The whole advantage of a train vs a plane is that a train has many doors, allowing a lot of simultaneous boarding to happen; and they also already have conductors who check your ticket to make sure you are getting into the correct car, and another ticket check once the train is in motion. It would be significantly better at major stations to just have conductors at every train car on the platform in parallel doing ticket checks, rather than just have one funnel.
> Today, Amtrak schedules the Acela, which travels express between Washington and Boston, to overtake the slower, local Northeast Regional at Penn Station. The organization claims that this requires scheduled dwells of 30 minutes for Northeast Regional trains
But why would anyone competent want to work for an organization like this?
the Midwest, for example, is roughly the land area and population of France. In fact, the TGV network overlays pretty well onto it https://preview.redd.it/8g59yft1lfs61.jpg?auto=webp&s=6ef0f3...
The Northeast is simply the most profitable because it already had the most scheduled services, the highest speed services, and the most Amtrak-owned track when it started out. But most of the country east of the Mississippi and a few corridors west of it are pretty good candidates for decent, profitable rail service.
Once one accepts that people are going to constantly leaving and entering the platform, that all ticket checking must happen on the train to not impeed circulation, running way more trains needing fewer platforms is revealed as (a) possible, and (b) the right way to do things.
They make everyone rescan tickets for the North East regional in NY also, if you're just passing through. It's a bit annoying, but I wonder if the traffic getting on and off is too great in NY to be able to do that. I have no clue, though.
Also, fun fact, if you don't go in the main hall Amtrak waiting area at NY Penn, you can board the platform whenever you want. But it's hard to figure out what platform/track to go to in advance — hiding that information is how they discourage this.
It's not a thing at any other Amtrak station I've been to, where the next stop often isn't for 45 minutes or more.
And no you can't have conductors in every train car. That's way too expensive and not needed for the rest of the 12 hour journey or whatever it is.
I'm thinking more, gate agents rather than conductors checking tickets at each door, and they're just always at NY Penn since there's trains constantly leaving out of there.
I have plenty of complaints about Penn St/Moynihan and Amtrak. The single file line isn't one of them.
In fact this past holiday season Amtrak stranded 100+ people in DC because the train left before all tickets were checked. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/12/27/amtrak-st...
And if the line slows down, there are generally other factors involved. I mean, they don't even scan your ticket in the line -- they just glance to make sure you have one for that train on that day.
It's unconvienent if a human needs to read a ticket. But tap-in or scan-in systems are pretty fast.
I'm 100% with you on this. It's idiotic.
Here on Amtrak Cascades, Seattle and Portland both do "airplane style" entry with ticket checks and sometimes seat assignment in the station, but at more minor stops (eg Longview, Bellingham) you hop aboard one of the open cars and get checked by the conductor.
In my experience 1 is very consistent – NYC and Philly at least. 2 I'm not sure about. But 1 is imo the big issue. The pre-queue wastes time and clogs up the station and we hate it.
I have minimal familiarity with NY and none with Penn, but will be Amtraking in and out in a couple weeks.
- Penn Station is directly under Madison Square Garden. There used to be a large building similar in scale to Grand Central Terminal, but it was rather controversially torn down in the 60s [1], and MSG built on its site and the train station portion becoming a bunch of tunnels beneath it.
- Across the street from Penn was a big post office building, with a grand Neo-classical design. As an attempt to somewhat remedy the destruction of Penn decades earlier, NY state decided to turn that into a train hall, which opened in 2020 [2]. It's the same station stop as Penn, so you can really think of it more as just an expansion of it. Take the stairs on the western (toward the Hudson river) end of the platform and you'll emerge into a big open space with an atrium that looks like an actual train station, instead of the basement of MSG. (They've also been doing good work raising the ceiling and widening corridors in Penn, so there's more light and air, but you're still basically in the MSG basement even if it's less cramped now).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Penn_Station#Original... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moynihan_Train_Hall
NJ Transit can barely seem to handle service w/o Through-Running, so any discussion of expanding service seems premature. Here are some highlights:
- Inability to tell consumers ahead of time that trains will be stopped (even though they know well in advance.) Now, entire private WhatsApp groups have been set up where commuters warn each other of stopped trains and clogged stations. This leads to people coming to Penn Station only to find out trains are not running/cancelled/delayed. This is with a hub/spoke -- imagine if they expand beyond Penn Station into CT/LI.
- Inability/Unwillingness to communicate sources of blockages. There are ways to bypass NYPenn/Secaucus and go directly to Newark (PATH train). But NJTransit wont tell you where the blockage is, so its impossible to work around delays
- Inability/Unwillingness to communicate which trains will depart first, when multiple trains are backed up and queued up. People guess and hope they choose the "next" train.
- Regularly cancelled trains, esp after 7pm. They randomly cancel scheduled trains. No point in a schedule if you wont follow the schedule.
I'd want to contain the chaos of NJTransit to NYPenn Station and not beyond. At most, a 2nd stop at GC (like with LIRR did). The system isnt currently mature enough to be granted more responsibility.
Mind you -- this would be valuable. Folks who move to NJ necessarily cut themselves off CT jobs (esp hedge funds, etc.) So of course, having thru traffic from NJ all the way to CT would open up huge pools of job applicants and job opportunities.
We are equally unaffiliated with all the railroads and transit agencies :)
We do have membership in NJ are very much as in the transit going-ons through the tri-state area. A big unifying idea is that the economic geography doesn't care about political boundaries, and so the transportation planning shouldn't either.
