It’s the kind of perfect storm that anyone who lives in (or has lived in) a city can relate to: The Long Island Rail Road, New Jersey Transit, and Amtrak all broke down (or, at least, were severely delayed) this morning. In other words, anyone from Long Island, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania who wanted to take the train to work in New York City this morning was seriously out of luck.
It all started yesterday, when a small fire broke out in a control tower at Jamaica Station, the hub for 10 of the railroad’s 11 branches traveling in and out of New York City. The fire proceeded to wreak havoc on the LIRR’s switches, an antediluvian (well, almost — it was built in 1913) system of levers and pulleys. As a result, there was no way to direct trains onto their proper routes, so the entire railroad ground to a halt as workers rushed around the tracks, manually locking the switches into place. Ironically, a new computerized signal system is scheduled to be installed this year — but it hasn’t been yet. [SButtonZ button="digg"]
While around 75% of LIRR service had been restored this morning, thousands of passengers were still left stranded. And on the other side of Manhattan, just about every train commuter in New Jersey woke up to a virtual nightmare: A power shortage along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor had caused the halting of every train on the line, from Maryland’s MARC to New Jersey Transit’s North Jersey Coast Line and Midtown Direct trains. Trains along the Northeast Corridor were completely motionless between 7:45 and 8:45 a.m. — prime rush hour. The cause of the outage, which occurred somewhere between Washington and Perryville, Maryland, was hazy — officials said it looked like a tripped circuit breaker — but the results were dire. Because of the low voltage, all NJT trains were stopped. Some trains totally lost power, including lights and air conditioning. Service was, for the most part, back up and running by 10 AM, but the ripple effects are still being felt along the line.
Yes, it’s a cliche, but we can’t help but bring up the classic infrastructure idiom: No one pays attention to it until it breaks down. Well, here, in a morning of intense karma, we have a trifecta of breakdowns that have stranded millions of people. Needless to say, if we had updated our trains and the technology we use to run them, these problems wouldn’t be so endemic (and they are — the last Amtrak power outage was all of 2 weeks ago, the result of a tree falling on power lines). Yes, Obama has pledged $112 million of the high-speed rail stimulus money to updating the Northeast Corridor — but that’s really just dipping a toe in the water. We cannot expect our urban areas to function, or to sustain economic and social growth, without a functioning and modern system of public transportation. And here is the universe nailing that point home, hard.
well put as always. i was wondering if there were any plans in the works for doing a forum/discussion on the U Penn paper. I’ve read a few of the sections of the paper, and while it’s a little far-fetched in our age of deficits and lack-luster state budgte (to say nothing of NIMBYism and political in-fighting), it does force us to discuss the possibilities. A longer form piece might spur that discussion.
[...] Yes, it’s a cliche, but we can’t help but bring up the classic infrastructure idiom: No one pays attention to it until it breaks down. Well, here, in a morning of intense karma, we have a trifecta of breakdowns that have stranded … infrastructure – Google Blog Search [...]
That’s one way to look at it. Another is: (1) What has Amtrak been doing with its existing subsidy money it has gone through since the Nixon Administration to get its main line working properly? (2) Isn’t this a demonstration that putting money into HSR vanity projects, such as the Tampa-Orlando bullet train, is an obviously stupid thing to do when you can’t run your principal existing rail line for two weeks straight without an interruption? Why doesn’t The Big O take the billions he is allocating to vanity HSR projects and actually get us a showpiece, or at least workmanlike NE Corridor? Doesn’t the NE Corridor run through the most Democrat-freindly (and donor-heavy) part of the country anyway? That’s what someone else might ask. Note that there are legion papers and proposals out there setting out what should be and needs to be done to make the NE Corridor what it should be, all of which appear to have been assiduously ignored by the trainophiles in the current government.
at least the PATH was running ok
Its not a either or situation. Our existing infrastructure is in dire need of repair. We also need new infrastructure. We need to do both.
The problem is the implicit assumption that we need to do all this in an environment of rock bottom taxes. High speed rail outside of the coasts costs maybe $40 million per mile on average. That’s $8 billion to $15 billion for a typical line. To put that in perspective, that’s the cost of our wars for a month, or the cost of the recently expired home tax credit.
