News on daily Sunset (incl older east of NOL discussion)

[Hytec]

"The state governments are uninterested -- which is probably a dynamic in these states, where the state capitols are in the interior and the Gulf Coast is culturally distinct. Upstate/downstate divides, maybe? I don't think the Gulf Coast will have any luck getting money from those state governments."

This is especially true in Mississippi, even though the Coastal six counties include the State's second largest metropolitan area by population.

The majority of the Legislature and other elected state officials are from the northern two-thirds of our state. The "corrupt" Coast is where they always have gone to party, but not be seen. "What Happens on the Coast Stays on the Coast." (with apologies to Las Vegas.) Casino taxes are collected from our nine coastal casinos, but the majority of the money is distributed throughout the northern two-thirds which has all the Amtrak service the legislators feel is needed.

 

[WoodyinNYC]

Here in San Antonio we amended the city charter to require voter approval before any proposal of passenger rail can use any public land and/or public money. Is that noisy enough for you?

... but why? ... Why amend the charter? Seems a bit over the top. Someone working on a solution for a issue that does not exist? Or was it backed by the local newspaper, radio, and TV stations. (Position Ads cost money.)

It's the noisy sound of haters. There's a cult that believes transit is Socialistic or something Evil.

So they oppose any and all: light rail, bus, Amtrak, whatever. Besides, us good people living in exclusive communities don't need transit, and who cares about "the others"?

History: San Antonio's first suburb was Alamo Heights. Its featured deed restrictions to keep it "exclusive". So no Jew could buy a lot and no buyer could later sell to a Jew. Or to a black,

of course. Or to any "Mexicans", tho they were the city's majority. (All Hispanics were called "Mexicans" in the day, even when I still lived in Texas. That was even tho most were "Tejanos", Texas-born descendants of Spanish soldiers and Native Americans who farmed irrigated land with help from Spanish missionaries, and many families still had their 200-year-old Baptism papers).

So the lines have been sharply drawn between the have and the have-nots. And transit is for the have-nots.

That's on top of issues of traffic congestion and historic conservation. The one-time main commercial street downtown was narrowed to one lane each direction, and lined with palm trees to tempt tourists to spend there. Now plans are to shrink the traffic sewer that flows in front of the Alamo, to give more respect to the historic site. "But where am I gonna drive my car?"

You can hear that cry from the self-entitled drivers at every election (and many of them are Hispanic, LOL, teaming up with the snobs and cult members).

Then plans were to put a light rail line down Broadway. That former highway to Austin is broad, and blighted. Plans were to upzone a stretch of former car dealerships, used car lots, and closed restaurants to permit high-rise housing. "You mean like in New York City?"

San Antonio is a beautiful city with gorgeous old train stations and a proud railroad history. It has many wonderful people. But it has plenty of folks, including some of my relatives, who vote to express their, um, passions, and vote against transit.

 

[Palmetto]

When I lived in Brownsville, TX, the MPO there wasn't even aware there had been a published State Rail Plan. Didn't know quite what to think of that.

There was a Thruway bus connection up to San Antonio at one time, but it went away because it was a trip between the two cities in the middle of the night.

 

[DSS&A]

Hi,

On December 4th, the Southern Rail Commission will hold a meeting to release the latest study by Amtrak on restoration of Gulf Coast passenger rail service. Here's a link to a news article yesterday about the meeting and the study.

http://www.weartv.com/news/features/top-stories/stories/gulf-coast-residents-may-see-passenger-train-service-again-62629.shtml#.Vl_Qp8nnbqD

 

[Palmetto]

Does anyone else find the redundancy here ridiculous? I mean: doing a study on a route the previously had service. Seems like a big waste of money.

 

[Bob Dylan]

Does anyone else find the redundancy here ridiculous? I mean: doing a study on a route the previously had service. Seems like a big waste of money.

Of course it is! But how else would "consultants" earn their living and how could government officials pay back those who finance their campaigns?

Cynical? Moi?

 

[keelhauled]

No, I don't think its dumb at all. Unless the only way of restoring passenger trains is in the form of the overnight, less than daily service, but that's not the case. At least I should hope it isn't, because anyone can tell them right now that's a bad use of money. (Can I have my consultant's check now please?) There have been various proposals for the Gulf Coast (restoring the SL, extending the CONO, short service to Mobile, a stand-alone overnight) but they are all hand-waving hopefulness until things like trackage, ridership, infrastructure, etc are all examined, and which are all like to have changed in the decade plus since service ended.

 

[benale]

Maybe something will actually happen this time. It's been ten years. Ideally, a train from New Orleans to Jacksonville, with connections to the Silvers and The Sunset. It's been way too long. A train connecting JAX and NOL is essential. It always has been essential.

 

[cirdan]

of course. Or to any "Mexicans", tho they were the city's majority. (All Hispanics were called "Mexicans" in the day, even when I still lived in Texas. That was even tho most were "Tejanos", Texas-born descendants of Spanish soldiers and Native Americans who farmed irrigated land with help from Spanish missionaries, and many families still had their 200-year-old Baptism papers).

