North Carolina NCDOT-Amtrak Piedmont Service

jthomas wrote: ↑Mon Apr 19, 2021 8:44 am

Gilbert B Norman wrote: ↑Fri Apr 16, 2021 11:24 am Who here might know the status of the Roanoke River bridge?

It's of course out of service, but is it standing?

It would seem that some interest group ought to dig into the Army Corps of Engineers pocket to rebuild it withdouble track - or start anew; after all they "dammed up" the River (not questioning the public benefit) - and their budget is simply a line item in the Defense Department's - and who'd miss a "couple of hundred" M out of that?

The bridge is still standing - I just drove past it this weekend. The piers and girders are clearly visible from the I-85 crossing of Lake Gaston.

still there.
http://bridgehunter.com/va/mecklenburg/ ... ke-gaston/

You beat me to it, Mr. Scratchy.

I was all set to post that same link!!!!

Oh well, what counts is it's there for ready review to all following this topic.

Who knows how structurally sound it is; those photos are not exactly any kind of measurement. Further, it is only single track, which if you are to realize Richmond-Raleigh HSR, two are needed. This could prove a formidable barrier to implementing this service - let alone rebuilding the pre-existing line Petersburg-Norlina to FRA Class 6 (not sure, but I'd be surprised if Norlina-Raleigh is higher than Class 3).

Gilbert B Norman wrote: ↑Mon Apr 19, 2021 11:31 am You beat me to it, Mr. Scratchy.

I was all set to post that same link!!!!

Oh well, what counts is it's there for ready review to all following this topic.

Who knows how structurally sound it is; those photos are not exactly any kind of measurement. Further, it is only single track, which if you are to realize Richmond-Raleigh HSR, two are needed. This could prove a formidable barrier to implementing this service - let alone rebuilding the pre-existing line Petersburg-Norlina to FRA Class 6 (not sure, but I'd be surprised if Norlina-Raleigh is higher than Class 3).

I could be wrong about this, but I believe that the last time I read the EIS, the plan is for the line to be single-track, with several long sidings (maybe ~10 miles each?). So the single-track bridge can be worked around. The proposed frequency of service is not high enough to require full double track at this time.

All is needed is to make the piles and bents wide enough to make the line 2 MT in the future. Once a decision is made to add second track over the bridge is to drop in the rail holding bridging.

The Engineers doing the bridge enables them to determine when to lower the lake to reduce costs.

I saw a photo on another forum of PIEDMONT 74 on 11-26 with six cars. Don't the PIEDMONTs normally run with four? Has NCDOT been adding additional cars for Thanksgiving business?
Andy

twropr wrote: ↑Sun Nov 28, 2021 4:27 pm I saw a photo on another forum of PIEDMONT 74 on 11-26 with six cars. Don't the PIEDMONTs normally run with four? Has NCDOT been adding additional cars for Thanksgiving business?
Andy

The Piedmont is normally at its busiest before and after University holidays. It was standard practice (pre-pandemic) for them to run longer trains on Fridays and Sundays and extra long trains around holidays like T-giving. Dirty (and then clean on the return trip) laundry is a common carry on item this time of year.

I am glad to hear the flexible consists are back! They determine the size of the consist based on total ticket sales so they rarely have sold out trains, so a six car consist indicates more than just a guess that loads will be heavy. They should have even more flexibility in two years when the long-completed Charlotte coach yard finally opens up. At the moment they can really only add/cut a coach in Raleigh.

I recently spent some time gathering some thoughts and statistics about NCDOT's Piedmont service.

-How it started,
-What it was
-What it is
-Where it's going
-Where it should go

This is a rehashing of a Twitter thread (https://twitter.com/oevans82/status/1480672509175513092) over the last day or so.

-----------------

The Piedmont is kind of the poster child for Amtrak's trademark incrementalism. Significant improvements in speed, schedule, and facilities have been achieved since the Carolinian started in 1990 and the Piedmont started in 1995, but it's been slow going, one step at a time. There is an official vision for the corridor, but even at its furthest reach, the vision falls well short of the potential for a corridor with a population of about 7 million (and growing rapidly).

Honestly there isn't much (any?) negative press about the Piedmont that isn't just anti-rail. It's seen, with some justification, almost universally as a major success story for intercity passenger rail service in the US. And I guess that's the core of the disappointment. It has an average speed of ~52mph, 4 round trips per day - and, unimpressive as that is, that counts as a big success by US passenger rail standards

There are quite a few contradictions with this corridor. Things that are considered at the same time a major component of this win or success, but in another light could be seen as a missed opportunity or promise unfulfilled.

