naturally, some of these fruits hang quite a bit lower than others.
