It looks like the Northeast Corridor is becoming the... East Coast Corridor with this new funding to create a high-speed line between Richmond, VA (not far from Washington, DC) and Raleigh, NC....
It looks like the Northeast Corridor is becoming the... East Coast Corridor with this new funding to create a high-speed line between Richmond, VA (not far from Washington, DC) and Raleigh, NC. It's called the "S-Line." Admittedly, it is "high speed" only in the vaguest sense of the word—we are absolutely not seeing 220 mph trains—but it would offer a level of service similar to the NEC, which the South currently lacks. That's extremely good for the region and for the state of passenger rail in the United States.
It currently takes about 2.5 hours (without traffic) to travel between these cities by car, and a pitiful 3.5+ hours by rail. The train that currently operates between these cities runs at 80 mph at the most, but is usually significantly slower, as anyone taking it can attest. Supposedly the new line "will be able to hit 110 mph or faster"; it's unclear if this means 110 mph the whole route or just a couple points of that. Max speeds are mostly irrelevant if average speeds are still low. Time will tell! (The "or faster" is a big if as the FEIS says the project will max out at 110 [see ES-6]. The line isn't going to be electrified immediately, which means it can't really go faster.)
Were this line to operate at 110 mph all the way from Richmond to Raleigh, travel time without stops would be just 90 minutes. That's the same amount of time it takes to get from New York to Philadelphia on the Acela. 110 mph service, even though it would probably not be for the full 162 miles of the S-line, would be a boon. The FEIS says that travel time between Richmond and Raleigh will be 2:14, which is faster than driving [see ES-7]. Travel time between Washington and Raleigh would go from 6 hours to under 4.5.
Eventually, plans call for further HSR (high-ish speed rail, I suppose) from Charlotte, NC to Atlanta, GA, one of the biggest metro areas in the country. That would be a very big deal as a high-speed rail city pair of Atlanta and Washington DC would be pretty strong, not unlike DC to Boston.
It doesn't say whether these new lines will be electric or diesel powered. Has anyone seen it mentioned elsewhere? So far, only the Northeast and Keystone Corridors are electric but it would be...
It doesn't say whether these new lines will be electric or diesel powered. Has anyone seen it mentioned elsewhere? So far, only the Northeast and Keystone Corridors are electric but it would be good news if that is changing.
There are other electric lines in the country. As of the Final EIS in 2015, this project will be diesel-powered: Since I haven't heard any specific comments on electrification, I assume that the...
There are other electric lines in the country.
As of the Final EIS in 2015, this project will be diesel-powered:
The maximum authorized speed (MAS) for the Project is established as 110 miles per hour (mph) using locomotives powered by fossil fuels. [p. ES-6]
The entire SEHSR Corridor is being designed for trains powered by fossil fuel. Early feasibility studies established an “incremental approach” to higher speeds, making use of existing rail ROW and fossil fuel locomotives. This minimizes impacts to both the human and natural environments. By using existing infrastructure, the initial capital investment is reduced.
It should be noted that the current Richmond to Raleigh Project designs will not preclude conversion to electricity in the future, thus allowing higher speeds. Conversion to electricity and higher speeds would require additional environmental evaluation at the appropriate time. Likewise, the potential use of dual-mode locomotives, which allow trains to operate along routes that are only partially electrified without switching locomotives, will be evaluated in the future as the technology advances. [p. 1-22]
Since I haven't heard any specific comments on electrification, I assume that the conversion is still not included but also not precluded for the future.
Sorry, I was puzzled by that because I was also thinking about regional/local routes. Yes, the only fully electrified main lines of note between major cities are the Northeast Corridor itself and...
Exemplary
Sorry, I was puzzled by that because I was also thinking about regional/local routes. Yes, the only fully electrified main lines of note between major cities are the Northeast Corridor itself and the adjacent Keystone Corridor. Depending on how you define "inter-city," there are various others:
The South Shore Line between Chicago, IL and South Bend, IN (90 miles), and other Metra Electric lines
Most of the western Long Island Railroad (60 miles); Amtrak has plans for Ronkonkoma service
The Metro North-owned section of the Empire Corridor to Croton-on-Hudson (40 miles)
The Metro North Harlem Line to Brewster (60 miles); in theory, could, uh, redundantly go to... Danbury?
