“The great cities of the world have their trains running through the urban core. They include London, Paris, Berlin, and Philadelphia, but not New York.” So says George Haikalis, who had a decades-long career as a planner and, at the age of 89, enjoys unquestioned seniority among the ranks of the rider-advocates in the New York area. While it seems unusual to think of the place where the United States began almost 250 years ago as a pace-setting city today, Philadelphia is now the only city in the nation that has linked the lines of two railroads that went from being fierce regional competitors to components of a citywide and region-wide transit system. In this article, we will look at the project that transformed two formerly separate train systems into an operation not seen anywhere else in the nation.
Before there was the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA), there were the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR or “the Pennsy”) and the Philadelphia & Reading, generally known as the “Reading.” The Pennsy called itself “The Standard Railroad or the World” and ran between New York and Washington, D.C., the southern half of what is now Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor (NEC). It also ran west to Pittsburgh and beyond, to Chicago, St. Louis and other Midwestern cities. It had an extensive network of “commuter lines” in the Philadelphia area, with five full-service lines and one limited-service line, where SEPTA operates local trains today. The Reading was a regional railroad, mostly running north and west of Philadelphia, toward Bethlehem and Allentown to the north, Reading and the coal country beyond it to the west, South Jersey to the east, and providing an alternate route to the New York area in cooperation with the Central Railroad of New Jersey. The Reading also maintained a number of local routes in the Philadelphia area, including six that SEPTA now operates. The two railroads were merged into Conrail in 1976, along with other Northeastern roads. The Airport Line, SEPTA’s other regional rail line, was completed after the agency was formed and opened in 1985.
The great innovation for those systems is that since November 1984, trains have started at the outer end of one line on the former Pennsy or Reading system, run through Center City Philadelphia, exited on one of the lines of the other system, and terminated at the outer end of that line. Before that time, Reading trains originated at Reading Terminal, a beautiful 1893 edifice that hosted those trains for more than 90 years, in addition to trains that went beyond commuting distance until 1981. The building is still standing as part of the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The head house and train shed have not been demolished, but lines built into the floor indicate where the tracks once terminated. One reminder of the old terminal that is still an integral part of city life is the Reading Terminal Market north of the station, which was founded in 1893 and remains a prominent part of the city’s burgeoning food scene.
Scott M. Kozel wrote a comprehensive article for Pennways in 1998 that was updated in 2003. He reported that the railroads were originally opposed to the tunnel project: “The two railroads were not very enthusiastic about joining their two Philadelphia area commuter rail systems. The two railroads had engaged in intense competition in the coal transportation business for decades, as Pennsylvania has large amounts of coal in its land. There was not much competition for commuters, although the two railroads did operate parallel commuter service to the Chestnut Hill section of northwest Philadelphia, which is one of the more exclusive sections of the city. James M. Symes, chairman of the board of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was quoted as saying in 1962: ‘The proposed center city connection is an improvement designed by the City of Philadelphia to benefit the center city situation, to increase tax benefits. It is not regarded by the railroads as an improvement for their benefit.’”
The Pennsy’s history is complex, and it played a significant role in the project that built the tunnel and started the through-running operation that has been ongoing for slightly more than 40 years. Historian Steven Ujifusa wrote an article detailing the history behind the tunnel project, headlined Making the Center City commuter connection. It was aired and published by Plan Philly, a local reporting unit of the city’s NPR station, WHYY, that covers the transportation and land use beat. The story ran on Feb. 12, 2008.
Ujifusa began his piece by quoting from the 1985 Engineering Report from the tunnel project. It said: “The Center City Commuter Connection, a direct rail link between Suburban Station and the new Market East Station formally opened for business on Nov. 12, 1984 after six years of construction. The project, which included a four-track wide tunnel and a new underground Market East Station, was finished on time, within its original budget, and with no worker fatalities. It linked all 198 commuter stations and united 500 miles of track in the Philadelphia region into a single system. It was also thelargest federally funded mass transit project to date, costing $330 million.”
The project was funded by the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA), which was the predecessor of today’s Federal Transit Administration (FTA). Ujifusa also quoted Louis F. Gould, SEPTA Board Chair at the time, as saying at the opening ceremony: “What we have accomplished here has never done before in the United States. We have, in one regional rail system, joined suburb to suburb and suburb to city.”
