It’s called third rail. Third rail is generally limited to about 750v because of clearance issues. 750v requires more current to supply the same amount of power (remember p = iv ) and therefore needs lots more substations. Grade crossings are an issue as well. Some old third rail lines do have grade crossings; they accomplish this by leaving a gap in the third rail where it crosses a road at-grade. This is generally not considered safe or ideal, and as such, is no longer done for new installations. Third rail is common for mainline rail in the UK, but the only mainline railroads in the US that use it are Metro North and Long Island Railroad. Most other places in the world use overhead wires.
New installations of overhead wire are generally 25,000v. Our entire region including branches to Durham, Apex, Wake Forest, and Clayton could feasibly be supplied with just a single substation (Put it here!). And the wire is generally installed something like 22 or 23 feet above the rail, so it’s well out of the way of vehicular traffic below.
A very big cost: $375M, about twice the size of the budget hole that Durham County is struggling to fill.
Click here for the math
The $375M figure’s based on this estimate from freight rail lobbyists, multiplied by 39 miles of track and two tracks. As that article says, this cost may be artificially high due to scarcity -but that’s kind of my point, here.
Also, I can’t agree or stress Owen’s point enough about how freight rail companies have over electrifying rail lines in America, or how needlessly hard it is:
Freight rail companies try to move as much cargo in as few trains as possible by running trains whenever they want. This leads to problems like ours (passenger rail lines can’t be electrified because freight companies don’t want that), as well as other consequences like food ingredients getting stuck in rail yards just miles away from their destinations because it’s “inefficient” for rail operators to move them. Rail companies may have the power to help with inflation or pandemic-induced needs for domestic goods, but their business model is so behind the times that it doesn’t seem like that matters to them.
There’s a recent movement to move cargo in more reasonable ways (like precision scheduling, where you run freight trains between big intermodal terminals, rather than having lots of trains carry little bits of cargo directly to shippers -which is somehow a new innovation!?), but it’s been warped into a money grab for investors with a half-assed implementation at the cost of literally everyone else. And because this is an industry with practical monopolies, lots of captive consumers, and high barriers of entry preventing any sort of competition, rail companies can get away with it.
Rail scheduling, service quality, prioritizing service and infrastructure for passenger trains,… no matter what issue you have, rail companies have no reason to care. There’s no real pressure to innovate or change things unless regulators intervene because they can get away with it.
I see your points but it’s infuriating. No reason freight companies can’t run electric either. They do in Europe. Entrenched companies with all the power and little incentive to cooperate.
Oh yeah no, absolutely! I purposely didn’t word things like that just so I don’t sound like a conspiracy theorist with a tin foil hat on, but honestly this really pisses me off After healthcare, I think this is the second most fucked up industry and the second-best example of how corporations can go off the rails when they have all the power and no real regulations. It’s like they only care about moving money into shareholders’ hands, and not about any moving any goods or people like they’re “supposed” to.
For those of you who don’t know (or didn’t go down a Wikipedia rabbit hole like I did the other day, lol), Colby’s talking about Conrail. That’s the company created by Congress that took over freight rail operations for potentially profitable parts of Penn Central Railroad in the 70s, when they went bankrupt and got bailed out by the federal government. They heavily invested in infrastructure like better tracks, rolling stock (trains) etc., and combined with this 1980 law that legalized new rail business structures. As a result, they became so profitable that they privatized, went public, and had the biggest IPO in American history at the time at about $4.7 billion 2022 dollars.
But it seems like the secret sauce behind Conrail's success is also the very same law that made it easier for freight rail companies to act in their own interests at the cost of the rest of us. (click to see why)
For example, let’s say you’re at VinFast, you want to ship newly-built cars from your future Triangle Innovation Point factory by rail, and you want to use Norfolk Southern (which has tracks nearby) instead of CSX (which goes there directly). Ideally, you’d be able to:
shop around between two rail carriers with similar and fair offers;
pick the service you want, and have the right to access that service, and;
carry your new cars on CSX tracks for a few miles until you can transfer them onto NS’s tracks.
