Amtrak Tennessee Proposals: Memphis - Nashville - Knoxville - Chattanooga - Atlanta

Jeff Smith wrote: ↑Wed Dec 06, 2023 7:19 am Corridor ID'd: NewsChannel

Chattanooga receives federal grant to study development of intercity Amtrak passenger rail

The City of Chattanooga has received a federal grant to study the development of an intercity Amtrak passenger rail, Mayor Tim Kelly announced Tuesday.

The $500,000 federal grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Corridor ID Program will fund a comprehensive study to develop the scope, the cost, engineering, and other requirements needed to establish Amtrak passenger rail service on existing alignments between Nashville, Chattanooga, and Atlanta.
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Do you know how much $500,000 goes today? Keeping it simple, that's employing 5 people to do the study at $100,000 or 10 people to do the study at $50,000. Consultants are more likely to fall in at the $100,000 per year salary.
And that's not including the rent for their offices, electricity for lights, heat, water, computers, internet and phone lines, etc. Yelp. that $500,000 is not going to last until the study's completion. They will need more money next year and every year there after until this initial study is complete, and more money for the next steps to get an environmental study done.
Best to think of this small amount of cash as a start of getting the ball rolling. But more money will be needed later.

Ron makes a really good point. Someone has to figure out all the fine details, because CSX is not going to let them just start running trains and stopping and letting people off in random places. Amtrak also doesn't want to violate any laws. So the question then is does Amtrak keep 20 people on payroll just to plan new ideas or do they contract it out? And you can bet Amtrak isn't alone in this - most government operations and many private companies do not have the bandwidth to make a strategic plan. Consider if IBM or Ford wanted to buy a building such as Michigan Central station. It would require six figures of study money, and probably seven figures of architectural review and planning. Ford didn't just buy that building, they had a plan in place beforehand to see if it was viable.

Back to Amtrak. Perahps instead of paying some beltway consultants to do these studies, a group of Class 1-related engineers and statisticians would be best. Especially if they were on a class 1 payroll, and Amtrak covered their costs for a year. That way the plan has firsthand knowledge of what works at the host railroad and has buy-in from the beginning. I don't doubt each Class 1 has some sort of planning staff that looks at new services and such. At what stage are they involved now? Does Amtrak ask them at the early stages or does Amtrak drop off a study by Booz Allen Hamilton and say "run this train"?

Tadman wrote: ↑Sat Dec 30, 2023 9:20 am Does Amtrak ask them at the early stages or does Amtrak drop off a study by Booz Allen Hamilton and say "run this train"?

Very unlikely. There are transportation consulting firms, usually with a revolving door to the various companies. And it's also very doubtful that such a firm is employing five people full-time on a given contract. The point of outsourcing such planning is you yourself (as a gov't or a private company) don't have to keep full-time people that you can't keep busy. The firm will have a variety of people with different areas of expertise, and they'll be working on multiple contracts over the course of a year, zooming in for the specialty, then maybe sitting in on meetings to stay up to date, but not providing much output till their area becomes important again.

I do this in a different industry, and also use to sit on citizen transportation planning committee that had such consultants speak to us occasionally. I've got three billing lines going right now, and some of my colleagues have 5.

On the other hand, Ron may have underestimated consulting salaries, though not by enough to cancel out the outsourcing gains.

The bigger issue I foresee is that suddenly releasing the amount of rail-plan funding they did last month is going to overwhelm the available, experienced, knowledgeable consultants. Hopefully the money doesn't have to be spent in a year, and some of the recipients won't have their act together right away. A funny thing to hope for. It would have been better to release a quarter of these grants a year ago, to help the industry ramp up.

I should concede that the committee I was on was very low-level, aspirational, a group of interested people drawn together by a Chicago area not-for-profit that had transportation as one of their focuses. I'm not claiming it gave me great insight. But we did have transportation consultants come talk.

Someone posted the Indy Corridor application in that threat. It identifies the firm they're partnering with for the planning work - Patrick Engineering.

