future electrification routes?

Just to keep something in mind.

Electrifying the 155 miles from New Have to Boston in the 1990s cost over $2B - by my calculations, approximately $15.4M per route-mile.

djlong wrote:Just to keep something in mind.

Electrifying the 155 miles from New Have to Boston in the 1990s cost over $2B - by my calculations, approximately $15.4M per route-mile.

To expand on this, that was just the cost of installation and if memory serves, included track and bridge improvements. This doesn't cover the cost of adding an entire department to support your operation nor the costs of purchasing/generating electric power. I seriously doubt any freight operator in their right minds would electrify their territory, especially to help passenger service. CSX, NS, Conrail (now shared assets) have repeatedly stated they would not allow catenary over their territories. It isn't worth the costs and the hassle, particularly when you have to either electrify sidings and other tracks to support the electrification or maintain a diesel fleet for the same territory. You don't have to worry about keeping off the top of equipment, trees in the wires, power companies failing to provide power, ice inspections, etc.

You also don't have to worry about maintaining a specialized/localized piece of equipment. For those who insist the MBTA should have purchased electric equipment, that makes zero sense. You now have a confined fleet that is trapped on the shore line. Currently, any train can traverse any territory at any time. If there is a fatality at New Hyde Park or wires comes down and the line is shut down, the MBTA can use the Dorchester Branch as an alternative. Meanwhile, Amtrak and their electric fleet is stuck. There is something to be said for a piece of equipment that can go anywhere at anytime. Furthermore, Amtrak can charge fees for the use of their catenary, which can be expensive. This was cited when Conrail started clipping their catenary. These are reasons MARC cited when they basically stated they want out of the electric operation.

It sounds good on paper (well, not really) but most of the buffy content in this thread will not occur and for good reasons.

To clarify my original question, I'm looking at least 15, 20 years down the road. In the meantime, what can we apply from European and Japanese electric rail technology here? What can we learn from the failures of electrification in the past? Diesels arn't going away anytime soon it seems. Perhaps in 20 years maglev power won't be so cost prohibitive and there probably will be advances in electrification. We will see... As for nuclear: the massive public subsidies, toxic uranium mines and waste disposal issues make it a very un green boondogle.

NRGeep wrote:To clarify my original question, I'm looking at least 15, 20 years down the road. In the meantime, what can we apply from European and Japanese electric rail technology here? What can we learn from the failures of electrification in the past? Diesels arn't going away anytime soon it seems. Perhaps in 20 years maglev power won't be so cost prohibitive and there probably will be advances in electrification. We will see... As for nuclear: the massive public subsidies, toxic uranium mines and waste disposal issues make it a very un green boondogle.

Enviros don't want new hydro generation, some want existing dams removed, and very few undeveloped feasible hydro sites exist in any event. Nuclear is extremely reliable. True that ratepayers would need to pay more for new nuclear than the cost for new gas or coal generation. But a lot less than for equivalent solar or wind. Solar and wind generation are intermittent resources and considerably more costly than nuclear because of the need among other things, for extensive new transmission, constant backup generation availability and the need for facilities to constantly and instantly balance customer load and generation supply. Nuclear spent fuel waste disposal issues are purely political, there are no significant technical hurdles. In addition, other countries reprocess (recycle) their spent nuclear fuel thereby reducing the waste stream and need for raw material. The US does not because of a several decades old law. From an environmental and economic standpoint, nuclear is the only reasonable option. The industry is actively engaged in research and development of small (100 to 300MW or so) modular nuclear reactors that are expected to be more economic than the present 1000+ MW reactors. Future traction power supply is not a roadblock to railroad electrification so long as politics does not muck up the works.

ThirdRail7 wrote:Electrifying the 155 miles from New Have to Boston in the 1990s cost over $2B - by my calculations, approximately $15.4M per route-mile.

To expand on this, that was just the cost of installation and if memory serves, included track and bridge improvements. This doesn't cover the cost of adding an entire department to support your operation nor the costs of purchasing/generating electric power. I seriously doubt any freight operator in their right minds would electrify their territory, especially to help passenger service. CSX, NS, Conrail (now shared assets) have repeatedly stated they would not allow catenary over their territories. It isn't worth the costs and the hassle, particularly when you have to either electrify sidings and other tracks to support the electrification or maintain a diesel fleet for the same territory. You don't have to worry about keeping off the top of equipment, trees in the wires, power companies failing to provide power, ice inspections, etc.

