TrainBlog by Marcel Marchon

… but I’m kind of busy right now …

Eurostar currently serves two main routes: London - Paris and London - Brussels, both with intermediate stops on some trains. There are also seasonal services to French Ski destinations (winter) and Avignon (summer), plus daily service to Disneyland Paris. With the opening of phase 2 of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link high speed line from London St. Pancras station (the new international terminal in London, replacing Waterloo station) and the Channel Tunnel on November 14 of this year and the corresponding reduction of travel times between London and Paris to 2 hours 15 minutes, the focus of service expansion and improvement might shift to the addition of service to new destinations.

One obvious candidate of such an expansion would be to finally start service to cities north of London - this was already planned for the original opening of the Channel Tunnel service, but the idea was then abandoned because it did not look promising enough. The connection through/around the city of London would have been cumbersome at best. But with the new high speed line that terminates on the north side of London, such connections will become much better - there will even be a direct link between the high speed line and the West Coast Main Line (already visible on Google’s satellite images) to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and points north. So a direct service between Paris and, say, Birmingham should be very easy to implement. Taking current Virgin Trains timetables as a guide, travel time between London and Birmingham is around 1 hour 30 minutes with 3 intermediate stops. Thus, a nonstop trip between Paris and Birmingham should be around 3 hours and 45-50 minutes.

East Coast service would also be possible, but would probably - at least initially - require a reversal of the trains at St. Pancras. Also, the option seems less attractive since cities on the ECML are smaller than on the WCML (and Scotland is too far away for attractive travel times).

One obstacle for starting services on routes with lower expected ridership is the fact that until now, the only trainsets allowed through the Channel Tunnel are the original Eurostar trainsets that consist of 2 motor cars and 18 coaches. 7 additional trainsets were originally built for the “North of London” services with 14 instead of 18 coaches, but that still seems like a lot. Regular TGV trainsets used on domestic lines in France only have 8 coaches.

Maybe the North of London trains could also be scheduled to stop at Stratford, Ebbsfleet and Ashford - at the same time, the London - Paris trains could run nonstop and thus provide an even more attractive travel option.

Other options for new Eurostar destinations would be service to Amsterdam over the new HSL Zuid line or possibly service east of Brussels to Cologne and other points in Germany. For these services, new trainsets would have to be built however - since the currently existing trains are not able to run over those lines.

All in all, the future looks promising - as all the various high speed rail lines in Europe are growing together and are starting to form a truly continental network.

There will be a National Rail Passenger Summit on Friday, March 23, 2007 in Chicago - if you’re interested in more details, head over to their website for more information.

The Washington State Transportation Commission recently oversaw the creation of a study of freight and passenger rail needs for the State of Washington - the final study plus various other documents and presentations are available at the Commissions website. If you have some spare moments, take a peek - there’s some very interesting information in those.

The Legislature provided the Commission with funding and a mandate to conduct a statewide rail capacity and system needs analysis. The Washington State Transportation Commission oversaw this study of strategic freight and passenger rail system needs, challenges and opportunities. The study reviewed the current powers, authorities, and interests the state has in freight and passenger rail and recommended policies for state participation and ownership of rail infrastructure and service delivery. The study also prepared a plan for managing state owned rail assets.

[Quoted from Washington State Rail Capacity & System Needs Study - Washington State Transportation Commission ]

I’d wish that other states (like California …) and the Federal Government would undertake similar studies - the result should certainly be interesting to read!

According to a report in today’s San Francisco Examiner, Caltrain’s ridership has reached record levels:

Average weekday ridership topped the 35,000 mark in December, the highest figure in the 143-year-history of Peninsula railroads, according to Caltrain.

[Quoted from Caltrain ridership booms to record high - Examiner.com]

So it seems very appropriate for the Governor to cut funding for transit - after all, nobody seems to be using it, right?

It looks like it has been a bad week for Capitol Corridor riders, due to the fact that Union Pacific had to undertake some urgent bridge replacement work on that route. Here are a couple extract from Gene Skoropowski’s “Message to Riders“:

Then the bottom fell out of the plan. Union Pacific engineering forces discovered major deterioration of two bridges in the middle of the planned tie renewal work area. (…) So, this week, UP bridge forces undertook a major effort to get the bridges replaced. (…) Due to the ongoing bridge replacement, this week has been a colossal mess, especially on the later morning trains and the early afternoon trains. Throw in a few signal problems, a drawbridge opening or two, a couple of vehicles and assorted debris intentionally placed on the tracks, a freight train with a crew that reached its legal ‘hours-of-service’ limit (federal law says the freight train stops when the crew uses up their allotted work hours, and the train then sits on the track until a relief crew can be found and sent out by van, taxi …or helicopter…!!) and we have the basic ingredients for the collapse of service.

I am really amazed by all this. I mean, seriously: do bridges just suddenly go bad from one day to the next (short of something like a washout)? Aren’t they (Union Pacific - they own the track) doing some sort of ongoing maintenance and checks on their trackwork? Shouldn’t they detect issues like that early on? And also, how can a crew just ‘die’ on the road? Shouldn’t the dispatchers, etc. know about this? Wouldn’t it be way more efficient to run all trains in a scheduled manner? They’d be much more predictable that way.