The NJ Transit Morristown Line (to Dover, 50 miles?); runs about 1/3 the way to Scranton
The NJ Transit Raritan Valley Line to nowhere (50 miles); but about 50% of the way to the Lehigh Valley
The NJ Transit Long Branch Line to Long Branch (60 miles); could go to Atlantic City
The SEPTA Doylestown Line (30 miles); could go to the Lehigh Valley via Landsdale/Quakertown
The SEPTA Media Line (30 miles); could go to the minor population center of West Chester
The Denver FasTraks system has at least one electric commuter line (20ish miles)
Various other local trains that Amtrak probably wouldn't ever run on
Caltrain between San Francisco and San Jose is all but completely electrified now. Electric service will begin next year. Other than that, projects of note would be Brightline West and California High-Speed Rail, both of which will be electric when built.
Since both Ronkonkoma and Scranton in particular will likely receive Amtrak service in the next decade I tend to think about their already electrified sections as main lines as far as planning is concerned. The Scranton Line would be particularly useful for inter-city rail because of future connection opportunities to Binghamton, Ithaca, and Syracuse, though there are no such plans. Electrifying the Empire Corridor to Albany would also be a big deal, though there aren't any specific plans for that either.
The others mentioned are fairly insignificant branch lines at the moment, although they could be relatively useful if extended to other population centers. Some of them, like the Harlem and Media lines, are probably completely useless as far as Amtrak is concerned directly, but are relevant to their cities' local networks. Local efforts to extend electrification could therefore boost that city's contribution to Amtrak ridership via transfers.
The Boston MBTA has been considering commuter rail electrification (Alternatives 3, 5, or 6) for years, and will probably do it this decade, but there isn't a specific timeline (maybe by 2035). Electrifying the Haverhill Line would be a prerequisite for Amtrak electrifying, say, the Downeaster. Boston should probably worry more about digging a through-running tunnel downtown though.
There actually used to be a whole bunch of electrified lines throughout the country, but they were mostly retired in the 1930s to 1950s. There are still a few electric freight lines in random places throughout the US, but most of them have also been retired. There are various electrified light rail lines in the works (Seattle, Maryland, Austin), but I'm not aware of any other other main line electrification projects.
Half serious question but why does it cost a billion dollars to do this? What is actually being built and how much does each thing cost? There’s the track The trains Track infrastructure and...
Half serious question but why does it cost a billion dollars to do this?
What is actually being built and how much does each thing cost?
There’s the track
The trains
Track infrastructure and signalling
Presumably some control infrastructure to manage the track in the above item.
Stations
Initial staff
Buying the land for all this stuff to go on.
Presumably once thats done they charge money to sit on the train so they can then pay their staff and run the trains and maintain the infrastructure with revenue.
Google maps says Raleigh to Richmond is 171 miles. So per mile thats some expensive train route.
$1 billion USD for the 162 miles of the S-Line is actually extremely cheap for American costs. That's $6.2 million per mile, which is amazingly low for a railway of modestly high speed in the US....
Exemplary
$1 billion USD for the 162 miles of the S-Line is actually extremely cheap for American costs. That's $6.2 million per mile, which is amazingly low for a railway of modestly high speed in the US. A four-lane highway could easily cost $4–10 million per mile while having a much worse physical footprint and other externalities. In this case, an equivalent highway in this location would probably cost substantially more due to not having a full right-of-way, whereas the S-Line already has a suitable one.
