Sunday Train: Rapid Passenger Rail moving ahead
As you are probably well aware, the US Government is gridlocked, which means that for years and years, nothing has been getting done.
However, because of the appropriations for "High Speed Rail" in 2009 and 2010, things are being done right now. "Bullet train" High Speed Passenger Rail services often grab the headlines (and you can watch a fairly hokey California HSR Authority youtube video on what they did in the first six months since construction started), but much of the actual services that we will see starting up in the final years of this decade will be work on or preparation for the "Rapid Passenger Rail" services that upgrade top speed from the sluggish conventional US corridor speed of 79mph to 110mph or more.
The primary Rapid Passenger Rail project is the Chicago to Saint Louis "HSR", which will cut about an hour from the present five and a half hour trip. The majority of this project will be completed next year, though some work will continue into 2018. Other projects are underway in Michigan, on the Northeast Corridor, and in the Pacific Northwest.
Chicago to St. Louis Rapid Passenger Rail
The Illinois "HSR" project was launched in 2010. A substantial amount of the required track upgrade work was completed between 2010 and 2012, but passing track, bridge replacement and rehabilitation, and drainage improvements were still required.
Much of the corridor has level crossings, and 110mph operation requires upgrades to rail crossings, with speed detecting four-arm crossing gates replacing the original two-arm gates. It appears that work on rail crossings is much of what the Illinois Department of Transportation will be engaged in before the projected Summer 2017 expansion of Rapid Passenger Rail service from the 15 mile trial 110mph section between Dwight and Pontiac to most of the corridor.
Positive Train Control is also required for 110mph operation. Under Positive Train Control (PTC), a train will not proceed through a crossing unless the crossing signals that it is clear of traffic. If no signal is received, it will automatically slow to a safe stopping speed, and if the crossing is still blocked, will stop. Similarly, if a section of track is occupied, by either a slower train moving in the same direction or an oncoming train, the train is automatically slowed and then stopped until the track is clear.
Train service on this corridor is presently provided by the daily Texas Eagle, from Chicago through Saint Louis and on to San Antonio, complemented by four Lincoln Services.
Of course, a majority of the passengers on this line do not ride all the way between Chicago and St. Louis. While ridership is very Chicago-centric, Chicago / St. Louis was only the second most travelled station pair:
- Chicago / Normal is about 79,550/yr
- Chicago / St. Louis is about 75,410/yr
- Chicago / Springfield is about 59,400/yr
- Chicago / Alton is about 16,960/yr
- St. Louis / Springfield is about 12,250/yr
In the "No-Build" alternative in the EIS, the existing Amtrak corridor would have been used, with three of the existing Lincoln Services upgraded to 110mph, and this provides the baseline for the operation at completion of the present project.
- CHI/STL Express 7am to 12:20pm becomes 7am to 11:30am
- CHI/STL 9:25am to 3pm and CHI/STL/... 13:25pm to 7:21pm remain the same
- CHI/STL 5:15pm to 10:45pm becomes 5:15pm to 10pm
- CHI/STL 7pm to 12:30am becomes 7pm to 11:45pm
- STL/CHI 4:35am to 10am becomes 4:35am to 9:20am
- STL/CHI 6:40am to 12:20pm becomes 6:40am to 11:25
- .../STL/CHI 7:55am to 1:52pm and STL/CHI 3pm to 8:40pm remain the same
- STL/CHI 5:30pm to 11:10pm becomes 5:30pm to 10:15pm
The second envisioned stage in the roll-out follows capacity that allows the 79mph Lincoln Services to be upgraded to 110mph services:
- CHI/STL 7am to 12:20pm becomes 7am to 11:30am
- CHI/STL 9:25am to 3pm becomes 9:25am to 2:10pm
- CHI/STL/... 13:25pm to 7:21pm remains the same
- CHI/STL 5:15pm to 10:45pm becomes 5:15pm to 10pm
- CHI/STL 7pm to 12:30am becomes 7pm to 11:45pm
- STL/CHI 4:35am to 10am becomes 4:35am to 9:20am
- STL/CHI 6:40am to 12:20pm becomes 6:40am to 11:25
- .../STL/CHI 7:55am to 1:52pm remains the same
- STL/CHI 3pm to 8:40pm becomes 3pm to 7:45pm
- STL/CHI 5:30pm to 11:10pm becomes 5:30pm to 10:15pm
Full build out of the Chicago / St. Louis Rapid Rail corridor accelerates trips further. The main benefits of the full build out focus on the ends of the corridor, speeding up train movements through Chicago and St. Louis, giving bigger benefits to the section of corridor between Springfield and Chicago that serves 80% of trips. "No-build" is the savings of the speed upgrade without investment in corridor improvements in Chicago, Springfield and St. Louis, while "full build" combines both the speed upgrade and the corridor investments:
- For Chicago / St. Louis, 5:35 travel time drops to 4:45 No-Build, 4:10 full build; 3:51 full build express
- For Chicago / Springfield, 3:25 travel time drops to 2:49 No-Build, 2:44 full build, and 2:27 full build express
- For Chicago / Normal, 2:14 travel time drops to 1:57 No-Build, 1:53 full build, and 1:43 full build express.