And diesel fuel is free, right? Hahaha. Diesel is pricey and only going up in price. If the law were changed to stop the railroads from doing fuel surcharges, we'd see wire going up on the Southern Transcon, with other lines following rather rapidly. You can make dual-mode locomotives. Electric freight motors would be short on weight for tractive effort, so you either fill them full of steel or concrete, or put a diesel engine or two in there for terminal ops, like getting in and out of container loading facilities where you physically can't have wire above the tracks.

You also don't have to worry about maintaining a specialized/localized piece of equipment. For those who insist the MBTA should have purchased electric equipment, that makes zero sense. You now have a confined fleet that is trapped on the shore line. Currently, any train can traverse any territory at any time. If there is a fatality at New Hyde Park or wires comes down and the line is shut down, the MBTA can use the Dorchester Branch as an alternative. Meanwhile, Amtrak and their electric fleet is stuck. There is something to be said for a piece of equipment that can go anywhere at anytime. Furthermore, Amtrak can charge fees for the use of their catenary, which can be expensive. This was cited when Conrail started clipping their catenary. These are reasons MARC cited when they basically stated they want out of the electric operation.

It sounds good on paper (well, not really) but most of the buffy content in this thread will not occur and for good reasons.

Yes, it would be confined to the Shore Line, until they electrify other lines. And even that's not bad. They could have a small electric fleet, and the coaches are still standardized and would be able to run on any line, under diesel or electric. MBTA could always send diesels out to rescue the electrics, like other railroads do. It's ridiculous that we have railroads looking to go backwards to diesel under the wire, when we should be electrifying everything that has the traffic density to do so. The maintenance thing was brought up as a big negative for MBTA. However, they don't need to, at lest initially, maintain their own electrics. They could contract it out to NJT or Amtrak, and run them down there to get serviced, and keep doing diesel servicing in-house.

We need to electrify, and electrify in a big way. Based on the mile-tons and the routes they take, something like 10,000-17,000 miles of US freight railroads should electrify (around 8-12%), which would be something like half of the mile-tons of freight hauled in the US, and the lines that have additional capacity added because of electrification and other improvements could not only take trains that current take other routes, but also take a big bite out of truck freight. Furthermore, they should be all FRA Class 6 tracks, concrete with CWR, CT catenary, fully grade-separated, 2-4 tracks (the old Pensey Main Line and the Water Level Route are two that could be re-quad-tracked easily), full CTC/PTC, and high-speed crossovers, interlocking, and fly overs/unders.

NRGeep wrote:In addition, other countries reprocess (recycle) their spent nuclear fuel thereby reducing the waste stream and need for raw material. The US does not because of a several decades old law. From an environmental and economic standpoint, nuclear is the only reasonable option. The industry is actively engaged in research and development of small (100 to 300MW or so) modular nuclear reactors that are expected to be more economic than the present 1000+ MW reactors. Future traction power supply is not a roadblock to railroad electrification so long as politics does not muck up the works.

Yup. And new 4th gen reactor technologies will also allow re-use of existing waste fuel for hundreds of years and many cycles.

Much of the stuff on here is a bunch of BALONEY!!! I have had it with this stuff at least for now.
Noel Weaver

Oh I certainly agree that the MBTA has a chicken/egg scenario going - one of their problems is that they have SO many different kinds of vehicles to maintain and they wouldn't want to add another..

But I've been to Europe a few times and the thing that has struck me is how much electrification has gone on over there. I mean, we have it in Philadelphia, for crying out loud! There's no insurmountable reason why Boston, Chicago, LA and others couldn't electrify their commuter routes - and that would be the start of electrifying inter-city routes.

Oh there are reason - political will and money - but those can be overcome. If NYC can finally get the 2nd Avenue Subway project "unstuck", East Side Access, SF's new Central Subway, etc.. It *can* happen. (OK, Boston has the problem of long memories where the Big Dig funding was concerned and the connector required to really do regional rail *correctly* would be expensive)

djlong wrote:Oh I certainly agree that the MBTA has a chicken/egg scenario going - one of their problems is that they have SO many different kinds of vehicles to maintain and they wouldn't want to add another..

