Again, it depends on how you define "high speed rail" as to whether something is workable here. A run that has 79 MPH speeds off of the "bad stretch" along Lake Champlain but that does the run in seven hours or less is feasible without putting billions of dollars into the plan...but you'd need NY state to get on board, and that's not likely unless/until a lot is happening on the main Empire Corridor.
A trip time of 7 hours would very likely require substantial ROW straightening between Fort Edwards and Plattsburgh. At some cost point, might as well build a true HSR corridor. However, I would venture that a roughly 8.5 hour trip time is feasible and maybe even 8 hours if enough money were spent in the slow stretches. I did a random check of Adirondack time-keeping on Amtrak Status Maps for different days in recent week and then back in the Spring. A common pattern is that the Adirondack runs late between Plattsburgh and Fort Edward, but then makes it up because of the extreme padding heading south of Saratoga Springs or north of Plattsburgh.
Removal of the custom stops at the border will help, not just in the obvious trip time savings, but I expect in better scheduling of the freight trains. If the southbound #68 spends anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes at the Rouses Point holding up the line, it throws a wild card every day into the dispatching of everything else on the line.
Rather than focus on 8 or 7 hour trip times, we should consider the effects of a 8-1/2 hour trip time (if Quebec is willing to pay for some track improvements north of the border). If ~86K are willing to take an almost 11 hour trip with a long mind numbing stop at the border for Customs, ridership should take off with a 9 or 8.5 hour trip time. Worry about better trip times later.
Well, a lot of the problem is that it is quite often easier to sell people on ten $100 million projects than on a single $1 billion project; moreover, it is easier to obtain those sorts of budget commitments. Among the million other issues surrounding it, the long timeframe on CAHSR is a bit of a problem: Politicians can think in timeframes of up to a decade or so if pushed (even if 2-4 years is their preferred frame of reference, 8 years or so for a major project means that a Governor starting something big can hope to be in office when it is done). Moreover, and I could be wrong here, but I think that at least some rules regarding studies may be a bit more lenient on smaller projects (i.e. cleaning up a couple of grade crossings or straightening a curve within an existing RoW) than on larger ones (i.e. starting up a new route with fresh alignments). Witness how quickly, for example, the Norfolk train came together (3 years, including construction) versus how long the Richmond-to-Hampton Roads project is taking (from what I can tell, that study process started in 2004 and there's
still a Tier II report required).
Being charitable, a bunch of small projects that can be shoehorned into a state budget with limited assistance from on high are more workable, in many cases, than one big project that requires a ten-year process. It's also worth noting that at least on the southern end of the Adirondack line (and the northern one as well), 90 MPH may be achievable (as opposed to "just" 79 MPH) within the foreseeable future. But when you get down to it, based on what is possible with regulations and whatnot, I'd rather see five or ten minutes of improvement every year or two than gamble on a big project aimed at whacking 90 minutes off of travel time (note that this is notwithstanding the border crossing delay).
Afigg: I'm going to argue that you can get down to eight hours even within reason, assuming that you can get a frequency that skips at least some downstate stops and some cooperation from QC. Right now, the trip is just over 11:00 (it's 11:05 NB and 11:10 SB). Dropping the customs stop should eliminate 2:00 each way, if the thick pad heading into Schenectady plus the customs times are any indication. That's 9:05-9:10 each way. Doing the limited NY State proposal should get you to 8:50-8:55 or so, and realistically shedding some of the local stops on the lower end (going to an LSL stopping schedule) should get you another ten minutes. 8:45-8:50 isn't entirely unreasonable to hope for, and that's with very little improvement along the line.
I do want to ask: Is the lower Empire Corridor capped at 90 MPH or 79 MPH? I can't recall, honestly, but the <60 MPH average speed suggests some room for improvement along here, and I
know there's a push to get 110 MPH running north of ALB.
My point with all of this is that with minimal operational changes and improvements, a push for 8:00 should be plausible without
too much effort in some sense, and as I think we can both agree, trip times in that range should send ridership up substantially enough to look at a second train (which should itself drive ridership up since I have very little doubt that the slightly insane NYP connection is
not helping with through traffic off of the NEC in
either direction, and a second train would seem to at least hint at one or the other leaving late enough to make the connection with a post-5:00 AM train out of DC one way, and to allow a legal connection to a train arriving in DC before 1:30 AM the other).
The other thing that I keep looking at is this: There's so much endpoint traffic on the route (and the "in between" areas are such a dead zone in terms of ridership) that I could see a serious discussion emerge of either an express frequency or an express section. As it is, I think the potential ridership to MTR with no changes but the removal of the border restrictions on capacity (i.e. not even cutting trip times down) is probably about 100k or so. I don't have a good metric to guess at what you'd get with consistent LD seating or with the large cut in in-transit time, but would demand increasing by 50% seem insane with that much improvement? I doubt it, and that's going to stress the train's capacity right there.
And Alan, I think you're dead on with the possible conflicts down the line being the issue...if CP can't tell whether the Adirondack will be coming through at 12:00 or 1:30, that's going to offer some real operational headaches.
As for choice of vendors, CAF in Elmira, Bombardier in Plattsburgh, and the Japanese outfit in Yonkers are all capable of producing said cars, so there is chance of some decent competition too. But at present none of them are producing the standard single level car as specified. The Viewliner is not the standard single level car specified.