The Ongoing Illinois Budget Crises (OIBC) have not disrupted this project, because the majority of the funding comes from the 2009 / 2010 Federal HSR appropriationsm, and the state funding match has already been allocated. However, one likely impact of the OIBC is the it seems likely that the improvements we see before the end of the Twenty Teens are likely to be limited to the existing services. Expanding to the ultimate target of eight services per day each way would require additional capital subsidy to buy new trains, and given the OIBC, that doesn't seem likely to be showing up anytime soon.
As long time readers of the Sunday Train know, Rapid Passenger Rail is not just about effective trip times. The three target benefits are travel time, service frequencies, and service reliability. And the investments presently being made are expected to also improve service reliability, improving on-time performance from 75% to 85%.
The planning of the Chicago to St. Louis Rapid Rail corridor has built into it a presumption that the Amtrak Texas Eagle service continues to operate as a 79mph rail service. However, the new Amtrak long haul locomotives and rolling stock are capable of 110mph operation. At the very least, if the Texas Eagle is scheduled as a 79mph service, when it is operating on the Rapid Rail corridor, it will be in a position to pick up the pace if it should happen to be running behind schedule.
Rapid Rail and Pre-Rapid-Rail Investments Around the Country
So the Chicago / St. Louis Rapid Passenger Rail service project continues to progress toward launch, despite gridlock in Washington DC and the OIBC. It is not the only project underway, however.
The other Rapid Passenger Rail project that is underway is also connecting to Chicago. This is the Detroit to Chicago corridor, which is the beneficiary of my Governor Kasich's decision to give the money for the Ohio 3C railway back. Amtrak owns the Michigan Line, from Porter, Indiana to Kalamazoo, Michigan, and had started track improvements to allow increased operating speed in the early 2000's, while the MDOT had started to work toward buying the corridor between Kalamazoo and Dearborn later in that decade, completing the purchase in 2012. Upgrades already made have trimmed half and hour off of the Detroit to Chicago time of the three Wolverine services.
Across the continent, the Cascades Corridor in Washington and Oregon received funding to reduce passenger and freight train interference, speed up passenger train operations, and allow the introduction of additional rail frequencies. Twelve of the 20 projects that were funded have been completed, and the remaining eight are in progress and expected to finish by 2017. The projects are expected to improve service reliability and will also allow the current four Cascade services each way to be increased to six.
These projects do not include raising the speed limit to 110mph. However, they do lay the groundwork for a speed upgrade in two different ways.
First, the speed limit of a rail corridor does not much matter to a train that is stuck waiting for another train to clear through a single track section or some other bottleneck. The strongest benefits to a speed upgrade occur when the trains in a corridor are going to be spending much of their time close to the speed limit.
Second, the economic benefit of the speed upgrade is leveraged by having more services on the corridor. It is so hard to justify a Rapid Passenger Rail upgrade in a corridor that only sees one service a day. Making the investments to permit six conventional rail services to operate on the Cascades Corridor will substantially boost the economic benefits of a Rapid Passenger Rail upgrade when the current HSR policy gridlock is finally broken.
Conclusions and Conversations
In addition to the Conventional and Rapid Passenger Rail projects I touched on, and the ongoing California High Speed Rail project, there is ongoing work on the Northeast Corridor, which I will take a closer look at another time, and also a wave of HSR and Rapid Rail corridor studies progressing, including in Virginia, for a Michigan passenger rail corridor north of the Detroit to Chicago corridor, and several others. There is also the Rapid Passenger Rail corridor from Miami to Orlando which I have looked at before and shall again.
So, set aside the election fever for a short time, and tell me, which rail project has got you the most excited?
Comments
I only know about the CA line.
But frankly, it's hard to get excited about it since it's timeline to complete is basically forever, we're using already obsolete technology compared to what we could be using (and then it will be even more obsolete by the time it's done) and I'm not even sure they have all the land rights necessary yet.
What is the "obsolete technology" line?