The federal government used to ensure that points 1 and 2 were possible for freight rail customers (among tons of other things) through a powerful, now-defunct agency called the Interstate Commerce Commission. But that 1980 law, the Staggers Rail Act, severely weakened the agency by getting freight rail companies off the hook from requirements like those. As a result, in our example, CSX could be free to price-gouge as much as they want, and they can deny service to, discriminate, and retaliate against VinFast for their desires to ship with NS more easily.
All of those points improve competition and discourage the formation of monopolies in the freight rail industry. But the Staggers Act and the ICC’s repeal in the 90s brought down the guard rails, and made it easier for those market failures to happen.
So I think Conrail would’ve been a great stepping stone to a better change. But I think we could still do better: what if our rail system worked as a public-private partnership? If we model this from Britain’s upcoming concession system, freight rail companies can still set their own schedules, operate trains, and make profits, but investments like future infrastructure is the domain of the people.
I think this would benefit everyone involved, as public and private rail interests can be subjected to the same pressures to do and be better. GoTriangle, Amtrak etc. would be put first in infrastructure investments, making it easier to run faster trains in more stations through electrification and level boarding. Plus, CSX, NS etc. can be publicly pressured to solve their first/last-mile problems in innovative ways, such as by paying attention to startups like these:
That’s why I mentioned the upcoming system, not the system of franchising that’s getting abolished. That was a failure that, I agree, we should avoid and learn from.
Click here to see why.
From what I understand, in that old system, companies auctioned for train services, then made all of their own decisions within their little fiefdom, afterwards, for better or for worse. Network Rail (an independent company owned by the British government, just like our postal service) was on the hook for maintenance and repairs, but only had so much power to choose the types of services or infrastructure upgrades they offered. This means, for example, when I went to Glasgow for a work trip before the pandemic, my train that was run by Virgin Trains arrived about an hour late because other trains run by other companies also got delayed. No one could just step in and readjust train schedules to the benefit of the bigger picture.
This article goes into more detail about the demise of Britain’s old way of doing things. The franchising system collapsed because of the pandemic, but the cracks in the foundation were there long before that.
According to their master plan, the UK’s new system seems to change things in two dimensions: their government gets more of a say in when and how passenger trains should run, and rail companies will follow rules and expectations that are much better defined and less complicated than they used to be. In those terms, I think the old and new systems (as well as other rail systems) would look like this:
It sounds like the British government also wants to give similar rights to freight rail customers as the ones that were taken away in America as I mentioned in my last post. The Williams-Shapps plan mention the right to fair access as well as the freedom to lease trains (instead of having to buy them from rail companies). So the Brits’ move to concessions seems good for improving competition in freight rail, too.
In an interview, GoTriangle President and CEO Charles Lattuca discussed where the project stands and why commuter rail could succeed where light rail failed.
Commuter rail, as opposed to the defunct light rail project, is “really a true regional service,” he said. Light rail was a “short service” between activity centers in Orange and Durham counties, he said. It had been planned for just a 17.7 mile corridor. The proposed commuter rail plan calls for up to 43 miles, possibly extending all the way into Clayton. The vision includes park-and-ride, where commuters drive to a lot and then take a train.
“People generally come as far as 10 miles away to jump on a train and go to work,” Lattuca said, an added distance that has the commuter rail line potentially covering 60 percent of the area’s population. “I thinks that’s a truly regional project.”
But it comes at a cost estimated between $1.8 billion and $2.1 billion depending on whether the line ends in Garner or Clayton.
Commuter rail, as opposed to the defunct light rail project, is “really a true regional service,” he said. Light rail was a “short service” between activity centers in Orange and Durham counties, he said. It had been planned for just a 17.7 mile corridor. The proposed commuter rail plan calls for up to 43 miles, possibly extending all the way into Clayton. The vision includes park-and-ride, where commuters drive to a lot and then take a train.