• Every station along the line has been (or is being) rebuilt, modernized, upgraded, relocated, or enhanced in a major way!
  ... but, while stations are nice, they aren't transportation - ideally, you spend as little time in a station as possible.
• They are investing in high platforms!!
  ... at the endpoints, where it will be a nice amenity, but will do nothing to shorten dwell times or improve service.
• They upgraded the signals to support 90mph!
  ... but they aren't running trains that fast yet because reasons.
• They are doing major upgrades by rebuilding the platforms at Salisbury and Kannapolis stations!
  ... but these rebuilt platforms will still be low-level.
• They have double tracked the entire corridor from Greensboro to Charlotte, and added/extended several passing sidings between Greensboro and Raleigh!
  ... but only added a single round trip, and didn't really see any net improvement in OTP.
• They have revised numerous curves for higher speeds!
  ... but the schedule has actually gotten slightly slower since 2006.
• They have some of the cleanest, best appointed, most comfortable rolling stock in the country!
  ... which consists entirely of rebuilt coaches from the 50s and 60s, and rebuilt locomotives from the 80s and 90s
• They have been awarded $157 million in federal grants for brand new rolling stock!
  ... 2-3 years ago, and nary a peep about how or when this will happen, and they even supposedly considered declining the grants entirely, around the beginning of COVID

The whole NCDOT Rail outfit got started on a shoestring budget, as a scrappy, resourceful operation with a mission of bootstrapping itself and creating something out of nothing, over 30 years ago. At this mission, they have had resounding success - but they have never quite seemed to grow up and shift out of that mode, in spite of plenty of signs that they should now be playing in the big leagues - with significant success in terms of ridership and winning competitive grants.

Before we dive in to some numbers, let's look at a timeline. This is a timeline of NCDOT's ARRA stimulus projects. There was work done before this, and work done after this, but this was the single biggest capital program that's been carried out on the corridor.


Next, let's look at the schedule and how it's changed over time.

There was big improvement from 2001 to 2006, thanks largely the installation of a CTC signal system allowing speeds to rise from 59mph to 79mph between Raleigh and Greensboro, along with other improvements. Things kind of stagnate after that, as the focus (appears) to shift toward adding more round trips.

Next let's look at On Time Performance (OTP). I was only able to find statistics for 2013-2019.

The main story told here for the Piedmont is that OTP suffered significantly while the ARRA projects were under heavy construction from 2014-2017. However, after the construction was complete, there doesn't really seem to have been any significant improvement in overall OTP between pre-ARRA and post-ARRA. The net result of all the capacity improvements (double track, passing sidings, etc) seems to have been to allow OTP to tread water. Disappointing.

How have these factors affected ridership?

First off, who knows what the Carolinian is doing here? I can't explain it.

But the Piedmont ridership seems to have major inflection points where ridership increases every time a new frequency is added (2010 and 2018) but suffer a dip when OTP is poor (2014-2017). These correlations are astonishingly clear. The overall increase from 39k in FY2003, to 214k in FY2018, is a 5.5x increase - which, ok, yeah, that's really impressive. You'd think, though, that with such an obvious correlation between frequency and ridership, NCDOT would be more gung-ho about adding frequency. But no. It's been slow going.

Summary:
Ridership: Piedmont increased 5.5x from 2003 to 2019!
Frequency: From 1x per day in 1994 (Carolinian only) to 4x per day in 2018 (Carolinian + 3x Piedmont)!
Speed: Big improvement from 1998-2006; ~stagnant since
OTP: Treading water
Spending: About $1 billion, all said and done

So where (metaphorically) is this service headed?

There are some station upgrade projects in progress for Charlotte, Kannapolis, and Salisbury. There are three new-build stations also under consideration (Harrisburg, Lexington, and Hillsborough). And of course more grade separations here and there throughout the corridor. PTC signals were installed due to the mandate, and they supposedly should allow for 90mph operations, but trains haven't been sped up yet. I have no idea why not.

NCDOT was awarded (in 2019 and 2020) $157 million in grant money to buy new trains, but has announced precious little about what they actually plan to do with it. Supposedly the grants do not expire, so I guess they are taking their sweet time planning this procurement.

