Other People's Rail: Amtrak, commuter rail, rapid transit news & views outside New England

F-Line to Dudley said:
If this had happened in the U.S., Amtrak would've dragged CN in front of the Surface Transportation Board pronto with a filing of providing substandard service on its host trackage and had a reasonable chance of success at getting an immediate favorable ruling. That tends to curtail a lot of these types of procedural shennanigans from ever happening in the first place. But the equivalent Canadian enforcement authorities are much weaker, so the host RR has a lot more latitude to degrade service. CN and Amtrak overlap quite a bit in the Midwestern U.S., so it's all one big political game and a tit-for-tat elsewhere might get CN dropping this restriction in Canada in short time. But it sucks that the Canadian feds and Quebec Province are borderline useless at mediating something as basic and stupid as this.

The NNEIRI study wanted to add 3 Montreal frequencies from New England, and all the upgrades to NECR in MA and VT put us well on our way to achieving some or all of that. But the Canadians are doing nothing to help it. As is, the Adirondack drops from 59 MPH to 30 MPH at the border and doesn't pick back up again until it's in the inner Montreal suburbs. These schedules could be pretty good if they gave two shits about providing equivalent physical plant as New York and Vermont, but everything current and projected has to lard on like 2 hours of padding forevermore because of the crap track conditions persisting forever north of the border.
Click to expand...

The New York rail plan calls for the tracks to be upgraded to 90mph with additional service to Fort Edwards & Plattsburgh... Amtrak could use the CP line which is in much better shape and partial used for commuter rail near Montreal and move the terminal to Lucien-L'Allier station which replaced Windsor Station which used to be the terminus for the Adirondack up until the 1986.
 
Platform Doors have at least 3 justifications:
1) personal jump/push safety
2) climate control
3) keeping garbage off the tracks. This is the big $ saver since you eliminate the track fires and (reduce) need for a vacuum train
 
Arlington said:
Platform Doors have at least 3 justifications:
1) personal jump/push safety
2) climate control
3) keeping garbage off the tracks. This is the big $ saver since you eliminate the track fires and (reduce) need for a vacuum train
Click to expand...
Platform doors also speed trains up by reducing dwell time. Trains can enter and leave the station faster, because they are not crawling to avoid passengers who are across the yellow safety line. Well designed platform doors also segregate exiting and entering passengers for smoother boarding flow.
 
JeffDowntown said:
Platform doors also speed trains up by reducing dwell time. Trains can enter and leave the station faster, because they are not crawling to avoid passengers who are across the yellow safety line. Well designed platform doors also segregate exiting and entering passengers for smoother boarding flow.
Click to expand...

Both important points. Stations with platform gates show people where the doors will be so it unconsciously makes people line up in front of them. This makes loading and unloading faster which is a nice benefit.
 
Nexis4jersey said:
The New York rail plan calls for the tracks to be upgraded to 90mph with additional service to Fort Edwards & Plattsburgh... Amtrak could use the CP line which is in much better shape and partial used for commuter rail near Montreal and move the terminal to Lucien-L'Allier station which replaced Windsor Station which used to be the terminus for the Adirondack up until the 1986.
Click to expand...
Lucien-L'Allier wouldn't work for Customs. Right now they're planning to open a preclearance facility within Gare Central station which will whack the one-hour Customs stopover at Rouses Point, NY (and close the intermediate stop at St. Lambert, QUE so the train can run 'sealed' to the terminal). That's a big, big get on the schedule. Lucien-L'Allier is so spartan it doesn't even have a ticket office, let alone the wherewithal to house a cordoned-off Customs platform and office. So if the terminals were switched the hour border-crossing delay has to go back into the schedule, which more than defeats any schedule improvements from running all the way on the CP Line. CN is going to have to be engaged somehow (whether on the Rouses Point Subdivision or some combination of CP and the shorter CN Delson Subdivision) for purposes of providing that all-important access to Gare Central station and the to-be Customs facility.

