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

Semass said:
Your description makes a lot of sense. The infrastrucure needs are certainly a consideration. Meanwhile the roll-out of a RI-run in-state commuter rail operation could mitigate that. The plan I understood from you and EGE is that MBTA services to Boston would likely terminate in Providence while RIDOT would serve Providence to Westerly on the NEC, probably with a starter diesel service. That could leave the MA electric infrastructure and locomotive procurement which could - theoretically anyway - be in time to support but not totally alleviate the pain of the phase out of the GPs and F40s.
Still, it seems that the ROI could be compelling. We will need some new locomotives. Fuel will not be cheap forever. Electrics have good performance characteristics and long lifespans. Worcester certainly expands the scope but there is that whole north south rail link thing to consider.
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Simply doing the last bits to get Providence + RIDOT going, then electrifying Fairmount + Worcester, puts well over half of the southside's equipment pool on-wire. It scales quickly after the sticker shock of that initial investment.
 
Re: Amtrak / Regional Rail Discussion Thread

bakgwailo said:
Not sure if this is the correct thread, but, it looks like Alstom and Amtrak have officially inked their deal for the replacement Acela II cars. Alstom, Amtrak ink deal
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The actual finalization/signing is (or will be) genuinely new news. I'm a little distressed that neither Amtrak nor Alstom actually commented for the article, but again relies on Senator Chuck Schumer as its source, and he's been consistently early and too emphatic in his "its a deal" calls.

We've known for a long time that Amtrak had selected Alstom as its preferred vendor and had entered what appeared to be a "just crossing t and dotting i phase" Amtrak Chairman Boardman said he wasn't retiring until he had a deal. Stuff like that made it feel like "by March" then "by May" then "by June" but it never happened.

Its news if it is really true this time.
 
Arlington said:
The Tier 1 FEIS has been released at http://www.necfuture.com/tier1_eis/feis/

The preferred alternative is here:
http://www.necfuture.com/pdfs/feis/c04.pdf

I've just started reading.
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Don't bother. The FRA working group changed virtually nothing except papering over all of New London County's objections with MOAR TUNNEL!, said "I'm a lame-duck so fuck your input, Connecticut", and laughed its way to the revolving-door exits to their next private-sector jobs with the dumpster fire left burning for the next Admin's FRA administrator to clean up.

It's complete consistency with how un-serious, divorced from reality, and antagonistic to all stakeholders the whole process has been from Day 1. Nothing new to see here.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Don't bother. The FRA working group changed virtually nothing except papering over all of New London County's objections with MOAR TUNNEL!, said "I'm a lame-duck so fuck your input, Connecticut", and laughed its way to the revolving-door exits to their next private-sector jobs with the dumpster fire left burning for the next Admin's FRA administrator to clean up.

It's complete consistency with how un-serious, divorced from reality, and antagonistic to all stakeholders the whole process has been from Day 1. Nothing new to see here.
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I agree, the alignment is so bad, it's clear they put a line on a map, and when they got opposition they just said.....TUNNEL!

I don't understand why they don't put an alignment from Providence straight to Hartford and down from there. It's a route that is shorter and actually connects the major population centers of the region.
 
Mongo said:
I agree, the alignment is so bad, it's clear they put a line on a map, and when they got opposition they just said.....TUNNEL!

I don't understand why they don't put an alignment from Providence straight to Hartford and down from there. It's a route that is shorter and actually connects the major population centers of the region.
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Turf warrage. They got pushback, and it was piled-upon by the Congressional delegations of multiple states...so they're just giving a big fat middle finger by doubling-down and vomiting up a non-revised report on a Friday afternoon news dump the week before Xmas. No consequences because the FRA administrators will be packing up their offices and leaving D.C. before there's time post-Holidays for any officially-organized public airing of grievances. It's exactly as childish as it looks.


They did drop the cross-Baltimore, cross-Philly, and cross-Long Island Sound tunnels, as well as the cross-Westchester alignment and Worcester-instead-of-Providence alignments. But they're still humping down on this and bypassing Wilmington (#6 on NEC ridership, #11 nationally) by pinning them in as Preferred Alternatives. Wilmington skip violates every principle of demand-served, as well as being a real rich presumption for making Delaware non-optionally pay into this project. And then the complete boxing-in of the Shoreline MOAR TUNNEL to cut off any further conversation on other alternatives is just a ratfucking of CT pols for having the temerity to ask for more study of Hartford/I-91 corridor demand...then sticking up for their Shoreline constituents. Probably with an extra zinger directed at Gov. Malloy, since he was the betting-odds favorite for a Transpo Sec'y nomination in a Clinton Administration.



