In this series, we have taken a detailed look at the concept of through-running for regional railroads operated by transit providers and serving a major city, railroads that were formerly considered mainly “commuter” railroads. Commuting is still an important component of those railroads’ business, but the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic has changed riding habits. More people are working “remotely” (usually from home) than before the virus struck, and much of the recent ridership growth has occurred on weekends. We have looked at all the “transit railroads” in the United States and Canada where through-running is being practiced, could have been built but was not, or remains feasible. Now it’s time for an evaluation and a look toward the future.
Looking at the report card for through-running, we kicked off the series with SEPTA in Philadelphia, which is the great success story for the practice, and might also be the exception that proves the rule. In Toronto, through-running works because of geography: Union Station in downtown Toronto is in the middle of a line, and it makes sense for GO Transit (now operated by Metrolinx, but under the system’s original name) to run between the east and west ends of the line, rather than originating and terminating many trains in the middle. Boston’s MBTA never built a rail link between its Northside and Southside services and, as things stand now, it seems unlikely that such a connector will ever be built. Of course, circumstances can change some day, but that proposal seems out of reach at this time. I’ll have more to say about New York and Los Angeles later in this article.
Benefits and Costs
Every project costs money, and part of the decision-making process regarding a proposed project is to look at the benefits it will provide, weighed against the monetary and non-monetary costs of building it. That includes the opportunity cost, which means the sacrifice of other projects that could have been built instead. That concept is most important when a number of projects compete for available funding.
Of the through-running projects that have been built and are operating today, Philadelphia is the big winner. During the 1970s and early 1980s, a tunnel was built that connected the local routes of the historic Pennsylvania Railroad with those of the historic Reading Railroad. Suburban Station (ex-PRR) was converted from a stub-end terminal to a through-running facility for most trains that stop there, and the historic Reading Terminal and its train shed were sacrificed, although the Reading Terminal Market below it continues to thrive. A new station, Market East, was built two blocks away to replace it, and the Center City Connector tunnel allows trains to serve that station, Suburban Station, and 30th Street Station, where Amtrak trains and trains on New Jersey Transit’s Atlantic City Rail Line also stop.
The SEPTA system has been in operation for slightly more than 40 years at this writing. It now appears that the core benefit from that operation is that all trains (except for a few downtown originations and terminations during the peak-commuting periods on weekdays) run through Center City and stop at all three major stations. That is a level of convenience not available to riders in places where there are two separate stub-end terminals located far enough from each other that it is not easy to walk between them.
There is a secondary benefit, which is that operations become simpler when train sets only have to be turned at the endpoints of a route. Stub-end terminals require that a train come into the terminal, let the passengers off, board outbound passengers, and then wait for a departure slot to become available. A through-running operation allows quick alighting and boarding at the downtown station(s), which saves time and improves equipment utilization. In practice, a line on the historic PRR system is paired with another line on the historic Reading system. Originally SEPTA was very strict about line pairs but has become less-strict recently. According to David Gunn, who was General Manager of SEPTA when the current system was implemented, the primary benefits were concerned with equipment and operations, and not with riders being able to stay on the train coming inbound on one line and going outbound on another. His view makes sense, because it’s the “luck of the draw” for a rider who happens to be going between an origin and a destination on the two lines that happen to be paired. Still, when all is said and done, the convenience of going to any of the major city stations is a benefit for almost all riders.
As for the cost side, tunneling is always expensive and disruptive, especially under a city’s urban core. Construction costs are soaring, as New Yorkers are finding out as they wait, patiently or not, for a three-stop extension of the four-stop Second Avenue Subway, a line that was planned more than a century ago and might never reach its originally planned terminal in Lower Manhattan. Californians are finding that out again, too, as the California High-Speed Rail project seems more like a roller coaster than a flat line with gentle slopes. That project is again being targeted for scrutiny by the feds. That sort of construction is also disruptive, as many residents of Manhattan’s Upper East Side will attest. They complained loudly during the years it took to build the short line under Second Avenue.
Two Visions for New York
We spent much of this series examining two concepts for “through-running” in New York City, which is served by trains coming from New Jersey on New Jersey Transit, from Long Island on the Long Island Rail Road, and from north of the City and Connecticut on Metro-North. One version, practiced by Amtrak every day and suggested by advocates at ReThinkNYC, AmeriStarRail and elsewhere, involves running trains on NJ Transit and the LIRR through Penn Station, instead of turning every train, which is the current practice. The other involves building a connecting track between Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal, the home of Metro-North with its many stub-ended tracks.
