Acela & Amtrak NEC (HSR BOS-NYP-WAS and branches only)

Breaking News: LI Residents in uproar over imagined problems with imagined project.
 
Yeah, pretty much. Lawn Guylanders are the worst.

BTW, on the topic of noise: I've noticed that London's elevated railway lines are pretty quiet to the surrounding streets. And in Amsterdam, I could hardly hear a noise at all from the elevated viaducts. Wouldn't notice a train going by unless you were looking for it. The ride was much smoother as well.

Americans really are still living in the 19th century.
 
underground said:
Breaking News: LI Residents in uproar over imagined problems with imagined project.
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They've been uproaring nonstop over imagined problems with real projects with immediate benefits, like re-laying Main Line Track 2 to Ronkonkoma and Track 3 to Hicksville. LI NIMBY's vs. a wholly imaginary project is like handing out speedballs at the door and seeing who can concern-freebase the fastest.


Just wait till the first Westchester County presentation.
 
Well it doesn't help that the News lied about the path the route would take. I haven't seen anything that would send it down Stewart Ave , everything points to using the lightly used Lower Montuak & Hempstead branch , abandoned Central Branch and adding and grade separating the Ronkonkoma Branch. It doesn't help the fact that the FRA is run by idiots...who should put out all the facts to the MSM...instead of just telling everyone the date and time of the meetings...
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
They've been uproaring nonstop over imagined problems with real projects with immediate benefits, like re-laying Main Line Track 2 to Ronkonkoma and Track 3 to Hicksville. LI NIMBY's vs. a wholly imaginary project is like handing out speedballs at the door and seeing who can concern-freebase the fastest.


Just wait till the first Westchester County presentation.
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Westchester people in general are warmer to projects then long Islanders same with people in NJ and CT... I don't know why that is...although the proposed route makes very little sense...compared to LI or some basic improvements to the existing NEC...
 
There will be a NVision 2020 transportation meeting tomorrow, January 28 in the Palace Theater, Waterbury. Topics discussed will include upgrades to the Waterbury MN line, and the potential NEC Future alignment through Waterbury.

NVision 2020: Naugatuck Valley Corridor Conference on Infrastructure and Development



The Naugatuck Valley Region already has the tools it needs to encourage growth and a sustainable economy. With access to CT Route 8 and Interstate 84, the second largest airport in the state, and a commuter rail system, the region boasts the underlying transportation infrastructure needed to support a steady flow of employees and goods into the thriving economies of nearby Fairfield County and the New York City metropolitan area. Employees in other regions of the state or in New York already call our region home, in part due to a supply of affordable housing. The region features accessible higher education institutions, abundant open space and recreational trails, and a growing arts community.

The NVision Conference will define how our region can capitalize on its strengths. With the foundation of a transit system already in place, we must expand options available to residents and to the business community. Expanding alternate modes of transportation will play a major role in decreasing burdens on the existing highway corridors and make our area more attractive to residents and business investment. Redeveloping vacant and underutilized sites near transit modes is key. We aim to retool our region for the twenty-first century by investing in technology and transportation infrastructure. These investments will leverage a more diverse, tech friendly economy supportive of existing businesses, new small businesses, local production, advanced manufacturing, and ultimately a better quality of life.

Conference registration begins at 9:00am.

When
Thursday, January 28, 2016 from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM (EST) - Add to Calendar
Where
Palace Theater - 100 East Main Street Waterbury, CT 06702 - View Map

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nvisio...structure-and-development-tickets-19621730123
 
Alt 2 should go via Worcester and electrification should be extended to Upstate NY and Interior New England...
 
Nexis4jersey said:
Alt 2 should go via Worcester and electrification should be extended to Upstate NY and Interior New England...
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I would agree with you, but that involves building a lot more track through very bad terrain. 2 only requires a new run between providence and hartford.
 
I agree the Hartford to Providence route makes more sense even aside from needing less new track/work on upgrades because even though technically Worcester is a "bigger city" the urban area of Providence and the metro is clearly larger by over 600 million people so it makes more sense to serve Providence than it does to serve Worcester.
 