So the lines have been sharply drawn between the have and the have-nots. And transit is for the have-nots.

I don't know if this is universally true.

I can't find the link now but I once read a web page that analyzed the number of minutes a worker had to work to afford a transit ticket, and it appears that far from being constant over time, that this has come down massively over time. This is logical really, if you think about the way ratios of staff to passengers have evolved over time with vehicles becoming bigger and bigger while jobs such as ticket inspectors were increasingly eliminated. In other words productivity has gone through the roof. And of course in the day most companies were private whereas today they need subsidies to operate. So if you've gone from lower to higher productivity yet have gone from making a profit to depending on subsidy, the indicator is quite strong that fares haven't kept up with inflation.

In the day, the working classes walked or bicycled to work and transit was for the middle classes and hence served mostly middle-class neigborhoods, charging fares the working class couldn't afford.

To some extendt this is stil true today, at least for light rail. Light rail is built where it delivers the greatest change. Working class neighborhoods will not get significant change from light rail as a high percentage of people ride the bus anyway, so you're basically replacing a bus by a train but not taking many cars off the street. Move to a middle class neighborhood and you see many people who would not be seen dead in a bus gladly riding light rail. Hence that's where the investment delivers the biggest change and hence where most of it goes.

In fact even where light rail gets built into working class areas, it is often opposed in those areas because tenants see it as a tool of gentrification and fear that they will eventually be forced to move out due to rent increases driven by having to compete with the middle class. And in fact that is often what happens.

 

[jis]

Actually, there are several examples where, when an LRT system was built through a working class neighborhood, soon after its inauguration the neighborhood got massively gentrified making it no longer affordable for the working class, and the middle class moved in. A prime example of this was Jersey City with the introduction of the HBLRT, which completely changed the composition and looks of Jersey City.

 

[Tennessee Traveler]

Oh,futility! I think a Sunset East is just a futile a hope as a new Amtrak Floridian on new route connecting much larger cities of Nashville and Atlanta. CSX loathes passenger rail and is dominant in Tennessee. Plus State Republicans are highly anti State funding of Amtrak in any way.

 

[tricia]

Actually, there are several examples where, when an LRT system was built through a working class neighborhood, soon after its inauguration the neighborhood got massively gentrified making it no longer affordable for the working class, and the middle class moved in. A prime example of this was Jersey City with the introduction of the HBLRT, which completely changed the composition and looks of Jersey City.

Gentrification was well under way in Jersey City before then, although undoubtedly this accelerated it. (I lived in Jersey City in the early 1980s.)

 

[Lonestar648]

It may be that the study is a mandatory pre-requisite for political support. So how much support may not be known until the study is published. Even with some support, if CSX isn't interested, and/or the cost to upgrade the line to full passenger speed exceeds what any political support could support, the deal is unlikely. Actually, with Amtrak's current inventory and the number of grade crossing incidents, any expansion is almost impossible without purchasing additional inventory.

 

[DSS&A]

Hi,

Here's a link to an article about the December 4th meeting and the upcoming study.

http://www.sunherald.com/news/article48723825.html

The study is very important to determine the potential ridership projections for different levels of train service and the corresponding costs to upgrade the tracks, stations and rolling stock. When a remote controlled switch on a mainline costs around $1 Million EACH (approximately $3.5 Million+ for a passing siding with two switches and a mile of siding between them), the people who want train service need good information to justify the expense.

Because of the high cost of each remote controlled switch, I feel that it's better to build longer passing sidings so that you can have a rolling meet or the one train can at least advance more miles down the track before waiting for the oposing train to pass by. Long sidings allow the option for a freight train to be put on the siding ahead of a passenger train. Short siding result in the passenger train being always "parked" on sidings for every train meet.

 

[neroden]

I do wonder what the source of overcharging for the switches is -- Class I railroad price-gouging, probably. Even including installation and electronics, the cost of a switch should definitely be less than $500K.

http://www.alibaba.com/showroom/railway-switch.html

If I'm right about this, it gets back to the first rule of running passenger trains: *buy the right of way*. Otherwise the Class I owner will keep gouging you.

 

[Anderson]

While I agree in principle about buying ROW, that really only applies if you're going to run substantial daily frequencies (unless the freight road in question is "throwing away" a line). Buying and keeping up a line for one or two daily round-trips doesn't make sense while doing so for a dozen trains per day in each direction probably does. In this context, buying the NOL-JAX line makes little sense (I really cannot see most of the line hosting more than two or three trains per day except in our wildest dreams). A stretch around NOL (perhaps as far as Mobile)? Maybe.

As to equipment...well, there's at least some ongoing ordering from AAF (which is, I believe, roughly compliant with Amtrak's single-level boarding standards) so if such a service was to be started up I see no reason that [insert entity here] couldn't have a talk with Siemens about piggybacking an order onto the likely second round of the AAF equipment order.

