NEC Future: HSR "High Line", FRA, Amtrak Infrastructure Plan

To add to the discussion, a former railroader's opinion (from someone many of you may know, or know of): The Day

What’s the hurry? High-speed trains are not worth the cost in N.E. Corridor

High-speed train travel is not feasible on the Northeast Corridor. Congress recently approved a $2.45 billion loan package for Amtrak, of which a good portion will be spent on 28 “Generation 2” high-speed trains. Why? The “Generation 1” (Acela Express) high-speed trains only accomplished a fraction of what they were touted to do. There is no reason to expect Generation 2 to be any different. Trains can only travel so fast on the existing roadbed no matter the tilt technology. Generation 1 trains were equipped with the latest tilt system yet could only equal, not exceed, the running time of the 1969 Metroliners between New York and Washington D.C.

The present roadbed with minor deviations dates back to the 1800s, taking a circuitous route to service large population centers and various industries. To attain a true high-speed system on the Northeast Corridor there must be a dedicated and exclusive infrastructure built as straight as the geography will allow. The cost and environmental impact of such an undertaking would be astronomical given the real estate values in that portion of the country.

As far back as the 1950s, when the New Haven Railroad purchased the Talgo trains, and in the 1960s when United Aircraft unveiled it’s state-of-the-art Turbo Train, proponents hailed the “trains of the future.” Since World War II, they’ve all headed to the scrap heap. These trains, including the Acela Express, have proven impractical.
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Amtrak force fed the Acela Express to the traveling public, trumpeting it’s airplane style decor, desktop seating replete with USB ports, WiFi, receptacles for recharging sundry electronic devices, all masking the fact that for the extra cost they did not arrive at their destination much sooner than the Regional Service trains, and the time difference was due mainly to the Acela making less stops than the Regional Service trains. Amtrak’s 30-year and older AEM7 locomotives with Amfleet coaches and an experienced engineer could, if they were allowed, equal Acela Express running time, as did the Metroliners of 1969.
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Joseph McMahon retired from Amtrak after 51 years of service as a locomotive engineer, beginning with the New York-New Haven and Hartford Railroad in 1963 and ending with Amtrak in 2014. His area of expertise is the Northeast Corridor between Boston and New York City.

The very last part seems like a stretch about "if allowed" that an Amfleet consist would be permitted to travel at 150 MPH between Boston and New York.

Regardless I think he's making points about speed that are not the focus of the new Avelia Liberty where the focus is in capacity. Ridership, market share and revenues are the strongest parts of Acela operations and those are the kinds of things that make a railroad run.

Even three hours BOS-NYP does not get travel times to where they should be to compete with other similar corridors. We should be aiming to cut that travel time should be at most 2:30 if not 2:00 to match what similar megalopoli have achieved for similar distances. The whole wringing of hands from Mr. McMahon and others over the cost is a farce. If there is any region in the US and indeed the world that can afford and will profit handsomely from true HSR, the Northeast is it. The undertaking will be challenging and costly, but America did challenging and costly public works and can do them again. Like many public undertakings, it is a matter of prioritizing the collective good over the continued enrichment of the donor class. Courage and leadership are what are lacking, nothing else.

Edit for parallel structure

Silly Question. Would the possible retraction from non southern states by CSX have an effect on possible future ROW? Like say, the Inland Route to Boston getting sold to the States/
Amtrak?

Here's a question. Let's say Amtrak got the following done:

1. Added a fifth track to 20-odd miles of MN territory west of Bridgeport to deal with congestion.
2. Replaced COB, SAGA, WALK and DEVON with lift bridges to reduce openings.
3. Restored the 4th main track from Devon to West Haven.
4. Added a 3rd main track between New Haven and Old Saybrook.
5. Replaced the Conn River bridge.
6. Built ~2.5 miles of new line, mostly in a tunnel, from Great Neck Rd. in Waterford to the west approach to the Thames River Bridge to eliminate curves and grade crossings through New London.

How much time would that shave off the current schedule?

scratchy wrote:Silly Question. Would the possible retraction from non southern states by CSX have an effect on possible future ROW? Like say, the Inland Route to Boston getting sold to the States/
Amtrak?

CSX is not going to retract from the B&A. It's too profitable now that they've got double-stacks to Worcester, and the Inland Route already has a quid pro quo agreement with MassDOT where all the passenger upgrade permissions WOR-SPG come with truck clearance improvements to huge West Springfield Yard to pad that fat intermodal profit center even more. There's already a formally proposed unfunded MassHighway project for that W. Springfield "Pimp My Yard" candy, which an Inlands deal will simply fund. B&A intermodal is now a big enough profit center to keep New England on Jacksonville's brain, and Norfolk Southern breathing down their neck in New England on the Patriot Corridor stokes the competitive fires with bona fide Class I-on-Class I competition keeping Jacksonville's attention span hot. On dollars and sense, Harrison is very unlikely to mess with success on a sure thing that's still got the minty-fresh smell of very recent upgrades. CSX has too many underperforming, sloppy, or less-strategic divs. and subdivs. in other regions to wrangle first.

