Intercity Rail in Peril

Wisconsin's Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Walker says he would put the kibosh on the extension of the Hiawatha line to Madison. Indeed, Republicans are a threat to rail projects around the country. But they are by no means alone.

Now some freight railroads are actively working against passenger rail.

Opposition from freight railroads is threatening the Obama administration's multibillion-dollar push to make high-speed passenger trains an integral part of the U.S. transportation network.

The standoff demonstrates the difficulties of introducing new passenger service to a rail network that is at least 90% owned by freight railroads and outfitted for slower trains.

To save time and money, government officials want new high-speed rail routes to operate on the vast system of train corridors that already crisscross the U.S., unlike European and Asian countries that have built dedicated tracks for high-speed rail.

But Norfolk Southern Corp., Union Pacific Corp. and other railroad companies are balking at sharing their tracks or rights-of-way with trains that would run between 90 and 200-plus miles an hour. They argue that mixing high-speed passenger trains with slower freight trains would create safety risks, prevent future expansion and cause congestion.

I read at one time that some freight carriers are more amenable to sharing track with passenger trains than others but I can't recall which carriers felt what way. To my knowledge, neither Canadian Pacific nor Wisconsin & Southern have put up a fight against intercity rail service to Madison.

Now, how W&S will react to both intercity and commuter rail here in Madison could be an altogether different story.

A side note on the above quote. ("unlike European and Asian countries that have built dedicated tracks for high-speed rail") Richard Longworth blogged about a paper by the Germany company Siemens, who build trains, called "High-Speed Trains Running on Freight Line Tracks: The Experience of Germany".

It's always been assumed, at least by me, that any real high speed network in the Midwest would need dedicated tracks, separate from freight lines, with all the expense this implies. The Siemens paper says this isn't necessarily so.

In Germany, it says, freight and passenger trains share the same rails: there probably isn't room for separate lines. This means that the shared lines have to be upgraded to handle both high speed rail and heavyweight freight, with curves straightened, grade crossings eliminated (for safety reasons) and "passing loops" installed. Rail automation has been upgraded to 21st-century standards to prevent accidents. (In 1998, 101 persons were killed in a terrible ICE accident: since then, there have been no fatalities on the system.)

All this, of course, is hugely expensive. But the dual use allows the expense to be more quickly amortized. And virtually everyone agrees that this dense train network is crucial to German prosperity.

It would seem that freight and passenger trains using the same tracks at the same time would produce inevitable delays. Siemens says the Germans avoid this by scheduling most freight trains for off-peak hours, with most daytime traffic reserved for passenger trains.

And while I'm on the subject of transit, check out Jarrett Walker's post "The Perils of Average Density". He calls the notion "effective transit requires high density" a fallacy and proceeds to look at the various ways density is calculated. Here's something that folks in the Madison area should take into account when contemplating commuter rail here:

Transit reacts mainly with the density right around its stations. It is in the nature of transit to serve an area very unevenly, providing a concentrated value around its stops and stations and less value elsewhere. So what matters for transit is the density right where the transit is, not the aggregate density of the whole urban area.

This is one reason why the Transport 2020 plan for light rail in Madison turns me off. Some of the stops are in the middle of nowhere because the plan is to utilize existing rail which is not laid out with passenger rail in mind.