[Edited to add that after re-reading, I'm not sure Patrick is yet picked for the upcoming Indy contract. They did the previous technical study of the Indy corridor. But the following is still very relevant to the discussion of planning consultants in this thread.]

Here is a portion of the "What We Do - Freight Rail" page on the Patrick Engineering website:
>Patrick has extensive experience in the engineering design and construction of railroad facilities, including freight yards, intermodal terminals, quiet zones, and design-build of rail spurs for rail service provided to industrial developments. Boasting strong client relationships and a reputation of repeat work with these clients, Patrick is proud of our history of providing comprehensive solutions to the nation’s largest freight rail providers.

They also have a page for Transit and Passenger Rail if anyone wants to look.
https://www.patrickengineering.com/what-we-do

Tadman wrote: I'm not sure that's the answer unless the constraint of "intrastate" is put on. Where are the people in Tennessee going? The people I know in Memphis do a lot of business in Little Rock and Saint Louis, send kids to Ole Miss and Arkansas, and spend leisure time in Chicago and NOLA.

The people I know if Chattanooga and Knoxville center around Atlanta and Charlotte as much or more than Nashville. Meanwhile Nashville seems to attract every third bachelorette party for the last ten years from all over the country.

Is an intrastate train a good idea? It really never was back in the day, the TC was always broke. Things have changed, but my purely anecdotal evidence above plus the crazy maps don't lend a good picture.

Many of the issues that plague the TC route then still exist now (and that’s excluding the missing 30 miles or so between Monterey and Crab Orchard): the route is too slow, too steep, and too windy, and in many places the trains would be forced to go at a crawl.

The 1943 timetable of the TC’s passenger services show that train 4 (with the fewest stops) leaves Nashville at 9, and gets at Harriman TN (the operational limit of the TC near Knoxville) at 3, a distance of 166 miles in 6 hours. For anyone who doesn’t have their calculators in hand, that’s fewer than 28 MPH on average for the TC corridor. It was another 2 hours and 25 minutes to Knoxville… just 50 miles away. 216 miles in over 8 hours.

People talk about trains like the Cardinal being slow, I’ve seen snails faster than this service. And for most of the route there really isn’t a good way to cut times.

And the worst part is that there isn’t a good way to cut these down. You could try it in some places (the commuter service realigned some track and helped uptick the speeds in some places, you could in theory do this for a few other parts of the route) but at best you probably have a train that would average maybe 35 MPH across the route. Tops

Unless you’re looking strictly for tourism, a passenger service on the TC is simply a non option.

As for a Nashville to Memphis service, you could get something there even if the original route on the NC&StL is no longer present. The original City of Memphis train was 5.5 hours long, averaging about 43mph. This does make it a slower train but it’s at least within the ballpark of some services Amtrak has today. Looking at the of the existing route, I think you could find ways to cut that down a bit, particularly in the western portion of the route where it’s almost perfectly straight.

A Nashville to Memphis train has at least some viability to it when it comes to the existing route.

Steamguy73 wrote: ↑Mon Jan 01, 2024 9:19 am
Many of the issues that plague the TC route then still exist now ... passenger service on the TC is simply a non option.

Completley agree. It was not a serious proposal on my part but just a note that it was perhaps never a serious railroad at all, and a lot of historians take that picture.

As for a Nashville to Memphis service, you could get something there even if the original route on the NC&StL is no longer present...

A Nashville to Memphis train has at least some viability to it when it comes to the existing route.

That may be, but I'd like to see some data on where the travel patterns are in TN. Nashville-Memphis is the more distance than Memphis-Little Rock, Jackson MS, and a bit less than BHM. I don't know that any of us here have much more than a map to connect dots with.

Also if you groove on the TC, the J Parker Lamb photo archives at the Center for Railroad Photos are incredible and show why the TC is not a serious passenger route.







https://railphoto-art.org/collections/lamb/group-five/

No big thing probably but CSX (NC&SL) Nashville - Chattanooga is interstate into Alabama and Georgia.