But I've been to Europe a few times and the thing that has struck me is how much electrification has gone on over there. I mean, we have it in Philadelphia, for crying out loud! There's no insurmountable reason why Boston, Chicago, LA and others couldn't electrify their commuter routes - and that would be the start of electrifying inter-city routes.

Oh there are reason - political will and money - but those can be overcome. If NYC can finally get the 2nd Avenue Subway project "unstuck", East Side Access, SF's new Central Subway, etc.. It *can* happen. (OK, Boston has the problem of long memories where the Big Dig funding was concerned and the connector required to really do regional rail *correctly* would be expensive)

I look forward to riding the SAS at least once... after my retirement in 20 or so years...

Noel Weaver wrote:Much of the stuff on here is a bunch of BALONEY!!! I have had it with this stuff at least for now.
Noel Weaver

Mod note: we have to take it easy here. By virtue of the fact that there is no electrification project on the books anywhere in the country, this thread has a "for fun" component, guaranteed to have some railfan baloney. We have a diverse forum with a lot of railroaders and a lot of railfans. Let's all respect each other and our opinions.

afiggatt wrote:The other is the Denver FasTracks project. Which is building 4 electrified commuter/regional rail lines on the north side of Denver by 2018, one of them to the Denver airport. The interesting part is that Denver is buying 56 EMU cars based on the SilverLiner V which are to be built/assembled in Philly. The doors on the Denver version appears to be configured for high level platforms only, which makes sense since Denver is building all new stations for the system. Quite impressive how quickly Denver is building out a rail transit system.

It's a lot easier to move quickly when you're starting from scratch, instead of working around 125+ years worth of legacy systems and structures.

djlong wrote:Oh I certainly agree that the MBTA has a chicken/egg scenario going - one of their problems is that they have SO many different kinds of vehicles to maintain and they wouldn't want to add another..

But I've been to Europe a few times and the thing that has struck me is how much electrification has gone on over there. I mean, we have it in Philadelphia, for crying out loud! There's no insurmountable reason why Boston, Chicago, LA and others couldn't electrify their commuter routes - and that would be the start of electrifying inter-city routes.

Oh there are reason - political will and money - but those can be overcome. If NYC can finally get the 2nd Avenue Subway project "unstuck", East Side Access, SF's new Central Subway, etc.. It *can* happen. (OK, Boston has the problem of long memories where the Big Dig funding was concerned and the connector required to really do regional rail *correctly* would be expensive)

The driver here may be RIDOT South County commuter rail, which the MBTA is about 90% likely to be the contracted operator for. If Providence-Westerly service and fattening up of the inside- I-295 belt with greater station density gets a recommendation or heavy Amtrak pressure for electric vehicles, RIDOT can exert a fair amount of influence on the T to go to an electric pool fleet for the Providence Line and and the RI intrastate service. Their current, very elastic agreement with the T gives them a paper ownership stake in the equipment pool that increases with each outside-MA service expansion. The T's still the ultimate decider, but FYI that they are bound to outside interests. They make a decent profit operating into RI because every penny of their operating and capital costs across the state line is subsidized by RIDOT, which is why they're quite happy to be the mercenary operator for those out-of-district routes.

A Providence pool fleet would have reasonable scale for supporting electrics. It would help if by the 2020-2022 range where they'd have to contemplate such a purchase that they'd be thinking seriously about electrifying the Fairmount Line to add some additional scale and have a longer-term eye on the Worcester Line. Those two additions + the Providence pool fleet end up being well over 60-65% (maybe even a little higher) of the southside's vehicle requirements. With the Needham, Franklin, and Stoughton Lines + the 3-branch Old Colony network being too low-return and not nearly saturated enough headways for electrics and fine to stay diesel forever. Ditto the northside network, which really doesn't have an in for electrification being disconnected from the southside.

