New York-Chicago

passrailsavesfuel wrote:

During the first surge of ridership on Amtrak, people were standing in the aisles. They don't add cars or extra trains. This way they just turn you away once the train has filled

The reason they didn't add many extra cars or run extra sections is that the equipment simply is no longer there. The "showcase streamliners" of the Postwar Era never ran in multiple sections for the same reason. That would have been a much easier option in the days before the vast shrinkage in the national passenger car fleet after Amtrak's inception, but it's no longer the case. And if you follow some of the threads over on the Amtrak forum, you'll also learn that this is an expensive proposition (something that always seems to happen once a function formerly left to the private sector is turned over to the bureaucrats and their partners in the public-employee unions).

It's arguable that a reserve fleet of bare-bones coaches could be developed and used to flesh out Amtrak; they could be shifted between excursion moves to the western National Parks in the summer, Eastern Seaboard-Florida trade in winter, used for government mandated travel such as military movements, and held in reserve in the event of a disaster (with buses also diverted from excursion service for the light-density moves).

But my principal point is that many of these options had evolved back in the days before the decision to underwrite air travel and the private automobile in the wake of World War II. And for the majority of the American people, the American Dream does not involve a return to those days.

Nevertheless, the recent quantum shift in the energy equation should increase considerably the number of locations, almost all of them on the outskirts of the major cites, where rail travel makes more sense. The immediate goal should be to restore commuter and intermediate-distance service to those areas where it existed the longest before the complete collapse of private-sector passenger rail in the 1960's (Upper Midwest, New England and Eastern Pennsylvania are good examples). This is going to require new and, hopefully, interchangeable mass-produced rolling stock and likely, some very heavy capital expenditure, mostly in new track, signalling and traffic control. The service is going to cross state lines, which always adds bureaucratic complications, and the freight railroads, given their shoddy treatment in the past, will likely cling to their "bunker mentality", with good reason.

It's going to take a lot of work, a lot of money, and it's going to have to be brought closer to the public's attention via that portion of the media that deals with more serious issues than Michael Jackson's lifestyle. But one way or another, it has to be done.

mtuandrew wrote:

lpetrich wrote:But there is a faster alternative. That is to skip 30th St. Station and go directly northeast-west or west-northeast at Zoo. There's a Philadelphia station it could stop at: North Philadelphia. It is a through station, thus requiring no reversal of direction. One can then catch either a SEPTA Regional Rail train or else a Broad Street Subway train to downtown Philly.

For some reason, hardly any Amtrak trains now stop there.

Ah, so you wish to use the Pennsylvania Railroad's approach. The Broadway Limited and other east-west trains generally did skip 30th St. Station on their ways to Pittsburgh or New York, or had connecting service (possibly a through coach?) to 30th St. No reason that Amtrak couldn't do the same, except that from what I understand, North Philly is a scary place to a lot of people crime-wise (the town, not the station necessarily), and people seem to prefer direct service through downtown.

There's yet another higher-speed option that people haven't discussed much... the NYC to Niagara Falls, sealed trains through Canada, and the Amtrak-controlled Michigan Central to Chicago. Essentially, a Niagara Rainbow, extended to Chicago. Eventually, NYC - Buffalo will be upgraded to 110 mph running, and the plan is for Amtrak to upgrade the entire Michigan Central to the same standard. Coupled with the current Transport Canada-allowed 100 mph running through Ontario, we've changed the schedule from nearly 19 hours (Lake Shore Limited) to no more than 12 hours. If nothing else, it's an option until Ohio gets off its duff and starts leading the way in HSR.

For the Philadelphia issue, you could probably just run trains push-pull, not too much of an issue.

The far northern route you're suggesting is problematic for two reasons, the first being that customs checks would waste time, and the second being that there are fewer cities father apart on that sort of routing. My preference would personally be for Chicago-Cleveland-Buffalo-Albany-NYC AND Chicago-Cleveland-Pittsburgh-Harrisburg-PHI-NYC, one of the two being a 110-125 MPH non-dedicated line and the other being a dedicated line. I think the latter would do better as a dedicated line, especially since you can do more using existing track on the northern routing (there's a study on the Ohio DOT website where they talk about getting 110-MPH from Cleveland-Buffalo for only about $3.9 million per mile, I can give you a link later if you want).

