In Philly’s case, it just sounds like the most recent effort to put lipstick on a pig. SEPTA can’t work as long as Philly and its suburbs are in a non-stop battle of wills regarding funding. SEPTA becomes the regional operator, SEPTA City Division is renamed, and suburban services are either renamed or operated by new subsidiary agencies. This is what happened in LA, when RTD was broken up. It was hard enough to get LA County cities to agree on services, let alone including Riverside, San Bernardino, and the OC. The SEPTA brand can be restricted to regional rail services. No other US city has seen the cuts in all categories of rail service that Philly has. No other city has just given up on so much streetcar service since the 60′s or earlier. SEPTA’s decline won’t stop until its constituent counties stop squabbling, and they project all their neurosis and dysfunction onto a transit agency and choke themselves in the process. The route numbering thing is just another symptom.

it is happening

The main expense of such a project would be connecting the extant Broad-Ridge spur and City Branch cut together–but it shouldn’t be too ridiculously hard to just build under that part of Noble.

It would also use the same equipment as the current Broad-Ridge trains do, so that’s another expense X’ed away, and would finally get us a line that properly services key Parkway destinations and that corner of the city.

Just an idle thought. Neither here nor there.

1. Making all destinations the same color will make it more difficult at stations, e.g. Wayne Jct. and Fern Rock especially, where there are no announcements telling you what trains are incoming, so you have to rely on the actual signage present on the train to figure out whether a train is going to e.g. Warminster or Doylestown.

2. The schedules will still likely fail to tell you a train’s ultimate destination if it’s not on the usual operational run-through (i.e. Warminster-Airport, Norristown-Wilmington, etc.) An improvement I can imagine without the Regional Rail network would be the ability to schedule run-throughs based on highest demand, something that the RR system does constrain against a bit. Lansdale-Elwyn, Fox Chase-Bryn Mawr, Trenton-West Trenton, etc., are runs currently not made that the current RR schema is a psychological force against scheduling: but this can only work if the schedules clearly show a train’s end-destination.

3. One of the major reasons why RR ridership has contracted so much since the ’50s is the fact that the network has contracted from the extent it had in those “halcyon” days to the current electrified-territory-only extent. Another major reason is the shifting of population concentrations away from the commuter network and towards greenfields: Chester County, very rural throughout most its history and not heavily serviced by the PRR, is now Philadelphia’s choicest suburb. Hence, the long-term service plan ought to be to bring several of those older commuter rail lines back online, in some form or another–in addition to focusing on bringing the mass transit to where the people are.

@Adirondacker: You do realize that 30th Street Station is bilevel, right? It’s fairly simple, if SEPTA were ever to so choose, to route trains from Wilmington/Newark, Media/Elwyn, or the Airport towards Paoli/Thorndale or Trenton (or, yes, Chestnut Hill East and Cynwyd as well) and vice versa: just skip the University City stop and run these through trains through Amtrak’s lower-level station throat. Of course, this would mean that SEPTA trains would board on the lower concourse and that these trains would skip Suburban and Market East as well, so perhaps we can quickly figure out why SEPTA is somewhat adverse to the idea. (Not that it’s a bad one, though.)

It cannot be done. Period. That’s a hard and fast FRA rule which isn’t gonna be waived any time soon. If anything, regulations will be made more strict. Any modernization of the system has to be done within the FRA framework(*).

Other options would be suboptimal. The Schuylkill Valley study envisioned running trains down the City Branch, and then on-street down to Market, but all of the potential alignments were found to be unsatisfactory because of short blocks and traffic conflicts.

*–the alternative would be to try and isolate the RRD from the ‘general railroad system,’ but then that would mean the Wilmington, Paoli, and Trenton lines would all have to terminate at 30th Street lower, and you’d lose all the benefits of the tunnel.

I agree, I just wanted to point out for many of the readers that it isn’t a simple thing to switch. From an operational standpoint, converting a RR line to OPTO would allow headways to be halved without a significant increase in costs. It would also allow former conductors to maintain a job as a train operator or a fare inspector.

It might make sense to switch some of the RR lines to use LRT rolling stock. This is what was done in the 50s with the MBTA green line branch to Riverside. It used to be a commuter line, but was converted to LRT. One of the papers I mentioned is a case study of this line.

The problem/difficulty of this idea is intermingling LRT and commuter rail vehicles in the city center…or finding another way for the LRT vehicles to access the city center.