About 50% of our bridges are obsolete or in great disrepair. That’s not going to be fixed for a few billion dollars.
Amtrak consumes a little more than $1 billion in annual subsidy. That doesn’t pay for a lot of repairs, either.
We can easily afford these things, but it doesn’t get done with wishful thinking.
Sometimes there is a silver lining to being unemployed. I am home and not trying to travel. Granted, the NYC buses & subways are working and I happen to be within walking distance of a station on the LIRR’s Port Washington line (which is not affected by the fire), so I could get to Manhattan if I had to.
OTOH, compared to the 10-day traffic jam in China, what’s a few hours of delay in the overall scheme of things?
I hope that when the LIRR (actually, the MTA) puts in that new & improved signaling system in Jamaica later on, that they put in a highly-available one so as to eliminate the single point of failure problem that currently exists. The 6 P’s principle comes into play here: Prior Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance. Companies in general would do well to remember the idea (especially when they run promotions and have way more people who want to participate but then they run out of chicken or ice cream or whatever).
Guys, Jamaica is not on the NEC. Despite the photo on the article, it’s on the LIRR, with no Amtrak service. It actually could use Amtrak service, with NEC trains not continuing north of New York sent east to connect to JFK. But it doesn’t have anything now.
And in places where executives defer maintenance to make the balance sheets look good, things like this happen once in a while – not too frequently that people blame them, but frequently enough that commuters get stranded. It happened to the private railroads, it happened to the Berlin S-Bahn, and now it happened to the LIRR.
Leave a Legacy: Jobs and Infrastructure
Jobs Bills and Stimulus efforts should leave behind, long term outcomes … such as repairing-modernizing out dated drinking water and waste water treatment plants which serve small towns-cities. These typically have small technical staffs, no lobbyist and a chronic inability to finance such projects.
Examples:
From Myrtle Point (OR) Herald: Feb 4, 2019
CITIES OF MYRTLE POINT AND POWERS FACE LARGE PROJECTS
The biggest project facing both cities is the construction of new waste water (sewage) treatment plants …
HEAVY RAINS FLUSH SEWAGE TO RIVER
http://www.theworldlink.com/articles/2010/01/13/news/heavy_rains_flush_sewage_to_river_30e.txt
PARTIALLY-TREATED SEWAGE WATER WENT TO RIVER IN STORM
http://www.kcra.com/news/22349878/detail.html
There are thousands of other examples
[...] York trains shut down en masse More here (Hat-tip Joust, [...]
This all made my Metro-North look all the better.
Christ, Eric, this schtick is getting old.
We are talking chump change being thrown around to various HSR projects- yet conservatards such as yourself bitch and moan as if it is the end of the world.
Amtrak gets a tiny subsidy to keep it on life support- no wonder it has numerous maintenance problems.
Conservatards can’t seem to understand that to have a modern, functioning society, it requires large scale public investment. The market isn’t going to spread its magic pixie dust and fix all of society’s problems.
Eric, we’re talking about less money than it takes to build one measely cloverleaf.
Yep. That’s why New York is spending ten times more than Paris on new transit construction and getting about the same route length: half the time the country is run by people who want to drown government in a bathtub and think if the government is too competent then people won’t support their program, and the other half it’s run by people who are so afraid of the bathtub people that they think the more money they spend the better.
Sean,
Liberaltards (see I can do it too) like you are the reason why we have a government that is incapable of acting efficiently or effectively. Everything we do costs twice as much and gets done twice as slow as anywhere else in the world, and the liberaltard answer to everything is to just throw more money at it. School system failing? Throw more money at it. Public transportation failing? Throw more money at it. Social Security system failing? Throw more money at it. Health Care system failing? Throw more money at it.
Liberaltards like you refuse to hold government accountable for their failures, and accept and embrace failure in the name of your ideology. And when someone demands accountability and refuses to continue throwing money into the bonfire, you get pissed.
Novel idea: Giving more money to people/organizations who use it well, and less to organizations/people that completely suck. Believe it or not, that is how successful countries do it.