As for other Northeastern commuter rail electrification expansion, I can't see it on any lines that aren't bootstrapped onto an Amtrak primary branchline. NJT would've been well-advised to fill in the diesel gaps on the North Jersey Coast Line and Morris & Essex Lines and, if anything, made its system a half-and-half split of full-diesel and full-electric lines instead of having such a confused and wasteful systemwide strategy with their equipment purchases and scope of the ALP45DP order. And that's about it. Metro North doesn't need to extend the electrification on the Harlem Line. They need to boost the power draw so it isn't straining to handle the existing electric service, and retrofit some of those too-small platforms to handle longer cars. Connecticut has no business electrifying Danbury when so few trains run thru to GCT or have any need to. It also likely can't electrify to a New Milford extension without messing with freight clearances. And it would have to rebuild its just-activated cab signal system on the line because it's not compatible with AC electrification. Just because this line had wires once upon a time doesn't mean it's manifest destiny that it have them again. Waterbury...who cares. The station spacing on that and the proposed Waterbury-Hartford CR are wide enough that diesel push-pull performs more-than-fine. Service levels will never be dense enough to return the investment.


As for the co-mingled Amtrak routes...how does electrification kick those routes up a notch unless the track underneath gets exhausted of investments in speed and capacity? This is the insanity of insisting the Springfield Line get wires right off the bat. The biggest single performance improvement left to tap is eliminating the crippling speed restrictions at the Wallingford and Meriden grade crossing clusters from hell. They shouldn't be thinking about ANY other frills until the money has been spent on those mass grade separation projects. Easily $250M right there. And the I-84 Viaduct replacement in Hartford is going to realign whole downtown sections of the line adjacent to the highway for the new cut 84 would be buried in. It's baffling enough that they'd build a busway that has to be equally be relocated by this highway project in 10 years, but they definitely have no reason to even fathom electrification until all that infrastructure gets revamped as a highway burial project dependency. Get to work in the meantime eliminating those crossing-related speed restrictions and pushing this line ever closer to 110 MPH. Every route that uses it from NHHS to the Shuttle to the Inlands to the Vermonter benefits the most the more streamlined and better-performing the Springfield Line track is. The wires don't max their investment until the track is ready to tap it.

Ditto on the Hudson. Metro North is such a godawful mess right now they've got a huge state-of-repair backlog to settle on the Hudson. Spuyten Duyvil needs a thorough reconfiguring of the junction. Signaling needs to get revamped. Amtrak has to finish the job getting its newly leased 85 miles to Schenectady in tip-top shape, sped up to as much 110 MPH territory as track geometry allows, and with all stations reconfigured for high platforms and extra tracks/platforms where needed. All the NY Central track capacity that was ripped out needs to be reinstated in commuter rail territory: 4th track continuing from Croton-Harmon to Peekskill, minimum 3 continuous tracks from the north limits of the rock cut pinch at Garrison to Rhinecliff (assuming a future MNRR extension there), slack space provisioned for future 4th track reinstatement there. Mass station reconfigurations of nearly every diesel-territory MNRR station around the extra tracks, with lengthened platforms. And several of the boat landing grade crossings have to get bridged over if transporting sailboats from the docks to the winter storage yard has any potential wire clearance issues. ALL...OF...THAT...must get done before wires to Albany (much less wires to anywhere fanning out of Albany) and replacing the MNRR 3rd rail north of the Spuyten Duyvil junction matters. Have fun funding that $1.5B before you even have the opportunity to fund another half-bil for the electrification.

And even relatively easy-reach Richmond needs TLC. Same speed and signaling improvements to best the track will handle. 3rd track pretty much the whole way. Grade crossing eliminations, including some of the same boat landing considerations. And decisions to make on whether the Amtrak and VRE station platforms go level boarding or half-and-half to support MARC thru-running or Acela thru-running to Richmond. Not nearly as expensive as the Hudson and Springfield to-do lists, but heavy grunt work all the same.

And of course...as long as the NEC is billions down the hole in state-of-repair deficits, no thru route to additional electric territory is going to be firing on all cylinders. The biggest by far improvements for the VA Regionals, Inlands and Vermonters, Keystones, and all commuter rail is settling up the NEC Infrastructure Master Plan bucket list: all the movable bridge replacements, the Baltimore tunnel, all the New Haven Line state-of-repair issues and solvable speed restrictions, all the commuter rail platforms that still need level boarding upgrades, all the 3rd/4th track projects south of Penn, all the 3rd track projects in MBTA territory, and slugging it out for the long haul on Gateway planning. That's biggest chunk of your schedule and frequency improvements to Springfield, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Second-biggest chunk...getting the existing branchline physical plant in the best shape and capacity it can be. Electrification is a tertiary need to all that tens of billions in investment.


