It has to be one and not the other because while reworking the NEC is absolutely not going to be the monolith project it's presented as in its current form, it's also not going to be broken down into phases as small as Hartford to Willimantic or Providence to Coventry.
Says...you? Reworking the NEC has, for 30 years now, been broken broken down into pieces
bridge-by-bridge,
tunnel-by-tunnel. I don't know what universe you're envisioning where there's going to be design and EIS'ing covering hundreds of miles in one shot, but that IS monolithic by orders of magnitude compared to present day. Please do show how that's going to change in the next 25 years such that this can get built in the 15 years after that. And substantiate with more than 'because I said so!'
Actual construction may happen in that sort of phasing by sheer coincidence, but the official, factual, designed-funded-built phase of the project is going to be Hartford to Providence. HSR-compatible trackage to Willimantic isn't getting built until we're 100% ready to go forward the rest of the way to Providence - if that means Willimantic gets built 20 years later than it could've/should've/would've been? Sorry, Willimantic, but Amtrak's just not that into you.
Bull. Then it doesn't get built at all. You just said it's not going to be a monolith, and then immediately turned around and declared it a monolith by deeming 2 out of 3 discrete legs of the ROW null and void and "just not into it" unless the third leg is signed/sealed/delivered/has-an-Acela-idling-on-it. That's NIMBY reasoning straight out of South Coast Rail: "Our way of life hinges on this getting built, BUT DON'T YOU DARE GO THROUGH THAT SWAMP until after North-Station-by-Whale's-Tooth" is open for business."
Pitting stakeholders against each other over personal preference is an excellent way to torpedo a project. Hartford-Willimantic has strong enough freight and CTDOT juice behind it that the state's already committed to studying reconnection of the NYNE, on grounds that highway or no highway the road congestion is too unsustainable. And it is the literal only way to get heavy freight off the Shoreline...which you better damn believe Amtrak is "into". But please do tell them their interests are trite and baseless and that they need to wait until some deity at USDOT or Amtrak deems it acceptable to care. That's really going to help when it comes time for these same stakeholders to put a little elbow grease into placating the NIMBY's on that far more contentious Plainfield-Providence stretch. I'm sure the negative reinforcement about how nobody's into them is going to make CT much more willing to go to the mat for this master planning deity's bidding. RI too...they'll surely go for gusto on a pinky-swear that doing battle with residents in Warwick and Coventry will eventually get somebody willing to care about the half-of-CT gap keeping them from a HFD-PRV one-seat.
You see where I'm going with this. We do not live in a country of planning and civil engineering dictatorship. Building a big project means give-and-take with a LOT of stakeholders. The more communities and states affected, the more stakeholders. Basing decisions entirely on what YOU (the planner) thinks matters, substantiated by the littany of things YOU think are baseless about the stakeholders' interests or personally aren't "into"...is an excellent way to ensure nothing gets built. But at least it'll have NOT been built on your terms, no?
Just try telling the majority of BOS-NYC travelers that their whole worth as a commuting market hinges on that Providence intermediate stop. And that without it they are not worthy of better transit at any cost. See how much agreement that spurs in the NEC's
entire ridership catchment area. Providence preferable, yes. Near and dear enough to the hearts of all the millions of people from Virginia to Maine to feel as ironclad in their conviction as you do about what routings can and cannot be on the table to get them from Penn to South Station faster? No. Not even a little bit.
Even if they're ready to go on everything west of any given point on the line that's not Providence, the odds are good that they won't build track to watch languish and they will wait and see how Providence shakes out before breaking ground - because the one thing they want to do less than leave money on the table is get halfway through a project and then have it summarily defunded in the wake of changing political tides, leaving us with the HSR equivalent of interstates like the Long Island Expressway or 384 as it exists today - roads to nowhere, clearly meant to continue on but doomed to languish in their present state forever.
Who's 'they'? CTDOT, P&W, and NECR...or Amtrak's CEO? And what does 'languish' mean? I don't see 40-car trains of double stack freight from 2 different carriers being a waste of track. Not when one of those carriers is giving up Shoreline schedule slots that can be taken up by passenger trains running twice the speed. I don't see a full HFD-NLN commuter rail schedule being a waste of track. This will immediately become the third-busiest rail line in the state. Long Island Expressway, indeed. . .
I do see Providence-Plainfield being quite very underutilized until somebody feels "into" enough to fill the gaps elsewhere. Not a single freight will use it because everything from Providence and Port of Davisville goes to the yards in Worcester before moving anywhere N-S-E-W in New England. RIDOT studied the commuter rail potential about 20 years...there is none west of Coventry, and east of there it's a DMU shuttle almost entirely in the Warwick and Cranston city limits. There is no interstate potential until it connects to Hartford.
Say you manage to construct true-blue HSR at great expense out to Plainfield but then a well-funded, well-connected opposition coalition manages to kill Providence once and for all. Okay, you can keep running your trains along the "bypass" that just got incidentally upgraded to the main line, it's not a total loss - but the real return on the sizable investment into the portion of the line that did get built just got adjudicated out of existence - if not forever, than for a long enough span of time to be effectively permanent for anyone reading this thread today. You can't just pull up stakes and say "well, since we now know that this won't happen, we'll just build along one of our interstate options" because the money that was there for our One and Only High-Speed Rail Line to New York City has been spent - and, that in turn, will have a disastrous domino effect on every future project. Kiss Albany goodbye. Kiss Concord goodbye. Kiss Portland goodbye. All of it - defunded in the wake of the NYC Line "Boondoggle."