The core benefit of the latter proposal is that riders would have direct access to both the East and West Sides of Midtown Manhattan. That is the sort of convenience that SEPTA offers to its riders, but it now seems highly unlikely that such a plan will be adopted. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) spent more than $11 billion to build a deep-cavern terminal far below Madison Avenue on the East Side of Midtown for the Long Island Rail Road, and a connection between Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal would be very expensive for the agency that pushed hard for the new and still-controversial Congestion Pricing toll that helps support its capital program, but is now under attack.
The New York situation also provides an example of an important detail that must be considered in any through-running project. That is compatibility of equipment that would run in such interline service. SEPTA had the advantage of running two systems that were technically very similar: electrified lines that ran almost exclusively with electric multiple-unit (EMU) equipment. That remains the case today, although a few “commuter trains” that run at peak-hours use coaches pulled by electric motor units. It appears that equipment compatibility was a major factor in facilitating SEPTA’s transition from two stub-end terminal operations to a through-running one. It also helped that a single agency ran trains on both systems, a situation that holds in Boston and Chicago, but not among New York’s three separate roads.
Only electrically operated trains are allowed in the tunnels extending from Penn Station to New Jersey and from Grand Central Terminal northward. Some of the power in the region runs alternates at 25Hz. (the historic Pennsy’s AC standard, which Amtrak’s NEC south of New Haven and SEPTA still use) and the more common 60Hz., which is compatible with standard commercial power. There are also different voltages involved. NJ Transit’s motor units can handle them with brief losses of power at phase gaps, and the agency’s Bombardier-built (now Alstom) ALP45DP units also have diesel engines in them, in addition to electric motors. Metro-North uses GE P32AC-DM units for diesel and 750-volt third-rail operations. The LIRR uses third-rail power in its electrified territory (also 750 volts) and also has dual-mode units that include diesel engines for running in non-electrified territory. Metro-North uses under-running third-rail shoes, while the LIRR uses over-running third-rail shoes. As we recently reported, Metro-North is planning to order units with batteries for its proposed service from Penn Station on the Hell Gate Bridge route that would serve new stations in the Northeast Bronx.
In short, with three agencies acting separately (even though the LIRR and Metro-North are both under the umbrella of New York’s MTA), it is very difficult and expensive to build a compatible operation that all three railroads could share. It could be done, but at a high cost, and the LIRR could easily opt out of such a plan, claiming that it offers East Side Access to its riders, no matter how inconvenient.
So, as things stand now, it appears highly unlikely that the two major stations will be connected, at least not in the foreseeable future, although advocates like George Haikalis have been pushing for such a connection for at least the past 55 years. A more-limited through-running model involving only the existing operations at Penn Station would be easier and less-expensive to implement, but there are still problems of equipment not being compatible across lines, although some limited use of through-running at that station has been proposed. AmeriStarRail has called for running trains from Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor (NEC) line to Ronkonkoma on the LIRR’s Mainline with a full span of service, while Amtrak has called for a much-more-modest three round trips per day to and from the Island. Even Amtrak’s modest proposal will have to wait for the railroad’s expansion project along the line to be completed before more trains can run there. Notwithstanding that delay, a three-train service could provide proof of concept and feasibility at that level of service, but not proof of full-span operation.
Los Angeles Ready?
Earlier in this series, we looked at plans to connect some tracks at Los Angeles Union Station for a future through-running operation. The station hit its nadir in the 1970s, when only a few Amtrak trains called there, but has become much busier in recent years. That is due to the emergence of Metrolink as a major regional rail system, and the expansion of service on Amtrak-run corridors to San Diego and Santa Barbara. Only a few trains operate with through-equipment between those two endpoints today, and Metrolink does not run through trains between specific line pairs, so it does not appear that there is an urgent need to spend the money required for through-running operation under current conditions.
On Feb. 4, Railway Age ran a rebuttal to that conclusion headlined Los Angeles Through-Running: ‘Build It and They Will Come’ by Neil Rubin, an attorney with Russ, August & Kabat, a firm with offices on Wilshire Boulevard.In his piece, Attorney Rubin argued that expansion plans call for so much additional service on Metrolink, Amtrak corridors, and the California High-Speed Rail project (CAHSR, now under construction in the state’s Central Valley, several hours north of the City of Angels), that through-running at Union Station will be necessary, so facilities for it should be built.
Attorney Rubin and this writer share a specialty in the legal profession: we are both Registered Patent Attorneys, and as I often say: “innovation is our business.” It is flattering to hear from a fellow member of our elite corner of our profession, who is also sufficiently concerned about rail to submit his opinion for publication here at Railway Age. In response, and with all due respect to Attorney Rubin, however, I must demur (even though the demurrer is an archaic form of pleading).