The timeline is one of the issue with Express HSR, aka "bullet trains" ... the curves that are requires to keep a train going at 220mph make it mandatory to build an all new corridor for them, which is why the Conventional and Rapid Passenger Rail projects are the projects that will be delivering services inside the current decade.
But what's that about "obsolete technology"? I know that I've heard of a gimmietarian yelling that at an event about one of the Texas HSR projects.
Is that about the Elon Musk Hypeloop? It's not as if the corridors being rolled out in China are Hypeloops.
-- Virtually, etc. B)
China is getting into magnetic levitation trains.
Shanghai Maglev
The fossil fuel corrupted US is so far behind where we should be in efficient, renewable and sustainable energy and transportation that it's tragic.
Beware the bullshit factories.
Yes, China is 'getting into' maglev ...
But it's steel wheel on steel rail that it is rolling out countrywide. Maglev so far is just a few trial corridors. And it's not as if the Express HSR corridors will stop being used if a new network of Maglev lines is built ... they are, after all, complements, not substitutes, just as mass transit is a complement for cycling and Rapid Passenger Rail and High Speed Rail are complements for local rail, dedicated busways, cycling and walking.
It's not as if the two technologies are equal well suited to all circumstances, but the primary Express HSR that countries are investing in all around the world today is the one with the greatest flexibility in supporting sustainable urban development. And if the average real cost of energy rises, the margin of preference between the two alternatives swings in the favor of steel wheel on steel rail.
If California wanted to set up a situation in which a Maglev train from the SF Bay to the LA Basin was a viable rail corridor, the first steps would be to establish an Express HSR trunk corridor, extended by Rapid Rail corridors. If the Maglev stations have connecting platform connections to an effective conventional rail network, it can benefit from it's substantial space advantage over air transport, connecting to a central multi-modal transport center rather than being out in the middle of nowhere so that it can be surrounded by enough parking lots for an auto-addicted version of the system.
The solution for the extended period of time that it takes to establish all-new HSR corridors is to set up an ongoing funding mechanism so that there are a series of new projects in the pipeline over time ... similar to last week's discussion of the rapid explosion of the Beijing Subway system over the past decade. And similar to the elevated subway extenders in the Beijing Subway, Rapid Passenger Rail projects can play a useful role in not just extending the reach of the system but also in delivering benefits up front rather than over a decade in the future.
{Whew, it's not Hype-loop.}
-- Virtually, etc. B)
I could be wrong.
I read an article in the past couple of months about a new type of trains that far out performed HSR that could be up and running this decade (I believe they were private companies looking at building these). Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the company or the technology (it definitely was not mag lev though).
Part of it was an assumption that every piece of public transportation infrastructure that they are building in CA otherwise is so behind the times (A 15-40 Year Plan to install light rail that might have already existed before the city tore it out at the behest of car companies? Can we aim a little higher?). I would be thrilled if the big CA train wasn't outdated like I was assuming.
That's the Hype-Loop
... the brainchild of Elon Musk, the Hyperloop uses not yet proven technology to move tube trains in partially evacuated tubes. It's yet another example of using a not yet available alternative to distract from an actual useful option ... in this case, it's been picled up as part of the noise campaign to disrupt the California HSR system.
Seriously, the costs for building the Hyperloop tubes were based on pipeline construction costs ... as if we haven't seen multiple pipelines leaking in the past few years.
Anyway, the costs for sufficiently air tight tubes over these distances seemed extremely optimistic, and whether it is a viable technology, never mind whether it would be as cheap as the introduction hype was claiming it would be, is not yet proven.
It would be a decade or more away from being able to conclusively say whether it would work and how much it would really cost, and meanwhile California loses the Federal funding to build the trunk of the HSR corridor through the Central Valley ... as well as wasting a decade twiddling it's thumbs in hopes of a paper system turning into a useful transportation option.
Maglev technology is a serious alternative, and for some city pairs that are too far apart to be connected by conventional steel wheel on steel rail HSR, like New York to Chicago, it might be the preferred alternative, or one of them (though for the large number of cities in between Chicago and New York that would be three or fewer hours apart by conventional Express HSR, the less expensive, more flexible and more energy efficient option would seem to be the better choice, so it wouldn't make sense to only have a Maglev line).
Hyperloop is Not Yet Ready for Prime Time. Its normally advanced as the same kind of bait and switch which sees, for instance, BRT proposed instead of light rail, from groups that fought against spending money on improving buses the last time that was an option. It was like the Bush administration pushing the "Hydrogen car" as it's "energy independence" transport technology.
-- Virtually, etc. B)
Thank you for a very complete answer!