Really...drop this insistence on electrification as some sort of Transit OCD completism thing. It's a long process, for one, because there's so much baseline work to do before these lines are able to tap peak benefits from electrification. All the states, Amtrak, and the federal government have to eat their peas on the basics first. Second...completism is self-defeating when nowhere near every branch-off-a-branch or every commuter rail line can return the investment. Some are too diffuse. Some have too many low-frequency branches. And traffic weights so heavily to some lines that the most transformative electrification is the most concentrated: the MBTA focusing on its RI pool, Worcester, and Fairmount; NJT filling the gaps before it cares about all-new end-to-enders; MNRR fixing its capacity issues before it even has the means to lay more wires or 3rd rail. And third...good dual-mode options makes total completism relatively moot. The Empire Corridor shouldn't be thought of as an electrification monolith. NYP-Schenectady shares all routes. After that the Adirondack and Ethan Allen have peeled off and the ALB short-turns have turned back. Why worry about the Water Level Route now when it needs its own mind-bogglingly expensive track upgrades before the wires go up, has wires-over-double-stack considerations to plan for, and with the biggest schedule boost coming south of Albany? And why does the B&A outside of MBTA territory need to be in the conversation? It's another wires-over-DS clearance fix, has no commuter rail considerations, has limited possibilities of any new intermediate stops on the LSL or Inlands to make electric vs. diesel performance from a dead stop matter too much, can't have its speeds pushed too much higher through the Berkshires or Worcester Hills, and in your wildest dreams will never have more than 10-12 trains per day east of Springfield or more than a couple more west of Springfield. Does it really matter if there are contiguous wires when a Sprinter-based dual mode in the near future will be able to branch off New Haven engine-swap free making better time than current equipment? And will be able to cover ever-shorter diesel gaps when MBTA territory gets filled in and the Springfield Line gets filled in? Who other than the most obsessive compulsive is going to care if by 2030 the 53 miles between Springfield and Worcester has to have the diesel engine fire up when all else has been filled in and this is the stretch of least concern, lowest upside, and diminishing returns on ROI? Nobody. The money not spent on OCD completism gets poured into improvements on the most consequential parts of the route to greater benefit to schedule and capacity than being completist.

The big picture is a whole lot more diverse than just wires, wires everywhere.

The big picture is a whole lot more diverse than just wires, wires everywhere.

Worldwide carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere is going to be the most important factor in this.

F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:The driver here may be RIDOT South County commuter rail, which the MBTA is about 90% likely to be the contracted operator for. If Providence-Westerly service and fattening up of the inside- I-295 belt with greater station density gets a recommendation or heavy Amtrak pressure for electric vehicles, RIDOT can exert a fair amount of influence on the T to go to an electric pool fleet for the Providence Line and and the RI intrastate service. Their current, very elastic agreement with the T gives them a paper ownership stake in the equipment pool that increases with each outside-MA service expansion. The T's still the ultimate decider, but FYI that they are bound to outside interests. They make a decent profit operating into RI because every penny of their operating and capital costs across the state line is subsidized by RIDOT, which is why they're quite happy to be the mercenary operator for those out-of-district routes.

A Providence pool fleet would have reasonable scale for supporting electrics. It would help if by the 2020-2022 range where they'd have to contemplate such a purchase that they'd be thinking seriously about electrifying the Fairmount Line to add some additional scale and have a longer-term eye on the Worcester Line. Those two additions + the Providence pool fleet end up being well over 60-65% (maybe even a little higher) of the southside's vehicle requirements. With the Needham, Franklin, and Stoughton Lines + the 3-branch Old Colony network being too low-return and not nearly saturated enough headways for electrics and fine to stay diesel forever. Ditto the northside network, which really doesn't have an in for electrification being disconnected from the southside.

When they finally do the north-south commuter rail connector, the only option is to go 100% electric, as diesels can't operate in the tunnel. It would be two improvements in one. It would decrease travel times while also offering quicker connections in the city itself, so it would really help downtown Boston out. I think Amtrak should take a stand, and at a minimum tell the MBTA that they're getting ZERO expansion on the NEC until they to electric. It's ridiculous that some of the fastest parts of the Acela route have diesel PP sets that can't get out of their own way.