As for Eastern MA, they've already dumped so much local territory run out of Framingham hub that they've only got a couple more property dumps and rights dumps left to shed the last of the misfit flotsam and reach their idealized network. It'll just be a few remaining local jobs that have to be there to serve their overall biz M.O. and protect their competitive flanks from any unwelcome P&W or Pan Am territorial intrusion loophole exploits. Basically, streamlining around just the Framingham-Walpole-Boston yard-to-yard "mainline", 3 strategic interchanges with landlocked shortlines, rights to Port of South Boston and planned Massport expansion therein, 3 or 4 stable daily locals that have nobody to outsource to without risking P&W or Pan Am potentially vulturing carloads from the shortlines via hidden loopholes, and a couple of key high-volume anchor customers in easy range of the yards. But those last holds are already sympatico with the pan-New England strategy, so the Harrison era won't do anything more than was already long-predicted: closeout streamlining of the last nonessential cruft that the prior big rounds of Eastern MA deal-making didn't scrub clean.


There's already been advance rumors of overtures of a WOR-SPG line buy by MassDOT if the state commits whole-hog to the Inland Route upgrades. Which would truncate their ownership to Schodack-Springfield where only the Lake Shore Limited roams and additional BOS-ALB passenger frequencies are still a couple decades down the bucket list. But as noted, you're not going to get SPR-WOR electrification in any souped-up Amtrak universe because of up to 35 bridges that would need megabucks for 23 ft. double-stack clearances under 25 kV wires and the geography of the Worcester Hills placing practical upper limits on speeds Palmer-Worcester. NEC FUTURE's rejected Hartford-Worcester routing never made a lick of sense because of the amount of "MOAR TUNNEL!" required by the steep, performance-compromising grades along I-84 in Tolland County, CT. Not to mention the violent opposition from Rhode Island for being cut out of HSR altogether that would've made Congresscritter approvals for that scheme a total nonstarter in a political environment where the NEC states' delegations vote as one big bloc.

Commuter-rail visions
Next stop, New York City
March 14, 2017 - Editorials - Tagged: 5th Congressional District, Dannel Malloy, Donald Trump, Elizabeth Esty, Taxes, University of Connecticut Towns: Danbury CT , Greater Waterbury , Waterbury CT - no comments

<SNIP>
Under the plan favored by Rep. Esty – known as Alternative 3 in Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor Future plan – the high-speed trains would roll from Boston, through Hartford, Waterbury and Danbury, then down to White Plains, N.Y., before racing into New York City. One option under this scenario would be to link Providence and Hartford, serving the University of Connecticut’s Storrs campus. “It would really be transformative,” Rep. Esty, who serves on the House Transportation Committee, said last week. “Imagine if you could get from Waterbury to New York City in an hour, and think about the great housing stock in Waterbury. People could afford to live in Waterbury and work in the city.”

Imagine if Connecticut’s movers and shakers had preserved the route known as the Air Line, which ran from the northeastern corner of Connecticut to Middletown. Parts of this 19th-century right-of-way, 25 miles shorter than the comparable shoreline route, could have been used today – had it not been abandoned.

If the U.S. government had $308 billion to spend on Alternative 3 – enough to sop up nearly one-third of President Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure vision – it’s doubtful Rep. Esty’s idea would go anywhere. Still … it’s fun to imagine being able to board a train in Waterbury and hop off in New York City an hour later. It’s like imagining winning the Powerball lottery – and almost as realistic.

http://www.rep-am.com/opinion/editorial ... l-visions/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Ah, but the Airline ROW WAS preserved as a rail trail, but it's a moot point because most of it's too darn curvy for HSR. Doing the hybrid I384 tack-on with the Coventry Greenway and the Washington Secondary still seems a better route. Still, it's nice to see more sentiment towards an inland alignment.

Note: The only reason Esty is advocating for the Danbury turkey is that the running miles are almost entirely within her swingy (only D+2) and population-deficient district, while every other alignment either shuts her out of the pork entirely or allows only token involvement where the Springfield Line clips the 5th's small downtown Meriden outcrop (i.e. district $$$ for the necessary grade crossing mass eliminations downtown, but no other toys and no sizeable share of the proceeds).