I agree with the poster who said we should take the money from vanity rail projects (Florida being one of them), and build a true high speed rail service in the northeast. This could be a pilot project with the highest ridership and the most challenging alignment – but if we could make it work, it would build momentum for other, less challenging routes across the country.
I just got back from my special ed class. I actually I had no idea that desiring a super fast and reliable northeast corridor was a conservative position, but definitions change. For example, I haven’t seen a single anti-war protest since January 2009. ‘Bams gave himself a nearly $1 trillion stimulus plan. He could have taken all of 1-2% of that and left office with a showpiece northeast corridor. Would that have been a nice parting gift to the country? Would that have been more useful than a Tampa-Orlando bullet train? As of now the only NEC projects I see advancing at all are actually Bush-era initiatives, which are needed (e.g., Portal Bridge), but not yet fully funded and not really part of a true HSR system. Rationalize all you want.
Danny burbles:
Giving more money to people/organizations who use it well, and less to organizations/people that completely suck.
I couldn’t agree with you more, Danny, and suppose we follow the money and start with the people are running the country, including the Federal goverment and both legacy parties?
Seeing a few banksters CEOs doing the perp walk in orange jumpsuits on the TV would do wonders for morale. It also take away a lot of personal money from organizations that completely suck.
So, how about it?
Danny, you tried but FAILED.
Social Security isn’t failing you moron. It will not start running deficits until 2037 and that is purely due to demographics. If Shrub hadn’t raided the SS Trust Fund surplus to pay for his tax cuts for the wealthy Social Security would be on even more solid financial footing.
Eric- the reason you haven’t seen any anti-war protests since 2009 is because Obama pledged to remove all combat troops from Iraq by the summer of 2010- which he DID. You are such an idiot. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
The public transit “system” in this country isn’t failing anymore than the Highway Trust Fund is. Lower tax revenues have caused service cutbacks. And conservatards such as yourself are the main reason why public transit sucks in this country.
Western Europe and Japan have extensive environmental and labor laws and still are able to build large scale public works projects with relative ease. NIMBYISM and the numerous layers of government approval needed for construction to commence contribute to the time and cost of large scale public projects in this country.
And on a final note, the health care reform bill that passed in March reduces the federal budget deficit by over $100 BILLION over the next ten years, according to the CBO. Health care costs so much because it is mostly privatized.
Eric: you shouldn’t blame Obama for this. He gave a bit of money to HSR, about as much as his advisors let him (Larry Summers was reportedly against the whole idea). The issue with the NEC is that the states it passes through don’t care about it, and Amtrak’s too timid to do anything useful with it.
Honestly, if I could blame one person in government for the lack of progress on the NEC, it’s Biden. He’s well-known as a regular Acela commuter, which means that it’s natural that other members of the administration would defer to him. Thus he’d be the most natural point person for the administration to press Amtrak to formulate plans to boost speed and capacity.
If Bush had his way, Amtrak would no longer exist and so would the NEC.
Most of Obama’s stimulus was TAX CUTS. Conservatards never mention that when criticizing the stimulus, probably because they don’t know and are just parroting whatever Caribou Barbie or Fat Limbaugh said.
Sean: Obama marginally accelerated the Iraq pullout. The plan dates back to Bush, who viewed the surge as a success. He also added more troops in Afghanistan, pissing off the entire organized left, which is now arguing (correctly, in my view) that Karzai is as brutal and oppressive as the Taliban.
As for American public transit’s failure, it has nothing to do with conservatives. Singapore is run by conservative autocrats, but has okay public transit; the ruling party likes the air clean and the roads uncongested, so it implemented congestion pricing since the 1970s, decades before any other city, and placed high car taxes. The US is falling behind both hyper-capitalist Hong Kong and Singapore and social democratic Sweden and Finland. That alone should be reason to suspect that it’s not about left versus right, but about more technical issues.
Clean air- that is a liberal value. High taxes- that is NOT a conservative value.
Singapore may be run by those who value social order and stability, but many of their laws are hardly conservative.
You can’t compare the development and economic systems of glorified city states to a nation the size and diversity of the United States.