In Europe, which has more comparatively normal costs than the US, a true high-speed line might cost somewhere between €12–45 million per kilometer ($22.8–85.5 million per mile, if I did my math right). For reference, California High-Speed Rail will cost something like $200 million per mile; US costs are completely unreasonable. The S-Line in VA/NC would intuitively be far closer to the lower end of the spectrum since it's at-grade (rather than a tunnel under the sea or through mountains) and obviously not high-speed, though it gets close (this line will reach 110 mph for now, and the international definition of HSR is 125–150+ mph). In this sense the S-Line's costs are more similar to Spain's, which is saying something! It's not as good as Spain's HSR because it isn't high-speed (the Ave Madrid–Lleida hits 193 mph and is of course electrified), but considering the US is typically between one and two orders of magnitude worse at spending money on rail than countries like that, I would call the S-Line's cost a win.
Note: I don't think the full cost of the project is $1 billion. This is just the size of the grant, not full project funding. The entire Southeast High-Speed Rail route of apparently 158 miles studied in the EIS has a total cost of $2.4 billion [Final EIS after p. ES-24, "Impact Matrix: SEHSR Corridor - Preferred Alternative"], most of which is rail/road construction cost ($2.1 billion) and only a small amount is right of way/utility relocation cost. The discrepancy between 158 and 162 miles would lead me to believe that these numbers apply to slightly different routes, or sections of a total route. Other tables in the report refer to infrastructure cost projections of $730 million [p. 1-10] which doesn't really make sense. Old projections also range from $1.2 billion to $3.8 billion [p. 4-72], though of course the Selected Alternative isn't going to match these. It's also worth noting that the FEIS is from 2015 and the actual costs since then might have changed substantially, either increased or decreased based on work done by other agencies in the meantime and various economic factors.
In any case, even with a total cost of $2.4 billion ($15.2 million/mile), while certainly higher than $6.2 million/mile, this is not a Second Avenue Subway situation. It's far below even the low estimate for HSR in Europe, far enough that despite the lower speed it would seem to be relatively cost-efficient. Electrification (to allow for higher speeds) in the future would cost an additional $5.3–8.5 million/km in an expensive and built-up area like San Francisco, or as little as $3.5 million/km done cost-effectively in that region. (In Europe, the cost could be $1.25–1.5 million/km or less; in New Zealand apparently $700k/km!) That's $3.3–5.3 million/mi or as little as $2.2 million/mi for SF; $777k–933/mi in Europe or $435k/mi in NZ. Kind of cheap. Most likely, reaching extremely high speeds would require realignments, which would require land acquisition and completely new track (including electrical systems). It's not clear to me how much of a bottleneck electrification of the existing system is vs. track curves on certain sections of the route, so I can't comment on it further.
What is actually being built and how much does each thing cost[?]
I'm going to preface this by noting that the cost-benefit analysis from the Federal Railroad Administration in the Final EIS (p. 1-7) for this project is very positive. They have a ratio of $2.54 in benefits for every $1.00 spent on the Southeast High-Speed Rail Corridor.
You can read the Final EIS if you want a full cost breakdown, though it's kind of unspecific and spread out across the 1141-page document. Here are the things that they spend money on:
Some right-of-way purchases. This totals something like $234 million [Final EIS p. 4-149]. They don't have to buy a whole lot of land for this project, which is one reason why it's inexpensive compared to something like California High-Speed Rail. They're using an existing right-of-way, not cutting through a bunch of properties. (Related: in 2021, the state of Virginia purchased a considerable amount of track between DC and Richmond from CSX for passenger operations. Virginia and North Carolina also purchased rights to operate trains on some existing freight lines. That's mostly a separate project and is therefore not included in the EIS, but it will increase this project's benefits considerably over what was laid out in the 2015 FEIS.)
Grade separation. This entails building overpasses or underpasses at any local road crossings or other rail crossings, as well as removing signaling systems and potentially closing some low-use road crossings. Grade separation is legally required for trains to go faster than 125 mph (Final EIS p. 1-28). This means that when they eventually electrify the track, they will not also have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on overpasses. Some realignment and of course track upgrades would be necessary for particularly high speeds, but their decision to grade-separate is a pragmatic and prudent approach. (In contrast, see Brightline Florida: constant at-grade crossings severely limit train speeds to just 80 mph for most of the route.)
