Southwest States Angle for New High-Speed Link

Denver to Albuquerque makes sense, but it should head west to the Phoenix area at that point.

Well, for what it is worth, El Paso/Juarez have a combined population (they are in many ways one city) of around 2 million.

It’s mostly flat between Denver and El Paso, and anything but flat between Denver and Salt Lake City.

Interesting concept.

Please remember that Albuquerque/Santa Fe are not minor cities but comparable to the Wasatch Front in population and, as reported, El Paso/Las Cruces/Juarez is a huge urban area. Also as reported the AMtrak route from Denver to SLC is impossible for speedy trains. It hangs off sheer canyon walls and climbs thousands of feet. (topologically North America is not France even if we wish it were) That said good fast (100 MPH) service along the Rio Grande corridor makes sence and would be reasonable in cost. There is already good modern commuter rail in Northern New Mexico

Phoenix/El Paso isn’t going to happen- hundreds of miles with few inhabitants. Easterners can’t imagine. Also, I just drove it and the mostly single rail is jammed with freight even in a recesstion.

I just realized I referred to Raton Pass as Cajon Pass in comment 6… sorry.

Just a regular Amtrak service here would be good, though the Sunset Limted needs to have service restored to Phoenix & to Florida.

The thing that is interesting about rail service is that smaller distances and large populations tend to mean that trains can be slower. If you look at countries like Germany and the UK, they are much denser and their cities are closer. Their trains tend to run in the 125-150 mph range. Cities in France, Spain and Italy are spread further apart and can only be effectively served by the fastest trains. Similarly, in California, they need 200 mph+ trains to make the San Francisco-LA trip worthwhile. Otherwise, it would not be competitive with air. On the east coast, because NYC and DC are not as far apart, a relatively mediocre train can take over half the market share on the corridor with much less investment and much less speed.

My point is that the distances from Denver to Albuquerque and from Albuquerque to El Paso are between 250 and 450 miles, depending on which city you are starting from. To go that distance, and make the investment worthwhile, this project really has to be full blown HSR. Note: even at maximum speed, the train would not take many riders off planes from Denver to El Paso.

The obvious problem is that even if you capture 100% of the travelers going between these cities, it’s still probably not a large enough market to support this technology. There just aren’t enough people. Cities that have developed this technology successfully in Japan and France, for example, have populations of many millions, not one or two. On the other hand, in the 20-30 years it would take to plan, finance and build the entire line, these cities could easily double in population. It would be prudent to start the planning for the day when 5 million people live in Denver. If we wait until then, the only choice might be another I-25.

“I’m sure 10 car platforms on the NYC subway looked ridiculous in 1909 too.”

Meh, not so much really. Keep in mind that the NYC subways were built to relieve the overcrowding on the Els from the same era as the Chicago ones.

This is essentially yet another variation of the “Denver north-south line”. Fort Collins-Denver-Colorado Springs would be eminently suitable and popular among daytrippers, and was pretty much the original proposal. There’s a lot of Fort Collins-Cheyenne traffic, so that was quickly added in; Pueblo, CO didn’t want to be left out and was easy to add in.

Now, Albequerque (already connected to Santa Fe) yearns for a Denver connection, hence the rather questionable link from there north. The track’s in place to El Paso and fairly straight, so….

Variations of this come up all the time.

‘Course if we don’t get a handle on global warming, and fast, nothing south of Denver will be inhabitable by humans anyway.

Matthew, My mother now lives in El Paso, and you reminded me of a lovely trip we took in the South of Spain in early June almost 20 years ago. Our rental car, with no a/c, turned into a sweatbox. Meanwhile a high-speed train flew past us and I wished … Believe me, if the Spanish can make the AVE work so well Madrid-Cordoba-Seville in their summer months, HSR can work in the Great Chihuahua Desert too.

Over at unitedrail.org, Andrew put up a post at the end of August quoting studies from a late colleague, Dr Adrian Herzog, emphasizing the importance of growing the network as part of the solution to Amtrak’s problems. The more routes the system has, the more potential city-pairs it can connect.

If adding a new route, like a Front Range line from Cheyenne down to El Paso, adds a lot of connections, it can add many more passengers to the system. The Front Range line is especially ripe with potential connections off its north-south route to three different east-west routes at Denver, Albuquerque, and El Paso.

If that route, and those connections, are supplied, they will draw forth demand from passengers who want to go, say, from Salt Lake City to San Antonio by train, but don’t want to go by way of Chicago to do it. Cumulatively, these new connecting passengers from many different cities and towns can help to fill Amtrak’s trains.