 

[neroden]

Honestly I think you should always be running substantial daily frequencies: train service is all about the economies of scale. It seems worth it to buy the route for as little as six trips each way each day (ask VIA Rail about that), and that's a reasonable level of service.

In the Gulf context:

When I think of the Gulf Coast, I'm mostly thinking of the Mobile - New Orleans corridor. That's a *great* route and should support several trains per day, enough to be worth owning the track.

The route from Mobile to Pensacola is circuitous and I honestly wouldn't support restoring service on it at all. Decent service in that corridor requires a new right-of-way with a bridge or tunnel. So again, own the track.

Pensacola-Talahassee has essentially been dumped by CSX, relegated to low-speed dark territory, so it would have to be purchased in order to get decent speed passenger service.

I doubt that Talahassee-Lake City-Jacksonville is a good enough route on its own to restore service there any time soon, though after HSR reaches Jacksonville, that may change. This is the only segment where it would make logical sense to be a tenant of the freight railroad.

This is actually the bind you get into regarding being a tenant on a freight-owned line. If freight traffic is heavy, you want to own your own line because if you don't the freight hauler will abuse you in the dispatching. If freight traffic is light, you want to own your own line because if you don't the freight hauler will abuse you in the maintenance of the line. Only if freight traffic is "just right" in the middle can you make a decent deal.

When the passenger operator owns the line and the freight hauler is the tenant, the passenger operator is generally friendly and helpful to the freight operator. So there's an asymmetry there.

 

[DSS&A]

Hi,

What makes the price of a mainline remote controlled switch so expensive is the CTC interconnect signal equipment and it's labor costs. These costs are equal to or greater than the price of the track material and trackwork installation labor. The +/- $1 million price "ball-park estimate" is not railroad price gouging.

 

[neroden]

Signal equipment for a switch shouldn't cost that much, period. I don't know what's going on with that, but there's something fundamentally wrong in the signal design if the signal equipment is costing $500K per switch. This is electronics. Even failsafe electronics is *not that expensive*.

I could see $500K per *reconfiguration* for the labor to reprogram the CTC system, which would make a high cost for ONE switch.... but that would mean you'd get all the signalling on the entire refurbished line (as many switches as you need) for the same cost as adding one switch.

 

[DSS&A]

Hi,

There are not many railroad signal companies that make the signal systems one contractor bought up one of its competitors a few years back. Supply and demand economic issues help to determine prices. Looking on the web, here is a link to an article about the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District spending $79.9 Million to have PTC installed on their railroad.

According to NICTD's April 2, 2015 on-line published meeting minutes, this is the second time that they went out for bids for a signal contractor. The first time they went out for bid in 2014, they only received one bid for $120 Million to install PTC on their railroad. Their consulting engineer had estimated the price would be about $40 Million.

Railroad signal equipment is very expensive. Automatic railroad/highway grade crossing signal costs are in the six figures.

 

[DSS&A]

Hi,

Here's the link to the NICTD PTC news article.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/news/ct-ptb-nictd-shutdown-resolution-st-1003-20151002-story.html

 

[neroden]

There are not many railroad signal companies that make the signal systems one contractor bought up one of its competitors a few years back.

Oho. Monopoly pricing. That will do it. And yes, that's price gouging.

Time for one or more of the railroads to start making their signal systems in house. It'll be cheaper to hire the skilled labor *without* the monopoly pricing overhead. I don't think an operation as small as NICTD could do it; not enough system to keep full-time hardware and software signalling experts permanently on staff. Metra might be large enough to do so; the MBTA probably is; NJT and the MTA are certainly large enough.

I would expect the Class Is to be doing signalling in house already, if an outside monopoly vendor is quoting prices that high. But the Class Is have been shedding expertise for decades, so reversing that trend might be hard for management to do.

 

[jis]

Signaling equipment vendors are down to just a few major ones through the recent spate of M&A. They are several well known names like Siemens, Alstom, Bombardier, and now Hitachi though the acquisition of Ansaldo. And rumor has it that Bombardier may be looking at shedding its entire rail related stuff at least to a subsidiary if not in an outright divestiture. But I don't think they are at a position where they can really practice monopoly pricing in today's world. There is a price point which is not that high, at which the China's and Japan's start entering the market in a big way ( c.f. Hitachi). AFAIK at present all railroads in US contract out significant parts of at least new signal systems installation, testing and commissioning. Many do the day to day stuff in house.

 

[west point]

A big signal cost is installation. Observation of one siding going to CTC was revealing. Installation took about 2 weeks with unknown number of personnel. There was at least 2 persons at each signal bungalow from far end of next CP to Far end of proceeding CP. So in that case 26 signal maintainers to test the system that took 2 days. and the sidings were only about 8 - 10 miles apart. Cannot imagine how many needed if siding are farther apart.

 

[neroden]

Good grief. I understand the need for testing of failsafe systems, but I just don't believe that that's the optimal number of employees or length of time. Is there just something fundamentally wrong with the signal system design which makes it exceptionally labor intensive?