Why is NEC NYP to New Haven so slow?

Most of maintenance and CAT replacement is supposed to be complete late summer 2018 ( per MNRR ). The bigger problem is the Walk bridge replacements. once work starts the inside north track will be out of service continuously and outside track duration of project once north lift bridge is operational will repeat for the 2 south track. Completion 2 -4 years in future.

EDIT. Then there will be other swing bridges on the New Haven line will need to be replace by new lift bridges.

Well, if we can't have huge improvements and a totally new ROW (that's fantasyland), how about some incremental improvements. While I have zero RR expertise, I can think of a few things that should work if the will to make them work exists:

1. Allow somewhat higher acceleration (outward) to be felt on curves. Subway and streetcar trains sometimes whipped around curves with a noticeable centripital force felt, enough that anyone standing needs to brace, with no ill effects. Proposal: Allow a less than alarming but well more than imperceptible cornering force to be felt, and change the drinkware for stuff with wide bottoms. Hmm, that holds more beer

2. Find the 3 curves causing the greatest delay, and buy a few acres around them, buildings or portions therof included if need be. Eminent domain will be needed, but it's not a large amount of land. Take just enough land so that passenger trains can pass through at 88 mph with considerations #1 and 3, or 60 with the absurdly low limits typically used.

3. Locate the remaining x (5?) slowest curves in NYC-BOS, and bank (superelevate?) the rails a bit more than usual. How much? Enough that the highest C.G freight trains should not stop on those curves, but are OK if proceeding at 20 mph. There's so little freight on the NEC that those trains can be dispatched to never stop there, and a 20 mph minimum safe speed allows for various contingiencies. Worst case, one less banked track can be reserved for any top-heavy freight pulled by donkeys who sleep on the job. Those curves will probably need more maintenance, but that's short sections and the repairs can be scheduled to happen before the track is fully worn out.

4. Where the ROW is so narrow that it constricts track spacing, buy a narrow slice along the sides. Gradually, as maintenance on tracks, signals and bridges is done, use the extra space to ease the track centers. With 4 tracks, even 3 feet of ROW width allows an extra foot of clearance.

Because trains brake and accelerate so poorly, each slow curve is causing several minutes delay. They are also a huge waste of energy, multiplied by hundreds of trains per day. Thus, there is a long term payoff from such incremental improvements.

What will be the expected travel time in a few years from New Haven to NYC or NYP? It needs to be competitive with highways, so an average speed of at least 60MPH for Amtrak would be needed. MN would be slower due to more stops. Can the Shore Line get to that speed?

I'm not sure that much of the current projects will provide meaningful increases in track speed, versus improving infrastructure reliability so as to ensure trains actually run at track speed (vs. slow orders). Constant tension catenary across the mainline would remove the need for slow orders driven by temperature extremes (heat and cold). The bridge replacements would ideally virtually eliminate the potential for bridges to be stuck open and thus remove the subsequent delays and cancellations as a result. Perhaps some marginal speed improvement could be made with a new bridge design, but maybe something along the lines of 30 -> 40 mph versus say 30 -> 60/70 mph.

BandA wrote:What will be the expected travel time in a few years from New Haven to NYC or NYP? It needs to be competitive with highways

Try driving the Merritt or 95 during rush hour (or even off hours with all the construction)...even now with the slow orders it's more than competitive.

Fun anecdote: one time I was making a drive from Naugatuck to the Bronx via the Merritt...with the construction in New Canaan it would have taken me the same amount of time to drive as it did to take THE WATERBURY BRANCH to the main line and get off at Fordham...and this was 7 or 8pm in the reverse commute direction. Got a scenic tour of New Canaan and Greenwich back roads that night. Too bad I can't dig up the +1hr20m screenshot if I continued on the from Google Maps - it's probably buried somewhere on my hard drive at home

MN #1419 originates at Bridgeport at 0632, makes all the stops between Bridgeport and South Norwalk. One of the few trains that skips Stamford entirely, it leaves South Norwalk at 0700 and arrives at GCT at 0702.

South Norwalk is 41 miles from Grand Central, according to the public timetable. 41 miles in 62 minutes is ~40mph. Upping the average speed to 50mph shaves a whopping 12 minutes off that trip. And remember, raising the average speed by 10mph implies that the maximum speed would have to be raised by much more, since there are always going to be speed restrictions through, say, Stamford or the Mianus River Bridge.