Creating or upgrading the physical bed of the railway (track ballast) for the entire length of the route. There are fairly specific engineering requirements for what materials are suitable for this, but it's just densely packed rocks. Luckily, they already have a bed from rail operations in the past: but it probably needs maintenance after being disused for decades.
Tracklaying: first the railroad ties that help disperse the vertical load from the tracks across the ballast, then the tracks themselves. The track on the northern section of the S-Line was torn up years ago (though the right of way remained), so they have to lay new track there. I think they are also laying new track parallel to the freight line in the southern section to minimize traffic. You can only lay tracks on particularly hot days unless you want to artificially heat them during installation (for various material compression/tension reasons that are too complicated to cover: but Practical Engineering does a great job!). This limits when tracklaying can happen and can be a source of cost overruns if there are bad weather events. That's a pretty well-understood cost though, so their risk contingency surely handles it appropriately.
Track geometry: as an extension of the previous point, there are extremely specific regulations for railway cant (superelevation), cant deficiency, etc. or else the train will derail. To operate at higher speeds, there are stricter requirements for each of these measures, as determined by a tracklaying/track geometry car. You can read the Federal Railroad Administration's Track Safety Standards (Section C, 5.29) for more information. Obviously, finer requirements are more expensive. This is one reason why HSR is costly relative to conventional rail.
Junction upgrades: since they're going to be running passenger trains on a route that previously only saw freight traffic, they will have to create/upgrade some junctions to allow for interoperability when maintenance on some section of track is required. Luckily, they are grade-separating most of the route, so these won't lead to delays, they're just a "nice to have."
Signaling systems. Since they're grade-separating, they actually don't need a ton of complicated signaling. But they will need some for any instance where their line comes into contact with the freight line.
Drainage infrastructure. Since this is a linear project, it's going to conflict with the natural flow of rainwater. They may need to build or upgrade culverts and otherwise ensure that waterways don't affect the track's stability. Since they're on an existing right-of-way, some of these will already have been constructed, and of course the ballast is permeable and avoids the worst effects of storm runoff. But the costs of fluid diversions can easily be in the tens of millions for a project.
Utilities and relocation. In some locations, the engineers must relocate underground or aboveground utilities (pipes, wires, etc.) that were built while the northern part of the route was out of service. If they're deviating at all from the existing right-of-way (which they might be in a few points), they would also need to account for utilities. Total cost around $52 million. [FEIS after ES-24: Impact Matrix; and FEIS p. 4-246]
Stations. This project is using existing stations where possible. It doesn't need that many new ones, and as I understand it they're making efforts not to overbuild them, because many American construction cost overruns are specifically from overbuilding stations. Stations are not necessarily just points along a route but ideally have high platforms (for level boarding, which is ADA-compliant and more operationally efficient than low boarding platforms), elemental shelter (a semi-enclosed or fully enclosed structure), and amenities like a ticketing office, restrooms, possibly a food venue for a larger station.
Various environmental costs including noise abatement (such as physical sound barriers). And probably some more stuff that I'm not recalling off the top of my head.
You can break down each of these costs across physical materials, labor, and administrative costs.
They don't have to buy new rolling stock because Amtrak will just operate their existing trains along this faster route. If they electrify the tracks, they would need to buy electric trainsets.
Operational costs after construction are a completely separate discussion. The FEIS has some numbers if you care to look (p. 1-34), but operational costs will be covered by ticket revenue: with a surplus of tens of millions in operating income, actually. The increased ridership from having substantially better travel times makes a big difference.
It looks like the Northeast Corridor is becoming the... East Coast Corridor with this new funding to create a high-speed line between Richmond, VA (not far from Washington, DC) and Raleigh, NC. It's called the "S-Line." Admittedly, it is "high speed" only in the vaguest sense of the word—we are absolutely not seeing 220 mph trains—but it would offer a level of service similar to the NEC, which the South currently lacks. That's extremely good for the region and for the state of passenger rail in the United States.
