Passenger Trains > $4.5 million per second

Amtrak Spent 11 Years and $450 Million to Save Acela Riders 100 Seconds 
Meanwhile, France built a brand new 210-mile high speed rail line with a max speed of 200 mph in six years.


MOTHERBOARD, Tech by Vice
By Aaron GordonJune 27, 2022  

In 2011, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood warned that “If we settle for the status quo, our children and grandchildren will fight paralyzing congestion, remain dependent on foreign oil and suffer from an economy stuck in neutral.”   Which was why he was announcing $2.2 billion for American rail projects, including $450 million to bring high speed rail to New Jersey.   The New Jersey project, dubbed the New Jersey High Speed Rail Improvement Program, planned to upgrade and improve 24 miles of track, wires, signals, and other infrastructure between Trenton and New Brunswick, accommodating speeds up to 160 mph, up from 135. 

It was supposed to take six years.

It did not. Just last week, Amtrak announced that 16 of the 24 miles are now ready for 150 mph Acela train travel, the “fast” train along the Northeast Corridor from Washington, D.C. to Boston. When Amtrak gets a new Acela fleet next year, it expects to run 160 mph service on those 16 miles. The other eight miles are expected to be ready in 2024, a mere seven years late on a project expected to take six. 

While 160 mph trains do indeed sound exciting, a little math reveals how this project is not the infrastructure triumph the Obama administration hoped it would be.  Rather than helping us break America free of stagnation, projects like these are precisely the reason why this country’s infrastructure has stagnated and deteriorated. A basic rail upgrade that was supposed to take six years is seven years late, wildly expensive for what it is, and provides negligible time savings for riders that are entirely negated by other flashy but anti-functional projects by the very same agency.   

“The $450 million upgraded this segment of track and provides benefits to Amtrak, NJ Transit, including faster speeds, improved reliability, and state-of-good-repair,” Amtrak spokesperson Jason Abrams told Motherboard.  The point of faster trains is to save people time, so how much time will this $450 million save Amtrak riders?   Abrams said it is “too soon to say” how much time the project will save passengers, but “we can probably save a minute or two and reduce some amount of delay” on the trains passing through that stretch of track.    This modest saving accords with basic back-of-the-envelope calculations.  

Back when the project was announced 11 years ago, then-transportation blogger and current fellow for NYU Marron Institute Alon Levy wrote that going from 135 mph to 160 mph would save about 100 seconds, not including acceleration and deceleration time.  To put it another way, a stretch of track that used to take 10 minutes and 30 seconds to travel will now take about nine minutes.  The Acela takes 75 minutes to get from Philadelphia to New York, so this time savings amounts to approximately two percent shorter travel times between those two cities.  But as Levy pointed out, this time savings was directly negated by another project Amtrak was undertaking, the recently-finished and ill-conceived $1.6 billion Moynihan Train Hall in New York City, which has narrow escalators ascending from the far end of the platform on the west side, forcing people to double back overground to get to the subway or other important Manhattan destinations.   And while people who pass through New York rather than getting on or off there would not have to deal with this roundabout station layout, they are also in the minority of riders.  New York is by far the busiest Amtrak station along the Northeast Corridor, with 7.9 million arrivals and departures every year pre-COVID, more than Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia combined.   “From my perspective as a passenger, the minute or two I lose every time I need to change concourses at Penn Station is worse than a minute or two spent on a train,” Levy wrote.

And Moynihan has, in practice, meant passengers need to spend an extra minute or two at least getting to the subway or points east in Manhattan—and since Moynihan is between 8th and 9th Avenues, with only the 7 train west of it, almost all points are east—than before. In other words, the $1.6 billion Amtrak station project negated the time savings of the $450 million Amtrak high speed rail project. And that’s before even talking about the cost and delays of the project.