Mongo said:
I would agree with you, but that involves building a lot more track through very bad terrain. 2 only requires a new run between providence and hartford.
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Alt 2 via Worcester isn't going to exist when the geologists get done tearing it to shreds. Unlike the Berkshires where there is an unbroken singular mountain chain with common rock base that you can bore a Hoosac Tunnel through...the Worcester Hills are a whole bunch of discrete and heterogeneous rubble piles. It can be the straightest two-dimensional ROW in the world, but the simple act of aligning the TBM at the sweet-spot injection points from one rock seam of X properties to the next rock seam of Y properties requires so many small corrections to the vertical grade to string it all together that the line's going to have constantly choppy up-down-up-down-down-up elevation changes limiting its speed. HSR can handle a pretty stiff absolute grade, but only when it's relatively constant. The more it's changing from stiff to gentle, or short-term changing from up to down...the more the propulsion has to be in a constant state of self-adjustment and the more the performance erodes.

Alt. 2 straight to Worcester is the complete antithesis of a constant grade. It's one endless wave of performance-degrading micro-adjustments that infinite $$$ chucked at TBM's can't paper over. The same way bolting a railbed onto the grading of a 1950's interstate highway is no magic bullet either when frequency of grade changes are factored in along I-95 on the Shoreline. NEC FUTURE might be dumbfounded how infinite TBM'ing in a straight 2D line nets a route where top speeds barely punch past 125 MPH for any meaningful distances, but the Swiss and Chinese will sit there arms folded and say "Told ya so." Connecticut provides the Exhibit A that upends their "TBM'z IZ TOTES MAGIK!" assumptions on every damn one of these alternatives.


They can do this on the unbuilt and still ConnDOT-owned I-84 land between Bolton and Plainfield because it sticks to the lowlands and the railbed grading would come first, not have to follow in the more permissive road grading's footsteps. It's doable on that routing where the I-95 Shoreline alternative isn't. And they can incorporate Worcester faster than any route that takes the Worcester Hills head-on by using the junction of the inland Providence spine with the north-south P&W Worcester-Groton mainline to set up a Worcester-Boston fork on an upgraded P&W. That line sticks to the river valley at low elevation while straightening out enough north of Norwich to have long tangent segments and historically zippy travel times. Injection point lies 35-38 miles due south of Worcester Union Station, and couple opportunities exist for 1-2 mile straightening bypasses (see Putnam, Webster, Oxford, Auburn) where the line presently diverges off-alignment to hit the old village downtowns but a realignment sticking closer to I-395 (which tends to steer clear of the old downtowns) knocks some consequential curves/crossings off the route.

It would not take very much work at all to have sustained speeds of 85-95 MPH diesel on those 38 miles for "Day 1" Northeast Regional service pulled by a dual-mode locomotive, ratcheted up in later funding shots to 95-110 MPH with incremental upgrades and squaring the freight clearances for contiguous electrification. If it's 125-165 MPH all points New Haven-Hartford-Plainfield and 100-125 Worcester-Boston...that short diversion fork on tarted-up existing track may end up a match on the clock to the real infinite-$$$ Hartford-Worcester Alt. 2 dig by virtue of keeping its (relative) speed penalty mercifully short-duration vs. the consistent mediocrity of the up/down/up/down bounce through the Worcester Hills. Real-time negligible, not just "plenty good for not needing to light an extra $100B on fire" negligible. In addition to not needing to pit Worcester vs. Providence against each other in a false dichotomy of mutually exclusive spines.
 
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^ So have I understood your plan to be to build the Hartford-Providence on the I-684 alignment and then serve Worcester via an improved P&W? Would you see then see the new NEC spine running HFD-PVD-RTE-BOS or PVD-WOR-BOS?

Could a single line that ran NYC-NHV-HFD-PVD-WOR-BOS be fast enough? Maybe? basically it'd be doing a 90deg turn at each big city but have potentially very straight-and-fast running between each?