Again, this wouldn't be a problem if the federal and provincial governments would step up. The Rouses Point Sub. can rev up to Class 3/59 MPH (the max for unsignalized track) if it could get some grant money steered to it. That's enough to knock a whole extra hour off the schedule. If they're hoping to attract the Montrealer back the speed increase and doubling of frequencies is more than enough justification for those grants. But the Province is lackadaisical in its support, Transport Canada at the federal level is particularly inept at hustling resources, and CN has no self-interest in running above Class 2/30 MPH (25 MPH freight) because the only freight on that line is the daily local fetch job to the NECR interchange.


Rumor has it that NY State is trying to get service back to Plattsburgh at some point this summer, and that Montreal service (barring any shorter-term success on negotiations) will resume in mid/late-September when heat season has safely passed.
 
I wasn't aware that they were that far along with the customs house at Gare...I heard that Canada was dragging its feet.. I feel like Amtrak could easily take a cab car off a train and place it on the Adirondack to resume service...this just speaks to broken state of Amtrak management.
 
WMATA just released their Blue/Orange/Silver Capacity & Reliability Study, i.e. subway extension plans to de-interline one of the three lines. All alternatives involve building a new tunnel through downtown, which then extends out to various places.

The cost per mile appears to be $1.5-2 billion per mile (quoted from Reddit discussions), or a total of $30 billion for each alternative.

This can be yet another reference to estimating costs of new transit tunnels like NSRL and various GL Reconfiguration components, in addition to this list that @Riverside compiled. On a per-mile basis, the cost is among the higher echelon of Riverside's list outside of the infamous NYC projects.

It's also encouraging to see plans for major heavy rail expansion of another mature rapid transit system on a similar scale to Boston's. Hopefully, efforts like this will build momentum and spark discussions for transit expansions that our own region desperately needs.

-------

(Edit to add - tangentially related to the above)

Just came across a discussion on r/nycrail subreddit about cut-and-cover vs. TBM for subway construction. The entire thread and comments touch on several aspects that were also mentioned in the followups to Riverside's list above: station depth, utility relocation (and consequent political costs), cost differences, even historical contexts of the urban landscape when the C&C subways were built vs what they are now.
 
Last edited:
Teban54 said:
WMATA just released their Blue/Orange/Silver Capacity & Reliability Study, i.e. subway extension plans to de-interline one of the three lines. All alternatives involve building a new tunnel through downtown, which then extends out to various places.

The cost per mile appears to be $1.5-2 billion per mile (quoted from Reddit discussions), or a total of $30 billion for each alternative.

This can be yet another reference to estimating costs of new transit tunnels like NSRL and various GL Reconfiguration components, in addition to this list that @Riverside compiled. On a per-mile basis, the cost is among the higher echelon of Riverside's list outside of the infamous NYC projects.

It's also encouraging to see plans for major heavy rail expansion of another mature rapid transit system on a similar scale to Boston's. Hopefully, efforts like this will build momentum and spark discussions for transit expansions that our own region desperately needs.

-------

(Edit to add - tangentially related to the above)

Just came across a discussion on r/nycrail subreddit about cut-and-cover vs. TBM for subway construction. The entire thread and comments touch on several aspects that were also mentioned in the followups to Riverside's list above: station depth, utility relocation (and consequent political costs), cost differences, even historical contexts of the urban landscape when the C&C subways were built vs what they are now.
Click to expand...
One key point that always seems missing in the cut-and-cover versus TBM calculation are the economic disruptions of cut-and-cover versus TBM construction. These disruptions are all externalities to the project, so do not show up in the "project costs", but they are real costs to the region in their impact. Cut-and-cover tends to be much more disruptive of the surface environment than TBM approaches.
 
Last edited:
Teban54 said:
Just came across a discussion on r/nycrail subreddit about cut-and-cover vs. TBM for subway construction. The entire thread and comments touch on several aspects that were also mentioned in the followups to Riverside's list above: station depth, utility relocation (and consequent political costs), cost differences, even historical contexts of the urban landscape when the C&C subways were built vs what they are now.
Click to expand...
Gah, Reddit is the absolute worst, jeez. But yeah, interesting link here about the different methods of C&C: https://railsystem.net/cut-and-cover/
WMATA just released their Blue/Orange/Silver Capacity & Reliability Study, i.e. subway extension plans to de-interline one of the three lines. All alternatives involve building a new tunnel through downtown, which then extends out to various places.

The cost per mile appears to be $1.5-2 billion per mile (quoted from Reddit discussions), or a total of $30 billion for each alternative.