Abrams told Motherboard the project includes more than just the high speed rail improvements, also addressing additional signal and capacity needs for New Jersey Transit commuter trains. Be that as it may, it was still fundamentally a repair-and-upgrade project that required no significant new construction. And it was woefully expensive for what it was.  As Eric Goldwyn, also a fellow at NYU Marron who works with Levy on analyzing rail infrastructure costs around the world, told Motherboard the cost of the New Jersey project compares unfavorably to entirely new high speed rail infrastructure constructed elsewhere, even ones that required digging new tunnels, building new bridges, or erecting extensive overpasses.

Referring to their high speed rail costs dataset from about 20 different countries, Goldwyn told Motherboard via email, “You’ll see that there are full-on projects in Spain, France, Turkey, etc. with tunnels, viaducts, stations, maintenance yards, etc. that have been built at a similar cost or even less than this project.” So the U.S. spent more money per mile to upgrade existing rail infrastructure to high speed lines than other countries do to build new high speed lines. It also took Amtrak longer to do these 16 miles than it takes other countries to build entirely new high speed rail lines stretching hundreds of miles.

To pick just one example, in 2011, the same year the New Jersey project was awarded, France began construction on the Sud Europe Atlantique, a 210-mile high speed line with 188 miles of new construction between Tours and Bordeaux and a travel speed of 200 mph. It started running trains in 2017.  The profound failings here are not solely down to Amtrak. The 24-mile New Jersey project is part of a state-by-state plan to gradually upgrade chunks of the Northeast Corridor to true high speed rail, hopefully by 2035, while concurrently running legacy commuter rail and slower Amtrak trains on the same track. This is not the approach more successful countries with true high-speed networks have taken. Instead, they build brand new tracks and routes for high-speed trains one chunk at a time. Various proposals to create brand-new high-speed lines in the Northeast that would mimic that approach and shave hours, not minutes, off travel times have gone nowhere, thanks to huge cost estimates that reflect America’s inability to build infrastructure at internationally-competitive rates which results in federal and state opposition to building more of it. 

 This stagnation and high speed rail cosplay leaves us where we started. Biden’s touted infrastructure law has virtually nothing for high speed rail. Back in 2011, President Obama had a goal to connect 80 percent of U.S. residents to high-speed intercity rail by 2035. We’re halfway there, but nowhere closer. 

https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxn8qx/amtrak-spent-11-years-and-dollar450-million-to-save-acela-riders-100-seconds



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/28/22 00:29 by GenePoon.

Just another railroad hater with an ax to grind.    Like this is the only govt project thats spent a lot of money and not accomplished a whole lot.
Maybe he'd  like to take a look at the airports in Kansas City and Pittsburgh.   Or our military actions in the middle east.

Next.....

Or maybe people are tired of of the Professor Hill monorail salesmen wasting money. God forbid any agency, public or private, listened to the people that actually know what the hell is going on. No, they that are given credence are usually MBA’s or logistics majors whose railroad experience is around a Xmas tree.

The easiest and cheapest way to go fast is not go slow, but running for 20 miles at 160 MPH is flashy and kool, never mind the other 300 miles are at 50 mph: Math is hard.

Boondoggles like PTC, California HSR, the Chicago-St. Louis return to almost as fast as the GM&O in the 50’s(AKA UPRR’s Christmas present)
And other Amjoke ratholes (anybody need a baggage or dining car?) make many people want to barf.

Is anyone in charge of the asylum?

Regards.

Posted from iPhone

Have been on Acela Express quite frequently lately. My trips have always been early into Boston, New Haven, and New York City. I am almost led to believe - can Amtrak tighten that time up a little but? The "early arrivals" have ranged from 3 minutes to 9 minutes. I know that may seem insignificant, but for Acela Express, it's quite significant. The goal for the south end was 2 hours or 2.5 hours, (Washington DC to New York City) and 3 hours for the north end (Boston to New York CIty). 

The southend - largely ontime for my trips, a much smoother ride than the north-end (I think), but they should be able to shave a couple of minutes here overall too, as time seems to have only been added since Acela Express was launched. 

This is my biggest issue with HSR here in the US... it costs so much because of the nimbys... and everything else it isn't worth it. I would love a European system here all over, bur not for the amount it would cost.