“People generally come as far as 10 miles away to jump on a train and go to work,” Lattuca said, an added distance that has the commuter rail line potentially covering 60 percent of the area’s population. “I thinks that’s a truly regional project.”
But it comes at a cost estimated between $1.8 billion and $2.1 billion depending on whether the line ends in Garner or Clayton.
We’ve talked about each of the reasons as they were revealed, but not really in the context of the bigger picture. It seems like the most major delays are because:
Norfolk Southern (the notoriously uncooperative freight rail company that practically controls the tracks that commuter trains may run on) has been taking their sweet time with their rail capacity study. GoTriangle can’t know when they can run their trains, how quickly they can go etc. until they have that information.
Cary and Durham’s transit hubs will be bigger and more costly than originally expected. Both municipalities have been going back and forth with the consultants hired by GoTriangle to work out design details, so that’s been making things take longer.
Although those two aims of the study are still ongoing, the other two aims -demonstrating that the Triangle has a viable market for rail transit, and demonstrating that societal benefits to building commuter rail in the Triangle exist- are pretty much complete! You can flip through the slide deck that was presented to Durham’s MPO earlier this month, or read this article that summarizes some of those points.
Durham and Cary might need to pull a Charlotte had phase in their train stations. Necessary things first and then work on the main passenger building latter maybe through private-public.
I think Charlotte’s strategy works well for them since their “Gateway District”, the P3-targeted parcels of land in that project, spans multiple blocks of relatively empty land. It’s about as low-risk of an investment as you can make it; developers have plenty of room to build your more “typical” kinds of commercial and mixed-use structures, so they don’t have to do much to make it transit-oriented. Plus, they have an existing (though very sketchy) station that’s been allowing for Amtrak service while the new station gets built.
Wouldn't that be harder in Durham or Cary, though? (Click to see why)
We’ve focused on buying just enough land to make the project work while minimizing the amount paid by taxpayers. That works well if we want to keep things simple, but it makes it harder to get private partners on board since their options for development are more limited. Last year’s feasibility study for Cary’s new multimodal terminal estimated that there’s about 7 acres of weirdly shaped parcels for TOD uses, which is about half of the 13 acres of full city blocks that Charlotte offers.
And also unlike Charlotte, we have no backup. Amtrak policy all bus demands local and intercity trains to run using separate platforms, so GoTriangle has no way to stop at Cary until their multimodal terminal is complete. This means there’s pressure to build more quickly (or at least, not let stations be delayed with respect to the rest of the rail network).
I’m not saying that’s impossible; I can totally picture that working out and giving the entire Triangle better transit and urban living experiences. But a phased public-private partnership has a higher risk of not being embraced by developers and it would add to the time it takes for the Triangle to have a working commuter rail line. In that context, do we have the evidence to say that gamble is worth it?
Source is next week’s GoTriangle Planning & Legislative Committee session. Presentation notes that Norfolk Southern has been asked to model these scenarios, so expect more in the relatively near future. Also, some fare models…
I’m not surprised about the cheapness, though. I think since all the way back in the Phase 1 study, GoTriangle assumed there would be no fare differences between buses and trains. That would be rare among trains in North America, but really important from a social equity perspective (which could be key for keeping Durham from dropping out of this project).
The rail capacity study’s memo includes a first pass of ridership estimates, and it points out some interesting result including how there’s not a ton of difference in expected ridership between running lots of trains mainly during rush hour versus running hourly trains all day. Keep in mind, though, that these guesses are sensitive to external details about this project, so we should treat these numbers as ballpark ranges rather than exact estimates (the consultants suggest a margin of error of ±1000 riders, but I’m pretending it’s more like ±3000 riders).
After healthcare, I think this is the second most fucked up industry and the second-best example of how corporations can go off the rails when they have all the power and no real regulations. It’s like they only care about moving money into shareholders’ hands, and not about any moving any goods or people like they’re “supposed” to.