As for service: NCDOT plans an extra Piedmont round trip once the new Gateway Station opens in Charlotte. That, plus 4 or 5 more round trips that would supposedly be added if the S-line (direct, "high speed" route from Raleigh to Richmond) were ever built. But that, 9 or 10 intercity trains per day, is the current endgame for the corridor. This seems ... unambitious, for a corridor of 7 million people, that's as economically, culturally, and politically "joined at the hip" as the North Carolina Piedmont. It seems like this vision was mostly written sometime between 1996 and 2002, and hasn't evolved much since.

Where could it, or should it go?
If we go back to the genesis of NC's state-run passenger rail program, you'll find that around 1990, shortly after the Carolinian started daily service, Governor Jim Hunt articulated a vision for hourly service, and 2 hour running times between Raleigh and Charlotte. A big vision WAS there, at some point - but somewhere, somehow, we've gotten mired along the way in a bog of timid incrementalism.


What would 2 hour Raleigh-Charlotte service entail? Basically, somewhere along the lines of Brightline, or the Boston-NYC NEC: 85mph average speeds. That's "Upgraded Conventional Rail" territory, not even true HSR. (True HSR would travel between Raleigh and Charlotte in closer to one hour.) But somehow, even that - "upgraded conventional rail" - is out of reach. So we're stuck with a few trips a day, ~50mph average speeds uncompetitive with driving, and refurbished 60 year old trains.

Now, I have to acknowledge, that in spite of the half-fulfilled promises and missed opportunities - NCDOT nevertheless has one of the best-run, most successful, most comprehensive, most competent, state-run passenger rail programs in the US. I give them credit for going as far as they have within such a suffocating framework!

However - if this is "as good as it gets," then when it comes to having actual, functional, useful, intercity passenger rail in the US - we're pretty much screwed.

A couple of comments:
- The Carolinian is the early morning Charlotte to Raleigh and evening Raleigh to Charlotte train (counterpart to the original 1-run Piedmont), which is why its included in Piedmont statistics as a vital part of the Piedmont service (its the train for a Charlotte to Greensboro or High Point to Raleigh day-trip).
- NCDOT bought equipment to expand the Piedmont fleet just before the grant for new equipment was made and got some significant political flack for that "wasted" expenditure.
- ADA requirements mandate step-less access between platform and coach unless the platform would conflict with other rail traffic. As the new Raleigh and Charlotte stations have new passenger-only trackage to the platforms, they are getting high level platforms.
- Per https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews ... equipment/ the Amtrak contract with Siemens to replace the Amfleet also includes new cars for NCDOT.
- NCDOT has owned, since at least December 2000, de-motored F59PHIs to be used as cab cars, but always runs each train with a locomotive at each end, so there may be some concerns about the reliability of their locomotive fleet.

Maybe just maybe ridership has leveled off because that all there really is for natural demand?...

You can't force or manufacture people to travel in a corridor, and that 7M isn't that impressive when you see it stretched out in a dogbone pattern over 170 miles long with huge rural gaps along the way .

By comparison, Chicago to Milwaukee is around 12M over 90 miles... and only has demand for 7 round trips on the weekdays and 6 on Sunday. That's actually a really good pattern of service, and yet there's really no demand to add any more frequencies despite the denser urban population of the two city centers.

Sometimes "just enough" settles in as actually being enough.

While it would be great to see the NCDOT owned Piedmont rolling stock last forever, it's been around a very long time and is due for retirement. Whatever NCDOT wants to do with brand new equipment will be their choice. I think the Siemens trainsets that Amtrak is ordering-NCDOT would do great with those trainsets. It would be nice to see more stations in North Carolina get high level platforms along the Piedmont route. Many of those stations are along straight track anyway-Salisbury, Burlington, and Durham come to mind. It would be nice to add high platforms at Greensboro but I believe that that station is on a curve.

Whether you believe this train is a success or a boondoggle, the reason the freight railroad companies have few objections of its growth over the years is because they do not own the railroad corridor, NCRR and eventually NCDOT does. As ridership and business have grown, state budgeted matching money for Federal funding has always been made available to improve the corridor, for both freight and passenger services. It has not been one type of service over the other.
Maximum speeds of the trains will probably never exceed 80 or 90 mph because the corridor is maintained and improved for both type of train services. The politicians expect the freight services to turn a profit, and expect small subsidies will be needed for passenger services. They are being realistic with expectations, not pie in the sky schemes of wishful children. That is why it exists and will continue to exist for a long time to come.