It'd be pretty amazing to tie every major city in New England to each other in a network this way (with SPG as a tag north from HFD...SPG-HFD-PVD-RTE-BOS would be a pretty sweet market (on the existing 165mph stretch too)
 
NYP-NHV-HFD-PVD-BOS is definitely the main spine - that's your fastest running. The HFD-WOR-BOS routing is going to be slower because both legacy alignments aren't going to get much beyond 90, maybe to 110. NHV-NLC-PVD, HFD-SPG-WOR, and PVD-WOR are all important intercity spines but they largely top out at 90. That gets you a one-seat ride between the most important cities, and two-seats on every other pairing.
 
Arlington said:
^ So have I understood your plan to be to build the Hartford-Providence on the I-684 alignment and then serve Worcester via an improved P&W? Would you see then see the new NEC spine running HFD-PVD-RTE-BOS or PVD-WOR-BOS?

Could a single line that ran NYC-NHV-HFD-PVD-WOR-BOS be fast enough? Maybe? basically it'd be doing a 90deg turn at each big city but have potentially very straight-and-fast running between each?

It'd be pretty amazing to tie every major city in New England to each other in a network this way (with SPG as a tag north from HFD...SPG-HFD-PVD-RTE-BOS would be a pretty sweet market (on the existing 165mph stretch too)
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No. Like EGE says:

-- ONE spine, New Haven-Hartford-Providence.
-- NO alt spines.
-- ONE HSR schedule, New Haven-Hartford-Providence.


The only suggestion here is to graft on a variation of a NE Regional schedule that diverts from the spine at Plainfield, hits Worcester, and continues on to Boston.

Reasons:

-- The Inland Route via Springfield will never get much faster than the current proposal because of the Worcester Hills. MBTA territory can probably get cranked up >100 MPH at some point, but it is what it is west of there. And so the schedules will primarily be flushed with New Haven-turning Shuttles with not enough trains continuing to NYC via Bridgeport and Stamford. That leaves Worcester at a continuing strategic disadvantage vs. the other secondary cities between NYC-BOS. There's not enough room for improvement to shoot for a schedule that can have any sort of mix-and-match parity with the Shoreline. It's going to hit its ceiling too quickly to keep scaling.

-- Providence is equally as operationally shitty as Springfield for forking a route. The P&W Worcester-Providence mainline is a clusterfuck of curves shaped by the meandering Blackstone River. The only reason it could ever support a viable commuter rail schedule north of the MA state line is that there'd be too few intermediate stops for the neverending curve penalties to kill the schedule alone. It's unlikely to top 60 MPH north of Woonsocket in its natural state.

-- NEC FUTURE's false dichotomy of depriving Providence of HSR to send it all through Worcester is stupid for a lot of reasons, but it also asks the wrong questions. Worcester is at a loss for medium-haul service, primarily NYC-BOS with it chained together to a bunch of its most-similar sized New England brethren. There is not an enormous amount of national demand for trips from D.C. to their doorstep. Providence, being the capitol city of Rhode Island, is always going to trump it in national importance. Piping the whole damn spine through there isn't what they need most of all.



So don't reinvent the wheel. *The* spine crosses the Worcester-Groton mainline two-thirds of the way to Providence. The Worcester-Groton mainline just happens to be flat, relatively short, tolerably straight in spots, and tolerably improvable in other spots. Use it...on a distinct minority of the NE Regionals schedule...to bind Boston, Worcester, Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, Stamford, and New York together on a mid-distance string of pearls. Hartford-Worcester becomes as fast as a commuter rail trip insde of I-495 thanks to all that high-speed territory, the rest as taut as a present-day Springfield Shuttle. It might even do Springfield some favors by refocusing it more squarely as the crossroads of Central New England where less stress trying to uphold a taut Inlands schedule opens up more options for regular Boston-Albany and Boston-VT slots.


That's it. It's one spine...then seeing the obvious economies and shooting the free-throws instead of making icky-poo faces like NEC FUTURE probably is that such a logical problem-solving variation in service doesn't carry enough billions in monument-building.

I mainly bring it up to challenge this stupid Providence vs. Worcester dichotomy in the alternatives that blindly assumes that the cities are completely and utterly interchangeable instead of fundamentally different with differing service needs.
 