So now I can just go back to hoping that CA can get the land rights needed.
Seeing your posts here reminds me of the good old days.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
Hey, how's it going?
Every year I come back from China things seem to be getting worse.
That's why I wanted to write a diary on some projects that are continuing to advance, despite the declarations of oil-lobby funded opponents that HSR is dead.
-- Virtually, etc. B)
No seem about it.
Things keep getting worse. I don't think there is an institution left in this country that people trust and/or respect.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
110 mph is still far behind elsewhere
hopeless even.
Watching the speed in an Italian train making 300 kph made my small son cheer, years ago. The only way to make fast trains work in the US is to make them........ fast. Knocking an hour off a journey between Chicago and St. Louis is going to impress no one.
Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.
Not really.
We should not only have Rapid Passenger Rail corridors, but we definitely should have Rapid Passenger Rail corridors.
Indeed, in countries with Express HSR systems, the fact that some trains go 180mph or 220mph does not mean that there are no trains going 110mph.
What 110mph is doing is reversing the Great Slowdown, which occurred when Congress passed a law that corridors with speeds of 80mph or higher required Positive Train Control signaling, so most US Railroads reduced their speed limits to 79mph.
With or without tilt-trains (that is more about terrain than anything else, which is why they are so widely used for conventional passenger express trains in Spain and Italy), this is the speed that conventional rail passenger trains that complement Express HSR trains often are going in much of the world, and the speed that they ought to be going, once the corridors have enough bottlenecks removed that the trains can spend a substantial part of their trip traveling at or about 110mph.
It costs substantially more per mile to build the dedicated rail corridors to go 220mph, and takes substantially more time, so even if we were building all of the corridors which make clear sense as Express HSR trains, we still ought to be investing in Rapid Passenger Rail corridors, because it would provide valuable service to city (and town) pairs that would not be served by an network that was limited to only having Express HSR services.
-- Virtually, etc. B)
I actually agree with you.
The problem is the US fails to think 'big' any more. A decent rail network, with useful speeds in the right places should be a no-brainer.
Apparently, we lack brains.
Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.
We have brains. And we have resources.
However, the resources are more directed to making the obscenely rich even more obscenely rich, so not much are left over to be directed in pursuit of no-brainer public investments.
-- Virtually, etc. B)
Thanks to Scott Walker
The very idea of travelling from Minneapolis to Madison in say, 3 hours is anathema.
Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.
That's part of the importance of getting the ...
... Rapid Passenger Rail services up and running.
As long as these alternatives are "hypotheticals or overseas", it's easy to con people. It's when they start running and people start benefiting from them in a neighboring state that it starts to be possible to start pushing "why can't we have the nice things they have?"
-- Virtually, etc. B)
Hey. Good to see you.
And I hope the Cascades changes to lessen passenger and freight interference fix our problems here.
If the trains ran on time, more (a lot more) folks would ride them. A few bad experiences have poisoned the train as an option for a lot of folks I know from Oakland to Bellingham. I think a lot of that has been due to freight competition, but I am not certain.
And, the coordination, at least for me, leaves a bit to be desired. Going from Eugene to Bellingham required a longish layover in either Portland or Seattle. I am hoping that this was caused by freight scheduling and will go away. From where I'm at, and where I want to go, if I can put my bike on a train, I can sell the car.
Yeah, it's mostly freight railroad interference & slow orders
This is from a memorandum to Congress from 2010, when the Cascades on-time performance was 71%.
And due to the recession (though the memo cites the work cooperating with host railroads), 71% was a significant improvement on 2006, when OTP was about 51% for the Cascade (and 4% for the Starlight, when it earned the nickname Starlate).
Equipment failures and cars blocking level crossings are two of the other main sources of delays, but for the Cascade, the main one is freight interference & slow orders on the host corridor. And of course, a drop in business which reduce freight interference would normally eventually lead to more slow orders ... because the freight railroads are investing for the freight capacity they think they will need.
-- Virtually, etc. B)
New Mexico has the Rail Runner
Not the highest-speed, but most of the traffic is from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, so it doesn't have to be super-fast to be a reasonable alternative to I-25. It runs Belen to Santa Fe, which means that it connects about half the population of the state (and is the only place that commuter rail makes sense.) They own the tracks, partially by buying from BNSF and partially by building. If they could get the right-of-way there's no reason it couldn't continue up and down the Rio Grande, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
I generally have little reason to go to Santa Fe, but the next time I have to play tour guide and take people to Santa Fe I'm planning on using the Rail Runner. I hate trying to find parking near the plaza and generally everything they want to see is in walking distance.
Thanks.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --