Is Passenger Rail Doomed?

electricron wrote:And New York is working on convincing NS to upgrade the existing tracks to 90, possibly 110 mph. Most of that convincing means paying NS to do so.

Still, per Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited timetables, its 431 track miles from Buffalo to New York City, and 8 hours and 10 minutes, averaging 53 mph. Assuming Amtrak can raise the maximum speeds from 79 mph to 110 mph, and therefore raising the average speeds the same 30 mph increase to 83 mph. We know this is impossible, but let's continue the what if to its conclusion. The elapse time between Buffalo to New York City becomes 5 hours and 11 minutes, saving around 3 hours.
Another more likely what if, that New York only convinces NS to a max speed of 90 mph, a 10 mph increase in max speeds, and therefore a 10 mph increase in average speeds to 63 mph. This what if elapse time between Buffalo and New York City becomes 6 hours and 50 minutes, saving just 1 hour and 20 minutes.
To get the average travel time between Buffalo and New York City to 4 hours, the elapse time goal of most HSR lines to gain a majority share of customers and profitability, the average speed needs to be 108 mph. Using our unrealistic max speed calculator, 108 mph -53 mph = 55 mph average speed increase, therefore 79 mph + 55 mph = 134 mph, at least, is needed for maximum speed. There's no way Norfolk Southern is going to allow that high passenger train speeds on shared tracks with 60 mph freight trains. You're going to need dedicated tracks in a dedicated corridor, and like California's approximately 400 track miles from SF to LA, around $80 Billion.

I'm sure Norfolk Southern would be happy to take New York's money, since the line in question belongs to CSX. Unless of course you're proposing higher-speed rail over the Southern Tier.

electricron,
Bad arithmetic. Raising the maximum speed n mph does not raise the average speed n mph, unless you also raise the areas with slower speed limits too. And that's assuming a mathematically perfect world where changing speed before and after slower speed limits is instantaneous. In the real world you also have to account for how long those different speed limit sections are and where they are. A bunch of 10 mile 110 mph stretch between 1 mile 25 mph stretches don't do as much good as they would if there were 50 mph stretches flanking them.
My opinion, along the lines of the aforementioned 'trains are too slow', we'd probably do better speeding up all those slow zones. It's kind of like bowling, 'take care of the spares and the strikes will take care of themselves', take care of the slow orders and the super fast track will take care of itself.

Station dwell times also eat into average speed limits. The Lake Shore Limited sits in Albany a long time, not just because they change engines, but because they have to transfer baggage, since the platforms west of Albany are too short to handle both the New York and Boston baggage cars, which are at opposite ends of the train.

neroden wrote:

amm in ny wrote: I would say that the biggest problem with rail travel in the USA is that, except for the NEC and a handful of other cities, there is no infrastructure to get passengers to and from the train, other than private car. For long-distance (i.e., non-NEC) trains, the usual travel paradigm is that you drive (or get driven) to a station somewhere near your home, and you get somebody to pick you up at the other end.

True. But that's the only available paradigm in places with no local mass transit.

That doesn't make it any less of a problem. If you don't have any way to get from the station to your final destination, it doesn't matter how fast the train is, it won't be an option. This severely limits who is going to take the train.

neroden wrote:

amm in ny wrote:Even when there is adequate infrastructure, the time spent getting to and from the Amtrak stations at each end is often more than the time spent on the train. In those cases, HSR is not going to make much difference.

Well, it depends on your situation, doesn't it? ... the time spent driving to and from the stations is no worse than the time you'd spend driving if you were driving direct; ....

You've switched back to assuming you can drive at both ends.

I'm reminded of what Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel) calls the "Anna Karenina principle.") For rail travel to be competitive with other travel modes for a given trip, all the pieces have to fall into place to make a package that is competitive with the other modes. This includes getting to the station, trains running when you need them and arriving when you need them, being able to get to your destination from the train and back. In some cases, you also have to have viable mechanisms in place to deal with luggage, kids, disabilities, etc.

If any one piece fails, or is slow or inconvenient, or doesn't mesh well with the previous or next piece, it doesn't work. For air travel, all the pieces are there and generally work pretty well. For travelling by private auto, they're all there. For trains, they mostly aren't, and even if they are, they are usually so poorly coordinated that train travel isn't competitive.