Posted from Android

The money was never really about HSR, it was a general State of Good Repair rebuild of the NEC between HAM and COUNTY that had a side effect of some faster speeds.

Complete electric transmission replacement, one new substation, complete signaling replacement, one 4 track crossover rebuilt and two 80mph high speed turnout interlockings added. 

I should also mention that the I-295/76/NJ42 interchange rebuild is still ongoing and projected to cost $900 million.

Sometimes I think about how in Japan they issued an apology after a train inexcuseably left 25 seconds early. Having such a system here is culturally impossible. There's no way I could see us getting to a place where people were compensated well enough and people had enough pride in a rail system to achieve such results. It is a belief system of people here that anything from the gov is bad or corrupt or expensive, and then people act on that belief to make it the reality. It's a belief system that we worship cars as the almighty of personal transport, and people act on those beliefs to actively sabotage any attempt to offer viable alternatives. It's truly sad. We could build a system like Europe if we wanted to, but to do so would be against the religious devotion to cars programmed and hammered into the majority of people here who have never traveled to someplace to experience how amazing it could be if we did.

Drknow Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Or maybe people are tired of of the Professor Hill
> monorail salesmen wasting money. God forbid any
> agency, public or private, listened to the people
> that actually know what the hell is going on. No,
> they that are given credence are usually MBA’s
> or logistics majors whose railroad experience is
> around a Xmas tree.
>
> The easiest and cheapest way to go fast is not go
> slow, but running for 20 miles at 160 MPH is
> flashy and kool, never mind the other 300 miles
> are at 50 mph: Math is hard.
>
> Boondoggles like PTC, California HSR, the
> Chicago-St. Louis return to almost as fast as the
> GM&O in the 50’s(AKA UPRR’s Christmas
> present)
> And other Amjoke ratholes (anybody need a baggage
> or dining car?) make many people want to barf.
>
> Is anyone in charge of the asylum?
>
> Regards.
>
> Posted from iPhone

If you want to see some real boondoggles you may want to consider looking at the defense department budget - of course no one wants to go there.

That section of catenary needed rebuilding, regardless of Acela, but the project management, its timeframe  and its budget were seriously botched. Before this, every time anything went through Princeton Jct over 90MPH, the catenary would bounce like a trampoline for half a minute after the pantograph's passage.  

Comparing the U.S. and France is often problematic. Eminent domain rules vary, deference to authority differs, $8 gasoline and road tolls differ. Etc

Posted from Android

kurt765 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Sometimes I think about how in Japan they issued
> an apology after a train inexcuseably left 25
> seconds early. Having such a system here is
> culturally impossible. There's no way I could see
> us getting to a place where people were
> compensated well enough and people had enough
> pride in a rail system to achieve such results. It
> is a belief system of people here that anything
> from the gov is bad or corrupt or expensive, and
> then people act on that belief to make it the
> reality. It's a belief system that we worship cars
> as the almighty of personal transport, and people
> act on those beliefs to actively sabotage any
> attempt to offer viable alternatives. It's truly
> sad. We could build a system like Europe if we
> wanted to, but to do so would be against the
> religious devotion to cars programmed and hammered
> into the majority of people here who have never
> traveled to someplace to experience how amazing it
> could be if we did.

If we want to build a European style system, yes, certainly we could....but it could serve only a fraction of the country and that's what makes it unthinkable. The northeast can only be mollycoddled so much before the rest of country thumbs their nose at them. They are not more special than we and we can't treat them special. I say on the whole for NEC a good state of repair is preferable and let any higher speeds flow from that AND the ability to maintain the track to those speeds....and therein lies the devil....you go fast on a train...you put heavy wear on the track...maintenance cost goes up....fast.... better to find the the middle ground between high speed and easy maintainablity.....how about 100mph on average?