It currently takes about 2.5 hours (without traffic) to travel between these cities by car, and a pitiful 3.5+ hours by rail. The train that currently operates between these cities runs at 80 mph at the most, but is usually significantly slower, as anyone taking it can attest. Supposedly the new line "will be able to hit 110 mph or faster"; it's unclear if this means 110 mph the whole route or just a couple points of that. Max speeds are mostly irrelevant if average speeds are still low. Time will tell! (The "or faster" is a big if as the FEIS says the project will max out at 110 [see ES-6]. The line isn't going to be electrified immediately, which means it can't really go faster.)
Were this line to operate at 110 mph all the way from Richmond to Raleigh, travel time without stops would be just 90 minutes. That's the same amount of time it takes to get from New York to Philadelphia on the Acela. 110 mph service, even though it would probably not be for the full 162 miles of the S-line, would be a boon. The FEIS says that travel time between Richmond and Raleigh will be 2:14, which is faster than driving [see ES-7]. Travel time between Washington and Raleigh would go from 6 hours to under 4.5.
Eventually, plans call for further HSR (high-ish speed rail, I suppose) from Charlotte, NC to Atlanta, GA, one of the biggest metro areas in the country. That would be a very big deal as a high-speed rail city pair of Atlanta and Washington DC would be pretty strong, not unlike DC to Boston.
Read more about the project from the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Check out the Southeast High Speed Rail Tier II Final EIS for more technical analysis of the route.
It doesn't say whether these new lines will be electric or diesel powered. Has anyone seen it mentioned elsewhere? So far, only the Northeast and Keystone Corridors are electric but it would be good news if that is changing.
There are other electric lines in the country.
As of the Final EIS in 2015, this project will be diesel-powered:
Since I haven't heard any specific comments on electrification, I assume that the conversion is still not included but also not precluded for the future.
Which other lines are electric? Northeast and Keystone Corridor are the only two intercity passenger routes I'm aware of.
Sorry, I was puzzled by that because I was also thinking about regional/local routes. Yes, the only fully electrified main lines of note between major cities are the Northeast Corridor itself and the adjacent Keystone Corridor. Depending on how you define "inter-city," there are various others:
Caltrain between San Francisco and San Jose is all but completely electrified now. Electric service will begin next year. Other than that, projects of note would be Brightline West and California High-Speed Rail, both of which will be electric when built.
Since both Ronkonkoma and Scranton in particular will likely receive Amtrak service in the next decade I tend to think about their already electrified sections as main lines as far as planning is concerned. The Scranton Line would be particularly useful for inter-city rail because of future connection opportunities to Binghamton, Ithaca, and Syracuse, though there are no such plans. Electrifying the Empire Corridor to Albany would also be a big deal, though there aren't any specific plans for that either.
The others mentioned are fairly insignificant branch lines at the moment, although they could be relatively useful if extended to other population centers. Some of them, like the Harlem and Media lines, are probably completely useless as far as Amtrak is concerned directly, but are relevant to their cities' local networks. Local efforts to extend electrification could therefore boost that city's contribution to Amtrak ridership via transfers.
The Boston MBTA has been considering commuter rail electrification (Alternatives 3, 5, or 6) for years, and will probably do it this decade, but there isn't a specific timeline (maybe by 2035). Electrifying the Haverhill Line would be a prerequisite for Amtrak electrifying, say, the Downeaster. Boston should probably worry more about digging a through-running tunnel downtown though.
There actually used to be a whole bunch of electrified lines throughout the country, but they were mostly retired in the 1930s to 1950s. There are still a few electric freight lines in random places throughout the US, but most of them have also been retired. There are various electrified light rail lines in the works (Seattle, Maryland, Austin), but I'm not aware of any other other main line electrification projects.
Half serious question but why does it cost a billion dollars to do this?
What is actually being built and how much does each thing cost?
There’s the track
The trains
Track infrastructure and signalling
Presumably some control infrastructure to manage the track in the above item.
Stations
Initial staff
Buying the land for all this stuff to go on.
Presumably once thats done they charge money to sit on the train so they can then pay their staff and run the trains and maintain the infrastructure with revenue.
Google maps says Raleigh to Richmond is 171 miles. So per mile thats some expensive train route.
