Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Right now, NJT and LIRR both terminate passenger services in Penn Station. The trains go in and go through a giant swath of switches (interlocking) to multiple platforms and then have to navigate and yield to incoming trains in order to get out. It’s a massive endeavor that takes up a lot of time and space and it’s actually so inefficient that NJT actually runs a number of its trains, without passengers on them, under Manhattan and the East River to Sunnyside in Queens to turn the trains back, because that’s more efficient than navigating back out at Penn Station.
One thing that many large cities such as Milan, Paris, Seoul and Tokyo, and soon, London, is to through-run their commuter line trains in the urban core in order to allow better point-to-point service in the metropolitan area as well as improve operational efficiency. Now setting aside the operational efficiency side of things, could you personally see yourself taking advantage of LIRR trains that go through Penn Station out to northern New Jersey and back?
Yes, I could see using that occasionally. Driving east to Newark and parking the car is much more convenient than managing the bridge/tunnel horror.
LI'ers and people from Jersey are mostly cut off from jobs at either end. Back in the day, I tried out for a job in Secaucus, but it wasn't realistically manageable as a daily commute from LI.
London as an example has multiple rail stations that the commuter lines are feeding into and their system is all nationalized as one system. Yes the stations are downtown but the trains dead end at these stations Waterloo, Charing Cross, St Pancras, Kings Cross, Euston, and Victoria. They are not going through the city, some have stops outside the city core the same at the lines coming into NYC's 2 stations.
The giant "giant swath of switches " you speak of is because so many rail lines are being fed in that they have to be reduced to the available number of tracks through the tunnels. There are 2 tunnels that come in to NY from NJ and 4 from Long Island that's it, every train commuter or Amtrak has to be routed to the appropriate track and then put back in the line up for one of the available tunnels.
How will routing a train from Long Island Out to New Jersey and then back eliminate any of this choke point shuffle?
Last edited by VA Yankee; 02-10-2020 at 02:23 PM..
London as an example has multiple rail stations that the commuter lines are feeding into and their system is all nationalized as one system. Yes the stations are downtown but the trains dead end at these stations Waterloo, Charing Cross, St Pancras, Kings Cross, Euston, and Victoria. They are not going through the city, some have stops outside the city core the same at the lines coming into NYC's 2 stations.
The giant "giant swath of switches " you speak of is because so many rail lines are being fed in that they have to be reduced to the available number of tracks through the tunnels. There are 2 tunnels that come in to NY from NJ and 4 from Long Island that's it, every train commuter or Amtrak has to be routed to the appropriate track and then put back in the line up for one of the available tunnels.
How will routing a train from Long Island Out to New Jersey and then back eliminate any of this choke point shuffle?
I did say "soon" London would also have a through-running network. What its effects are remains to be seen, but Crossrail is often touted as the most transformative project London has done in recent history and the entire idea behind it is to make many commuter trains through-run east-west through London's core rather than dead end.
Yes, that's what the giant swath of switches are for--they are meant to manage the many rail lines being fed in instead of coming in one end and out the other to do their turnarounds at the endpoints where it's a lot easier and less congested. You got the tunnel count right. The New Jersey side also sends trains to go further out to Sunnyside Yards to do their turnaround because they don't want to get in the way of operations coming in and out from the New Jersey side. Doing that means that they take up capacity on the East River tunnels. There's also technically a third tunnel popping west of Penn Station going up the west side of Manhattan, but that's not in commuter rail usage.
The chokepoint shuffle is partially being managed by sending NJT Trains out to Sunnyside Yards--making at least those as through-runs with LIRR's shorter branches means that the East River tunnel capacity they're using at least goes for something. That doesn't get rid of the chokepoint from New Jersey, but that's what the various attempts to make another set of tunnels under the Hudson have been.
But East Side Access is going to be complete in 2012...
East Side Access went for a massive terminal paradigm which meant a giant interlocking and many new terminal berths deep underground in two massive caverns for one station instead of something like Crossrail where it had more stations that were much smaller with two tracks. Wonderful combination of less useful and more complex.
Oh, plus the corruption with phantom workers getting paid with no discernible work duty. That was pretty exciting. Or having tunnel boring machine crews that needed two to three times the staffing that similar teams needed in other developed countries.
I did say "soon" London would also have a through-running network. What its effects are remains to be seen, but Crossrail is often touted as the most transformative project London has done in recent history and the entire idea behind it is to make many commuter trains through-run east-west through London's core rather than dead end.
Yes, that's what the giant swath of switches are for--they are meant to manage the many rail lines being fed in instead of coming in one end and out the other to do their turnarounds at the endpoints where it's a lot easier and less congested. You got the tunnel count right. The New Jersey side also sends trains to go further out to Sunnyside Yards to do their turnaround because they don't want to get in the way of operations coming in and out from the New Jersey side. Doing that means that they take up capacity on the East River tunnels. There's also technically a third tunnel popping west of Penn Station going up the west side of Manhattan, but that's not in commuter rail usage.
The chokepoint shuffle is partially being managed by sending NJT Trains out to Sunnyside Yards--making at least those as through-runs with LIRR's shorter branches means that the East River tunnel capacity they're using at least goes for something. That doesn't get rid of the chokepoint from New Jersey, but that's what the various attempts to make another set of tunnels under the Hudson have been.
Want to add that I'm not giving London enough credit as they also have done a lot of through-running for commuter rail with Thameslink, West London line, East London line, and the Canal Tunnels.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