GenePoon Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Amtrak Spent 11 Years and $450 Million to Save
> Acela Riders 100 Seconds 
> Meanwhile, France built a brand new 210-mile high
> speed rail line with a max speed of 200 mph in six
> years.
>
>
> MOTHERBOARD, Tech by Vice
> By Aaron GordonJune 27, 2022  
>
> In 2011, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood
> warned that “If we settle for the status quo,
> our children and grandchildren will fight
> paralyzing congestion, remain dependent on foreign
> oil and suffer from an economy stuck in
> neutral.”   Which was why he was announcing
> $2.2 billion for American rail projects, including
> $450 million to bring high speed rail to New
> Jersey.   The New Jersey project, dubbed the New
> Jersey High Speed Rail Improvement Program,
> planned to upgrade and improve 24 miles of track,
> wires, signals, and other infrastructure between
> Trenton and New Brunswick, accommodating speeds up
> to 160 mph, up from 135. 
>
> It was supposed to take six years.
>
> It did not. Just last week, Amtrak announced that
> 16 of the 24 miles are now ready for 150 mph Acela
> train travel, the “fast” train along the
> Northeast Corridor from Washington, D.C. to
> Boston. When Amtrak gets a new Acela fleet next
> year, it expects to run 160 mph service on those
> 16 miles. The other eight miles are expected to be
> ready in 2024, a mere seven years late on a
> project expected to take six. 
>
> While 160 mph trains do indeed sound exciting, a
> little math reveals how this project is not the
> infrastructure triumph the Obama administration
> hoped it would be.  Rather than helping us break
> America free of stagnation, projects like these
> are precisely the reason why this country’s
> infrastructure has stagnated and deteriorated. A
> basic rail upgrade that was supposed to take six
> years is seven years late, wildly expensive for
> what it is, and provides negligible time savings
> for riders that are entirely negated by other
> flashy but anti-functional projects by the very
> same agency.   
>
> “The $450 million upgraded this segment of track
> and provides benefits to Amtrak, NJ Transit,
> including faster speeds, improved reliability, and
> state-of-good-repair,” Amtrak spokesperson Jason
> Abrams told Motherboard.  The point of faster
> trains is to save people time, so how much time
> will this $450 million save Amtrak riders?  
> Abrams said it is “too soon to say” how much
> time the project will save passengers, but “we
> can probably save a minute or two and reduce some
> amount of delay” on the trains passing through
> that stretch of track.    This modest saving
> accords with basic back-of-the-envelope
> calculations.  
>
> Back when the project was announced 11 years ago,
> then-transportation blogger and current fellow for
> NYU Marron Institute Alon Levy wrote that going
> from 135 mph to 160 mph would save about 100
> seconds, not including acceleration and
> deceleration time.  To put it another way, a
> stretch of track that used to take 10 minutes and
> 30 seconds to travel will now take about nine
> minutes.  The Acela takes 75 minutes to get from
> Philadelphia to New York, so this time savings
> amounts to approximately two percent shorter
> travel times between those two cities.  But as
> Levy pointed out, this time savings was directly
> negated by another project Amtrak was undertaking,
> the recently-finished and ill-conceived $1.6
> billion Moynihan Train Hall in New York City,
> which has narrow escalators ascending from the far
> end of the platform on the west side, forcing
> people to double back overground to get to the
> subway or other important Manhattan
> destinations.   And while people who pass
> through New York rather than getting on or off
> there would not have to deal with this roundabout
> station layout, they are also in the minority of
> riders.  New York is by far the busiest Amtrak
> station along the Northeast Corridor, with 7.9
> million arrivals and departures every year
> pre-COVID, more than Washington, D.C. and
> Philadelphia combined.   “From my perspective
> as a passenger, the minute or two I lose every
> time I need to change concourses at Penn Station
> is worse than a minute or two spent on a train,”
> Levy wrote.
>
> And Moynihan has, in practice, meant passengers
> need to spend an extra minute or two at least
> getting to the subway or points east in
> Manhattan—and since Moynihan is between 8th and
> 9th Avenues, with only the 7 train west of it,
> almost all points are east—than before. In other
> words, the $1.6 billion Amtrak station project
> negated the time savings of the $450 million
> Amtrak high speed rail project. And that’s
> before even talking about the cost and delays of
> the project.
>
> Abrams told Motherboard the project includes more
> than just the high speed rail improvements, also
> addressing additional signal and capacity needs
> for New Jersey Transit commuter trains. Be that as
> it may, it was still fundamentally a
> repair-and-upgrade project that required no
> significant new construction. And it was woefully
> expensive for what it was.  As Eric Goldwyn,
> also a fellow at NYU Marron who works with Levy on
> analyzing rail infrastructure costs around the
> world, told Motherboard the cost of the New Jersey
> project compares unfavorably to entirely new high
> speed rail infrastructure constructed elsewhere,
> even ones that required digging new tunnels,
> building new bridges, or erecting extensive
> overpasses.
>
> Referring to their high speed rail costs dataset
> from about 20 different countries, Goldwyn told
> Motherboard via email, “You’ll see that there
> are full-on projects in Spain, France, Turkey,
> etc. with tunnels, viaducts, stations, maintenance
> yards, etc. that have been built at a similar cost
> or even less than this project.” So the U.S.
> spent more money per mile to upgrade existing rail
> infrastructure to high speed lines than other
> countries do to build new high speed lines. It
> also took Amtrak longer to do these 16 miles than
> it takes other countries to build entirely new
> high speed rail lines stretching hundreds of
> miles.
>
> To pick just one example, in 2011, the same year
> the New Jersey project was awarded, France began
> construction on the Sud Europe Atlantique, a
> 210-mile high speed line with 188 miles of new
> construction between Tours and Bordeaux and a
> travel speed of 200 mph. It started running trains
> in 2017.  The profound failings here are not
> solely down to Amtrak. The 24-mile New Jersey
> project is part of a state-by-state plan to
> gradually upgrade chunks of the Northeast Corridor
> to true high speed rail, hopefully by 2035, while
> concurrently running legacy commuter rail and
> slower Amtrak trains on the same track. This is
> not the approach more successful countries with
> true high-speed networks have taken. Instead, they
> build brand new tracks and routes for high-speed
> trains one chunk at a time. Various proposals to
> create brand-new high-speed lines in the Northeast
> that would mimic that approach and shave hours,
> not minutes, off travel times have gone nowhere,
> thanks to huge cost estimates that reflect
> America’s inability to build infrastructure at
> internationally-competitive rates which results in
> federal and state opposition to building more of
> it. 
>
>  This stagnation and high speed rail cosplay
> leaves us where we started. Biden’s touted
> infrastructure law has virtually nothing for high
> speed rail. Back in 2011, President Obama had a
> goal to connect 80 percent of U.S. residents to
> high-speed intercity rail by 2035. We’re halfway
> there, but nowhere closer. 
>
> https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxn8qx/amtrak-spen
> t-11-years-and-dollar450-million-to-save-acela-rid
> ers-100-seconds

