BandA wrote:Is there rush hour congestion in Augusta or Waterville area, and/or is the RR a superior route to the highways?
I-95 isn't very congested up there (though I can't speak for the back-roads like US 1). The problem is more that 95 and I-295 really suck coming out of Portland because of all the growth down there. Lewiston/Auburn and Freeport/Brunswick have legitimately painful commutes to/from the south at peak rush hour, and 95 is pretty yucky coming north out of Saco/Biddeford to the 295 split. But that's a fundamentally a 9-to-5 commuter problem that Amtrak corridor service doesn't address in any meaningful way. And not a realistic solve with commuter rail service because Portland-proper still isn't big enough, and the suburbs not big enough, to float meaningfully frequent-enough CR schedules that would actually draw significant traffic off the expressways. Unlike other New England states who have proposed commuter rail systems that serve their largest cities' commuter needs adequately concentrating resources to ONE schedule on ONE line, you can't solve Portland commuter traffic without attacking I-95/US 202 and I-295/US 1 in tandem. Rail service along one Greater Portland highway corridor isn't going to save congestion along the other Greater Portland highway corridor like singular commuter rail mainlines spanning I-95 both sides of Greater Providence, I-91 the length of the New Haven-Hartford-Springfield corridor, and US 3/I-93 Nashua-Manchester-Concord on the Capitol Corridor act as permanent killshots in those other states. It's just the way the highway corridors line up with the geography.
Rock and a hard place: Portland only gets a permanent fix for traffic with one line coming from 95/Western Route from the south splitting into 2 lines along 95/295 to the north. And Maine doesn't have the demographics to support the frequencies required for splitting a schedule. Worse, the contrast between Portland's economy and the rest of the state's has sharpened into a near-permanent condition where Portland is the revenue donor that has to float the expenses for the entirety of the rest of the state. In even sharper relief than the trio of Capitol Corridor cities floats the entirety of the rest of New Hampshire. But as far as infrastructure spending is concerned, it's not possible to let Cumberland County take all the spoils while everything else is allowed to go to the weeds. The loggers up in Aroostook County can't function if every MEDOT bridge their trucks run over gets tagged with deferred-maintenance posted weight limits--forever--so I-295 can get loosened up by frequent commuter rail service. Mouths still have to be fed, or else even Portland's bustling economy won't support the house of cards it has to carry on its back.
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That doesn't mean there's no future for extended Downeaster service. As I said, Vermont is putting on a clinic on how to substantially expand intrastate Amtrak service
without possessing any anchor metropolitan area whatsoever. They're doing it being extremely disciplined, making their funding case based on self-funded work already completed (not just studied or talked about) to make a compelling show of inertia-of-motion, and 'hiding' their passenger pitches inside freight funding with an immediate revenue payoff to increase their funding chances and mitigate the risk. For example, they already got the grant and finished the track work on NECR from St. Albans to the Canadian border for the Montrealer restoration...but if the Montrealer restoration hits a significant snag or never happens at all NECR is taking advantage of the uprates for 286K carloads, faster speeds, and newly-protected grade crossings with real revenue increases pumped into the local economy right now today. That's how it's done in a small state; run an airtight ship, and make it impossible for the feds to ignore an effort well-executed.
For Maine, the answer is freight freight freight freight freight. No rail infrastructure investment they can ever make matters as much as double-stacks on the Western Route. Portland already has a DS lane out of St. Lawrence & Atlantic + PAR Danville Jct.-Rigby, and Waterville already has one out of Northern Maine Jct. They don't matter--they
pathetically don't matter--because the shipping lane from the Class I carriers in Worcester County, MA dwarfs all other lanes to such cosmic degree, and kneecaps them to such cosmic degree when those northern lanes can't network with the only lane that matters. So why isn't MEDOT actively funding bridge raisings and track undercuts on the Western Route? Why aren't they pre-emptively adding more double-track between South Berwick and South Portland so growth of Downeaster frequencies stays ahead of the exploding length and frequency of intermodal trains coming in 10-12 years when MassDOT and NHDOT finish their share of clearance upgrades? Why are they wasting their time funding double-track on the MEC mainline around Royal Jct. when the congestion problem up there is inefficient freight ops canning out-of-service trains on all available passing sidings? Why throw money on the ground there instead of addressing WHY freight ops out of Rigby and Waterville Yards are so clumsy that Pan Am has to bogart the mainline for a parking lot? If they want demonstrable results to make a passenger funding case to the feds, they'd be putting on a "Show Me" clinic with Western Route return-on-investment and making a freight revenue case for further passenger investment. Including things like how reinvestment in the efficiency of the freight yards buoys the Brunswick Branch by sweeping out that parking lot of canned trains that's eating all the track capacity...instead of simply buying Pan Am a longer parking lot at Royal. Vermont can successfully do this with NECR and VRS, Class III's with absolutely silly-smaller lanes than Pan Am out of Massachusetts. Why does short attention-span theatre prevent Maine from doing the same on an orders-of-magnitude bigger freight lane?