We build things through complicated terrains all the time in this country , so I don't think it will be a problem here...
 
We build things through complicated terrains all the time in this country when we decide to spend a lot on infrastructure. We've currently decided not to, which yes, presents a problem generally and for a Worcester inland route specifically.
 
underground said:
We build things through complicated terrains all the time in this country when we decide to spend a lot on infrastructure. We've currently decided not to, which yes, presents a problem generally and for a Worcester inland route specifically.
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Using this logic would be a prime example of wasteful spending. Why spend ten times more than necessary when a sufficient alternative can be done cheaply -- especially when the expensive alternative simply satisfies the urge to connect dots on a map?
 
We still do to a certain degree with highways....so if you were to push a little then its possible. Both routes are complex , and present the same amount of challenges...
 
underground said:
We build things through complicated terrains all the time in this country when we decide to spend a lot on infrastructure. We've currently decided not to, which yes, presents a problem generally and for a Worcester inland route specifically.
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"Complexity" and "if only we could spend money we'd have nice things" are not the problem with NEC FUTURE's map doodles.
"Unnecessary. . ."
​
"Does not obey laws of physics / upended by its own physical challenges. . ."
​
"Makes for shitty HSR by any reasonable world standard. . ."
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"Has no coherent mission statement. . ."
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"Does not know/understand/care what demand question it is asking. . ."
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^THESE^...and many more asinine reasons strictly related to fed vs. state/city turf warrage...kill NEC FUTURE long before you've even isolated the workable pieces for a cost/benefit debate.


What I'm saying is that the alternates that pump full-blown HSR through Worcester flunk it on "WTF is this supposed to be?" grounds way, way before the "WTF is this supposed to cost?" question gets posed, much less compared to some other spine. Their alternatives choices are predicated on an assumption that Providence and Worcester are completely and utterly identical, interchangeable, and mutually exclusive picks. They're not. At no point does this corrupt little time-waster even ask the question "So what does a Providence or Worcester need out of the NEC, and what does the NEC need out of a Providence or Worcester?" Nope. It's "here's Choice A, here's Choice B; now let's quickly distract ourselves with tunneling talk before somebody remembers that this is a binary answer to a question no one asked."


This is the same corrupt little time-waster organization that couldn't even be arsed to ask that question about the CBD's of fricking Philly and Baltimore when pushing those tunnel bypasses underneath downtown. The Philly public presentation in early January was one great gobsmacked chorus of "WTF is this supposed to be???" from everyone from individual voters to business leaders to elected pols. With knives going out for NEC FUTURE's hide on the revenue questions before cost questions. So much of Philly's active CBD redevelopment winds the center of the universe tighter than ever around 30th St. Station, and this plan runs completely contrary to where they thought it was going. The locals and especially the 1%'ers with real estate money were more immediately confused and troubled about that disconnect than they were about what Big Dig under Philly was going to cost.

Unasked questions about basic-ass mission statement are killing them in the 2nd largest city on the NEC. Soon will be killing them in the 3rd largest city on the NEC when Baltimore gets its crack at a public inquisition. It's going to kill them in a half-dozen other places before Providence v. Worcester even gets its turn in the queue. But the more people NEC FUTURE gets to distract into thinking this is about political will to take on large costs, the longer they get to waste everyone's time and money before the jig is up.

Some of the responses in this thread are taking that bait. NEC FUTURE wants this to be a stubborn Crazy Transit Pitches argument about 'possibles' and 'challenges' and freeing one's mind to spend hundreds of billions on 'possibles' and 'challenges'. It's a means to an end to justify their continued existence producing studies-about-studies. They are scared to death about getting grilled on needs, purpose, and synergies that actually require them to justify their existence. Personally, I think the hugely encouraging takeaway from the Philly presentation is that the locals paid so little attention to the distractions and went right for the jugular on the existential questions and contradictions. I'll be even more encouraged if Baltimore skewers them with same or better laser-like focus on what matters. The faster NEC FUTURE can get wiped off the face of the earth, the faster we can replace them with a coalition of non-grifters who ask the right questions first.
 
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