My most recent experience was with trying to go to RPI (in Troy, NY) from Westchester County (NY) for the day. The drive takes 2 1/2 hours. The train trip takes 2, but it doesn't start at my home and it doesn't go to Troy. Door-to-door, using local bus to get from Rensselaer to Troy, the trip would have been about 5 hours, and I would have had to leave Troy by 5 p.m. to avoid getting stranded in Rensselaer. This is what I mean by "not competitive."

This is my most frequent criticism of most rail proposals, esp. HSR proposals. They focus on running trains, not on getting people from where they are to where they want to go.

Or invest in a real integrated transport system? Busses and trams feed trains, trains feed aircraft. That's the way it works over here.

And yes, the busses here do go to every town. About every single settlement above 500 people actually, not just every town.

kato wrote:Or invest in a real integrated transport system? Busses and trams feed trains, trains feed aircraft. That's the way it works over here.

And yes, the buses here do go to every town. About every single settlement above 500 people actually, not just every town.

"Over here" meaning where?

If regulation got out of the way, transportation systems would integrate by themselves instead of being forced into it.

amtrakowitz wrote:If regulation got out of the way, transportation systems would integrate by themselves instead of being forced into it.

Or they'd disintegrate. We both know that neither market forces nor regulation are panaceas or effective without the other, so let's skip the drum-beating and propose workable solutions instead.

(Note: the above is my personal opinion, not as a moderator.)

amtrakowitz wrote:"Over here" meaning where?

Sorry: Germany.

amm in ny, you *do* have a point... but it says that we need more passenger rail. The first conclusion from your points is: there should be rental car services at train stations. The availability of rental cars at airports is often the only reason the airports are usable *at all*. However, the rental car companies are reluctant to locate next to a station with relatively few train services. More trains -> rental cars move in.


In fact, the most critical missing elements which render train travel uncompetitive are usually:
(1) insufficient frequency;
(2) insufficient speed.

If you get sufficient frequency and speed, there are other things you need, but many of them will arise through market forces.

Now, you also discuss the difficulty of getting from Troy to Westchester. But this isn't the typical trip.

Travel patterns, nationally and internationally, are such that most trips have a big city at *one* end. And these are often a situation where the big city end is significantly more convenient if you *don't* drive into the city. For instance, any trip to Manhattan, where driving is miserable and parking is expensive. If people drive to the train station in Syracuse (or Utica) to catch the train to NYC, many would agree that it is far more convenient than driving all the way to NYC.

Perhaps Buffalo is a step too far for high-speed rail to New York City; perhaps nobody drives from Buffalo to NYC, either. But *even by electricron's numbers*, Syracuse certainly can be put within the 4-hour range. (In fact, there are several sources of slow-speed bottlenecks from New York to Rochester, the alleviation of which would lead to significant time gains; a simple percentage computation is misleading.) From my parochial point of view in the middle of the Finger Lakes, if electricron is willing to clearly support Syracuse-NY HSR, we can discuss the question of Buffalo service later, once he's envious.

You can't get an average speed of 107.5 mph with a 110-mph top speed unless you have almost instantaneous acceleration. You'd need a top speed of at least 143 mph, as tilt trains such as the Siemens Venturio (which operates on Deutsche Bahn's ICE-T service between Berlin and Hamburg) run at. The fastest average speed that any Amtrak train has operated at is 92 mph (the Acela Express "super-express" between WAS and NYP, stopping only at PHL), so unless you get up to 150 mph, you're going to need to cut out a lot of stops if you get up to 125 mph at least.

amtrakowitz wrote:You can't get an average speed of 107.5 mph with a 110-mph top speed unless you have almost instantaneous acceleration.

With a decent engine that's roughly 200 seconds acceleration and deceleration per stop (at 0.5 m/s² or 1.65 ft/s²). At 110 mph constant max velocity and 4:10 hrs for 431 miles that leaves room for about two 90-second stops inbetween. Of course not realistic, in particular the notion that you could do a 90-second stop in New York