Andrew says Dr Herzog also emphasized the importance of having three or four daily frequencies on the long-distance Amtrak routes, in part to ensure that the wait to transfer from one train to another won’t take more than a few hours. Otherwise it would be impossible to synchronize the schedules to make close connections possible all along the main routes. And they advocate having two trains running express or skip-stop service with at least one local train making frequent stops.

There are other very good reasons to want three or four trains a day on each Amtrak route. Depending on the season, at a minimum one third and up to almost two-thirds of the arrivals and departures on the schedules occur in the dark. For example, Amtrak’s arrivals and departures in Cincinnati and Cleveland are all post-midnight or pre-dawn, and who calls that service?

Of course, multiple trains daily allow return trips between nearby towns and cities. If Amtrak can take you there in the morning and bring you back in the evening, you might take the train. Sadly, few routes allow this now. Think Kalamazoo-Niles/South Bend, for example, but with only three trains a day, or Ann Arbor-Niles/South Bend but only two trains, it’s just not enough. Even with an overnight stay, return trip schedules can be difficult.

Frequent departures give the passenger flexibility too. Airlines are well aware of the importance of this factor, and most try to arrange their flights so that if you miss one, there’ll be another one in a couple of hours, or less. The heaviest routes, like NYC-ATL, offer hourly flights.

I guess it is a given now in thinking about transportation routes that more frequent service will always attract more riders — whether it’s bus routes in Portland, or Southwest Airlines planes between city pairs. or trains on California’s Capital Corridor. The British are aiming for service so frequent on their main lines that the passenger need only “turn up and go.”

Isn’t this also another way of thinking about Boardman’s provocative remark that there are other ways of reducing trip times besides high speed?

A few years ago, a lawyer in Springfield could hope to catch one of three trains to Chicago. Let’s say, making up the schedule, one at 8 a.m., one at 1 p.m., and one at 6 p.m. If he finished his business mid-afternoon, he had to await until 6 p.m. for the next train — or drive or fly. But Illinois added two train to the existing three, and ridership almost doubled. Maybe a new departure added at, say, 4 p.m. made the difference to our lawyer. After all, his TRIP TIME was not station to station, but from the courtroom to his living room. Hanging around the station waiting for the next departure is “trip time” to him.

Looking at it this way, the quickest easiest way to reduce trip times on every Amtrak route in the country is to add more frequencies. On the basis of the Illinois experience, where 67% more trains gained 90%+ more riders, we’d see a remarkable increase in total passengers — before spending billions on HSR lines.

There is enormous pent-up demand for passenger rail. Of course we’d all like faster trains. But not to lose sight of the need for more trains. Many more trains on Amtrak’s existing routes, as well as added or restored routes like the Pioneer and the Front Range.

Sadly, few besides unitedrail.org seem to be beating the drum for tripling or quadrupling the frequencies on Amtrak’s current long distance routes.

At this site, there’s a lot of attention given to the notion that HSR can help the movement to livable cities and lowering the need for autos in our cities, thereby reducing demand for energy and lowering pollution of various types.

No doubt it is true that HSR could have a dramatic impact on center cities it serves. So to me, one powerful reason to support HSR, even watered down to 110 mph, on routes like Chicago-Detroit, Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati, Chicago-St Louis, Buffalo-Rochester-Syracuse-Utica-Albany-NYC, and Philly-Harrisburg-Pittsburgh-Youngstown-Cleveland, to name a few, is to help revitalize these rust belt cities.

But standard speed trains can also have a great impact. Let’s get back to that proposed Front Lines train. It does not have to be HSR to have a big impact on livability, energy use, and urban revitalization. Imagine starting service with three trains daily from ELP to ABQ and beyond. Like the Sunset Limited, it would use the same grand 100-year-old station in El Paso that today sees more parked buses than Amtrak passengers. If both these trains ran three times a day each way, the station that now greets two trains a day would see 12 trains. It wouldn’t be underused any more, it would be a lively place.

And those three trains a day between El Paso (and the University of Texas at El Paso) and Las Cruces (and New Mexico State) about 45 miles away? For the price of two more trainsets you could have hourly service, say, 18 trains a day, all feeding into the station on the edge of El Paso’s downtown. The railroad line would transform the somnolent district, now home to offices, courthouses, and museums — emptied out by 6 p.m. The commuters and other passengers could support new retail, restaurants and bars, as well as the streetcar line always in the city’s dreams.