Extremely dishonest article from the fake news media. The 100 seconds of time saved was just a bonus, it was a SOGR project to replace catenary, track, new turnouts etc. Every replacement on the cantenary between NY and DC will see time saved in the long run.

Posted from iPhone

Travelers are in fact enthusiastic about small reductions in travel time, and often more or less oblivious to "diministhing returns". 

Two narratives.

The Hiawathas between Chicago and Milwaukee cover the distance in 90 minutes on average, with a top speed of 80 mph. Raise that to 110 (which can be done fairly cheaply), travel time is reduced by 40%, so now 54 minutes (all things being equal). Not bad, and the capital costs would be affordable. Raise the speed to 125 mph, and the travel time is reduced another 14%, but it's 14% of a much smaller number, so a travel time of 48 minutes saves a mere 8 minutes over the 110 mph service. And at a cost, at least 20 times the cost of upgrade to 110 mph operations (total grade separations, probably a new set of tracks because that route sees heavy freight operations which couldn't share tracks with a fleet of passenger trains running at 125 mph). The upgrade from 90 to 54 minutes is significant (think, one hour vs an hour and a half). The upgrade from 54 minutes to 46 minutes (a saving of 8 minutes) would hadly be noticeable. Some would say it wouldn't be worth the gigantic capital costs. 125 mph is thought to be the maximum that diesel locomotion is capable of, meaning that anything faster would mean electrification, a huge capital cost.