Similarly, why is this distraction about forking passenger routes completely ignoring the freight needs between Portland and Waterville? Freight volumes to Northern Maine have collapsed with the paper industry's collapse. Freight movements are extremely inefficient. They have to get way, way more efficient for the more meager north-of-Portland intermodal potential to fill some of the void of paper traffic that's never coming back. The MEC Back Road is in deplorable state-of-repair from the southern vicinity of Auburn out to Waterville, with absolute zero potential on-line business on that desolate stretch to help offset the cost of repairing it. Penny-pinching Pan Am isn't going to invest in it, and the future company that buys out Pan Am has a brutally tough business case to make for self-funding beyond the tolerable minimum state-of-repair when traffic only has so much potential to rebound out of its current hole. It's going to be up to the state to pay the balance that actually raises the revenue ceiling.
Why are they not doing that? Lewiston on one hand split with Brunswick/Augusta on the other doesn't meaningfully move the needle on a complete freight corridor to Waterville. It self-defeatingly divides and conquers itself. ESPECIALLY when all this forking extracurricular steals focus from the Western Route. If Portland's economy has to float the whole rest of the state on its back, then Portland's premier freight lane has to float the rest of the state's freight rail network on its back. This isn't rocket science. Every brain cell distracted by north-of-Portland to south-of-Portland's demerit by stuff like double-tracking in the wrong place for the wrong reasons is wasting time. Want to make a case for northward expansion? Get every ounce out of that premier passenger and freight lane to the south so pent-up demand starts compelling serious investment in a Portland-Waterville freight lane with enough ROI to float a passenger extension subsidy on its back. It won't be with a forked route; it can only be by going all-in on one corridor, and coming to grips with the fact that there's only enough cumulative traffic for one corridor. That would tend to favor extension out of Brunswick where fewer route miles and less support infrastructure need to be upgraded, and where first step to Augusta closes the gap enough for Pan Am & successors to make airtight self-funding case for doing the remaining miles to Waterville themselves. If Downeaster to Waterville has to be a Phase II to keep Augusta within-cost...then the track to Waterville will be ready for it with little additional fuss and paying itself back with freight revenue. Just like NECR north of St. Albans is ready for the Montrealer while earning more freight revenue today than it did yesterday.
There's no chance of getting over that hump by starting all over again with a second fork that doesn't get far enough for momentum to coast it over the finish line in Waterville. Or abandon the sunk cost to Brunswick to go all-in to Auburn instead. So what if the Back Road has to get abandoned from Leeds Jct. to Waterville for a rail trail because thru traffic switched to the upgraded Lower Road; the mainline to Downtown Auburn's never going away, and St. Lawrence & Atlantic's Portland-Quebec lane becomes a significantly more strategic complement to that all-important Portland-Massachusetts lane if the Western Route goes bigtime intermodal. Figure it out after the topmost priorities are taken care of. Near-term bus shuttles are plenty useful. A properly stabilized state economy leaves the door permanently ajar for real I-95/I-295 commuter rail in a couple decades when they can better afford it. That Montreal tourist hotel train proposal keeps hanging around if Portland freight grows enough to justify consistently good state-of-repair on the SLR corridor. And so on.
WORK SMARTER and good things will happen. Examples abound of this right under their noses. It's there for the taking if they want to roll up their sleeves and work the punchlist from top priority on down with patience and discipline. But pretending the state is bigger than it really is to convince themselves that they deserve nice things and can talk talk talk about deserving nice things is not how Maine's planning institutions will ever accomplish something. That's the gut-check the state...and this balancing act of sustaining all that is Portland with all that is not-Portland...is facing. Do they want to look that challenge in the eye and work the limited options they have towards a goal?
It's not clear today that they truly want to.
