This is long term reinvestment expense that I can get excited about. As anyone who has been to Japan or Europe knows, high speed rail is green, convenient, lowers congestion on roads, helps communities build denser, and it is just plain more comfortable and fun than flying, IMHO.
The fact that there has not been a serious movement to put high speed rail in place between Boston and Washington has made me wonder whether the US can handle the long term issues that we need to face. So hats off to Obama for starting us down this path.
On the downside, isn’t it ridiculous that we give AIG 176 billion but only put 8 billion towards this program? I would argue that putting more money towards high speed rail in this country would be a better return on investment.
Tell me, would it not be sweet to go from watching the B’s vs. Habs, Game 2 in The Garden and then zip up to Montreal for Game 3.
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p>For those that may scoff, I have four words: North – South Rail Link.
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p>Well, first we have to take the first step:
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p>
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p>Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
A Vision for High Speed Rail
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… HSR to Montreal for years. Too many people needed to play ball and coordinate such that any one can roadblock it, which is what seems has been going on for years now.
but would somebody explain to me why they wouldn’t connect with HSR:
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p> * Jacksonville to Kissimmee/Orlando
* Buffalo to Cleveland
* Pittsburgh to Cleveland
* Houston to San Antonio
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p>They’re short hops, and they’d connect regions to each other in ways that make sense. I’m not arguing somebody would take a train from NYC to Miami very often, but Atlanta/Jacksonville/Savannah/Charleston to-from Orlando/Tampa/Miami is certainly plausible.
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p>
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p>Maybe that’s phase II, set to be implemented in 2047 or so… shrugs
I put a huge priority on extending Acela into Southeast ASAP — get it down from DC to Richmond, Raleigh, Greensboro, and Charlotte. VA and NC are turning blue, and anything you can do to increase the desirability of the cities in those states will only help to strengthen the demographically blue areas of those states. It also serves to help with the cultural separation that VA and NC is starting to have with the deeper south.
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p>Getting it up and running within three years could help secure those EVs for Obama in 2012 and have real cultural impact by the 2016 election.
Would be to actually turn Acela into a high speed train. Currently it only goes it’s top speed for something like 10 miles. Make the necessary track improvements on the existing line before expanding it.
I read about this a while ago,
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p>
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p>but then I read something that appeared to reverse it. (I am no lawyer, it is hard to understand the language sometimes.)
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p>This proposal goes from Boston to Springfield to Albany. Hurray! I hope they will stop in Palmer. They must, it is worthless to people in Central Mass for short distance travel if it doesn’t stop in Palmer, you have to drive to far to pick it up.
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p>Oh well, we’ll see, but I am so excited about the whole high speed rail project in all of the locations. It’s well past time we had this useful resource for travel.
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p>
if the Consolidate Appropriations Act I noted above was reversed? I see the Boston to Albany corridor on some maps and missing on others. If anyone has any knowledge of a reversal, could you please link it. Thanks.
High speed rail isn’t so fast if it stops in every town with 12,500 people in it.
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p>I know Palmer wants rail, and I want rail for Palmer. Local rail service. Commuter rail service. Not high speed service — if it stops nearby, it needs to stop in Chicopee-Springfield [I have no idea where the right of way is], not a nice town with an old rail yard 20 miles away.
If Palmer is a lousy place for rail service, what was the merit of putting Mass Pke exit 8 in Palmer? Palmer’s population may not be huge, but it is a central location for the entire region including Monson, Wales, Brimfield, Wilbraham, Hampden, Ware, and Belchertown. The tracks and train station are already there, and it used to be one of the busiest hubs in state.
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p>I’m not going to spend another minute of my life arguing with you. After the ridiculous argument you made on my earlier comment about how foolish it was for me to think that a traffic jam could compromise an emergency rescue, I realize know that you are just looking for a fight, I’m not gonna give it to you. When you can make sense, and offer up reasonable debate, I’ll listen to you again.
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p>In case you didn’t realize it, I am fighting to save this South Central region of Massachusetts. Rail service would have an extremely positive impact. It is reasonable to include Palmer in the list of stops if you consider it as central between Worcester and Springfield. Service from Boston, to Worcester, Palmer, Springfield, then Albany, makes absolute sense.
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p>I wrote that. Just above your comment. Palmer would certainly benefit from it, has the basic infrastructure and right of way for it, and ought to get it. The only person who put the words “lousy”, “rail service”, and “Palmer” together is you.