Another story. Back in the Metroliner days, I was taking Amtrak from D.C. to Boston in an Amclub car on a regular Northeast Regional, or whatever they called them in those days. In Philadelphia a businesswoman bound for NY boarded, and as soon as she settled in got on the phone to rearrange her agenda, in effect clearing her afternoon calendar. From which I (and the rest of the car) learned that her Metroliner had been anulled and so by default she was stuck on "the milk train" (her term) and didn't know when she'd get to NY. Many calls (and much complaining) later, her last call was cut off when the train plunged into the Hudson tunnels. I never figured out what business she was in, but if it involved numbers and she had bothered to look at a timetable, she would have noticed that the difference in the running times of her Metroliner and the "milk train" was all of about 20 inutes. At worst much less of an inconvience than what she put herself (and her clients) through, thanks to the marriage of cell phones and her poor grasp of what was actually at stake. (Points extra for knowing what a "milk train" is, or was.)



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/28/22 10:38 by widowsihler.

The terminals are what sucks in America. They are the toughest to improve sort out congestion

Lackawanna484 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Comparing the U.S. and France is often
> problematic. Eminent domain rules vary, deference
> to authority differs, $8 gasoline and road tolls
> differ. Etc
>
> Posted from Android

Not mention the SNCF was largely destroyed in 1945.

masterphots Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> Not mention the SNCF was largely destroyed in
> 1945.

...and subsequently generally put back the way it wa as quick as possible. Modernization generally began in the 60s while the US was building highways to compete with railroads and drive the railroad industry into ruin.

TAW

kurt765 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Sometimes I think about how in Japan they issued
> an apology after a train inexcuseably left 25
> seconds early. Having such a system here is
> culturally impossible.

Japanese commuters count on making timely transfers, even between platforms on different levels via stairs. I hosted my U.S. friends in Tokyo ~20 years ago to demonstrate the fact that if you walk too slow, you miss the transfer at most stations, and you'll have to wait 2-5 minutes for the next train. No big deal? Those missed transfers can add up in a hurry. Millions of commuters in Japan count on making those timely transfers everyday.

As I posted elsewhere with a photo proof of a schedule board, Japanese trains work with 15 second margins... so an apology for a 25 second "disruption" makes sense.

I remember reading the article about the train leaving early, and most people in Japan humorously dismissed the incident... because they have to deal with other schedule anomolies - suicides, medical emergencies, mechanical/electrical issues, mother nature, and so forth.

I don't know if "culturally impossible" is the right word. BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) on a good day can operate trains with ~2 minute headway without problems. But in a society of automotive hegemony where trains are "alternate" transportation, there won't be any demand for such precision, even if we knew how to do it.

Was also going to add the bellyaching about Moynihan in this piece is also idiotic. Moynihan is a significant upgrade over the dump across the street. If one finds it inconvenient or would be prefer to be closer to the subway lines - by all means the old dump is still available for you. But just about everyone I’ve talked to and seen over there is impressed with the new setup and prefers it over the dump. I know there are some that prefer the old location and if you do great it’s still open.

Saying Amtrak paid $450 million for 110 seconds of improvement is like saying your new set of tires cost $30,000 - the cost of the new car they were attached to.

With this project, the major improvement was the electric capacity increase at the Metuchen convertor station. The old rotary 25 MW frequency convertor has been supplemented by new 60 MW static convertors. This helps solve the long-time issue with maintaining voltage in the north of Trenton section of the NEC. Metuchen is the only 25 Hz source for the NEC between Philadelphia and New York. Also, the project built a new 138/12 kV substation and replaced catenary. The reliability enhancement affects both Amtrak and NJ Transit. The project was paid from a federal grant.

The original poster seems to go out of his way to find and post any news that places Amtrak in a bad light. There are lots of them out there. There is no need to post one that is false.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/04/22 12:07 by prr60.

Or probably more accurately anything that places Amtrak in the Northeast in a bad light. But it shouldn’t be NEC vs the network.