This can be yet another reference to estimating costs of new transit tunnels like NSRL and various GL Reconfiguration components, in addition to this list that @Riverside compiled. On a per-mile basis, the cost is among the higher echelon of Riverside's list outside of the infamous NYC projects.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I'd say this is in line with the level of precision of my estimates: $1B per mile, give or take a billion.
JeffDowntown said:
One key point that always seems missing in the cut-and-cover versus TBM calculation are the economic disruptions of cut-and-cover versus TBM construction. These disruptions are all externalities to the project, so do not show up in the "project costs", but they are real costs to the region in their impact. Cut-and-cover tends to be much more disruptive of the surface environment than TBM approaches.
Click to expand...
I'm not unsympathetic to this, but I think it cuts both ways. True, we often don't talk about the externalities of a C&C project, but we also don't talk about the externalities of a No-Build alternative: the costs of pollution and climate change, the withering impact that poor transit and car-centricity has on an urban space, the cost of sprawl prompted by low density & parking requirements, and the resultant impact on things like housing costs and cost-of-living.

We pay for things no matter what is done. TBM happens to absorb a larger fraction of the costs directly into the project itself, and thereby absorbs more of the costs directly into the itemized expenditure of public monies, which is the kind of spending that we are the most thrifty about as a society and which receives the most scrutiny -- and thereby is the most likely to be rejected on cost grounds.