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p>
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p>Let’s look at the Acela route stops — the USA high speed rail line — and consider if Palmer makes sense:
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p>Boston South Station (pop 575,000)
Back Bay (pop 575,000)
Route 128 (intersection of I-93 and I-95)
Providence (pop 175,000)
New London (pop 26,000, equidistant b/n Prov, New Haven)
New Haven (pop 125,000)
Stamford (pop 120,000)
New York City (pop 8,275,000)
Newark (pop 280,000)
Metropark (Woodbridge Twp, pop 100,000)
Trenton (pop 83,000)
Philadelphia (pop 1,450,000)
Wilmington (pop 73,000)
Baltimore (pop 635,000)
BWI Airport (10 mi from Bal, 30 mi from DC, confluence of I-97,95,695,895,195)
Washington, D.C (pop 590,000)
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p>
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p>So, Palmer. Population 12,497. Not known for a massive employment center, the intersection of interstates, or anything else that makes it relevant for long distance rail. What stops are most like Palmer on Acela? Based on population, you’ve got Route 128 — but that’s the intersection of two major interstates serving the entire South Shore, where driving to Boston is a burden much bigger than the number of miles. There’s New London, but that’s 57 miles from Providence and 47 from New Haven… far more than 18. BWI is in a census district with a population of 7,000… but Palmer is clearly not comparable to BWI in terms of relevance on a transportation network.
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p>On a line between Boston and Albany (roughly 170 miles via I-90), more relevant stops include but are not limited to the Pittsfield area, Chicopee-Springfield, Worcester, and Framingham. Palmer is an easy 18 miles from Chic-Sp.
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p>Why on Earth would high speed rail stop at Palmer instead of Chicopee-Springfield? It wouldn’t. Why on Earth would it stop at both, adding 5-10 minutes to the trip to pick up dozens of passengers in a place that has no regional draw? Hell, Sturbridge would be better — it’s closer to midway between Chic-Sp & Worcester, and it’s got the intersection of the Pike and I-84 in it’s favor. Hell, it’s even got a tourism destination.
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p>
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p>So, don’t “spend another minute of [your] life arguing with” me. But, do make a case for Palmer being worth an extra 5-10 minutes on a high speed rail line when the train is barely going to get moving again before stopping again in Chicopee-Springfield. Which city on the Acela is Palmer like exactly? Do “offer up reasonable debate” and make the case for high speed rail in Palmer. You sure as hell didn’t make it in your last post, citing 7 towns which have populations under 15k an exit on the Mass Pike, and had lots of rail traffic 50 years ago.
You’re 20-25 minutes from the Springfield train station. That’s really too far to drive?
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p>And comparing a high-speed train stop to a Mass Pike exit is comparing apples to oranges. When you put in a Pike exit, you don’t force everybody else on the road to stop in Palmer. People who don’t want to stop there can just zip on by. Not so for other passengers in the train.
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p>Palmer should absolutely have rail service. Regional rail service. Commuter rail / Amtrak regional style service to Springfield and Worcester and beyond.
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p>If there were to be another high-speed stop between Boston and Albany other than Worcester and Springfield, it would make more sense to put it in Pittsfield than Palmer. Not that I’m necessarily arguing for Pittsfield per se, just saying that it makes more sense: About halfway between Springfield and Albany, which is the only stretch of more than 60 miles that wouldn’t have a high-speed station. Pittsfield would also be a gateway to the Berkshire region, a popular tourist destination.
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p>None of these things applies to Palmer. Ergo, Palmer should not have high-speed service.
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p>(For the record, I live next to Framingham – a town that, like Palmer, is a decent-sized town roughly 20 miles from the nearest proposed high-speed rail stop. It, like Palmer, is the hub of the region, and it, too, lies directly on the route. And it would be utterly ridiculous to have the high-speed trains stop here. I say that of Framingham and I say that of Palmer. Both should have regional service, but neither should have high-speed.)
It takes 45 minutes to get to Springfield from where I live, it takes me about 12 minutes to get to downtown Palmer. All of this doesn’t really matter, because we will never have high speed rail across the state. The “powers that be” do not have the thoughtful capacity to do such a challenging and foward thinking project without making a mess of it.
which I really doubt they could, I stand firmly that there should be High Speed Rail Pick up and Drop off in Palmer. Contrary to what stomv said above, Routes 32, 20, 181, 67, and I-90 intersect in Palmer. I understand how a few additional stops might slow things down a little, but limiting stops also reduces ridership which will have an impact on the success of the project.
Which city on the Acela is Palmer like exactly?
I fear liveandletlive is looking at this question through the wrong end of the telescope.