This almost seems like an impossible task for Amtrak and the Capitol Corridor folks: they are trying to run a frequent, scheduled, reliable service, but they have to do that in an environment that is completely unstructured (it appears), unscheduled, unmaintained and thus unreliable.

I also wonder if Amtrak and/or the State of California receives some kind of compensation (at the very least refunds of track usage fees, better would be some kind of money to reimburse for damages) in cases like this? I mean there must be a contract in place that has certain incentives for Union Pacific not to let this happen … I’d be very curious to see this contract …

While doing some totally unrelated to rail, I ran across this site “The True Cost of Smoking” - quite interesting, but since I don’t smoke, not that relevant. But then I thought, obviously there are similar calculations out there for “The True Cost of Driving” - well sure, here you go.

Let’s give it a try - suppose my job was in downtown San Francisco. That wouldn’t be too unusual. To drive from Mountain View to San Francisco is roughly 38 miles (according to Google Maps), i.e. 76 miles round trip. Suppose I work 5 days a week and use my car for commuting exclusively. In that case, my annual cost of driving (or more precisely, the annual cost of my driving) according to that site would be ~$23,500, i.e. roughly $90 per day!

Well, that sounds like a lot. And I’d like to be able to say that using public transportation would be “cheaper”. Sure, I can tell you that a Caltrain ticket would cost me $6.33 per day (based on a monthly pass cost of $139.25 and an average of 22 days of usage every month). But that is clearly not the “full cost” - there are other costs to be factored in, i.e. contributions to Caltrain’s budget from tax monies, cost of pollution, etc.. Is there a site that shows “The True Cost of Public Transportation”? Adron, that sounds like something you might be interested in? I’m pretty sure that public transportation would still be cheaper than driving overall. Such a calculation would probably also show that there are economies of scale associated with public transportation, i.e. if ridership goes up and trains are fuller, farebox recovery will be better and less taxpayer money will be needed. In other words, the (absolute, not just relative) share of total costs covered by fare purchases will go up. Sure, as more and more people use the train, there will need to be some investments, i.e. add more cars to trains, acquire more rolling stock, even run more trains, but even there, the economies of scale should still prevail.

PS. The more comparable number to that Caltrain ticket cost would be the “Total Direct Drivers Expense per mile”, which in my example above was $0.86 - times 76 miles that results in a total per day of $65.35. Still a lot more expensive than using Caltrain.

PPS. Caltrain also has a calculator.

The Lott-Lautenberg Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act, formerly known as Senate Bill #1516, has been reintroduced as the Lautenberg-Lott Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act under Senate Bill #294 in the new Congress.

Washington, D.C.—Senators Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Trent Lott (R-MS), appearing at a joint news conference this noon at Washington Union Station, announced that they were introducing today their Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act. The new bill, S. 294, is similar to S. 1516 in the last Congress, except for changes in the dates and technical amendments.

[via NARP Press Release]

This proposed legislation would, among other things:

• Reauthorize and provide funding for Amtrak for 5 years
• Establishes an 80% federal match funding mechanism for capital projects.
• Requires the development of a long-range Federal rail policy

According to a report in the Belgian newspaper Gazet van Antwerpen (not available online, scanned copy here), Siemens Transportation has won the tender for new electric passenger locomotives in Belgium, against strong competition from Alstom (who were hoping to be able to sell their PRIMA 6000 series locomotive) and Bombardier. The new locomotives will be based on the Eurosprinter series and will be similar to the E191s for Mitsui and LE4700 for Portugal (for more details on these, see railcolor.net). They will have a top speed of 200km/h and will be able to run under three voltage systems: 25kV AC, 3kV DC and 1.5kV DC. Delivery should be from Januar 2009 through October 2009.

(via Zug & Eisenbahn Blog)

Adron has a post on his blog where he attempts to calculate how high the gas taxes would have to be to actually cover all costs associated with road construction and maintenance. His conclusion:

In no scenario does the gas tax cover roadway maintenance except in certain circumstances. Even on the vast majority of the interstates gas taxes don’t cover the costs. If they where to cover the costs the taxes would have to increase from 10-35 cents per gallon to about 60-80 cents per gallon minimum. In addition to that if new construction and maintenance where factored in for ongoing expansion of roadways that would have to increase somewhere to the tune of $1.20-2.00 per gallon.

[Quoted from Transit Sleuth : Gas Taxes for Roads?]

The main take from this should be the following: a lot of people in politics and elsewhere complain about the fact that public transportation (especially Amtrak) is not “self-sufficient” - this calculation hear clearly shows that road-based transportation is also not “self-sufficient” and I believe a similar calculation applied to air traffic would show the same. What follows is that no means of transportation is currently “self-sufficient” (i.e. pays its own costs), but rather relies on certain subsidies to be paid out of general tax monies.