If we want to incorporate the externalities into the Project Costs for C&C projects, I'm all for it -- as long as we do the same for TBM and No-Build.

~~~

Also -- and this gets a bit into theory of democracy stuff here -- it's worth noting that many tunnel projects (and certainly almost all of the ones we talk about in a Boston context) are designed to have a systemwide capacity impact. WMATA is a prime example: the tunnels they propose aren't merely for the sake of (e.g.) building a subway to Georgetown; the aim is to increase capacity across the entire stretch of the Orange, Silver, and Blue Lines.

Similarly, for example, a Green Line subway from Huntington to Back Bay to Pleasant Street isn't about building a subway to Bay Village; the aim is to increase capacity across the entire Green Line.

(Interestingly, the Second Ave Subway is the exception that proves the rule here. As far as I can tell, it doesn't increase capacity across the network, at least not right now. Phase 2 will, but that's still a long ways off.)

And... I dunno, I'm not sure I think it's fair for someone to
  • live/run a business in a city
  • enjoy all the benefits of living/working in the large sprawling economy afforded by a metropolitan region
and simultaneously
  • use the happenstance of their private control of a small slice of the city to oppose an infrastructure project that will benefit the region at large
I agree that TBM is superior in terms of leaving the day-to-day fabric of the city undisrupted, but it reads as "higher cost" on paper, which often prevents anything from being done either way. And then the entire region pays those costs of the status quo -- and the day-to-day fabric of the city, which was so prioritized by opponents of C&C, continues to weaken and fray, slowly and subtly enough to go unnoticed until it's too late.

It's tough though because, yeah: probably someone will go out of business during a C&C closure. Probably someone will need to uproot their life and move because they can't handle the disruption. Probably these things will happen to a significant number of people. And that really sucks. I think all of the options here come with significant downsides, so it's always going to be a tough call.
 
JeffDowntown said:
One key point that always seems missing in the cut-and-cover versus TBM calculation are the economic disruptions of cut-and-cover versus TBM construction. These disruptions are all externalities to the project, so do not show up in the "project costs", but they are real costs to the region in their impact. Cut-and-cover tends to be much more disruptive of the surface environment than TBM approaches.
Click to expand...

Like Riverside, I'm sympathetic. But if it is important to count the externality of disruption during construction, you also need to count the externality of station access time. As New Yorkers are quickly seeing with East Side Access, deep bore stations are genuinely far less convenient to access than cut-and-cover stations close to the surface. On top of that, the construction disruption even in the longest projects (e.g., the Big Dig) does not last as long as the lifespan of the tunnel being built.

Here is a good example from page 217 of Zachary M. Schrag's "Great Society Subway", the authoritative text on the history of Washington's Metrorail system. Key part is bolded:

"When WMATA finally broke ground on the Green Line, in August 1985, residents learned that the only thing worse than lack of construction was construction itself. With bedrock too deep below the surface to employ rock tunneling, WMATA engineers specified the same cut-andcover construction that had proved so disruptive downtown and on Capitol Hill. In the long run, this would provide the neighborhood with better access than that enjoyed by the wealthier neighborhoods on Connecticut Avenue, because each station would have more entrances and shorter escalators. In the short term, though, cut-and-cover meant pain. Virginia Ali, whose Chili Bowl restaurant had served U Street since 1958, had endured riots and illicit drug markets, but subway construction was worse. With U Street itself blocked off, customers had to find their way through alleys. If construction workers hit a gas line, diners would have to evacuate, and frequently Ali found her restaurant’s floor inches deep in dirty water that ran off the wooden planks that served as U Street’s decking."

I don't want to minimize what Ms. Ali and other business owners on U Street went through. It sounds pretty awful! But she made it through and even today her restaurant remains an iconic landmark on U Street. Thanks to that temporary pain, U Street and other stations along this stretch like Shaw and Mt. Vernon have easy access to and from the platform. I used to live along the Green Line in DC and can confirm that easy access to its stations is part of the reason why I would use it for relatively short urban trips, even a one-stop journey up the hill from U Street to Columbia Heights. In contrast, I would never take the Metro from Woodley Park to Cleveland Park - it is faster to grab a quick bikeshare or catch a bus rather than going deep underground on this deep-bore section. Even in the dense and walkable neighborhood of Dupont Circle, I think twice about using the Metro for short trips because the escalators are so long. Unlike construction disruption, that inconvenience is baked into the concrete tunnels forever - billions of wasted seconds accumulating for as long as Metrorail exists.
 
michaelw37 said:
Like Riverside, I'm sympathetic. But if it is important to count the externality of disruption during construction, you also need to count the externality of station access time. As New Yorkers are quickly seeing with East Side Access, deep bore stations are genuinely far less convenient to access than cut-and-cover stations close to the surface. On top of that, the construction disruption even in the longest projects (e.g., the Big Dig) does not last as long as the lifespan of the tunnel being built.

Here is a good example from page 217 of Zachary M. Schrag's "Great Society Subway", the authoritative text on the history of Washington's Metrorail system. Key part is bolded:

"When WMATA finally broke ground on the Green Line, in August 1985, residents learned that the only thing worse than lack of construction was construction itself. With bedrock too deep below the surface to employ rock tunneling, WMATA engineers specified the same cut-andcover construction that had proved so disruptive downtown and on Capitol Hill. In the long run, this would provide the neighborhood with better access than that enjoyed by the wealthier neighborhoods on Connecticut Avenue, because each station would have more entrances and shorter escalators. In the short term, though, cut-and-cover meant pain. Virginia Ali, whose Chili Bowl restaurant had served U Street since 1958, had endured riots and illicit drug markets, but subway construction was worse. With U Street itself blocked off, customers had to find their way through alleys. If construction workers hit a gas line, diners would have to evacuate, and frequently Ali found her restaurant’s floor inches deep in dirty water that ran off the wooden planks that served as U Street’s decking."

I don't want to minimize what Ms. Ali and other business owners on U Street went through. It sounds pretty awful! But she made it through and even today her restaurant remains an iconic landmark on U Street. Thanks to that temporary pain, U Street and other stations along this stretch like Shaw and Mt. Vernon have easy access to and from the platform. I used to live along the Green Line in DC and can confirm that easy access to its stations is part of the reason why I would use it for relatively short urban trips, even a one-stop journey up the hill from U Street to Columbia Heights. In contrast, I would never take the Metro from Woodley Park to Cleveland Park - it is faster to grab a quick bikeshare or catch a bus rather than going deep underground on this deep-bore section. Even in the dense and walkable neighborhood of Dupont Circle, I think twice about using the Metro for short trips because the escalators are so long. Unlike construction disruption, that inconvenience is baked into the concrete tunnels forever - billions of wasted seconds accumulating for as long as Metrorail exists.
Click to expand...
It really depends on how deep you go with the TBM -- they don't have to be 200 ft. down. If you have a corridor that is suitable for cut-and-cover, then the TBM stations can end up only a bit deeper than a cut-and-cover station.

Of course there will be times where geography and man-made obstructions force you to go deep. But in those cases you were never going to be able to cut-and-cover that routing anyway.

I would also point out that cities that actually maintain their metro systems seem to do fine with deep station access. Keep the escalators and high capacity elevators in working order, and access can be fast and efficient (think Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Chongqing, Stockholm). WMATA ranks with the T for not maintaining anything.
 
Last edited:
Riverside said:
Gah, Reddit is the absolute worst, jeez. But yeah, interesting link here about the different methods of C&C: https://railsystem.net/cut-and-cover/

Yeah, I'd say this is in line with the level of precision of my estimates: $1B per mile, give or take a billion.

I'm not unsympathetic to this, but I think it cuts both ways. True, we often don't talk about the externalities of a C&C project, but we also don't talk about the externalities of a No-Build alternative: the costs of pollution and climate change, the withering impact that poor transit and car-centricity has on an urban space, the cost of sprawl prompted by low density & parking requirements, and the resultant impact on things like housing costs and cost-of-living.

We pay for things no matter what is done. TBM happens to absorb a larger fraction of the costs directly into the project itself, and thereby absorbs more of the costs directly into the itemized expenditure of public monies, which is the kind of spending that we are the most thrifty about as a society and which receives the most scrutiny -- and thereby is the most likely to be rejected on cost grounds.

If we want to incorporate the externalities into the Project Costs for C&C projects, I'm all for it -- as long as we do the same for TBM and No-Build.