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p>I think we should be asking “What is the criteria for selecting stops”, then see whether Palmer (along with all the other stops) makes the list.
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p>If the train is going to maintain a given “timetable speed” (the scheduled timetable departure times divided by the distance between stops on the timetable), and the train has a finite top speed and a finite rate of acceleration and deceleration, then the number of and distance between stops is constrained fairly tightly.
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p>I suspect that if the ridership were comprised primarily of travelers who wished to travel between Boston and Chicago, then any stops would decreased ridership. The tradeoff is between people who get ON at intermediate stops (and pay less, by the way, because they don’t travel as far) and ridership lost at the origin because of increased delays.
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p>That’s a reasonably complex modeling problem, and I’m not sure that the conflux of local highways at any one point has very much bearing on the outcome.
which is one reason why it will never happen. There will be legislatures and citizens bickering back and forth about what would be the best location for stops along the route, no one will ever be able to agree, and the project will come to a screeching halt.
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p>The corridor in question does not extend to Chicago. It appears to travel from Boston to Buffalo NY.
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p>http://www.fra.dot.gov/Downloa…
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p>I would think a common use for the system would be to travel within the state quickly and conveniently. It would be stupid to drive 45 minutes West to Springfield to pick up a High Speed train East to Boston. It only takes 90 minutes to drive to Boston. I would never use it to travel to Boston if I had to do it that way. I suppose I could travel to Worcester and pick it up there, but by the time you travel to the station, park, buy ticket, wait for train, etc. you might as well just drive, since you are already half way there anyway.
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p>So, yes, criteria would be considered in selecting locations for stops, and part of the criteria would be use of the service, whether it would be for extremely long distance travel only, or for convenient and quick travel across the state. I’m sure they will compile a wealth of statistics prior to making any decisons.
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Palmer may want the rail stop for its new casino.
And we sit in the best possible place to utilize this service. Very exciting, indeed.
is the federal government running them. Don’t commercial freight carriers make money? Why not privatize Amtrak?
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p>The government has a role in providing the interstate rights-of-way that, like the Interstate Highway System, span state borders.
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p>But the government shouldn’t be running the trains. They can’t, they don’t know how, they waste money.
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p>And now they’ll probably spend the $8 billion and have little to show for it.
We dump orders of magnitude more public $ into that then we do into rail. Freight carriers make money when gas gets expensive because they are anywhere from 4-7x more fuel efficient than trucking, but in general (excepting the last 2+ years) they’ve been losing market share to trucks for decades.
Railroads — passenger + freight carriers — are analogous to the trucking companies.
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p>The Feds should write the laws, reconcile intra- and interstate issues, set national standards, etc. Then they should get out of the way and let the private sector own, design, and operate the system.
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p>The Feds can barely run the air traffic control system so they should stay far away from running the airlines, too.
Nationalize the right of way for all railroads (freight and passenger) and then — and only then — encourage private carriers to compete in running trains on them. Freight tracks need to be separated from passenger tracks (for a host of reasons).
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p>Good luck getting all that to happen.
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p>On the other hand, if something miraculous was to somehow occur, a new national and federally-owned rail system — with 21st-century signaling and control technologies — could work astonishingly great benefits for all of us.
The right of way for these tracks couldn’t have happened without the US Gov’t either giving/selling land to the railroads directly or using eminent domain for the railroads to acquire the land.
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p>There’s no reason why moving many people at 150 mph should be held hostage by shipping coal at 10 mph. None. Get the right of ways, widen them where possible for more than 2 parallel tracks (high speed, local, and freight where feasible), and get that high speed cranking.
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p>The goal is to make it more convenient to train than to fly or drive for more and more origin-destination pairs. Since most people don’t live next to the train station and aren’t going to a destination right next to the train station, and since train tracks are rarely the straightest line between points [see: Bos to NYC via Providence], the train has got to break 100 mph to even compete with cars on time. To beat trains, it’s got to depart and arrive on time all the time, so that the total travel time is sure to beat the total air travel time (security, etc included).
RR’s are much greener than long-haul trucking for freight. But RR’s been losing market share for decades (except for high volume low value density stuff like coal) due to things like speed and reliability.
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p>Recently, my impression is that RR’s have started getting better on timeliness and service; some of my clients (who run trucks almost 100%) are thinking about rail again.
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p>If conflict with passenger service caused problems for freight, you could end up with even more freight shifting to truck, which is undesirable for everyone.