As for other Northeastern commuter rail electrification expansion, I can't see it on any lines that aren't bootstrapped onto an Amtrak primary branchline. NJT would've been well-advised to fill in the diesel gaps on the North Jersey Coast Line and Morris & Essex Lines and, if anything, made its system a half-and-half split of full-diesel and full-electric lines instead of having such a confused and wasteful systemwide strategy with their equipment purchases and scope of the ALP45DP order. And that's about it. Metro North doesn't need to extend the electrification on the Harlem Line. They need to boost the power draw so it isn't straining to handle the existing electric service, and retrofit some of those too-small platforms to handle longer cars. Connecticut has no business electrifying Danbury when so few trains run thru to GCT or have any need to. It also likely can't electrify to a New Milford extension without messing with freight clearances. And it would have to rebuild its just-activated cab signal system on the line because it's not compatible with AC electrification. Just because this line had wires once upon a time doesn't mean it's manifest destiny that it have them again. Waterbury...who cares. The station spacing on that and the proposed Waterbury-Hartford CR are wide enough that diesel push-pull performs more-than-fine. Service levels will never be dense enough to return the investment.

NJT should electrify everything. They have the density to do it, and after the Gateway project, they will have some additional capacity, and they could connect the Main, Bergen, and Pascack lines to the NEC to offer Penn Direct service. Danbury and Waterbury will become a lot more important when the $117B NEC plan is put into play, and they act as feeders on both ends. Up in the New Milford area, there can't be any obstructions that are that hard to raise clearances on in order to put wires in that can run with freight. If you electrify NYP-ALB, that captures the GCT-POK runs, then Danbury is really the only thing left needing DM locomotives, as the Harlem has very little through-service. By electrifying, you get rid of that need. Agreed on the Harlem. They need to bulk up capacity and stations for full 12-car trains all the way to Southeast.

As for the co-mingled Amtrak routes...how does electrification kick those routes up a notch unless the track underneath gets exhausted of investments in speed and capacity? This is the insanity of insisting the Springfield Line get wires right off the bat. The biggest single performance improvement left to tap is eliminating the crippling speed restrictions at the Wallingford and Meriden grade crossing clusters from hell. They shouldn't be thinking about ANY other frills until the money has been spent on those mass grade separation projects. Easily $250M right there. And the I-84 Viaduct replacement in Hartford is going to realign whole downtown sections of the line adjacent to the highway for the new cut 84 would be buried in. It's baffling enough that they'd build a busway that has to be equally be relocated by this highway project in 10 years, but they definitely have no reason to even fathom electrification until all that infrastructure gets revamped as a highway burial project dependency. Get to work in the meantime eliminating those crossing-related speed restrictions and pushing this line ever closer to 110 MPH. Every route that uses it from NHHS to the Shuttle to the Inlands to the Vermonter benefits the most the more streamlined and better-performing the Springfield Line track is. The wires don't max their investment until the track is ready to tap it.

They should knock out every speed limitation that is physically possible as part of electrification. It's additive, not either-or.

Ditto on the Hudson. Metro North is such a godawful mess right now they've got a huge state-of-repair backlog to settle on the Hudson. Spuyten Duyvil needs a thorough reconfiguring of the junction. Signaling needs to get revamped. Amtrak has to finish the job getting its newly leased 85 miles to Schenectady in tip-top shape, sped up to as much 110 MPH territory as track geometry allows, and with all stations reconfigured for high platforms and extra tracks/platforms where needed. All the NY Central track capacity that was ripped out needs to be reinstated in commuter rail territory: 4th track continuing from Croton-Harmon to Peekskill, minimum 3 continuous tracks from the north limits of the rock cut pinch at Garrison to Rhinecliff (assuming a future MNRR extension there), slack space provisioned for future 4th track reinstatement there. Mass station reconfigurations of nearly every diesel-territory MNRR station around the extra tracks, with lengthened platforms. And several of the boat landing grade crossings have to get bridged over if transporting sailboats from the docks to the winter storage yard has any potential wire clearance issues. ALL...OF...THAT...must get done before wires to Albany (much less wires to anywhere fanning out of Albany) and replacing the MNRR 3rd rail north of the Spuyten Duyvil junction matters. Have fun funding that $1.5B before you even have the opportunity to fund another half-bil for the electrification.

Absolutely. They should fix all that as part of an electrification project, as well as modernizations like high-speed crossovers and grade separation. They should go ahead and put back all the track that was ever there. If the right of way is there, it's easy to do, and if you build it... they will come. Yes, you should bridge over everything, although I would think the railroad has right of way, and could force everything going over the crossings to be legal-height.