Nowadays there must be dozens of restored and preserved train stations in the US, representing usually some federal funds and a lot of local funds. Unfortunately, in Amtrak’s bookkeeping, and in Congress’ books, these stations are not counted for what they are: an enormous waste of taxpayers’ money — because they are so little used. But I think that many taxpayers and voters do see the waste, and don’t like it.

Yet if frequencies were increased on all Amtrak routes, these many stations, as I suggest for El Paso, would no longer stand as monuments to public waste. They would become new centers of life and business in downtowns all across the land. Huge increases in the number of passengers using the stations each day — in the El Paso example, from two trains to 12 a day, before adding another dozen commuter trains — would slash the cost-per-passenger spent to rebuild them. So almost paradoxically, larger Amtrak subsidies to provide for additional trains would end the waste involved in these many stations that are owned by local governments and transit agencies.

Yeah: like everyone else said, big ding in failing to use conurbation populations. Most of the “El Paso” area population is on the far side of the border (though I suppose mentioning that will cause the anti-immigration crowd to oppose this train….)

This is sort of the agglomeration of a bunch of different plans.
(1) New Mexico wants to link Albuquerque/Santa Fe up with the most logical intercity connections — namely El Paso and Denver. This is understandable for NM but probably shouldn’t be considered high priority by anyone else.

(2) Colorado wants to establish fast rail in its north-south corridor (Pueblo-Colorado Springs-Denver-Boulder-Fort Collins-Cheyenne, Wyoming). This makes sense and *should* be a high priority.

(3) El Paso wants better connections. A very El Paso-specific desire.

If you add that up and analyze it, you find that the only trouble spot is Pueblo-Albuquerque. South of Albuquerque demands very modest upgrades and would run quite decent speeds with quite decent numbers of riders; similarly north of Pueblo. Unfortunately Pueblo-Albuquerque is mountain railroading *and* the lowest-demand section of the entire proposed route.

Oh, and Alon: “In truth, half of Amtrak’s operating losses in FY 2008 came from just four routes: California Zephyr, Empire Builder, Southwest Chief, and Silver Star. ”

100% False, and I’ll tell you why. You’re depending on one of the bogosities of Amtrak accounting: “fully allocated costs”. The allocation of “costs” in Amtrak accounting is not realistic — essentially it ends up allocating a lot of costs by number of miles travelled, making longer routes look worse.

These numbers are just not true. If you look at *avoidable* costs — real numbers — you find that most of the long-distance trains run very modest operating losses. Amtrak’s operating losses come largely due to an enormous set of fixed, *unavoidable* costs, and not enough trains to spread that cost around on. Amtrak fails to gain economies of scale. Even looking at avoidable costs, the LD trains look worse than they should because track access fees convert what are “capital” costs on Amtrak-owned lines into “operating” costs on freight-owned lines.

And again even some of the truly avoidable costs for LD trains *shouldn’t* be avoidable. The large cost of running a station in Minneapolis/St.Paul is “avoidable” by removing the Empire Builder, but I think you’d agree that that’s stupid; Minneapolis needs train service. If we were running, say, Midwest HSR, then that cost *wouldn’t* be an avoidable cost of running the Empire Builder.

Looking only at *avoidable* costs, the deadbeat trains are (1) the three-times-a-week trains, which really are unusually unpopular (so run it daily or not at all); (2) the Silver Star, which has an outrageous and super-slow routing in Florida (so don’t run trains on STUPID routes).

There is a lot of historic evidence that long, multi-day train routes really need to run daily, and rarely benefit from running more than daily. If you’re thinking of running a second “Silver Meteor” frequency you’re likely better off running a “Silver Star” going to different intermediate towns — provided you don’t end up with the silly routing it currently has. Likewise, if the Empire Builder fills up, the North Coast Hiawatha seems to be a better idea than a second Empire Builder.

Note that small town stops, nowadays, cost very little to operate. (Unlike big city stops like Minneapolis.)

Alon, you also haven’t read the Empire Corridor schedules recently. It’s really two parts: NYC-Albany, with very high frequencies, and consistently packed, and Albany-Niagara Falls, which is twice a day each way (less than Chicago-St. Louis). You have to run the numbers for the two parts *SEPARATELY* in order to get a fair comparison with Chicago-St. Louis. It’s like lumping St. Louis-Kansas City in with Chicago-St. Louis. Financially the results of “Empire Corridor West” and “Empire Corridor South” are very different from each other.