Northeast US Rail Infrastructure Spending and Value
In the Northeastern United States, much talk of rail infrastructure concerns rehabilitation work to atone for the deferred maintenance of the mid-20th century. In Connecticut, where I am finishing my Ph.D. in an unrelated field, riders have had to put up with decades of slow speeds and tracks out of service around the clock, supposedly in service of plant upkeep. Yet the conditions do not seem to be improving. Travel times on the New Haven Line have slowed considerably since I moved up here in 2015, let alone 2000. Moreover, the investments proposed in both the Time For CT and CONNECT NEC 2035 mostly consist of maintenance with some expansion projects. Most media coverage leads uneducated observers to believe that the state really does lack the money to keep up its railroads. However, examination of data on similar work reveals that Connecticut and the greater New York area as a whole already forward comparatively generous sums for rail network upkeep.
A few years ago, the Union International des Chemins de Fer (UIC), the international standard setter of railroads, published a report on maintenance and renewal expenditures on European rail lines. In 2015, the eight countries from which data was collected spent 15.3 billion euros on 55,175 route miles (circa 88,000 track miles). That is circa $250,000 per track mile in 2020 dollars, which is a similar figure to that cited in an earlier publicly available Amtrak OIG report. It is reasonable to take this figure as a good estimate of the steady-state cost of a unit of railroad. The European countries evaluated are not known for low costs of living, and the average usage of the railroads, just under 40 train-miles per track mile per day, mirrors that of the Northeast Corridor. The Amtrak OIG report also discusses Amtrak’s own estimate of the cost to keep the Northeast Corridor at a steady state: $316,000 per track mile. Generally speaking, the money European railroads spend on their plant buys them work practices that confine maintenance to the wee hours when little to no demand exists. When maintenance requires disruption outside those windows, the schedule changes are generally communicated ahead of time in considerably greater detail than the vague announcements that are accepted as normal here.
National Transportation Database (NTD) disclosures show that, since 2015, NJ Transit, Metro-North (under which the New Haven Line is bundled), and the Long Island Rail Road have each spent well over what Europe spent on their infrastructure. Note that all three of those railroads spend both operating and capital money on their physical plant, so looking through two categories of NTD data is required. While NJ Transit has somewhat legitimate claim to having lean funding during the Christie years, this pattern generally holds since 1997, which is the earliest data present.
Just about every category of railroad construction work takes more disruption in Connecticut than elsewhere. In Paris, along the four-track approach to the Gare d’Austerlitz, the overhead wire and the poles that suspend it over 110 miles of track are being replaced during overnight outages over six years. The total cost is projected around $350 million. The vehicles being used to run the wire are expected to replace nearly a mile of it per nighttime window. Along the New Haven Line, replacement of 220 track miles of wire and selected poles took thirty years of 24/7 track outages and nearly $1 billion. Segments of track between Bridgeport and the Housatonic River were out of service for months to years just for wire to be strung up on the poles that were ready. Moreover, the scope of work came nowhere close to replacement of every pole.
| Work Category | Metro-North experience | Comparable foreign experience |
| Overall capital expenditure | $682,000 per track mile (2015) | $250,000 per track mile (2015) |
| Track replacement | Daytime outages, rail and ties replaced separately. 5.3/440 rail miles on the New Haven Line are to be replaced in 2021 | Both rails and ties replaced at night 500 m/hr |
| Catenary replacement | Daytime outages 30 years, $1 billion for 220 track miles |
Night work, 6 years $300 million for 110 track miles |
| Ballast undercutting | Few miles per year, several weeks of daytime shutdowns | Overnight work, 100 m/night or more |
| Ballast tamping/regulation | Few miles per year, daytime shutdowns | Overnight work, 1 mile per night |
Ballast undercutting and track replacement generally require the track to settle under the weight of passing trains, necessitating temporary speed restrictions after the maintenance forces have finished their job, no matter if done with manual labor or with machines. However, a day or two of slow speeds is superior to having the track completely out of service, as is common practice on the Connecticut-owned portion of the Northeast Corridor.
My photograph, 20 July 2020 13:13 near East Norwalk. Claw cars like this are a common sight on the New Haven Line, including during peak times on weekdays. Despite these extensive disruptions, crews have been replacing just over 1% of the Metro-North system’s ties per year. Note how removal of any one tie temporarily blocks an adjacent track. Most modern track renewal trains do not impose this constraint and generally perform tasks much faster.
Replacement of life-expired undergrade bridges seems to be the most disruptive activity taking place in Connecticut lately. Yet replacement of a pair of bridges in Port Chester started one-and-a-half years ago and is not due to wrap up until next spring. Just across the Sound, similar projects require weekends. Yes, in Port Chester, service has been maintained while elsewhere it is often shut down completely. However, traffic at Port Chester has been at times restricted to two of four tracks, and the bridges have been placed one track at a time. Moreover, just miles away in Stamford, the six-track Atlantic Avenue bridge was replaced one half at a time over a nine-day service reduction in 2019. Given that, it is hard to see how avoidance of shutdown maps to a two-year construction time in Westchester County. The costs and timelines for both the Stamford and Port Chester bridge replacements also far outstrip those for a similar undertaking in South London.
There is more than enough to conclude that Northeastern passenger railroads are shorting their riders, particularly in Connecticut. Saying we need $120 billion—a sum that should suffice for a new Boston-Washington high-speed line twice to thrice over—to save less than half the time of a dedicated route would is effectively saying, I cannot deliver reasonable value for money. The institutions need to absorb practices from elsewhere pronto, and the government needs to help them do it. Employers that (are required to) take years to hire staff and severely backload benefits are not going to be attracting the caliber of staff needed. The insularity pervading the consultant-written Time For CT report should dispossess anyone of the notion that consultants can drive needed change. Their outside perspective matters little when they are alums of the same railroads they are advising and when more-functional overseas rail institutions don’t use them. If someone like me with no money or networking skills can develop connections to those familiar with overseas practices, surely American railroaders can figure out knowledge transfer from their counterparts at a fraction of AECOM’s going rate. Above all, it’s time to stop portraying Northeast US passenger rail as starved when it is anything but that.