$1 billion USD for the 162 miles of the S-Line is actually extremely cheap for American costs. That's $6.2 million per mile, which is amazingly low for a railway of modestly high speed in the US. A four-lane highway could easily cost $4–10 million per mile while having a much worse physical footprint and other externalities. In this case, an equivalent highway in this location would probably cost substantially more due to not having a full right-of-way, whereas the S-Line already has a suitable one.
In Europe, which has more comparatively normal costs than the US, a true high-speed line might cost somewhere between €12–45 million per kilometer ($22.8–85.5 million per mile, if I did my math right). For reference, California High-Speed Rail will cost something like $200 million per mile; US costs are completely unreasonable. The S-Line in VA/NC would intuitively be far closer to the lower end of the spectrum since it's at-grade (rather than a tunnel under the sea or through mountains) and obviously not high-speed, though it gets close (this line will reach 110 mph for now, and the international definition of HSR is 125–150+ mph). In this sense the S-Line's costs are more similar to Spain's, which is saying something! It's not as good as Spain's HSR because it isn't high-speed (the Ave Madrid–Lleida hits 193 mph and is of course electrified), but considering the US is typically between one and two orders of magnitude worse at spending money on rail than countries like that, I would call the S-Line's cost a win.
Note: I don't think the full cost of the project is $1 billion. This is just the size of the grant, not full project funding. The entire Southeast High-Speed Rail route of apparently 158 miles studied in the EIS has a total cost of $2.4 billion [Final EIS after p. ES-24, "Impact Matrix: SEHSR Corridor - Preferred Alternative"], most of which is rail/road construction cost ($2.1 billion) and only a small amount is right of way/utility relocation cost. The discrepancy between 158 and 162 miles would lead me to believe that these numbers apply to slightly different routes, or sections of a total route. Other tables in the report refer to infrastructure cost projections of $730 million [p. 1-10] which doesn't really make sense. Old projections also range from $1.2 billion to $3.8 billion [p. 4-72], though of course the Selected Alternative isn't going to match these. It's also worth noting that the FEIS is from 2015 and the actual costs since then might have changed substantially, either increased or decreased based on work done by other agencies in the meantime and various economic factors.
In any case, even with a total cost of $2.4 billion ($15.2 million/mile), while certainly higher than $6.2 million/mile, this is not a Second Avenue Subway situation. It's far below even the low estimate for HSR in Europe, far enough that despite the lower speed it would seem to be relatively cost-efficient. Electrification (to allow for higher speeds) in the future would cost an additional $5.3–8.5 million/km in an expensive and built-up area like San Francisco, or as little as $3.5 million/km done cost-effectively in that region. (In Europe, the cost could be $1.25–1.5 million/km or less; in New Zealand apparently $700k/km!) That's $3.3–5.3 million/mi or as little as $2.2 million/mi for SF; $777k–933/mi in Europe or $435k/mi in NZ. Kind of cheap. Most likely, reaching extremely high speeds would require realignments, which would require land acquisition and completely new track (including electrical systems). It's not clear to me how much of a bottleneck electrification of the existing system is vs. track curves on certain sections of the route, so I can't comment on it further.
I'm going to preface this by noting that the cost-benefit analysis from the Federal Railroad Administration in the Final EIS (p. 1-7) for this project is very positive. They have a ratio of $2.54 in benefits for every $1.00 spent on the Southeast High-Speed Rail Corridor.
You can read the Final EIS if you want a full cost breakdown, though it's kind of unspecific and spread out across the 1141-page document. Here are the things that they spend money on:
You can break down each of these costs across physical materials, labor, and administrative costs.
They don't have to buy new rolling stock because Amtrak will just operate their existing trains along this faster route. If they electrify the tracks, they would need to buy electric trainsets.
Operational costs after construction are a completely separate discussion. The FEIS has some numbers if you care to look (p. 1-34), but operational costs will be covered by ticket revenue: with a surplus of tens of millions in operating income, actually. The increased ridership from having substantially better travel times makes a big difference.
Well I am glad I asked because we are all better off for your answer. Thanks for putting in the effort to respond!