Totally a self-serving boilerplate statement to her constituents to say she's doing something for them. Nobody else in-state is advocating for that one because it bypasses nearly all the Fairfield/New Haven County HSR catchment and that region's outsized political capital, so she knows there's zero shot and that these statements are all for-show. She'll fall in line with the others when the advocacy inevitably zeroes in on the Springfield Line-Hartford + midland bypass.

As I mentioned in previous posts, the political insider-ball Job #1 is defeating the FRA's alt-Shoreline alignment being shoved down their throats with no negotiation wiggle room. Because if they tactically don't challenge that, the @#$%show is going to be even worse when the FRA tries to ram through its more mysteriously-aligned mid- New Haven Line bypass through much more politically potent population density. The blocker being thrown up looks a couple chess moves down the board for protection. Then when this inevitably forces open re-evaluation of the arbitrarily rejected alternatives, the next set of chess moves throws the advocacy kitchen sink at New Haven-Hartford (and inevitable retreat to the eminently upgradeable Springfield Line footprint rather than the kookily unnecessary "MOAR TUNNEL!" intrustions on the FRA's map that inexplicably stick closer to the Air Line and bore straight through the largest mountain in Central CT). And then the chess moves after that put the squeeze on the midland bypass with bait of all that CDOT-owned former I-384 land when the challenges of the B&A's topography Springfield-Worcester and political + geological impossibility of the Worcester/I-84 bypass narrow the options.

Just keep in mind that there's political tactical rhyme-and-reason why they're not revealing all their cards at once about preferring anything New Haven-Hartford first, midland to Providence second. Right now it's a game of wresting control from the rogue FRA back to state involvement, and since the NEC states' Congresscritters always vote as a unified bloc the current focus on CT means their Congresscritters are doing the bidding for everyone MA to MD who's on-point re: the control issues of this needing to be a joint fed-states coalition instead of being run entirely out of their hands.

They're going WAY over schedule on the 25 mile stretch from New Brunswick to Trenton what makes you think this will be done anytime before 2050. Don't waste your breath.

Can anyone explain the exact reasoning for the 4-tracking between Guilford and Branford? Could other potential sections of track work just as well? Is this just generally part of a move toward 4 track along the entire corridor? How soon would this become useful/necessary? I'd appreciate your thoughts.

Probably has to do with the existing 2.5 miles of quad west of the CT River in Old Saybrook. If they can buff out the OSB quad a little bit west to its practical limits and stick another equal length of quad to the west closer to New Haven, then the switch-off between 4, 2-3, 4 tracks is evenly-spaced enough to net some viable capacity gains on the current alignment. They can't add tracks everywhere; Shoreline's too closely-abutted by development in spots, and water + rock outcrops limit the practical widening options elsewhere. So it'll always have to be a balance of well-placed passing tracks. But they really don't need more than that since Shore Line East service levels projected against population density can only get so thick in Middlesex & New London Counties before tippy-top demand is more than satisfied. Unlike the orders-of-magnitude greater demand in New Haven & Fairfield Counties, the 50-year threshold for service saturation in SLE territory is still below what requires >3 fully contiguous cross-state mainline tracks to handle local service and NEC FUTURE HSR + Regional service.


More quad would also come in handy here for the daytime freight, as P&W runs at its most fully-loaded car length and weight between the Tilcon quarry in OSB just west of the bridge, Branford Steam RR interchange, and New Haven. Even if (by HSR or conventional CDOT action) some permutation of the Willimantic-Manchester midland routing were reopened and got thru Groton-New Haven freights off the Shoreline, a New Haven-OSB daily local would be a largish mandatory job for scooping up all those crushed stone loads.

IMO just getting most of the relative slower sections NYP <> WASH up to 160 MPH will be very effective. As others have posted Acela-2s cannot really lower times NYP<> WASH unless the ROW is rebuilt with curve easing or eliminations. Now no one can realistically expect 160 every where but for each section that can be clocked at 125 or more will increase the timing differential between Acela and ACS-64s.

This is the biggest fix you can do that has the biggest impact. The B&P Tunnel I think has a 30 MPH limit to it, and is only double-tracked. They're going to replace it with a 79 mph limited curve into Baltimore Penn Station. Putting that in will raise the average speed up tremendously. Fixing the North Philadelphia curve (50 mph if I remember from that accident) will also raise it up.

Other than those two, where else is it "permanently" speed limited so that you have to drop below 80 mph to traverse safely?

STrRedWolf wrote:This is the biggest fix you can do that has the biggest impact. The B&P Tunnel I think has a 30 MPH limit to it, and is only double-tracked. They're going to replace it with a 79 mph limited curve into Baltimore Penn Station. Putting that in will raise the average speed up tremendously. Fixing the North Philadelphia curve (50 mph if I remember from that accident) will also raise it up.