Raising speeds much from where they are right now is going to incur a major cost for a marginal benefit for the vast majority of users of the New Haven line-- the Metro-North commuters.

Ridgefielder wrote:MN #1419 originates at Bridgeport at 0632, makes all the stops between Bridgeport and South Norwalk. One of the few trains that skips Stamford entirely, it leaves South Norwalk at 0700 and arrives at GCT at 0702.

South Norwalk is 41 miles from Grand Central, according to the public timetable. 41 miles in 62 minutes is ~40mph. Upping the average speed to 50mph shaves a whopping 12 minutes off that trip. And remember, raising the average speed by 10mph implies that the maximum speed would have to be raised by much more, since there are always going to be speed restrictions through, say, Stamford or the Mianus River Bridge.

Raising speeds much from where they are right now is going to incur a major cost for a marginal benefit for the vast majority of users of the New Haven line-- the Metro-North commuters.

Well said Ridgefielder! Need to walk before we can run on the New Haven Line by first getting to a state of relatively good repair (bridges, catenary), then we can talk about the next level of investment to reduce steady state travel time.

Historically, what were the highest speeds on this line and when? Certainly highway speeds used to be higher!

Presumably speed increases will also increase the capacity.

Triaxle wrote: 2. Find the 3 curves causing the greatest delay, and buy a few acres around them, buildings or portions therof included if need be. Eminent domain will be needed, but it's not a large amount of land. Take just enough land so that passenger trains can pass through at 88 mph with considerations #1 and 3, or 60 with the absurdly low limits typically used.
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That has been our thoughts here. If a curve(s) could be eased condemn the property and get your speed increase . Then when project is complete then go on to the next. That way MNRR would be just conflicted with a few NIMBYs. In a way that is what is happening with the WALK bridge replacement because some property is needed on each side of present ROW. Has there been much Nimbyism there ?

BandA wrote:Historically, what were the highest speeds on this line and when?

The maximums were never higher than they are now. In the 1950s and 1960s, the New Haven's basic passenger speed limit between Woodlawn and New Haven was 70 mph with much the same collection of curve and bridge restrictions that are in place today. (East of New Haven, the Shore Line speed limit was generally 79 mph, again with numerous local restrictions.) A premier nonstop GCT-Boston express like, say, the Yankee Clipper of 1965 was scheduled at 61 minutes for the ~60 miles Woodlawn-New Haven. Most trains made multiple stops, though, so that was a best case.

There were no speed recorders or radar guns in those days, so that 70 mph limit wasn't necessarily as strictly enforced as limits are these days when an engineer had to make up time. Perhaps Mr. Weaver can comment on this as an engineer from that era.

During my NHRR days the top speed between New York and New Haven was 70 MPH by the timetable. I dare say it was somewhat faster than that on occasions depending on whether we were on time or not, who was the engineer, did the engineer want to make a train to DH home on out of New York and maybe one or two other conditions. The main problems were the curves, drawbridges and signal locations, there were a couple of tricky places where the signals did not give you a whole lot of time to react to an adverse signal and some curves could be carried a bit faster than others. With FL-9's we did not have to worry about the pantograph riding on the wire but in most cases the FL-9's would not get out of their own way anyway and it took a long time to just get up to 70 MPH to say nothing of anything higher. The fastest runs between New Haven and New York were made with electric motors and I had a few very fast ones way back when. Of course in those days we did not have event recorders, speed tapes and other devices to figure out what we were doing. Sometimes we did not even have a decent working speed indicator say nothing of anything else. Even the older motors would really move when we wanted them to. Some curves might be good for a plus 5 or even a plus 10 but we had to know just what ones were, some of them were not good for anything more and we did not want to spill drinks in the dining or bar cars. I rode in the dining car a couple of different times when deadheading and I was hungry and I remember the coffee getting spilled one morning at South Norwalk on number 8 which most of the time had a jet for power. With an electric motor we did not have to worry about recovering from a speed restriction, the motor would always recover quickly and we were back up to track speed before you knew it.
I don't think you will ever see much improvement in speeds over the tracks between New York and New Haven. There are too many bridges and curves all with restrictions on them and there are too many trains for the existing signal system to allow for any higher speeds and a different signal system could allow for higher speeds but at a reduced capacity. I suspect they will end up spending millions of dollars to save maybe 5 minutes running time overall. This would be a total waste of money in my opinion. Just finding and buying the right of way to by-pass one curve would cost a fortune. South Norwalk comes to mind, I can't imagine anything happening here for less than several billion dollars, just to save a few minutes at just one location of many. Incidentally the speeds between New York and New Haven were not always 70 MPH either, back in the early days of electric motors they were 60 MPH most of the way. They talked about raising the top speeds on the straight stretch through Mamaronect but they were concerned about pantograph bounce and that for one thing stopped anything big from happening here. They actually did raise the speed through this area for a period but I guess it just wasn't worth it, 90 MPH for a couple of miles accomplishes little in benefits. Today I guess it is what it is and so be it.
Noel Weaver