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p>So everyone needs to place nice. How? I have no idea.
separate the passenger and the freight track. Easier said than done, of course. You could also free up substantially more freight space by using less coal to generate electricity… but that’s for another thread.
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p>One of the ways that freight finally started becoming competitive again was — gasp! — they started using computers to handle the scheduling. It’s just a few short years ago that the rail couldn’t promise a schedule because when cars would arrive in a switching yard, the manager would arrange the swaps and redirects out of his head. Things would get missed. Things would get buried. Things would be taken out of order. It was a real mess… the best you could expect out of a person, but exactly the task that computers excel at performing. Folks like CSX finally started applying 50 years of operations research to their industry, and they’ve improved QoS on freight dramatically.
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p>As for “trading” more freight on roads for more passengers on the rail, it’s a major net win even if that does happen. In this overly simplistic situation, if 30 cars of freight end up on the road, that’s 30 18 wheelers more. If an entire train worth of people switch from autos to the train (say, 500 people), thats something like 350 autos off the road. I’d gladly take 30 more trucks on the road to get 350 autos off. It’s a major CO_2 win, and a major win in terms of roadway congestion. Of course, this is an extremely oversimplistic example, and I’d prefer getting more people and more freight on the rails.
Rail shipments aren’t used for things where speed is important. When something is shipped by rail, it has to be brought to a train station and moved from a truck to a train. Likewise when it arrives. So if you care about a few hours difference in when the shipment arrives, you already won’t use trains. Giving passenger trains the right-of-way would delay freight trains by only a few hours for regional shipments and at most a day or two for cross-country shipments. And the delays could be determined ahead of time, which means it would increase the shipping time, but not decrease the reliability or service.
as an operations research guy, I can say with certainty that your claims are far from certain. The devil is in the details, and these particular details are both complex and translucent at best.
… that there would be a significant advantage to expansion of freight rail in specific areas. My understanding is that a lot of imports wind up in the US via Nova Scotia and then by truck. Someone could make a killing running a freight line through form Nova Scotia to, say, Ohio. But of course the ROW, state, and agency agreements would be a gordian knot.
… the tracks are generally privately owned.
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p>It’s the opposite of the highway system, where the roads are generally gov’t operated, and the carriers are private.
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p>I think the latter model works better (the network is the public good, the service providers are private enterprise), but try telling that to CSX.
I have no idea what the breakdown of public vs. private track is, but I do know that it’s an incredibly complex patchwork of ownership and jurisdictions.
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p>As for telling it to CSX, I’ve long been an advocate of eminent domaining the rail from CSX.
Amtrak owns most of its tracks in New England. They own almost no tracks anywhere else. The Federal Government owns no tracks (but Amtrak’s tracks effectively belong to the Federal government in many ways). Local and state governments own some tracks for commuter rail operations. The vast majority of the railroad network is owned by private companies.
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p>Everyone involved in rail travel would actually benefit from having the Federal Government own the tracks. Local governments like to take advantage of the difficulty of moving tracks to charge obscenely high property taxes on railroads. It would be much cheaper for the private companies to sell their tracks to the Feds and then pay usage fees because it would eliminate the property taxes. It would probably also help standardize the equipment (switches and such things) over time, which would reduce the operational costs. And once the Feds own it, they will start subsidizing rail shipping (since the only people who will pay attention to what the government is charging for the rails will be the railroad companies). Given the environmental benefits of increased rail traffic, there is no good reason not to nationalize the railways.
A major obstacle has been that railroad companies pay local property taxes on every foot of every privately-owned right-of-way. Local municipalities are loathe to disturb that revenue stream.
At least from the perspective of understanding the mechanics. It’s worth noting that if a rail runs through my town but doesn’t stop nearby, I suffer from the noise, the pollution, and the right-of-way obstructions, but get nothing in return.
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p>This is much different from interstates, which tend to have more access points than rail has train stations.
would be, 90 minutes to New York, 2:40 to D.C.
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p>That would be in keeping with HSR in Europe, where you can go (for instance) from Paris to Marseilles–about the distance from Boston to Virginia–in 3 hours.
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p>So, true HSR, not the fake version that passes itself off as such today. And the place to start is the Northeast Corridor. The greatest obstacle is if congress insists on earmarking this all away into several regional HSRs to Nowhere.
But that will require a new set of tracks. The Acela trains are not the TGV but they are not utilized as they could be either. Like in southwest CT, where the 150 mph Acela trains have to give right of way to the 60 mph MetroNorth trains on the same track. There are many other areas where the track is simply not rated for 150 mph speeds.