Other than those two, where else is it "permanently" speed limited so that you have to drop below 80 mph to traverse safely?

Elizabeth Station in NJ goes from 125 MPH to 55 MPH to 110 MPH in the span of one mile. That's really not a difficult fix, though. The downtown viaduct that contains the station and Elizabeth River crossing is mostly abutted by parkland, parking lots, and the station parking garage so rebuild/realignment is non-destructive and just trades parkland-for-parkland & reconfigs a bunch of poor-value parking parcels. Fix that and everything's tangent from Metropark to Newark Penn and up-rateable to as high a speed as traffic density allows.


Metuchen Curve sticks out far worse than anything on the whole of WSH-NYP because it's way out in the open on a 30-mile stretch of current 125-135 MPH that'll be near-total 165 MPH territory Trenton to Newark Penn once the state-of-repair deficit is tamed. Less acute a restriction than Elizabeth viaduct, which is a pretty open-shut (if delicate) realignment case. But Metuchen is more distended through a lot wider variety of private property, which makes it a much more invasive solve.

Right now speed limit drops from 125 to 110 at MP 28 on approach to Metuchen freight yard. Then the S-curve between the yard, I-287, and the Conrail Bonhampton Ind. Track is 90 & 80 MPH. Straightening MP 28 to MP 26 solves the restriction south of the station. A lot of it is industrial, big-box store, and highway interchange land so this shouldn't be too difficult.

The swooping curve north of the station spanning NJT Metuchen and NJT/AMTK Metropark makes a three-legged S-curve over 2.5 miles with 100 MPH curve restrictions (in 110 territory): south of the Conrail Port Reading Secondary overpass, north of Port Reading Sec. overpass, south of Metropark station approach. These are densely-abutted all around and much tougher solves without controversial land acquisition. Maybe if property rights are too hot to handle you can play some superelevation games and knock those curves up to 110. Which looks pretty spiffy for current speeds. But not so hot when you consider that Trenton-Newark is going to be unbroken 165 and this 3+ miles will be the only thing the whole way that drops below 125. What other momentary sub-165 blips are left are too negligible to even press against first-world standard HSR schedule margins for error...but the drop over those 4 miles at Metuchen is proportionately large enough to be a turd in the punchbowl. Much moreso than the station approach slow zones bookending Baltimore, Wilmington, Philly, and Newark-to-NYP where every schedule under the sun stops...and drops speeds coming in/out of a mandatory stop.



As for "momentary blips" outside of the big-city catchments...these are the only others between Newark Penn and Frankford Jct.:

-- MP 40, just north of Monmouth Jct. - 130 MPH curve (in 135 MPH territory). Negligible curvature (no fix needed / minor superelevation???).
-- MP 34, just south of NJT Jersey Ave. - 130 MPH curve (in 135 MPH territory). Negligible curvature (no fix needed / minor superelevation???).
-- Delaware River Bridge - 110 MPH (in 125 MPH territory) from Trenton Station to Morris Interlocking, 95 MPH restriction at halfway point between bridge and station. Don't understand reason for the 95 MPH restriction; 100% tangent, on land, no change in # of tracks. Rest of 110 territory is negligible because of the station approach.
-- MP 61.5, north of SEPTA Levittown - 115 MPH curve (in 125 MPH territory). Negligible curvature (minor straightening + superelevation fix???), land readily available.
-- MP 64.5, south of SEPTA Levittown - 120 MPH curve (in 125 MPH territory). Extremely negligible curvature (no fix needed off-footprint / superelevation???).
-- MP 66, north of SEPTA Bristol - 115 MPH curve (in 125 MPH territory). Minor curvature (straightening or superelevation fix???), land readily available.
-- MP 70, between SEPTA Eddington and Croydon - 105 MPH curve (in 125 MPH territory). Modest curvature, limited land between I-95 and industrial abutters (superelevation fix + *very* slight straighten???).
-- SEPTA Torresdale - S-curve: 100 MPH north of station, 110 MPH south of station (in 125 MPH territory). Moderately tight confines; possible compacting of over-wide I-95 median and station parking reconfig allows straightening at neutral-to-positive impact to residential abutters.

^^ All of these are solveable for short money and no controversy. If SGR backlog fixes and traffic management uprate the MAS, some of these speed dips are so proportionately minor vs. MAS that they may not have any schedule impacts whatsoever traceable outside the margin of error and can be left alone.


(EDIT: Locations/speeds referenced from an old Rich Green track map. May be dated info.)