And even relatively easy-reach Richmond needs TLC. Same speed and signaling improvements to best the track will handle. 3rd track pretty much the whole way. Grade crossing eliminations, including some of the same boat landing considerations. And decisions to make on whether the Amtrak and VRE station platforms go level boarding or half-and-half to support MARC thru-running or Acela thru-running to Richmond. Not nearly as expensive as the Hudson and Springfield to-do lists, but heavy grunt work all the same.

And of course...as long as the NEC is billions down the hole in state-of-repair deficits, no thru route to additional electric territory is going to be firing on all cylinders. The biggest by far improvements for the VA Regionals, Inlands and Vermonters, Keystones, and all commuter rail is settling up the NEC Infrastructure Master Plan bucket list: all the movable bridge replacements, the Baltimore tunnel, all the New Haven Line state-of-repair issues and solvable speed restrictions, all the commuter rail platforms that still need level boarding upgrades, all the 3rd/4th track projects south of Penn, all the 3rd track projects in MBTA territory, and slugging it out for the long haul on Gateway planning. That's biggest chunk of your schedule and frequency improvements to Springfield, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Second-biggest chunk...getting the existing branchline physical plant in the best shape and capacity it can be. Electrification is a tertiary need to all that tens of billions in investment.

Really...drop this insistence on electrification as some sort of Transit OCD completism thing. It's a long process, for one, because there's so much baseline work to do before these lines are able to tap peak benefits from electrification. All the states, Amtrak, and the federal government have to eat their peas on the basics first. Second...completism is self-defeating when nowhere near every branch-off-a-branch or every commuter rail line can return the investment. Some are too diffuse. Some have too many low-frequency branches. And traffic weights so heavily to some lines that the most transformative electrification is the most concentrated: the MBTA focusing on its RI pool, Worcester, and Fairmount; NJT filling the gaps before it cares about all-new end-to-enders; MNRR fixing its capacity issues before it even has the means to lay more wires or 3rd rail. And third...good dual-mode options makes total completism relatively moot. The Empire Corridor shouldn't be thought of as an electrification monolith. NYP-Schenectady shares all routes. After that the Adirondack and Ethan Allen have peeled off and the ALB short-turns have turned back. Why worry about the Water Level Route now when it needs its own mind-bogglingly expensive track upgrades before the wires go up, has wires-over-double-stack considerations to plan for, and with the biggest schedule boost coming south of Albany? And why does the B&A outside of MBTA territory need to be in the conversation? It's another wires-over-DS clearance fix, has no commuter rail considerations, has limited possibilities of any new intermediate stops on the LSL or Inlands to make electric vs. diesel performance from a dead stop matter too much, can't have its speeds pushed too much higher through the Berkshires or Worcester Hills, and in your wildest dreams will never have more than 10-12 trains per day east of Springfield or more than a couple more west of Springfield. Does it really matter if there are contiguous wires when a Sprinter-based dual mode in the near future will be able to branch off New Haven engine-swap free making better time than current equipment? And will be able to cover ever-shorter diesel gaps when MBTA territory gets filled in and the Springfield Line gets filled in? Who other than the most obsessive compulsive is going to care if by 2030 the 53 miles between Springfield and Worcester has to have the diesel engine fire up when all else has been filled in and this is the stretch of least concern, lowest upside, and diminishing returns on ROI? Nobody. The money not spent on OCD completism gets poured into improvements on the most consequential parts of the route to greater benefit to schedule and capacity than being completist.

The big picture is a whole lot more diverse than just wires, wires everywhere.

I think you're making a good, valid, and true argument that a lot of work has to be done to the non-electric infrastructure as part of the electrification efforts. It shouldn't be an either-or. The thing is, you have to look at the various lines as a system, not just in isolation. The value of electrification on the core trunk routes is higher if they have more places that they can feed to that also have electrification. Yes, there are some lines that have little justification of being electrified by their own merits, but as part of a larger system, they would be very useful. Full dual-modes are a kludge that the railroads use because they're too poor to do it the right way. Commuter rail has no place running dual-modes, they should electrify all the way, or where the density gets really low (like the East End LIRR), just transfer to a much smaller DMU train, and maybe have a few big diesel push-pull sets in a yard somewhere for the occasional peak traffic demands (like going out to the Hamptons on summer Friday and Sunday afternoons, or peak Cape Cod traffic). Amtrak, however, could use ALP45DP-esque full dual-modes in order to reach some far-off places from an otherwise electrified network, like Cape Cod, or reaching north into Vermont and New Hampshire. Other places, however, like Atlantic City, should just go under the wire.