The Pennsy’s predecessor station was the Broad Street Station, located near today’s Suburban Station (also known at one time as “Penn Center” and still in use today) and Philadelphia’s City Hall. It was designed by Frank Furness, a famous architect during the Victorian period, and was completed in 1882. It lasted until early 1952. The station building was a magnificent edifice, with a 16-track train shed behind it. What was not so magnificent was an elevated viaduct between it and 30th Street Station (also still in use today by SEPTA, Amtrak and NJ Transit trains to Atlantic City) that covered the block between Market Street and Pennsylvania Boulevard (now JFK Boulevard) to the north. It was also 16 tracks wide, according to Ujifusa, and presented such an imposing barrier that locals called it the “Chinese Wall.” When Broad Street Station was demolished, the Chinese Wall went down with it.
The route for the Center City Commuter Connection (CCCC) was conceived in 1975, one year before the Conrail merger. According to plan, it proceeded between 30th Street Station and the Reading alignment on Ninth Street, with the appropriately designed turn from easterly to northerly. Trains coming from PRR points of origin would stop at 30th Street and Suburban Stations. The latter was changed from an eight-track stub-end facility to a through-running station with four tracks, while the other four tracks are used occasionally for express trains that originate or terminate there during peak-commuting periods on weekdays. A new station, Market East, was built at 11th and Market Streets to replace Reading Terminal (at 12th and Market) as a station. It has four tracks, two in each direction that share a wide platform. The tunnel then turns and proceeds in a northerly direction under Ninth Street, where it joins the historic Reading line, as trains on different routes later split off for their destinations.
Ujifusa commented: “This public project achieved what never could be done when the railroads were under private ownership. From the 1880s to the 1960s, Philadelphia was a two-railroad town. The first was the mighty Pennsylvania, headquartered at the Broad Street Suburban Station near City Hall. Along with its national network of railroads, it had also helped develop upscale suburban towns along its ‘Main Line,’ today known as the R5 Line.” The “Main Line” is the line to Paoli, which was also the start of the PRR main to Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and points west. It also hosts Amtrak service today.
Ujifusa also said: “Until the completion of the Center City Commuter Connection, the two trunk lines did not connect. A passenger who wanted to go from, say, Paoli to Doylestown had to walk several blocks from Suburban Station to the Reading Terminal. The distance was more than an inconvenience during inclement weather, and city planners felt the lack of a connection between the two stations was severely hampering Philadelphia’s role as a regional commercial center.”
The “R5” designation was part of a line-pairing system and nomenclature that Vukan R. Vuchic, a transportation specialist and longtime faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, originated. Vuchic told Railway Age that he had suggested the operating plan to David L. Gunn, who was General Manager of SEPTA at the time. When Conrail stopped operating local passenger trains at the beginning of 1983, there was a 114-day strike against SEPTA, so Gunn had his hands full. Vuchic and his students proposed the fare structure and the line pairings for the operating plan, and SEPTA implemented it.
At the other end of the R5 line was Doylestown in Bucks County, northeast of the city. Trenton was at one end of the R7 line, paired with Chestnut Hill East, which is within city limits. Trains to Wilmington and Newark, Del., are paired with service to Warminster, also north of Philadelphia. These combined routes were more-strictly observed at the beginning than in later years. Some trains still run that way today, but indications of which lines are paired are paired no longer displayed prominently.
Strict line-pairing had its defenders. Another scholar in the transportation policy field, Yonah Freemark, criticized SEPTA in the Febr. 4, 2010 posting on his publication The Transport Politic: “Unfortunately, SEPTA has spent the past 25 years making a mockery of the 1980s investment in its regional rail network. Now, the transit agency’s planners are pushing to remove uniform nomenclature from services and eliminate even the suggestion of through-running from operations. It’s a waste of transit capacity on a grand scale, and a disappointment for the agency’s 130,000 daily riders.”
While Freemark criticized the agency for moving away from strict operation of each line pair as a unit, he praised the concept behind through-running: “When it opened the Center City Commuter Connection in 1984, Philadelphia had produced an interconnected regional rail system few other American cities could boast of. By digging a tunnel 1.7 miles between the former Pennsylvania Railroad’s Suburban Station and the tracks of the former Reading Railroad, regional transit authority SEPTA created a unified rail system spanning the entire Philadelphia region.” After that introduction, he stated the core benefits of the new system: “Unlike most U.S. commuter systems, Philadelphia could offer its riders through-service from one part of the metropolitan area to the next and stops at multiple stations downtown. Trains wouldn’t have to turn around at the center-city terminus, clearing up space for redevelopment and speeding up travel times. New uniformly numbered lines operated from one suburban destination to another, via downtown, just like the Paris RER and many German S-Bahn systems.”