The specific experience you're describing sounds familiar --- pretty much the same thing has happened to me. It sounds like MN had express track 2 out of service that day for trackwork so the Metro dispatcher was sticking everybody on local track 4, and your
Amtrak train got nailed behind a MN local. Yes, this is infuriating. Since all 4 tracks are bi-directional, I suppose with a little "creativity" the dispatcher could have helped your train out but, to be perfectly blunt, MN simply didn't give a damn and just did what was easy for them.

TCurtin wrote:The specific experience you're describing sounds familiar --- pretty much the same thing has happened to me. It sounds like MN had express track 2 out of service that day for trackwork so the Metro dispatcher was sticking everybody on local track 4, and your
Amtrak train got nailed behind a MN local. Yes, this is infuriating. Since all 4 tracks are bi-directional, I suppose with a little "creativity" the dispatcher could have helped your train out but, to be perfectly blunt, MN simply didn't give a damn and just did what was easy for them.

Kinda hard to say what could have or should have been done unless you are sitting on the dispatching desk yourself and know the conditions of all tracks....

This country could have had a much more modern passenger rail system, if someone had foreseen the need back in the '50s and '60s when the Interstate highway system was being designed. If, for example enough land could have been acquired for the I-95 corridor to add a high-speed rail line alongside, rail travel would have been a whole lot better today. Not only could the curves and bridges been built for higher speeds, being so close to the roadway, access to stations would have been so much better, so park & ride systems could have worked much better.
I was very disappointed when designs for the new TZ bridge were finalized without even serious consideration for adding a high-speed rail corridor alongside. Even if that corridor would only have gone from Nyack NY to connect with the Hudson line at Tarrytown, it would have been better than nothing at all, and much faster than the ferry ride.

I think that the biggest problem with getting funding for trains, is that nobody wants to lay out the money unless there is some sort of "guarantee" that the project will be profitable. I can see the reasoning behind that kind of thinking.

CPSK wrote:This country could have had a much more modern passenger rail system, if someone had foreseen the need back in the '50s and '60s when the Interstate highway system was being designed. If, for example enough land could have been acquired for the I-95 corridor to add a high-speed rail line alongside, rail travel would have been a whole lot better today. Not only could the curves and bridges been built for higher speeds, being so close to the roadway, access to stations would have been so much better, so park & ride systems could have worked much better.
I was very disappointed when designs for the new TZ bridge were finalized without even serious consideration for adding a high-speed rail corridor alongside. Even if that corridor would only have gone from Nyack NY to connect with the Hudson line at Tarrytown, it would have been better than nothing at all, and much faster than the ferry ride.

I think that the biggest problem with getting funding for trains, is that nobody wants to lay out the money unless there is some sort of "guarantee" that the project will be profitable. I can see the reasoning behind that kind of thinking.

The new Tappan Zee Bridge is designed to support a future rail line. The main reason it is not being built with one already is lack of anticipated demand for rail service across the Hudson up there.

You also have to consider geography. The Nyack approach to the bridge is very steep, and the right-of-way is already very constrained. Where would a rail line go? And then on the Tarrytown side, sure, the Hudson line is right on the river, but the bridge is a lot higher up - you'd have to split the rail from the road bridge then build a long trestle to grade the rail line down to the Hudson.

As for building high speed rail along interstate highways... that's not really feasible. Grades and curves would never support HSR speeds pretty much anywhere. And if you designed the interstate system to support HSR from the beginning, it likely would never have been finished, because the higher design standards would have made construction and ROW acquisition orders of magnitude more expensive.