Freight has a different dual-mode need. They need to get in an out of terminals, including container facilities. That, however, just doesn't require the big horsepower, as it would be low-speed operation. You could have a 9,000HP electric motor with twin 1800HP diesel engines, and it would do just fine, running 75mph hotshot intermodal service under the wire, and then coming slowly into the terminal, doing the last mile or two with Tier-4 compliant engines burning biodiesel.

Using passenger dual-modes for "bridging gaps" just sounds like a bad idea, as it forces you to buy more expensive equipment, as opposed to just doing the electrification. Also, for Springfield to Worcester, if you do electrification from Albany to Worcester, you could tie together freight electrification from Chicago to Albany with the Springfield and Worcester container terminals. That now gets you single-level service down to Cedar Hill, and electrifying Worcester to Providence gets you racks and stacks under the wire to Davisville, as well as Ethanol to Providence. Now the relatively small diesel systems in dual-mode-light freight locomotives can finish off the last few hundred yards of these freight moves. It's all about the system. The system should be comprised of heavily improved electrified freight lines that form the backbone, with all the bells and whistles, and then feeder lines off of those to funnel traffic onto these "steel interstates".

And the more I think about it, the more I realize that there is huge value to building another, parallel, 2-track, 225mph NEC that is completely separate (although it would most likely be built next to or over the existing one in many places) from the current one. Although it might not have as big of an impact IN the NEC, it will have a huge impact for making more trips from the NEC to other places on a nationwide HSR system far more competitive with flying, and provide much needed capacity, so that additional 165mph Express, 125mph Regional, and 110mph long-distance service can be added to the existing system to better serve some of the smaller communities that the HSR will pass by, and provide some lower-density routes running conventional equipment with good access to locations on the NEC. Also, it would free up more space for commuter service, as well as bringing back services like the Clocker.

george matthews wrote:

The big picture is a whole lot more diverse than just wires, wires everywhere.

Worldwide carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere is going to be the most important factor in this.

Yes. This is absolutely true. We are going to have to come up with solutions for non-electrified trains, like biodiesel, but it's a heck of a lot easier to do that if you take half the mile-tons and most of the commuter operations completely off the table by electrifying them. Nuclear and renewable power can power them, and major corridors out west will act to tap more wind potential with new transmission lines than the entire electric US railroad system would consume in electricity. Long-haul freight also has the ability to take a huge number of diesel-guzzling trucks off the road through rolling highway and traditional intermodal, and high-speed rail and take probably half of the air market, since the majority of it is relatively short-haul stuff around the Eastern US, which is entirely replaceable by rail. That would also leave far more capacity and resiliency at airports for long-haul flights.

NRGeep wrote:Assuming there's funding for it (a big IF of course), any routes that would make sense down the road for future Amtrak electrification? And if they're owned by freight RR's, could host RR's be convinced to haul their freight via catenary sources? This is obviously speculative waaaay in the future...

Before we all get hung up on who should and should not electrify and when, let's not forget the point of this thread (as highlighted above). I think at this point (thanks in no small part to F-Line's much appreciated thorough analysis) we all realize that it'll take A LOT for additional electrification to become a reality. But in the meantime IMO it makes for an interesting discussion.

NH2060 wrote:

NRGeep wrote:Assuming there's funding for it (a big IF of course), any routes that would make sense down the road for future Amtrak electrification? And if they're owned by freight RR's, could host RR's be convinced to haul their freight via catenary sources? This is obviously speculative waaaay in the future...

Before we all get hung up on who should and should not electrify and when, let's not forget the point of this thread (as highlighted above). I think at this point (thanks in no small part to F-Line's much appreciated thorough analysis) we all realize that it'll take A LOT for additional electrification to become a reality. But in the meantime IMO it makes for an interesting discussion.

A lot, yes, but that's all economics and political will... the New Haven Railroad invented the fundamental technology in 1914.