For the most part, I am not disputing the facts as he presents them. However, most of his “facts” are recitations of several studies promulgated by the railroads and transit agencies, metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) like LOSSAN, and other public agencies between 2018 and 2024. While plans of that sort are necessary before new infrastructure to accommodate service improvements can be built, the fact remains that all of those plans express hopes for future service, hopes that might, but do not necessarily, ensure that the desired service improvements will actually be implemented.
As an advocate for enhancements to rail transit and a better Amtrak, I sincerely hope that Attorney Rubin is correct in his expectation that everything proposed in the plans he mentions will be built, even though, as a senior, I and others in my age cohort will not live to ride most (if not all) of the proposed new starts. Having first visited Los Angeles in 1979, before Metrolink and Metro’s rail transit lines existed, I can attest to the improvements that rail transit and a regional railroad have brought to the city and its surrounding region, not the least of which are cleaner air, better mobility for non-motorists and motorists alike, and the revitalization of the city’s downtown core since the 1990s, which was unimaginable when I first visited there. I also express my respect for the residents of the area, who have been willing to vote to raise their taxes to pay for those transit improvements, despite the high bar of a two-thirds vote required to increase any tax in California.
I am not in a position to dispute any of the assertions in the studies that Attorney Rubin cites. Still, I have reviewed many such studies over the years, and one overarching characteristic that essentially all of them have in common is they express a best hope under optimal economic and political conditions, the sort of circumstances that seldom exist in today’s reality, if they ever do.
Almost 25 years ago, NJ Transit proposed an enhanced rail network, along with projects for other modes, that would have built a robust system of new train and light rail lines by 2020. There were fourteen projects that would have expanded the rail system in the Garden State, but not one of those projects was ever built. Planners are still talking about building a few of them someday, but most have been consigned to the dustbin of history. The same agency planned a project called Access to the Region’s Core (ARC) between 1995 and 2010 that was downgraded so severely over the years that the advocates who had pushed for a connection between Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal in New York City ended up opposing the plan. It was later scrapped and replaced by today’s Gateway Program.
As a New Jerseyan, I have reviewed more studies in the New York and New Jersey region over the years, and I now have a pile four feet high of documents promoting projects that have not been built. They will soon leave my house as part of my decluttering effort, just more useless memories of hoped-for improvements (or sometimes transit nightmares for the riders) that never came to pass. That’s not to say that studies have negative attributes in and of themselves, but they express hopes that can be dashed at the will of tight-fisted politicians or those who hate transit or don’t understand why it benefits cities. People can go somewhere by getting on a train, light rail vehicle, streetcar, or other form of transit. They can’t get anywhere by riding a study, which is often little more than a wish supported by numbers.
California is one of the deepest of “blue” states, and a place where transit has made it easier to live in several of its cities, and for visitors to get around in those cities. The “light rail revolution” of the 1980s and 90s made its mark there, with new lines in San Diego, Sacramento, San Francisco, San José, and Los Angeles. Before then, BART helped improve mobility in the Bay Area. The rate of new starts seems to have slowed down in the state lately, but Caltrain was recently electrified, the OC Streetcar in Santa Ana should be coming soon, and Metrolink is adding service on some of its lines. That means more mobility in the system’s service area, as people have more options besides traditional commuting.
Prospects for new starts, especially rail transit, seem at best uncertain currently, and probably much grimmer than that. Projects that states have implemented with confidence, from Congestion Pricing in New York City to high-speed rail in California, are now under direct attack from DOT in Washington. Funding is becoming problematic in many places, too, as states are finding it increasingly difficult to pay for the services that their residents want and that the states themselves would like to provide, if they can afford to do so. Lots of rail services are on the chopping block these days, and they include Amtrak trains and new transit starts in many places. Time will tell just where, and we will know soon.
Returning to Attorney Rubin’s call for through-running at L.A. Union Station, I will not say that it will never be needed. If enough of the plans he cites come to fruition, Union Station will need more capacity, which Metrolink’s commuter-oriented schedule does not yet require, and neither do the small number of trains currently running on Amtrak-operated corridors. The recent additions of trains on Metrolink’s Antelope Valley and San Bernardino Lines (including Arrow service) now provide additional mobility along those corridors, but the system has a long way to go before providing a full span of service that might someday necessitate through-running infrastructure.
Anything to Add?
At this point, probably not. Metrolink and Amtrak California might someday increase service enough to justify the expense of through-running infrastructure at L.A. Union Station, but those prospects look uncertain from here, under the circumstances in effect today. So does any sort of through-running that will actually improve mobility in the New York area with its three local railroads.
Forty years ago, Philadelphia’s SEPTA established a through-running system of rail lines that enhanced mobility and did so in an efficient manner. Whether that success can be replicated is a different matter.
