HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE AUGUST 2008 ISSUE
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Amtrak’s NEC: Healthy hybrid
The Western Hemisphere’s busiest passenger rail route delivers a dazzling array of service unequalled by more glamorous global counterparts.
For Amtrak’s most severe critics—and even some of its most ardent backers—the Northeast Corridor serves as a convenient whipping boy for what’s wrong with U.S. passenger rail policy. They fail to grasp that the NEC is a jack-of-all-trades. It may be champion of none, but it’s a master at juggling complex and sometimes contradictory rail needs.
Even as Congress moved during July to bolster Amtrak’s fiscal year 2009 funding, the Northeast Corridor was again maligned as too slow to merit the label “true high speed rail” by one of Amtrak’s perennial critics, Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.). Not to be outdone, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), long supportive of Amtrak, painted Acela service as deficient and the NEC in need of at least $1 billion of fiscal rescue.
Amtrak’s NEC unquestionably can use more capital. The company conservatively estimates it requires $3 billion to bring the NEC’s New York-to-Washington segment up to a state of good repair. State-of-the art technology and upgraded track share the burden with catenary structures and wire put in place in the 1930s, old and undersized tunnel structures, and numerous bridges demanding attention or replacement—all while demand for space on the NEC, already at a premium, grows ever more intense. As riders flocked to Amtrak during the spring and summer months, driven in part by soaring energy prices, many discovered what others have said all along, in some cases for two decades or more: The NEC works, and works well, in a multilayered, complementary way.
“The range of users, from 40 mph freights to 150 mph Acela, is unique to my knowledge,” says Anthony Perl, professor and director of the Urban Studies Program at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, B.C. “And the range of owners is also complicated, with the U.S. government, state governments, and even local authorities (MTA, New Jersey Transit), each owning more or less significant assets on the NEC.”
Somehow, it all comes together, and if the NEC isn’t a model for the future, it is an admirable, indeed unique, present-day operation. Says Perl, “While other countries have much faster rail lines, they segregate traffic onto dedicated high speed passenger, commuter rail, and freight lines. In my opinion, the NEC does a better job of serving all these needs with a single piece of railroad than any other operation in the world.”
Even among those pursuing dedicated rights-of-way for high speed rail, “It’s worth remembering that the Northeast Corridor is the grandfather of the European system,” says Ulisses Camilo, division president of Alstom Signaling Inc. “It’s a legacy system—and it works.”
The NEC is the unquestioned heart of Amtrak, operationally and politically, but even here the full picture is complex. Amtrak owns 363 miles of the 457-mile NEC between Washington and Boston. But Metro-North Railroad is master of 56 NEC miles between New Haven and New Rochelle, N.Y., while Massachusetts owns 38 miles from Boston, the northern terminus, to the Rhode Island border. Other players, such as the Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit, own or share other NEC facilities along the route, including stations.
Add other NEC’s tenant operators, including freight railroads such as Norfolk Southern and Providence & Worcester, which have grown in number during the past 20 years, and Amtrak’s NEC mission becomes a true challenge, as it juggles nearly 2,000 trains a weekday over electrified territory.
Indeed, the NEC’s modest capacity improvements have been dwarfed by traffic increases. NJ Transit operated 172 trains on the NEC in 1990; it now contributes 432 movements on a daily basis to the Corridor, due in part to its own capital programs linking previously separated rail lines to the NEC. Similarly, 36 MARC (Maryland) trains plied the NEC between Baltimore and Washington in 1990; 89 trains arrive at or depart from Washington’s Union Station today, with 50 of those trains running between Washington and Baltimore (and, often, now beyond to Maryland points north).
Photo by Joseph M. Calisi.
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Copyright © 2007. Simmons-Boardman Publishing Corp.