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| Re: NY Senate Urges MTA To Reject Proposal To cut LIRR service into Penn Station (1140408) | |||
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Re: NY Senate Urges MTA To Reject Proposal To cut LIRR service into Penn Station |
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Posted by Olog-hai on Sat Feb 18 14:27:32 2012, in response to Re: NY Senate Urges MTA To Reject Proposal To cut LIRR service into Penn Station, posted by Henry R32 #3730 on Sat Feb 18 14:04:52 2012. They've already started increasing the length of trains to/from the capital regionFrom what to what? And I'd advise you to watch out for that being a ploy not to increase service. If they start double-heading P32AC-DMs on twelve-car trains, even worse still. Remember, this is all up to the state, not to the service operators. There are quite a few trains that you can count on to sell out on any given weekend, where five years ago you could make a walk up purchase for any train any time (except Thanksgiving). Tech companies and colleges are building huge campuses up here in Albany. Cuomo is throwing $1 billion at Buffalo. GE is giving their Schenectady location some expansion. Upstate NY is growing (finally), electrification will be quite useful in the coming years and it will be best to have it when we need then then need it and not have it Speculation. Manitou and Breakneck ridge can have their platforms raised with something like a Mini-High Still in pipe-dream-land, eh? The MTA really blew a lot of capital dough on raising platforms from low to high. That cost apparently still has not been paid off yet. They don't have unlimited funds, certainly not to replace Shoreliners and M7s with fictitious M8s, and absolutely not to build wires from NYP to ALB or beyond. I still insist that if you're going to do the overhead wire thing to Albany, then all of Metro-North all the way back to GCT needs to get that treatment. The M3s and M7s get pantographs, all third-rail anything goes bye-bye, and P32AC-DMs get replaced with electric motors on the Shoreliners (NJT still has ALP-44s that are less than twenty years old sitting perfectly idle in Kearny)—that's the only way that the notion can be cost-effective. Finally, for cost effectiveness you are working under the assumption of current diesel prices. In 10 years time do you think we still will be able to afford to blow hundreds of gallons a trip for 14 trains a day? Still cheaper than electrifying, and way, way cheaper than re-electrifying—for fourteen trains per day. Right now, the price of gasoline is a close match to what it was in 1980 when adjusted for inflation, interestingly enough. And what we can afford is highly dependent on world stability—which the USA let run away due to switching to being dovish. And I forgot to mention that with the Keystone service, the electric overhead infrastructure to Harrisburg was already there. Restoration is not the same as new-build. |
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