Curiously, at the end of that post, he said “Today, roughly 5% of passengers take advantage of SEPTA’s through-routing, departing and arriving at destinations outside of downtown.” If that is correct, there might not be much need for strict line-pairings. Schedules indicate where a train will go if it continues outbound on another line. That system appears to give riders information they can use, without sacrificing the benefits of through-running. It appears important that at least some trains still go somewhere beyond Center City to turn around, rather than using a downtown station as if it were a stub-end terminal.
Gunn, who was later President of Amtrak, said that the biggest benefit of the new SEPTA operation was improved equipment utilization. Regarding riders who would ride through Center City and go to a point on the outbound segment, he told Railway Age: “There was no vast market there. The vast majority of passengers were still going to the city.” He added that, under the new routings, operating costs were somewhat lower. Concerning trains running through the city’s core and not changing ends, he said: “You sped things up a little, but changing ends is not a big deal.”
Another transportation scholar, Alon Levy, published a post on the Plan Philly section of the WHYY website on Oct. 10, 2017, headlined How SEPTA can turn Regional Rail in Philly into high-frequency rapid transit. Levy suggested some changes that SEPTA could make: “SEPTA has Regional Rail, a commuter rail network. Several Regional Rail lines are entirely contained in the city, in neighborhoods otherwise underserved by public transit, and several others cross into the suburbs but still make multiple city stops. SEPTA could add service at low cost just by modernizing the infrastructure it already has.” He endorsed through-running and using electric trains, which are the current practices. SEPTA discontinued service on all of its non-electrified lines in 1981 and now runs the only all-electric multi-line regional rail system in North America.
Levy also called for full fare integration and “high off-peak frequency: at worst, a train every half hour on outer-suburban branches and every 15 minutes on trunks and urban branches.” He summarized his proposal this way: “Transit frequency and fare collection go hand in hand. SEPTA, like most other U.S. commuter railroads, relies on multiple conductors to check and punch every ticket. Multiple conductors per train adds to labor costs, which can make running additional trains too pricey. But a more efficient fare collection system exists: proof-of-payment (POP), with random fare inspections. POP networks require passengers to hold a valid ticket whenever they ride and then levy fines whenever POP inspectors catch a passenger on a train without a ticket. POP systems are common on American light rail lines and throughout continental Europe. They require ticket-vending machines at every station, but SEPTA is already installing Key card kiosks throughout its rail network.”
Scott R. Spencer, now Operations Director for AmeriStarRail, was Senior Operations Planner for SEPTA and a member of the project’s “Top Team” at the time. It was his job to supervise the transition from the old system with Reading Terminal to the new system with the tunnel and new set of stops. He told Railway Age that nothing like it had been done in railroad history (at least not in North America). He said that other SEPTA managers doubted that he could move all the agency’s trains on only four tracks, but he had seen such operations in Europe. While some accounts placed the first day of service on Monday, Nov. 12, Spencer said that the new Saturday schedule with the through-running ran on Nov. 10, and that he rode the first through train from Media at 5:41 AM that day (Train 4222, which also left Market East at 6:30 and arrived on time at West Trenton at 7:29). The full weekday schedule ran on Sunday, Nov. 11, as the “dress rehearsal” for regular weekday service, which officially began the next day, when the opening ceremony was held.
The tracks, power and signal systems from Reading Terminal had been disconnected the previous Tuesday, which was Election Day. For the next three days, there was a temporary schedule that managers called the “Brown Throw,” the cutover at Brown Street to the new track, power and signals. Trains on the Reading side originated and terminated at Logan Station (which SEPTA later closed), and riders transferred there for the Broad Street Subway to reach Center City.
The project faced some serious challenges. Spencer said it was the only mega-project that had “an unceremonious ‘un-opening’” for emergency repairs before the new service plan could be implemented permanently. It started with a leak at the old Temple University station on the Reading side that had rusted at least one support girder. He told Railway Age that, on Friday, Nov. 16, “At 10 PM that evening my boss calls me to say I need to report at 8 AM Saturday morning to work on Special Emergency Schedules, crew and car assignments and passenger information to ‘un-open’ the tunnel’ Monday morning to resume terminal operations at Suburban Station, Market East and Logan Station for more than 400 weekday trains. The ex-Pennsy and ex-Reading lines operated as separate systems again, starting Monday, Nov. 19. It would have taken so long to replace the defective Columbia Avenue bridge that the Christmas shopping season, especially at the mall in Center City, could have been lost.” Spencer credited SEPTA Project Manager Matt Trzepacz with “ingeniously” replacing the old bridge with fill, which allowed the new service to resume on Saturday, Dec. 15, a move that saved some of the shopping season downtown.
