Projected New NEC Routing Through CT

David Benton wrote:

Eliphaz wrote:acquiring land for a new ROW through the affluent suburbs of eastern Mass., using eminent domain - - no. impossible. no sense in even discussing it.

How did they build the highways and freeways ???

those were different times.
the power of NIMBY didnt exist. now it is insurmountable.

Decades before urban sprawl, and Highways are not straight, they wind around ostacles.

Eliphaz wrote:acquiring land for a new ROW through the affluent suburbs of eastern Mass., using eminent domain - - no. impossible. no sense in even discussing it.

Er...the whole point of the proposals floated was to use existing ROW's or highway medians. Meaning virtually no land acquisition required. All of the preferred west leg routing is existing active former double-track ROW except for the Newtown-Waterbury that has to be pieced back together from portions of rail trail and I-84 parallel running. All of the east leg options follow active lines, RR's under legal landbanking statutes, carriageways of interstate highways, and/or land already bought and held for never-built highways. The landbanked ROW's all have mothballed RR operating charters that can be reactivated with the necessary permitting; federal and state statutes deem them reusable for transit whether rails have been gone 50 years or not. And all of the highway carriageway land can get built on with similar permitting as an add-a-lane project, since the carriageway is already covered under EIS's for the highway.

The only land acquisition you're going to need are strips of land at station sitings and a few curve straightenings for HSR speeds, both negotiable with abutters. Too many NIMBY's in one area...oh bother, somebody's going to have to wait 20 years to get their intermediate station or we'll have to put up with those 1-2 slow curves that couldn't be eliminated.


Not that stiff community opposition on widespread stretches of the line wouldn't be a dealbreaker here, but in no way is this comparable to the highway system build-out that was almost totally buyouts or eminent domain of private land. With the highways citizens could (often rightfully) sue on their property rights to stop a project. The RR's preceded the highways, and states snapped up the lines as they were abandoned. There's hardly any private property rights in play. If the gov't badly enough wants passenger trains on the inactive rail line in your backyard, they're gonna build it. If they want to upgrade an already active line, they're gonna upgrade it with even less required public comment. You consented to those possibilities when you bought property abutting a chartered, zoned RR line. Or a federal highway in the case of interstate carriageway expansion.

Rail has had weaker leverage than highways re: land acquisition, but it's also true that highways by their nature require much more a bull-in-china-shop mentality to property taking. They're usually carved through private-owned land on a path that previously didn't exist, and states have to buy/seize in bulk and steamroll an acceptable percentage of opposition to get it built at all. RR's are much more a negotiate-and-mitigate on builds because the ROW's already have ownership settled. Yes, individual towns have stopped commuter rail projects before, but those are in transit districts where each municipality has roughly equal voting stake in the district. Where those projects have fallen apart over it's usually been over spiraling mitigation costs for quality-of-life issues (real or imagined). There's never been any precedent until California HSR for a major new line on the national rail network with state + fed investment akin to an interstate highway. Not even the incrementally upgraded-in-place NEC. These HSR projects still re-use majority existing ROW's by necessity, but if they need land for stations or curve straightening it's much more like a series of off-ramp construction projects taking extra width in few-and-far-between spots along the line. There's no new scars being carved across the countryside like a new highway, and when that "all-new" ROW is preferred highway medians are preferred path of least resistance (unless it's through uninhabited desert like Cali Phase I). It's easier and cheaper to acquire land for a rail line. Maybe more expensive to build, but not expensive to acquire when the ROW's are already...acquired.

Put it this way: in the span covered by the typical 4-year project budgeting window of the average state DOT, more abutter land gets taken in the counties this line would run through for widening expressway off-ramps and adding turn lanes on state roads than will EVER be needed for the Inland NEC through the likely 20-year construction period of this project. Drive through any historic town center on the main state drag and see how small the front yards have gotten from ripping up the road every 2 decades for a wider shoulder or a left-turn signal at the shopping center. Add up all that continuous slow creep happening on state roads in every single town and the land acquisition comparison is probably a wild understatement.

andegold wrote:Couldn't a routing over the Harlem Line use the Empire Connection to Penn rather than going out under the East River? While this would involve a change of ends at Penn it's not like there would be any trains that wouldn't be stopping there for enough time to do so anyway. Also such a routing would spread the cost of electrifying the Empire Connection and the entire route to Albany over more traffic.

Edit: I'm confusing the Harlem and Hudson lines aren't I? If so please disregard.

Not sure if you are or not. Technically you could but it would involve taking a big dogleg north. It's six-odd miles from the junction at MO to Spuyten Duyvil, where the Empire Connection joins the Hudson Division.

What I suppose you could do if you were set on using the Harlem would be tunnel under upper Manhattan from MO to join the Empire Connection somewhere just north of Riverside Park. However, that would still be a multi-billion dollar project, and would add more traffic to the already-congested trackage through the Central Bronx. Far better to make use of the under-utilized Hell Gate route through the East Bronx to add HSR capacity.

David Benton wrote:

Eliphaz wrote:acquiring land for a new ROW through the affluent suburbs of eastern Mass., using eminent domain - - no. impossible. no sense in even discussing it.

How did they build the highways and freeways ???

Even in the heyday of massive highway projects, Southern New England-- and Connecticut in particular-- was not an easy place to build a freeway. I know of more than one "expressway" (as we call them) that end miles from anywhere because a town was succesfull in blocking the plan. Case in point: the Route 7 Expressway in western Fairfield County-- Wilton, Ridgefield and Redding fought the DOT for something like 50 years over this road until ConnDOT finally gave up-- with the result that the highway dead-ends at a traffic light on Belden Hill Road on the Norwalk-Wilton line.

In addition, I-95 in the more urban parts of Connecticut is often right next to the Northeast Corridor, taking the same curves. The Merritt Parkway is even curvier.