It's all meaningless. The whole point of this sorry exercise from Day 1 was for a niche purely regulatory agency to grab an opportunity to swing a big dick at their transpo food chain peers with a little empire-building fantasy in their own sandbox. Any which way the election turned out the usurpers were all heading for the exits in January and their handiwork thrown in the trash. A new working group with the real NEC stakeholders and the states would've taken years to put together anyway, so nothing was going to happen in the next 4 years other than pulling the plug on this little time-waster. No harm to the long game except some squandered study money and a lot of PDF-format virtual dead trees wasted for a sick joke.
 
Was on Google & came across THIS story on the Viewliner cars, including the newer ones on order. I found it to be very interesting! You might have already known about it, but I thought that I'd post it anyway. :cool:



http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Viewliner
 
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Groton and Stonington Grade Crossing Elimination

If we want to frame the goal on the New Haven to Providence segment as eliminating high speed grade crossings, has anyone ever looked at keeping the existing Thames River bridge, keeping the alignment from the Thames to New Haven as is aside from minor changes with the Connecticut River crossing replacement, but moving the Thames to Rhode Island section to the I-95 corridor?

There seem to be some conceptual plans for how to close the Miner Ln crossing in Waterford, CT, even if there doesn't seem to be any actual action being taken to make that happen; and the New London crossings are relatively low speed.

But some of the Groton and Stonington crossings look like they'd be impossible to grade separate without a substantial negative impact on waterfront views.
 
Re: Groton and Stonington Grade Crossing Elimination

Joel N. Weber II said:
If we want to frame the goal on the New Haven to Providence segment as eliminating high speed grade crossings, has anyone ever looked at keeping the existing Thames River bridge, keeping the alignment from the Thames to New Haven as is aside from minor changes with the Connecticut River crossing replacement, but moving the Thames to Rhode Island section to the I-95 corridor?

There seem to be some conceptual plans for how to close the Miner Ln crossing in Waterford, CT, even if there doesn't seem to be any actual action being taken to make that happen; and the New London crossings are relatively low speed.

But some of the Groton and Stonington crossings look like they'd be impossible to grade separate without a substantial negative impact on waterfront views.
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Drive I-95 and you'll see why any permutations of this alignment are impossible. It's a continuous substandard bunny-hop of shitty grades blasted through millions of tons of jagged Connecticut trap rock outcrops. They can make a straighter alignment here, but the speeds wouldn't be much improved going over that bunny-hop...hence the "MOAR TUNNEL!" nonsense. Not to mention the 95 corridor is much more densely-abutted than the immediate Shoreline where the current NEC runs through a whole lot of tidal swamps on an embankment. That's their primary objection, and it's a very legitimate and non-NIMBY objection because the land-takings and historical destruction are barking insane.


ConnDOT has been delinquent on moving forward with closing the remaining crossings. Miner Ln. and School St. Groton both have generally agreed-upon conceptual plans and town-level advocacy for elimination. They've just lost complete interest. Maybe when Shore Line East starts running full schedules east of Old Saybrook there'll be some movement in Waterford on Miner, and Groton's for-sure going to sabre-rattle about School for the SLE extension to Westerly. With all the redev going on at New London Ferry Terminal, city can probably be convinced to close the Bank St. Connector crossing to the very small 18-space parking lot next to the harbor walk; they're adding garage space in the rest of downtown, and they can expand the harbor walk park by eating that lot.

Stonington is where the NIMBY's fought every single elimination as a wedge to depress train traffic, such that only a couple tiny roads got eliminated in the late-90's upgrades before feds + state threw in the towel in complete frustration. Absolutely no one on earth is inconvenienced by bridging Lartimer Point Rd. and Wamphassuc Rd. over the tracks; the crossings are in the swamp out of sight of private abutters. And Palmer St. is much too busy to not be overpassed on a rail bridge. Stonington just needs to be steamrolled on this.


The only ones that are going to be impossible are:

  • State St. + Winthrop Blvd., New London. Both of these are Coast Guard boat evacuation routes for vessels pulled out of the harbor, so they need vertical clearances...eliminating possibility of a rail bridge. National security overrules conceptual perfection on doing a Bridgeport-style station viaduct here. And space by the ferry terminal is too constrained to bridge over the driveway. There is currently a new pedestrian overpass being constructed which should cut down on the number of peds crossing there and make things a lot safer. But overall these are both least-concern crossings because of the very slow speeds on the station approach.