No, the Singaporean laws are actually conservative. Income taxes on the rich are very low: the marginal rate is 20%. The government is raising revenue by raising sales taxes, falling on the middle class, just like Margaret Thatcher did. There is no minimum wage, strikes are illegal, there are no unemployment benefits, and social security is strictly defined-contribution.
The small size of Singapore should if anything make it less governable. In small geographies, a few private interests can dominate; this is routine in local governments in the US, which is why they’re usually more corrupt than the feds. There are actually a lot of advantages to bigness, as far as government cleanliness is concerned.
The difference between Singaporean and American capitalism is twofold. First, American capitalism is based on the idea that government doesn’t work. Singaporean capitalism isn’t; it’s based on the idea that government should play a role in helping capitalism. If American boosters want to write about a capitalist success story, they won’t write about Singapore, but about countries where capitalism has developed as a reaction to government failure, such as Israel and India. This American attitude makes it hard to do infrastructure well; unsurprisingly, infrastructure sucks in Israel and India just as much.
And second, in the US the special interest groups that lead the capitalists were traditionally in the oil and auto industries, creating an illusion that environmentalism is anti-capitalist. In Singapore there are heavy polluting industries, but the stronger government can keep them away from populated areas, and there’s no lobby for more oil use.
“That’s one way to look at it. Another is: (1) What has Amtrak been doing with its existing subsidy money it has gone through since the Nixon Administration to get its main line working properly”
Keeping the trains runnning. With very rare exceptional years, Amtrak has NEVER been given enough money to both run the trains and maintain the tracks. It’s been on starvation budgets since the Nixon administration and it’s amazing that it’s still running — in fact it’s proof of the efficiency of trains.
The Northeast Corridor improvement projects have gotten about 20% less funding than was available for the construction of the LGV Sud-Est. If Amtrak had been halfway competent, it would have been capable of running trains reliably on its own underused tracks, instead of screaming for capacity increases and state of good repair money.
The only time Amtrak was genuinely underfunded was in the late 1990s, when they were building the Acela. Congress was anxious to use the project to make Amtrak profitable as soon as possible, so as the project fell behind schedule, Amtrak was forced to start running trains prematurely. The signals preventing train collisions were not fully installed, which is what led the FRA to demand that the trains be compatible with steam-era buff strength rules. This made the trains overweight, unable to tilt as much as planned, and extremely unreliable, raising both maintenance costs and travel time.
The Northeast Corridor is twice as long as the LGV sud-est and shared with multiple commuter lines. A good percentage of is infrastructure dates back to the days New Haven and PRR. The Sud-Est was built as an exclusive double tracked high speed line. All construction could commence uninterrupted by daily rail operations.You really can’t compare the two.
Until the 1990s, the Northeast Corridor was just NY-DC, which is about 12% shorter than the LGV Sud-Est.
The age of the infrastructure doesn’t make it more expensive. On the contrary, it makes it cheaper. The PRR overbuilt the ballast, which means that the only improvements the entire line needed (as opposed to individual curve modifications) were concrete ties and constant-tension catenary, both of which are much cheaper to build than a greenfield high-speed line.
The NEC I noiced when I rode on it is ruled by several bottle necks that kill it such as when you get to Washingtion DC you waste a hour to 40 minutes changing from oil to eletric. Then when you get Baltmore you have four tracks going down to two track tunnels that where build in the 1870′s which are stub standard. After you get out of Baltmore you have to major railroad birdge crossings which are double track but have four sets of tracks on eatch side of them narrowing down to get on to them.
I would first go break open some of the bottle necks blocking up the NEC such as the tunnels in Baltmore and the double track railroad bridges on the four track sections of railroad
As for the power suppy of the NEC it’s amazing how old the system is and how long it has been running with out say something major happening that has killed or hurt anyone so far. I remember seeing a Pennsyvinia Railroad 70 foot tall H beam catenary mast that had a three foot dent knocked into it and it was bending at a angel but it was still holding up the wires. I think over all the 25Hz Catenary system has worked well but I think it needs some repairs and basic upgrades to it.