This is imagination run amok on itself.
90% of what makes HSR possible is the grading. Tangent ROW, few curves overall, few curves with any degree of sharpness, superelevated curves, and grade separation. What word don't you see in that previous sentence?
Track. You seem to be under the impression that funding 384 means getting an HSR line out-of-the-box, with all the dependencies that entails, or woe-is-us all is lost. Wrong.
The 384 build is a RAILBED. That's where the highway funding pushes the schedule along faster, combines EIS's, saves money, and gets the earth moving faster. Lots of
roadbeds were built 50 years ago for interstates that were never completed. They're all over the place in this region, be it mothballed, repurposed for other uses, or waiting for construction that is still planned. The 384-Willimantic greenway plan got fed fast-tracked 12 years ago by the Bush Admin., with a routing that got tentative approval from the towns (no NIMBY stoppers of note) until the Army Corps quashed it and tried to strongarm its own more invasive and controversial routing. Had it proceeded to funding instead of going back in mothballs in '04 it probably would have opened by now.
Bootstrapping with rail-on-greenway does not mean the ribbon-cutting ceremony at Bolton Notch would've raced a ceremonial first car vs. a ceremonial first train. Much less an Acela. All that plan revision does is bolster the state's preference for its own, more buildable, routing by citing how future traffic growth can be throttled by diverting truckloads to trains and commuters to commuter rail. It gets Amtrak and other USDOT factions chiming in with their letters of approval for
reserving a viable inland ROW, even if that's just extra fluff to greenlight the asphalt funding sooner. It gets RIDOT putting a little more priority on its side of the border knowing that CT's got both interstate road and rail corridors earmarked. It does NOT mean that a single piece of rail gets paid for or laid by I-384's opening day. It does NOT mean that Amtrak ultimately has to use this as their true-blue HSR routing (although given the lack of other pre-protected options it's pretty self-explanatory). It means the greenway median, which is going to get reshaped and earth-moved and bulldozed and replanted over, will get a railbed packed down on it while the highway roadbed is being packed down. It'll get culverts, drainage, pre-dug cable conduits, bridge abutments (but maybe not bridge decks). And the roadbed geometry will closely follow the interstate's for pre-built grade separation and high-speed curves. With EIS and engineering costs combined in with the road build, so whenever they decide to do something on top of it they don't have to re-EIS it, re-engage the Army Corps, or re-fight NIMBY wars.
It is no different than a highway that gets built with an unused carriageway to support future widening or expansion. Consolidate the engineering, permitting, and dirt-moving now so pouring the asphalt later or adding the extra bridge berths later is an uneventful formality. That's not a "boondoggle". It's over-engineering to
save future money. If nobody has money to lay rail right away, then don't. If the only money there is for laying rail right away is a single diesel track with passing sidings, do the miserly in-house + stimulus grants thing to finish that job so the freights and commuter rail can do their thing. It's an all-new railbed...it would cost less to get running to 80 MPH than it would to take a decrepit existing 25 MPH line and get it to same spec.
When Amtrak is "into" it...let them get into it with funding for wires and for pushing the speeds. The ROW is already graded for high speeds, so not a single rail has to be ripped out to push it higher. FRA track class (i.e. max speed limit) is a
maintenance rating. It can go up or down based on how much TLC an owner/operator wants to put into it. Every commuter rail line in the region can go Class 6 if the T or Metro North cared to...it wouldn't make them go a damn bit faster around their naturally-occurring speed restrictions on curves or grade crossings. And Amtrak could just as easily say they're not "into" maintaining the NEC and let the same untouched track get downgraded to Class 5, 4, 3.
If Amtrak is
never "into" it...it's still the most critical multi-modal project CTDOT has undertaken in decades, well worth it to them, and well worth it to USDOT. Moreso than you could say if Providence-Plainfield, the segment ONLY Amtrak is going to use, got built and everything else fell apart.
Dispense with the notion that scaling up an inland route has to be an all-or-nothing proposition lest it get all boondoggly or duplicate efforts. And dispense with this elitist notion that only Amtrak or city of Providence matters.
It sucks. But that's American politics today, and unless something catastrophic happens, that's American politics for the next fifty years. We've only got one shot at this, and all things considered, our position is on pretty damn uncertain ground. We might not be able to afford Hartford - Providence in one straight shot, but we're even less able to afford the hit we'd take as a direct result of building Hartford to Anywhere East if/when There to Providence goes up in smoke and legal fees.
And here you are contradicting yourself yet again. You want an environment that is wholly different from the way things are...where we can just blast things through in one shot at the command of one authority. But that is not how things work politically today, or how they are likely to 50 years from now.
So what is it that you do want? Are you willing in the slightest to be flexible about engaging stakeholders, or are you going to double down again on my-way-or-the-highway until all the resources of the country do exactly what you say in exactly the order you say it?
Sorry, CBS...it's the same damn argument we've been having ad nauseam. You want a planning dictatorship that doesn't exist in this country. And you're concerning yourself more with "Why not?" indignation than the how's and where's of advancing the goal. That does not get shit done in this country. Maybe some other country, maybe some imaginary U.S.A. But we play the hand we're dealt and learn to compromise in this country if we want nice ideas to someday turn into nice things.