Vuchic also told this writer that the new connection “was a very logical connection to make.” Still, the elevations of the lines were different. The stub end of the Pennsy at Suburban station was at –2 level, or two stories below ground, while the Reading Terminal train shed was elevated at +2 level, so there were grades and changes in altitude to consider while building the tunnel. The result, according to Vuchic, was “the best-connected rail system in the United States.”
According to Spencer, Gunn would often tell reporters and anybody else who asked that the project was like “putting a brand-new heart into a 95-year-old patient with hardened arteries.” Gunn did not say that first, according to a Nov. 19 article by Gar Joseph headlined Flawed Bridge Severs Artery in the now-defunct Philadelphia Daily News. Joseph also reported: “The analogy stuck. It has been repeated in various forms by SEPTA officials, most recently by general manager Joseph T. Mack.”
Despite all of these difficulties, including emergency repairs that required a four-week reversion to the old operating system, or as close to it as railroad managers could replicate, the repairs were completed, and the new system has kept going for 40 years and counting.
Other advocates and planners, including Haikalis, have also proposed frequent service and enhanced fare integration for other places like New York, but those changes can be expensive. Available fare collection systems can save money on crew salaries and benefits, but the technology can be costly. If there are more trains, crew members could be assigned to new trains that are added to the schedule. That practice could improve crew utilization without requiring layoffs. Still, one consideration is how much more equipment would be needed to provide more-frequent service if the consists used for the service could all run through the city’s core and turn around only at outlying terminals. Railroads do not always accept innovations easily, especially if managers do not believe it’s necessary to do so. As many riders have found out the hard way, transit managers can be reluctant to embrace new operating practices or new infrastructure if they don’t believe their railroad needs it.
One of the reasons for that attitude might be the sharp increase in cost for new transit projects over the years. The CCCC received one of the first of the misleadingly named Full-Funding Grant Agreements (FFGA) from UMTA, the FTA’s predecessor. Those grants cap the amount of money that the feds contribute toward a project, with the sponsoring agency left on the hook for any increases in cost that were not contemplated in the FFGA. The original tunnel project cost $330 million (about $1 billion today). In contrast, the Gateway Program in New York City and nearby New Jersey, parts of which are under construction, is slated to cost tens of billions of today’s dollars. While Gateway is a bigger project, its cost would exceed the SEPTA tunnel by more than one order of magnitude.
SEPTA’s through-running system was highly innovative when it began 40 years ago, but it has not changed much, except that more trains are terminating near Center City and fewer are going to outlying endpoints today. The other change is that SEPTA, like most transit providers, is in financial trouble as the fiscal cliff looms. We recently reported that the Republican majority in the Senate is not on board with the amount of state funding that Gov. Josh Shapiro wants to give to agencies in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and elsewhere. So, SEPTA could be hit with big fare increases and service cuts this year. As always, the vicissitudes of politics will overshadow the best of innovations when it comes to transit.
When all is said and done, the greatest change caused by the CCCC and the through-running operation that it enabled might be the new look that it brought to Market Street and JFK Boulevard, rather than any direct result from the through-routing. Ujifusa described how demolishing the “Chinese Wall” made room for light, air and new development along the two streets west of 12th Street. Mid-20th-century-style high-rise buildings have been replaced with new office space that was convenient for commuters. The “glass box” style of skyscrapers (by Philadelphia’s standards, if not by Midtown New York’s) is not considered as aesthetically appealing today as it was then. Ujifusa concluded his article by saying: “An irony is that the cursed ‘Chinese Wall’ might have saved many of historic houses and office buildings along the old commercial corridors of Chestnut and Walnut Streets. Because these high-rises were built on land long occupied by the viaduct, fewer historic structures had to be sacrificed to construct them than if they were built south of Market.”
We reached out to SEPTA for this story, but the agency did not return our request for comment.
One city where transit is consistently rated as among the best on the continent is Canada’s largest city, Toronto. In addition to the Toronto Transit Commission’s extensive and multimodal local network, the city also has Metrolinx GO Transit trains running on several lines. One of them, the Lakeshore Corridor, has operated as a through-running line since the system’s inception. We will look at it in the next article in this series.