  • Walkers Marina + Ehiu Island Rd. private crossings, Stonington. Tracks are literally 25 ft. from the cove here so physically impossible to bridge over and incline down onto the narrow rock causeways both of these driveways travel on out into the cove. Both least-concern due to low traffic and no activity during winter months.

  • Mystic Station/Broadway Ave. Ext. Just a brutally difficult one because of the tight confines. Feasible, but it'll be an ugly-looking job the village probably isn't going to be keen on. Ugly enough that the village probably has a point. Sub-ideal to keep, but a low concern for SLE commuter rail where it's a station stop, for Amtrak where it's in the middle of a curve + movable bridge speed restriction, and for low traffic levels.


Done right they can reduce their crossing count from 11 to 5 lickety-split by getting on with the Waterford + Groton ones, closing the superfluous NLN parking lot, and telling Stonington to go screw because their objections are baseless. That's not bad considering 2 of those remainders are limited-liability private crossings, and the remaining 3 are on slow-speed station approaches. Absolute perfect grade separation across 1000 miles of Corridor was always going to be reliant on luck much more than engineering brawn. Not even the first-world's best HSR lines can make ironclad promises of total separation without relying on luck breaking their way on those inevitable toughies. It's not the end of the world to have 4 or 5 impossibles in a 13-mile stretch that's a mere blip on the radar vs. the Corridor at-large.
 
Re: Groton and Stonington Grade Crossing Elimination

F-Line to Dudley said:
  • Walkers Marina + Ehiu Island Rd. private crossings, Stonington. Tracks are literally 25 ft. from the cove here so physically impossible to bridge over and incline down onto the narrow rock causeways both of these driveways travel on out into the cove. Both least-concern due to low traffic and no activity during winter months.
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If this one truly needed to go, it could be addressed by extending Salt Acres road. Ironically, the current google imagery caught a car on the Elihu Island road crossing.
 
Just saw a sweet Acela commercial. An aerial view with Manhattan in the background.

Can't find it on the internet yet.
 
Seems that only the computer-graphic vids of the new Avelia Liberty trains can be seen on the Internet for now.
 
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odurandina said:
Just saw a sweet Acela commercial. An aerial view with Manhattan in the background...Can't find it on the internet yet.
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When you do find it, it'd be super in the Amtrak / Regional Rail Discussion Thread thread, (for discussing today's Acela, Northeast Regional, Vermonter, NHHS Shuttle, and Downeaster and stuff that was in Deval Patricks' big package (BOS-SPG, and New Haven - Greenfield)), which could use the love.
 
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An Amtrak train had suffered a sudden loss of power this morning while enroute from Philly to Penn Station & South Station in Boston.

"My feet were numb!", said a woman who was one of the many passengers that became STUCK ON A POWERLESS Amtrak train which had lost its juice on one of the most brutally cold days this winter.

She went to sleep, but when she woke up, she and the others were bone-rattling cold!, as the warmth from the heat was not on at all. :eek:


https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2...t-for-hours/Jj84G4YtLAJlHma0nf4ZVL/story.html
 
There are several threads about Amtrak.

Maybe some of them can be combined to make them look neater.
 
Jahvon09 said:
There are several threads about Amtrak.

Maybe some of them can be combined to make them look neater.
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I see no need for combining. I think the distinction between planning (this thread) and operations (the other thread) is a helpful distinction. I would, however, retitle them:
HSR Rail Planning (Amtrak NEC Future) (This thread) is about re-making / rebuilding the Northeast Corridor (a far-future planning topic focused on BOS-NYC-WAS) It focuses on actual track-laying and network planning.
Amtrak Far-Future Plans (this thread), currently titled for its headline project
Amtrak's $117 Billion Plan For High Speed Travel

Amtrak / Regional Rail MA, CT, RI, VT, ME, NH[
To focus on the nuts and bolts of current and near-future ops on all passenger lines in New England, which tend to be Amtrak operated but would include RIDOT, Western Mass (MA EOT), & Shore Line (CDOT)
 
Really cool program on Nova this week.

S44 E6 "Why Trains Crash," playing fright now on GBH World, and at 8pm tomorrow,
and multiple times on Sunday.
 
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