~~~

Also -- and this gets a bit into theory of democracy stuff here -- it's worth noting that many tunnel projects (and certainly almost all of the ones we talk about in a Boston context) are designed to have a systemwide capacity impact. WMATA is a prime example: the tunnels they propose aren't merely for the sake of (e.g.) building a subway to Georgetown; the aim is to increase capacity across the entire stretch of the Orange, Silver, and Blue Lines.

Similarly, for example, a Green Line subway from Huntington to Back Bay to Pleasant Street isn't about building a subway to Bay Village; the aim is to increase capacity across the entire Green Line.

(Interestingly, the Second Ave Subway is the exception that proves the rule here. As far as I can tell, it doesn't increase capacity across the network, at least not right now. Phase 2 will, but that's still a long ways off.)

And... I dunno, I'm not sure I think it's fair for someone to
  • live/run a business in a city
  • enjoy all the benefits of living/working in the large sprawling economy afforded by a metropolitan region
and simultaneously
  • use the happenstance of their private control of a small slice of the city to oppose an infrastructure project that will benefit the region at large
I agree that TBM is superior in terms of leaving the day-to-day fabric of the city undisrupted, but it reads as "higher cost" on paper, which often prevents anything from being done either way. And then the entire region pays those costs of the status quo -- and the day-to-day fabric of the city, which was so prioritized by opponents of C&C, continues to weaken and fray, slowly and subtly enough to go unnoticed until it's too late.

It's tough though because, yeah: probably someone will go out of business during a C&C closure. Probably someone will need to uproot their life and move because they can't handle the disruption. Probably these things will happen to a significant number of people. And that really sucks. I think all of the options here come with significant downsides, so it's always going to be a tough call.
Click to expand...
SAS parte uno should increase the capacity and improve the reliability of the Lexington Avenue line 4/5/6. Removing people on the 4/5/6 into midtown by siphoning off some of them to the Q between 96th and midtown should still make it much easier for Bronx and Harlem and even let a few more people on.
 
JeffDowntown said:
It really depends on how deep you go with the TBM -- they don't have to be 200 ft. down. If you have a corridor that is suitable for cut-and-cover, then the TBM stations can end up only a bit deeper than a cut-and-cover station.

Of course there will be times where geography and man-made obstructions force you to go deep. But in those cases you were never going to be able to cut-and-cover that routing anyway.