… track remediation would be part of HSR development. That’s what happened in the NE corridor.
but HSR a la TGV also requires tracks that are farther apart from each other due to the extra buffer required due to high speeds plus the space needed for the “lean” due to curved track and the train’s lean itself.
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p>The tracks, even the remediated NE track, are often too close together. Too narrow a right of way is sometimes the problem, other times it’s that it’d be far more expensive to push those tracks farther apart due to berms, bridges, fences, and the like. I’m not claiming that it can’t be done, merely that the cost per mile is really high and we just don’t have that kind of political willpower to spend the money there. I sure as heck wish we did.
… I totally agree that it’s a lot on a cost per mile basis, but if any of this is intended to do double duty as stimulus, then now is the time to put forward the high cost per mile projects anyway.
would put an end to short-hop air travel and all that carbon. It is the lowest-hanging fruit with the best return on investment. It should take priority over HSR to nowhere.
but I’m not sure it’s any lower than mid-Atlantic, the SF-LA run, or travel around Chicagoland. Other considerations include marginal cost for each marginal improvement, the degree to which each areas airports are near/at/past capacity, and the same for interstates. I do know that new track (as opposed to upgrading existing right of way) is insanely expensive. Not impossible — heck, we do it for highways which require far more acres — but damn expensive.
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p>This isn’t to pooh-pooh New England. We’re certainly worthy of better rail given our population density, our propensity to live within a few miles of train stations, our existent local mass transit, and so forth. I’m just not willing to claim it’s the best return. It’s certainly a good enough return to warrant the investment, and I hope it’s joined by investment in other regions which warrant HSR (or, more likely, HSR-lite much like the Acela exists today).
the place to start would be the west, with far fewer of those pesky rivers, bridges, cities, and therefore — curves, grades, curves, grades, and then more curves. I suspect we’d want to walk before we run, and therefore look for routes where the track can be straight, level, and with no stops. The desert is a whole lot more suitable than, say, RI or CT.
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p>The bulk of the much-acclaimed (and very successful) speed increases for the Acela (and “conventional” trains as well) resulted from eliminating the extensive stretches of “slow-order” track with maximum speed limits of 5 or 10 MPH (not to mention the layover at New Haven to switch between electric and diesel). During the time when the Acela was out of service with its brake problems, conventional locomotives and “heritage” cars averaged very close to Acela speeds.
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p>The game, in the NE corridor, is to minimize the amount of time the train (even a conventional train) spends running slowly, much more than raising the maximum speed in the handful of short segments where the Acela can really crank.
Slowing down to 79 mph and then speeding back up to 110 mph kills a lot of time. Sure I’d love an average speed of 150 mph between stops, but the way to get there is to shave minutes off here, minutes off there by straightening track, increasing the distance between parallel track, securing movable bridges in a closed position when idle, that sort of thing. You chip away at it one project at a time.
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p>The hard part is that most of these projects will costs tens (or hundreds) of millions to shave minutes off of a journey. But, pile enough of these improvements up, and you’ve got faster and faster service.
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p>An example: simply raising the train station platform so that there’s no steps up to the rail cars shaves a minute or three from a stop because getting on and off the train is faster for the passengers. Do that for 6 stations and you shave 10-15 minutes off the journey and you haven’t even touched the track!
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p>The key is to get enough Federal force behind it to overcome NIMBYism. Remember, in populated areas most people near the track don’t benefit directly from it being there — and their objections must be overcome one way or another to have that construction in their backyard, and then that faster train in their backyard.
which is one reason why it will never happen. There will be legislatures and citizens bickering back and forth about what would be the best location for stops along the route, no one will ever be able to agree, and the project will come to a screeching halt.
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p>The corridor in question does not extend to Chicago. It appears to travel from Boston to Buffalo NY.
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p>http://www.fra.dot.gov/Downloa…
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p>I would think a common use for the system would be to travel within the state quickly and conveniently. It would be stupid to drive 45 minutes West to Springfield to pick up a High Speed train East to Boston. It only takes 90 minutes to drive to Boston. I would never use it to travel to Boston if I had to do it that way. I suppose I could travel to Worcester and pick it up there, but by the time you travel to the station, park, buy ticket, wait for train, etc. you might as well just drive, since you are already half way there anyway.
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p>So, yes, criteria would be considered in selecting locations for stops, and part of the criteria would be use of the service, whether it would be for extremely long distance travel only, or for convenient and quick travel across the state. I’m sure they will compile a wealth of statistics prior to making any decisons.