As for the age of the Piedmont rolling stock, it must be embarrassing for Amtrak to see so many positive reviews for them on youtube and the internet in general. Larger windows, as comfortable seats, smoother ride, more space. Amfleets may be able to travel faster on the NEC, but they are just as slow in North Carolina as the Piedmont rolling stock. I think that is why the FRA was so quick to promise to help fund new rolling stock for the Piedmont trains. they were embarrassed too much by the older rolling stock getting better reviews.

eolesen wrote: ↑Tue Jan 11, 2022 5:58 pm Maybe just maybe ridership has leveled off because that all there really is for natural demand?...

You can't force or manufacture people to travel in a corridor, and that 7M isn't that impressive when you see it stretched out in a dogbone pattern over 170 miles long with huge rural gaps along the way .

By comparison, Chicago to Milwaukee is around 12M over 90 miles... and only has demand for 7 round trips on the weekdays and 6 on Sunday. That's actually a really good pattern of service, and yet there's really no demand to add any more frequencies despite the denser urban population of the two city centers.

Sometimes "just enough" settles in as actually being enough.

This is wrong and I'm going to prove it with numbers.

If all the "natural demand" were being met, you'd expect that adding frequency would have little or no effect on ridership. This is means an elasticity of 0: the amount of service provided has no impact on ridership. If ridership were entirely limited by service we would expect that any increase in service would result in a matching increase in ridership (eg: double the service, double the ridership.) This would mean an elasticity of 1.

Mind you - we define the amount of service as the number of *trains* not the number of *seats.* You can't really say much (at all) about how much demand there would be for a train leaving Raleigh at 9:00am, based on how many seats are filled on a train that runs at 6:30am today. There may be some overlap in the market, but not much.

So, anyway, if demand is being met, we expect elasticity close to 0. If there is significant unmet demand on account of not enough service, we expect an elasticity closer to 1.

Now let's take the specific case of the Piedmont.

NCDOT added an extra train to this route sometime in 2010, and again in 2018. So, let's compare ridership in the last full year before the service change, with ridership in the first full year after: 2009-2011, and 2017-2019.

When they went from 1 Piedmont per day in 2009, to 2 per day in 2011, ridership rose from 68k to 140k - more than doubling - meaning that increased frequency actually resulted in higher ridership per train, from 68k to 70k! If we don't know ridership for the Carolinian for the same segment, but we should assume similar ridership per train. This would mean that a 50% increase in overall service on the corridor caused overall corridor ridership to rise by 54% from 136k to 210k. This is an elasticity of greater than one - 1.08. With elasticity like this, you can't even possibly predict what the natural demand would be!

When they went from 2 Piedmonts per day in 2017 to 3 per day in 2019, ridership went from 148k (74k per train) to 214k (72.3k per train). Ridership per train was almost entirely unchanged. Making the same assumption about Carolinian ridership between Raleigh and Charlotte, we estimate that a 33% increase in service for the corridor caused ridership to rise by 30%, from 222 to 289. This is still almost perfect elasticity: 0.91.

This is clear evidence that NCDOT had barely begun to scratch the surface of demand in this corridor, before COVID threw a spanner in the works in 2020. And it makes sense: a more frequent schedule makes the service more convenient!


...And this doesn't even take into account the potential for still better ridership if trip times were shorter or OTP were better.

We have to look differently at 2020 and 2021, since they suspended service entirely in May 2020, only partially resumed in August 2020, and fully resumed in March 2021 - but even given that those years had partial service, demand per train also appears to have fallen off as a result of the pandemic. We'll have to watch and see if and when ridership returns to pre-COVID norms.

----------

I actually don't believe there's anywhere in the Amtrak system where the frequency being provided, comes anywhere close to satisfying the demand. For example, I believe that Acela could run every 15 minutes all day long, with 12 car trains, and still have similar load factors. They might not be able to charge quite as much of a premium in fares, but they'd easily more than make up for it in revenue and volume.

Similarly, I believe there would easily be demand for hourly service between Milwaukee and Chicago. This would be around 18 round trips per day. Maybe even two trains per hour! The limiting factor is not demand. Everywhere in the US, I believe ridership is essentially limited by service, and service is limited by capacity in some way: whether it's "capacity" in terms of what the freight RRs will allow, "capacity" in terms of congestion on the NEC, or "capacity" in terms of the funding to run service.

Expanding further on the idea of frequency/ridership elasticity:

I have come up with a theory, which is completely unproven and half-baked, but makes a lot of sense to me, that I call "the rule of 3's" that applies here.

The Rule of 3's states:
In order to substantially meet the natural, latent demand in a corridor, the interval between trains should be roughly equal to, or slightly less than, three stops worth of travel time on the corridor.