I would also point out that cities that actually maintain their metro systems seem to do fine with deep station access. Keep the escalators and high capacity elevators in working order, and access can be fast and efficient (think Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Chongqing, Stockholm). WMATA ranks with the T for not maintaining anything.
Click to expand...
I am absolutely speaking outside my area of expertise, but isn't one problem with TBM in Boston and similar places the issue of landfill? Cut-and-cover can be constructed in landfill (with, AFAIK, the inclusion of a long-term pumping system), but I think a TBM needs a more solid substrate?
as02143 said:
SAS parte uno should increase the capacity and improve the reliability of the Lexington Avenue line 4/5/6. Removing people on the 4/5/6 into midtown by siphoning off some of them to the Q between 96th and midtown should still make it much easier for Bronx and Harlem and even let a few more people on.
Click to expand...
Hmm, that's a fair point, although even so I would argue that that it still falls short of being a systemwide capacity impact. But, I probably should have hesitated to invoke any NYC examples at all; due to its population size, density, and geography, New York is invariably a unique case unto itself.

Just for some density comparisons (all numbers sourced from Wikipedia, so caveat lector), in terms of population per square mile:
  • Roxbury: 13K
  • Allston: 14K
  • Boston overall: 14K
  • Brighton: 16K
  • Cambridge: 19K
  • Somerville: 20K

  • Queens: 22K

  • North End: 28K
  • Fenway-Kenmore: 32K

  • The Bronx: 35K
  • Brooklyn: 39K
  • Hoboken: 48K
  • Manhattan: 75K
New York City proper (representing the scope of the NYC Subway) had a population of about 8.8 million in 2020. From what I can tell, even the loosest definition of "Greater Boston" -- inclusive of Cape Cod, Providence, Worcester, and Manchester -- still falls a bit short of that, at 8.4 million.

All of which is to say that I think any comparisons to New York should be taken with a grain of salt. The context is just so different and so exceptional that I think any example is hard to generalize.

(And yes -- it is true that there are other large cities/metropolitan areas in the US and other high density urban spaces: Los Angeles (County), Chicago(land), Houston, DFW, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Miami. But as far as I know, none of them come close to the density of NYC, except maybe SF, and none of them come close in terms of sheer number of people, and none of them come close to the level of consistently high density spread out across a region. The only place I can see that might be comparable in some respects is Mexico City -- of similar population, somewhat lower density in the city proper, but actually a higher density in the greater metro area than New York. But yes -- aside from CDMX, I think NYC is in a league of its own in North America.)
 
I do believe that LA has a higher population density over NYC outside of Manhattan.
 
bdurden said:
I do believe that LA has a higher population density over NYC outside of Manhattan.
Click to expand...
I don’t think so… LA is around 8K per sq mile, which, as you can see in the list, lags far behind most NYC boroughs. (Though to be fair it is roughly equal to Staten Island’s.) There may be pockets of LA that are much denser though.

If NYC is exceptional due to its high population and high density, LA is exceptional for just how geographically large it is. It is mind-boggling.
 
Riverside said:
I don’t think so… LA is around 8K per sq mile, which, as you can see in the list, lags far behind most NYC boroughs. (Though to be fair it is roughly equal to Staten Island’s.) There may be pockets of LA that are much denser though.

If NYC is exceptional due to its high population and high density, LA is exceptional for just how geographically large it is. It is mind-boggling.
Click to expand...
The original idea of that is actually born out by US Census data - LA metropolitan population density is generally higher than NYC metropolitan population density. However this data trick has been going on for a while since many folks don't experience LA as more dense than NYC. So, some folks have used a weighted density - https://austinzoning.typepad.com/austincontrarian/2008/03/perceived-densi.html - to show more what people experience as a typical condition. I think it's fair to use this metric to get a better understanding of what one percieves and experiences as the general average of the built form of an urban area.

However, the US Census's raw data get at the main point of LA metro area being fairly uniformly dense area - with fairly dense residential development. In comparison, you can go 20 or 30 miles in any direction from central Los Angeles or NYC and you'll very likely experience very different things. In LA, you'll a fairly medium-level of density all the way through. (No ranchos or haciendas to be found anymore). Go 30 miles from NYC in some directions you can find little hamlets or country-club estates in Nassau County and near Chataqua or out to Parsippany in Jersey with fairly large, almost exurban development.
 
Am I making this up, or is there some law/regulation/de-facto standard that says interstate rail must be operated by Amtrak, outside of some exceptions (such as Rhode Island subsidizing MBTA service). I could have sworn I read something like this at some point, but can't find anything about it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top