Amtrak and commuter railroads can reduce ‘dead time’ and increase speeds for less than it would cost to build new high-speed rail lines
by BENJAMIN SCHNEIDER
HIGH-SPEED trains, zooming across the landscape at over 200mph, have long been a Holy Grail for US transport advocates. Though projects are advancing in California, Nevada and Texas, progress has been arduous. Even in sparsely populated corners of the American West, from-scratch high-speed rail development is expensive, complex and politically fraught.
But brand-new bullet trains are not the only way to deliver faster passenger rail service. In regions with lots of older rail infrastructure, like the North-East and Midwest, the existing tracks are full of untapped potential.
Momentum
That’s the main finding of a new report by the New York University (NYU) Marron Institute Transit Costs Project, authored by Marron Institute research fellow Nolan Hicks. The strategies outlined in the report, Hicks said, “can deliver a whole lot of what high-speed rail promises using the infrastructure we already have, and at costs that are reasonable for the value delivered in return.”
On middle-distance intercity Amtrak routes and big-city commuter rail lines, this suite of targeted improvements — which Hicks dubs the “Momentum” framework — could speed travel times by as much as 30%, according to the report. That’s fast enough to compete with driving or flying in many corridors. The ride from New York to Albany could take under two hours, a 30-minute improvement on current travel times. Chicago to St Louis goes by in four hours flat, a 40-minute improvement.
The report comes at a precarious moment for passenger rail in America. Amtrak ridership hit a new high in 2024, and federal funds authorised during the Biden Administration are paying for improvements across the country. But the Trump Administration’s more transit-sceptical stance has
imperilled long-term planning, and trains outside of the popular North-East Corridor (NEC) are often dogged by delays, thanks to continued conflict with the freight railroads that own most of the nation’s track network.
The Momentum framework calls on Amtrak and commuter rail agencies to make big plans nonetheless. And it asks them to shift their focus from increasing the geographic coverage and capacity of their rail services, to decreasing trip times on the corridors with the most ridership potential.
“The guiding principle of this project was to figure out what our railroads are actually capable of,” Hicks said. “Hopefully it helps start the conversation in that direction.”
Dead Time
Hicks’ Momentum approach achieves its time savings not so much from increasing top speeds, but from reducing the “dead time” trains spend idling at stops and getting back up to speed again. “There is an incredible amount of time lost at every stop with how we run railroads today,” Hicks said.
That’s primarily because of two attributes of most of America’s passenger rail lines: Low-level boarding platforms and diesel locomotives.
Low-level platforms require passengers to ascend a steep flight of steps to board the train, which can be especially challenging for the elderly, children and people carrying suitcases or bikes. For passengers with disabilities, portable wheelchair lifts often need to be rolled in and set up. What’s more, trains designed to serve these kinds of platforms typically have narrow doorways that require passengers on- or off-boarding to walk single-file. Getting everyone on and off safely takes time: Around 90 seconds on a commuter train, and around four minutes on an intercity train.
Once the doors are shut, a diesel train then takes another two or three minutes to reach 80mph.
“All of a sudden, you’re talking about a four-to-five-minute penalty per stop,” Hicks said. “But with a well-designed infrastructure package, you can take that four-to-five-minute penalty and boil it down to two minutes.” Multiply that by 10 stops, and you’ve got some serious time savings.
The first intervention Hicks recommends is high-level boarding platforms. This Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)-accessible design allows passengers to walk or roll aboard without alighting any stairs. It also enables a train car design with wider doors, so more people can get on and off more quickly.
An even more significant improvement would be electrified trains, which can accelerate roughly twice as fast as those with diesel power, in addition to all of the environmental and maintenance benefits that come with electric vehicles (EVs). That means trains can spend more of their journey traveling at the maximum allowable speed.
“Electrification can make a huge difference in overall travel times, especially on services that make a lot of stops,” said Christof Spieler, an urban planner and professor at Rice University who was not involved in the report.
The US$2.4 billion (RM10.61 billion) electrification project undertaken by the Caltrain commuter rail system, completed in 2024, is the only such project undertaken in the US in more than two decades. The improved performance of electrified trains over the diesel models they replaced have sped San Francisco to San Jose trip times from 107 minutes to 83 minutes on the local service, and from 65 minutes to 59 minutes on the express. These time savings come despite the fact that the line still features low-level boarding platforms.
Hicks, a former transport reporter for the New York Post, likens the Momentum framework to Moneyball, Michael Lewis’ bestseller about how the Oakland A’s assembled an elite baseball team on a shoestring budget.
“It’s like, I need a guy with a .350 on-base. I need a guy who can hit 43 home runs. And I need a guy with an RBI (runs batted in) rating of whatever. That’s kind of what we did,” he said. “We can’t afford high-speed rail, but here’s what we can afford.”
“Affordable” is relative here. Hicks estimates that the New York City-to-Albany upgrades would cost somewhere between US$3.4 billion and US$3.9 billion. Extending electrification and level boarding all the way to Buffalo, effectively connecting every major city in the Empire State to speedy trains, would cost somewhere in the US$30 billion range. Applying the Momentum framework to the Long Island Railroad, offering fast, electrified service as far as the Hamptons, would cost between US$11.9 and US$12.9 billion.
Segmented Delivery
Hicks said these upgrades can be delivered in segments, providing incremental benefits to riders over time. He also noted that costs could come down from the levels of Caltrain’s electrification project with economies of scale, as manufacturers, contractors and transport agencies coalesce around standardised components and processes.
In effect, Hicks is calling for a national rail network built up to the standards of the NEC — not a worldclass high-speed rail line, but a popular, profitable route that dominates the travel market in its region. Over decades, the NEC has steadily improved, adding electrified service, building out high-level platforms and making other targeted upgrades. New York’s Metro-North and the Long Island Railroad made similar improvements to long stretches of track in the 1970s, leading to significant travel time savings and ridership gains.
Since then, however, investment in these kinds of projects has dwindled, particularly federally supported research and development.
When making changes to rail infrastructure or services, state and local railroad agencies often must negotiate with the freight railroad companies that own most of America’s track network. These companies tend to demand high vertical and horizontal clearances that make it hard to string the overhead wires that supply power to electric locomotives or build out high-level boarding platforms. They’re also reluctant to allow more frequent passenger service that could reduce the amount of time their freight trains have access to track.
NIMBYism (not in my backyard) represents another challenge to electrification. “There has been a lot of quote-unquote environmental opposition to electrifying railroads,” Spieler said. “It’s some guy who’s got a house on the Hudson with a nice view of the river, and now the railroad wants to come along and put a wire in front of that.”
Right now, Hicks and Spieler agree that the most promising place to pursue electrification and level boarding is on publicly owned tracks, like the Long Island Railroad, the line connecting Boston and Providence, or much of the Chicago-Detroit route. Along these segments, “the governor could decide, we are going to do this”, Spieler said. “They have money. That includes state local funds, but it also includes federal funds that they have the ability to flex to transit projects.”
But broadly speaking, America’s railroads are losing ground when it comes to infrastructural innovation, especially compared to other countries. “These agencies do a lot of things very well,” Hicks said. “The trains run safely every day. But we want to empower the agencies to have the imagination, to have the planning capacity, to really think about ways to take what they’re doing and to make it better.” — Bloomberg
- This article first appeared in The Malaysian Reserve weekly print edition
The post How to speed up passenger rail, without bullet trains appeared first on The Malaysian Reserve.