The big problem that people keep citing, that the route would be too long, is fallacious since it assumes no intermediate stops. Trains would easily fill up by stopping at major cities enroute. CHI-NYC might not make sense, but NYC to cleveland does, as does CHI to Pittsburgh.

superjoo wrote:The big problem that people keep citing, that the route would be too long, is fallacious since it assumes no intermediate stops. Trains would easily fill up by stopping at major cities enroute. CHI-NYC might not make sense, but NYC to cleveland does, as does CHI to Pittsburgh.

That's the point of my discussions of how populated various routes are. That is why Cleveland is a plausible intermediate stop, and that is why the southern-Pennsylvania and the water-level-NY routes are the most practical NYC-Chicago routes across the Appalachians.

Checking on this HSR map of Europe at Wikipedia, it is evident that some long stretches of high-speed route have been emerging, like 300 km/h for most of the way between Sevilla and Amsterdam. Those cities are about 1400 mi apart by highway; by comparison, NYC and Chicago are 800 mi apart by highway (1200 mi, 700 mi great-circle distance).

However, European HSR construction has been motivated by expediting much shorter trips, like Sevilla - Madrid, Madrid - Barcelona, Montpellier - Paris, and Paris - Amsterdam, and making long lines has been a side effect of that.

This has relevance for other possible long HSR routes -- they need to be multicorridor routes in order to work. Even the Northeast Corridor is more-or-less a multicorridor route, a combination of NYC - DC and NYC - Boston. The Southeast Corridor proposed route is a good one; its initial phase will effectively be DC - Raleigh and Raleigh - Charlotte, with additional possible phases like Charlotte - Atlanta and Atlanta - Jacksonville. Combining it with the Northern New England, Gulf Coast, and Texas T-Bone corridors gives a continuous high-speed line from Portland, ME to San Antonio, TX.

This combined route is about 2500 miles long, but it is much more reasonable than (say) a high-speed route from Chicago to Seattle or San Francisco or Los Angeles (about 2000 - 2100 mi). It is essentially the corridor concatenation Portland - Boston - NYC - DC - Raleigh - Charlotte - Atlanta - Birmingham - New Orleans - Houston - San Antonio, while the Chicago - West Coast routes run through thinly-populated prairies and mountains and deserts.

Hmmmm....

Its great having 125 MPH trains here in the Northeast, getting to Philadelphia by train from NYC is very civilized. As is the trip to DC or to Boston. But this is not the point of the NYC to Chicago train. This is not to say that a 125 MPH train between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia or Chicago and Cleveland is anything to sneeze at. Indeed, it would be preferable to air travel, but 125MPH from NYC to Chicago would serve roughly the same market trains on this route serve today.

True HSR between NYC and Chicago (via Philadelphia and Cleveland) would change not only how people travel, but how often they travel. By creating a ROW of the highest possible standard along this route (tunneling through the mountains like the Swiss do), we not only prepare a route than can handle 225MPH AGV style trains, but also prepare ourselves for the next generation after AGV that can go at faster speeds. This investment would make the NYC to Chicago line preferable to taking a plane because when adding in the hassle of getting to the airport, security, etc, it is faster and more productive to take the train. This means a ~4 hour journey, hard to do, but not impossible. Moreover, the Chinese are doing it along their 800 mile route between Beijing and Shanghai (they estimate 5 hours). So we can create a route that will be under 5 hours when it opens and as the technology progresses, it can be sped up (see 357MPH AGV record http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8skXT5NQzCg). There is little chance that passenger airplanes will be able to travel faster than the speed of sound, so it is just a matter of time before the train becomes a better choice for a run like NYC-Chicago.

The above post sounds fine in theory, and might fly on the other side of the Atlantic, where the peasantry accept limits and governmental intrusion into their lives more readily.

But as is currently being demonstrated by the widespread, and very visceral resentment against the proposed overhaul of the health-care industry, Americans retain a basic, and healthy suspicion of anything conceived within the intellectual cocoon of the Beltway, and forced upon the entire nation in a "one size fits all/take it or leave it" approach.

A pilot poject, sufficient in size to demonstrate the viability (and high cost) of a serious HSR project is currently under way; both fortunately and unfortunately for some of us, it's exclusively in California, a state large enough in both size and population to tackle the cost of the project on its own when push comes to shove.

For the time being, any attempt to increase the attractiveness of passenger rail east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio has to revolve around the upgrading of existent systems at a manageable cost, and that is a lot more feasible when only one state, or a small number of states on the same side of the red/blue divide, are involved.

Hmmm...ny, nj, oh, in and il all supportes president obama in the election. Does this count?

2nd trick op wrote:The above post sounds fine in theory, and might fly on the other side of the Atlantic, where the peasantry accept limits and governmental intrusion into their lives more readily.

actually , from my experience of living and working briefly in both contientents , i would say it is the other way round .

David Benton wrote:

2nd trick op wrote:The above post sounds fine in theory, and might fly on the other side of the Atlantic, where the peasantry accept limits and governmental intrusion into their lives more readily.

actually , from my experience of living and working briefly in both contientents , i would say it is the other way round .

Yes, this rings true from my experiences in the UK and Europe as well. The American peasants are much more willing to believe their leaders when it comes to things like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the patriot act, etc.

FRN9 wrote:Hmmm...ny, nj, oh, in and il all supportes president obama in the election. Does this count?

Remember "Elkhart County"? The President's first road trip in February and recent electric car promoting trip? The President lost that county by 8000 votes (11%). Perhaps he doesn't know or just wants to win the county next time, but I don't see the choice for president affecting the amount of attention given.

A bigger influence would be the senators and representatives along the line. The president doesn't get to decide where the HSR goes all by himself. Congress does not exist to serve the president's whims (whomever the president may be). The Chicago to the east line is going to have to live and die on it's own merits.

The biggest challenge is finding support along the line. You may get support in the cities that it serves ... especially big cities where people are accustomed to public transportation (buses and rail). But getting the support of the flypast districts and states the line doesn't serve will require some horse trading.

FRN9 wrote:

Yes, this rings true from my experiences in the UK and Europe as well. The American peasants are much more willing to believe their leaders when it comes to things like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the patriot act, etc.

Actually, sir, I don't think anyone wants to be viewed as a peasant, but among those who escaped the class-consciousness of the Old World, the only action by the state that will be viewed as more denigrating and hostile than curbs on the use of private vehicles would be restrictions on ownership of a firearm.

What the Politically Correct world of academia has been categorizing of late as "Southern Mountain culture" has roots that go back well before the American Revolution. The Scotch/Irish heritage from which it emerged could be found as far north as Pennsylvania and western New York state, and the Okies and, in part, the Mormons, aided its dispersal through the Western states. I can show you communities in Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania where the names are mostly Slavic or Italian, but the deer rifle and the pickup truck became part of a way of life a long time ago.

My point being, that the idea of "enlightenment to the hillbillies" which seems to be a recurring theme among some of the most smug and self-justifying of the HSR lobby, would not play well here.

To return to my original point, if the central focus of HSR development is likely to be on the West Coast for the near future, there should be no reason why New York and New England, bluest of the blue states, couldn't find a way to develop a Boston/NewYork/Buffalo corridor on their own efforts. The excess right of way is readily available, as are alternate routes for diverted freight if NIMBY pressure becomes too strident. (We know why this doesn't fly; it's the same reason California or Massachusetts won't develop their own health plan and market it to other states should it succeed. Better to coerce the dissidents into the grand scheme whether it works or not, and guarantee that the levers of power will remain anchored within the Beltway.)

Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan are similarly "blue" when the measure is conducted primarily on economic terms, and the revival of SEPTA exurban rail service, which once reached every Pennsylvania community of more than 10000 people within 50 miles of Philadelphia, could probably be effected at a fraction of the cost of a start-from-scratch HSR.

We don't walk around with our heads in the clouds up here; we paid notice when a CBS "60 Minutes" segment last January noted that two of the principal players in the "hedge fund" run-up of oil prices over the summer of 2007 were the endowments of Harvard and Yale, hardly bastions of corn pone-flavored conservatism. The more far-sighted among us recognize that the auto-dominated society has passed is peak, and that some form of alternative transportation has to evolve. But it appears that some of the financial wizards joined with the intelligentsia to temporarily make life a little more challenging for some people who didn't have as many options as those living closer to the Corridors.

Because an HSR network isn't going to do a lot for someone out here beyond the suburbs, where daily existence sometimes depends on shift-based work in a factory (or hospital) twelve miles down the road in the next town.

As the High Speed Rail buzz continues around the United States, has anything really started to happen?

In this case, Amtrak connecting Chicago-New York via Higher Speed rail seems to grow more feasible with government funding. Keep in mind that this is not a non-stop connecting only one end point train. The train greatly reduces the travel time to New York from Chicago, and ultimately 4-8 trains a day would run from Chicago to New York, but that is not the only service to be operated on the route.

Say the service connects Chicago-Indianapolis-Cincinnati-Pittsburgh-Harrisburg-Philadelphia-New York. The there would be additional trains running from Chicago-Indianapolis-Cincinnati that terminate in Cincinnati. There would also be trains between only Cincinnati and Indianapolis. Trains that operate from Cincinnati to Pittsburgh. Trains that run from Pittsburgh-Harrisburg-Philadelphia-New York. So ultimately there are numerous trains that run on the route. If another portion is electrified, Pittsburgh-Cleveland-Toledo-Chicago is Electrified, then the city pairs are connected increase drastically.

Chicago-Toledo-Cleveland becomes a corridor, Cleveland-Pittsburgh, Cleveland-New York becomes faster. With the Proposed 3-C's corridor, this further provides additional connectivity in the system, Passengers can connect from Cleveland-Cincinnati and connect on to Indianapolis. And the intermediate stops between served by local trains add further to the systems utility. Higher Speed Express trains connecting the major cities would serve the major markets, local trains would serve the cities between the larger cities, and commuter services would be able to operate from the suburbs of cities on the route into the larger cities, so this creates a larger network of trains defraying the cost of the line. While few trains operate the entire distance, ridership is maximized, as well as revenue, by serving the routes people want to take.

FRN9 wrote:Hmmmm....

Its great having 125 MPH trains here in the Northeast, getting to Philadelphia by train from NYC is very civilized. As is the trip to DC or to Boston. But this is not the point of the NYC to Chicago train. This is not to say that a 125 MPH train between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia or Chicago and Cleveland is anything to sneeze at. Indeed, it would be preferable to air travel, but 125MPH from NYC to Chicago would serve roughly the same market trains on this route serve today.

True HSR between NYC and Chicago (via Philadelphia and Cleveland) would change not only how people travel, but how often they travel. By creating a ROW of the highest possible standard along this route (tunneling through the mountains like the Swiss do), we not only prepare a route than can handle 225MPH AGV style trains, but also prepare ourselves for the next generation after AGV that can go at faster speeds.

125 MPH trains wouldn't gain a huge chunk of the market, but provided the service was high quality with at least decent public awareness, I could see it taking at least 10-15% from the airlines, maybe as high as 25% depending on coach amenities (like wi-fi and food service). Remember, it only takes and average speed of 77 mph to make the trip 12 hours, and 115 mph for 8 hours. Interestingly I think a demand profile for the service would have two peaks, one at around 12 hours (where people would use the sleeper service), and then another as you get into the area of true HSR (4-5 hours). Once you're talking about a non-sleeper train that also can't compete time-wise with the airlines, fewer people are going to use it. Therefore, I think the initial goal needs to be a 12-14 hour sleeper train with 90% on-time performance in the near/medium-term, and a true high-speed line in the long-term.

I really don't see the attraction for sleeper service when flights are so cheap.

I think it makes more sense to focus on very high end straight track segments between cities with the goal of NYC chicago once tech improves and benefits of shorter runs realized.

Oh I can see the appeal. Having to take a late flight out of an airport because that's what youcould afford, get there early, get to your destination in the middle of the night, pay for a hotel room that you may only really need for 4 hours (even though you wish you could sleep for 8), etc....

Compare that to "leave NY in the evening, arrive early AM in Chicago" with a roomette costing less than a hotel room and I think you have something viable.

Remember, airfares aren't as low as they used to be. Even the base fares are up and the fees are being piled on like potato chips at a BBQ!

A few years ago, I could fly SWA from Manchester NH to Philadelphia for $29 - I bought several tickets for my daughter at that fare (she went to college there). Now the cheapest is $49 on a good day in advance. Air travel is getting increasingly inconvenient.

Given the airport delays, check-in time, security lines, boarding, gate holds, etc., I would think that quite a few business travelers who have early meetings in NY or CHI (i.e. 9am start times) would possibly opt for an overnight train ride that arrives right downtown, if the total cost would not exceed air + hotel. That, of course, assumes that overnight trains each way could make it into end point cities by no later than 8:30 am.