Amtrak should go along the NEC add constant tension catenary to it a lot of the existing H beams are sold thick heavy built steel so they could easly hold constant tension catenary brackets. I’d also go pick out the sickest and the weakest of Pennsyvinia Railroad H beam masts and replace them with new same styile Pennsyvinia Railroad H beams maybe something in stainless steel glaze to give them a more futuristic look. As for the 25Hz system we shouldn’t be mad at it for being 25Hz it’s done a good job given the very little resources it’s been given from the 1950′s to 2000′s such as new parts so we should go and replace a lot old transformers and expland and add some new 25Hz static converters or do away with static conveters by adding detacated 25Hz power generators at some of the power stations along the line.
Those advocating simply upgrading the NEC rather than building a brand new high speed link should check out the example of the West Coast Main Line (WCML) in the UK.
Like the NEC is a very old and very complicated system consisting of a main line from London linking to Glasgow in Scotland and Manchester in England. It then has lots of complications including managing the feat of running BOTH via Birmingham and bypassing it altogether and having multiple spurs to smaller cities such as Liverpool AND sharing space with local commuter lines and other cross country lines going elsewhere.
So when they tried to introduce flexible in cab signalling to boost speeds to 140mph they found the route was so complicated that it was almost impossible without significant investment going over the original budget of £2 Billion (about $3.7 – $4 Billion at the time) to a figure in excess of £13 Billion ($21 – 26 Billion). In the end this was dropped which dropped the improved speeds down to 125mph.
Other issues were with bottlenecks (of which there were many along the line), the opening and electrification of other routes to provide extra capacity and provide relief in the event of failure on the WCML itself, readying the entire route for tilt train running, entire remodelling of multiple stations to seperate the high speed line from the communter and cross-country lines that used to cross over it, etc.
In all it wasn’t a disaster but it went way way way over budget and missed multiple deadlines. It was only acheived after a strategy of “blockades” which shut down entire parts of the line for months on end while the work was carried out.
The benefits are 3 trains an hour to Manchester and Glasgow in under four hours and thirty minutes which is a huge acheivement and now Virgin trains can compete directly with domestic air carriers for the first time.
So I’m not saying don’t bother with the NEC rather I’m saying that you guys WILL experience a lot of pain before the pleasure kicks in.
Simply put, it doesn’t seem as clear cut and simple as you guys are making it out to be but, eh, what do we know? We’ve only been in the railway business since..well..it was invented.
The Boston-Washington NEC is fully electrified, so no, there’s no change from diesel to electric. (As if this change actually requires 40 minutes in the real world.)
The double-track bridges are not a real issue. There’s almost no commuter traffic between Baltimore and Wilmington. Even south of Baltimore, four tracks are only necessary at several times the traffic levels of today. The tunnel in Baltimore is a real problem, but according to Amtrak, it costs the Acela two minutes. It’s not enough to explain why the Acela is slower than the 1970s’ Metroliner, which had to pass through the same tunnel.
@Prestwick: the projected cost of the London-Birmingham segment of HS2 works out to about the same per route-km as the 90% underground Bologna-Florence line. So I wouldn’t bring up Britain as an example of good planning.
The NEC has different issues from WCML. First, for most of the way, it’s the single straightest corridor in existence connecting the major cities; it’s cheaper to ease curves individually than to construct a bypass. Second, it already has cab signaling, and is already fully grade-separated except for seven crossings, all on the one segment that can be bypassed. The technology is not its problem; the curves are.
The problem is that Amtrak really, honestly, despite Alon’s claims, has *not* been given enough money to perform appropriate maintenance and routine system upgrades on its tracks.
Please remember that it inherited tracks with massive deferred maintenance. Now tell me where in Amtrak’s budgets, since the Nixon administration, the replacement of the entire electrical distribution infrastructure south of NYC (the current major problem remaining) was supposed to come from.
Thought you couldn’t.
Alon, the diesel-electric change is at DC lower level for the trains from Richmond (and Lynchburg). As you should know. No, it shouldn’t take 40 minutes, but with crowded tracks around DC Union, I’m not surprised.