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> NJ Transit can barely seem to handle service w/o Through-Running, so any discussion of expanding service seems premature. Here are some highlights:
You do raise a good point that through-running does require some amount of competence --- simply have a more interconnected rail network (revenue service on both sides) inherently means there is more potential for failures to propagate throughout the network. But, we'd like to believe this is surmountable.
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1. First of all, NJT and the MTA have done it before! See "train to the game". See:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Haven_Line#Meadowlands_gam... - https://www.njtransit.com/press-releases/take-train-game-met...
Of course, running some special event service is not the same as doing through running day-in and day-out, but it is something to build on.
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2. What's the alternative?
- If there is no new expansion and no through-running, than the billions spent on Gateway way be rather wasted. That would be a huge embarrassment to the agencies, and politicians that stuck their neck out for the funding, alike.
- If Penn Expansion is not pursued for bullshit reasons, but the kayfabe is dropped and its done for the honest reason that no one believes agency competency can be improved, that is also embarrassing. Would the station actually be funded at that point?
We therefore think even just changing the conversation to acknowledge that ops competency, and not station geometry, is the binding constraint, would be a major improvement.
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3. We have time
In line with the above counter-factuals, the rubber only hits the road (excuse me, steel hits the tracks :)) once Gateway is done. For better or worse, that is a long way off. This gives the agencies time to get ready.
- The money that would be been spent on station improvements can be spent on NJT "tech debt" instead --- all the behind the scenes infra that enables higher reliability.
- Congestion pricing should be raised, and hopefully the next crop of NJ politicians will be more open-minded and accept some money for NJT.
- Penn Station Access sending Metro North trains to Penn station makes for a good opportunity to "train" the agencies through-running, prior to Gateway being finished. And don't forget "train to the game".
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> Mind you -- this would be valuable. Folks who move to NJ necessarily cut themselves off CT jobs (esp hedge funds, etc.) So of course, having thru traffic from NJ all the way to CT would open up huge pools of job applicants and job opportunities.
Yes, it is a huge opportunity! Our main report (https://www.etany.org/modernizing-new-york-commuter-rail) talked quite a lot about that. I wish our politicians were less provincial about state boundaries, and better able to visualize just how impactful expanding commute sheds is.
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A final disclaimer: I am far less knowledgable on train things than the other ETA members, so take this all with a bit more grain of salt.
The idea of through-running is to not have trains parked like that in an over crouded midtown. That way they can reduce the number of tracks and widen the platforms. It has beem done with great success in many big cities already. The idea would be to have NJ Transit trains run to platforms at their rail yard in Queens. This is a large ripe for development area between Long Island City and Sunnyside Queens. It could also go farther to Port Morris in the Bronx and link with Metro North and the further North East rail corridor. Long Island Rail could go to a new terminus rail yard in NJ which could have a bus terminal to reduce the amount of busses into NYC. The main issue I can see is some of those commuter runs are too long for crew rotations and may require crew shifts who just do last stop in NJ through to the outer boro NYC rail yards.
Here is the group advocating this idea. Rethink Penn Station NYC https://www.rethinkpennstationnyc.org/
Could one craft a gold-plated through-running transit hub proposal which supports the grab? Then transit improves, grab or no grab. Given the dominant power of real estate in NYC, the TFA had for me the feel of a proposal from engineering to a c-suite with big divergent incentives. Could one tease apart the "don't build badly" from the "don't need to build" arguments? "There are better alternatives to that, but if that gets done anyway for whatever reasons, at least get it right by ...".
This report is more narrowly tailored on refuting Amtrak's grossly mistaken reasoning in their recent study.
I am however familiar with this style of argument. The page reads like a lot of motivated reasoning, where they have a conclusion set and they're selecting data, massaging statistics, etc. to fit into their narrative.
They might be right in the points they're making, I have no idea, but the style of the article definitely makes me skeptical.
From a European perspective a 15-22 minute dwell time sounds ludicrous. My local train station is pretty large and designed around through trains, and a 7-minute followup between departures (so between train 1 departing on track X to train 2 departing on track X) is routine here.
If it can be done over here, what makes Penn Station so special that they need 3x as much time? Why can't Amtrak do what other railway companies have been doing for years? Amtrak is already lying about other countries using headway-based scheduling, so can they really be trusted about the rest?
I have no idea if this ETA article is 100% trustworthy, but Amtrak definitely isn't.
The commuter rail service here is a bit of a basket case, but that has nothing to do with through-running practices, which make the system much better than it otherwise would be.
Even if there were passenger circulation issues problems (and our passenger model was half-written when we did the first report), there are other solutions like decking over tracks to join adjacent platforms into a wider platform. We're happy that do not appear necessary, but if it did it doesn't fatally imperil through running as being the best option.
Finally, the number of outright errors and dubious claims in the Amtrak study makes us think they are doing their own reasoning. If you really don't believe my previous two paragraphs, just think ask yourself motivated reasoning seems less suspect! :)
Through-running, unlike 10s billions for a station expansion, is a cheap experiment. We can just try it! If there are more passengers than expected (yay! Though) and safe circulation does become and issue, that's great new info and very little money wasted.
outer terminus------>ny penn|alight|board new train|----->later station
outer terminus------>ny penn|stay on train|---->later station
EDIT: Thank you to the commenters (who I can't answer because I'm rate-limited).
Consider a rail network connected like A-B-C . With terminating trains you'd have one train run A-B-A, and another train run C-B-C. With through trains you'd have one train run A-B-C and another train run C-B-A. Terminating trains have to stop and reverse, which takes quite a lot of time because the driver has to go to the other end of the train. Through trains can just continue in the same direction, so it is a lot faster.
Because a through train occupies the track for less time you don't need as many tracks to serve the same number of trains per hour.