I believe this rule applies for everything from light rail, on up through high speed trains (The rule is a little different for buses, however.) It boils down to the ratio of time spent waiting for a departure, to the amount of time that you will spend in transit to your destination. Not that many people will bother to ride a train for a single stop, but if you figure most people would consider riding a train three stops, for a train trip to feel convenient, the average time spent waiting for a train should be less than half the time you will spend in transit to your destination, and the worst case should still be less than the time in transit.

Intuitively, it makes sense. At one extreme, take a train that runs once a day, but makes a stop every mile. This would be a ridiculous service, and would see very little ridership compared to the potential ridership in the corridor. Unless your desired departure time corresponds *almost exactly* with the train's scheduled departure time, it's likely to be faster and more convenient to just walk, let alone drive, than sit around and wait for the train.

At the other extreme, if you have a train where the average passenger rides for two hours, having a departure every five minutes doesn't really help much; it doesn't matter much to a passenger if they leave at 9:00 and get there at 11:00, versus 9:05 to 11:05. This level of frequency only makes sense in cases of extreme density (like the Tokaido corridor in Japan.)


In the case of the Piedmont, it takes (very approximately) 1 hour to travel 3 stops from Raleigh to Burlington, or Charlotte to High Point. So my theory would dictate that, in order to substantially meet all latent demand, with the present stopping pattern and speeds, the Piedmont would need to be an hourly service.

Imagine a hypothetical world where NCDOT electrifies the Piedmont, installs high platforms at every station, and gets the max speeds in the corridor up to 110-125mph. They could then both add extra stops (Harrisburg and Hillsborough) and still achieve get end-to-end trip times of about 2 hours, as per Governor Hunt's 1990 vision. This means 3 stops from Raleigh would be Hillsborough, and 3 stops from Charlotte would be Salisbury - and in either case, the distance would be covered in about 30 minutes. So, to meet latent demand there, you'd need to run *2* Piedmonts every hour.

When you are running trains that frequently, and consists cannot be lengthened, and trains are periodically selling out - then is the time to further increase capacity by adding frequency. This is probably required in very dense areas like the NEC, but probably not North Carolina - not in my lifetime anyway.

A further extension of the "rule of 3's" is that, when you start overlaying local and express services in a corridor, the local should make about 3x as many stops in a given distance as the express. But that's a separate topic.

electricron wrote: ↑Tue Jan 11, 2022 11:17 pm Whether you believe this train is a success or a boondoggle, the reason the freight railroad companies have few objections of its growth over the years is because they do not own the railroad corridor, NCRR and eventually NCDOT does. As ridership and business have grown, state budgeted matching money for Federal funding has always been made available to improve the corridor, for both freight and passenger services. It has not been one type of service over the other.
Maximum speeds of the trains will probably never exceed 80 or 90 mph because the corridor is maintained and improved for both type of train services. The politicians expect the freight services to turn a profit, and expect small subsidies will be needed for passenger services. They are being realistic with expectations, not pie in the sky schemes of wishful children. That is why it exists and will continue to exist for a long time to come.

With regards to corridor ownership, it is definitely more advantageous for passenger rail than corridors owned outright by freight RRs, but It's a bit more complicated and more restrictive than what you're suggesting.

NS leases the corridor from NCRR. A 99 year lease inherited from the Southern expired at the end of 1998; at that point, they entered a new 15 year lease, with a right to renew for another 2 15 year terms. The current 15 year term, the second of three, started in 2014, and ends at the end of 2028. The 1998 lease incorporated permission to run a certain (fairly small) number of new passenger trains; I'm not sure how much the terms were revised in 2014, and how much they can be further modified for the final 15 year renewal. Because of the lease, NCDOT/NCRR does have limited flexibility as far as what they can do without running afoul of the lease and risking legal action. And aside from a short stretch between Raleigh and Cary dispatched by CSX, the corridor is dispatched by NS anyway. So there's no way for NCDOT to just tell NS "We're going to run a bunch of passenger trains and there's nothing you can do about it."

While the NCRR's guidelines and standards explicitly forbid running passenger trains *on tracks shared with freight* any faster than 90mph, it does *not* forbid the state from building dedicated, passenger-only tracks in the corridor with higher maximum speeds. So there's no reason they couldn't add some stretches of passenger-only third track, where speeds could be 110mph, or even 125mph if they can separate all the crossings.

Why was CSX granted dispatching rights? Of the three major users (NCDOT, NS, CSX) they seem to be the one that would use that trackage the least given that it's almost at the end of their line in that area.