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| Re: No Future MN New Haven Line Service to Penn Station ?? (899118) | |||
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Re: No Future MN New Haven Line Service to Penn Station ?? |
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Posted by trainsarefun on Sat Feb 13 11:13:18 2010, in response to Re: No Future MN New Haven Line Service to Penn Station, posted by Olog-hai on Fri Feb 12 22:16:06 2010. Ain't gonna happen. And it certainly wouldn't be due to LIRR opening ESA.There have been mixed statements. If you go by the ESA documents, which are issued by MTA CC and LIRR, then there will be no peak service cuts when ESA is operational, and LIRR with add 24 AM trains during the peak hour while retaining full current peak hour service. However, most of us don't believe that. For one thing, ESA is approaching completion, and LIRR simply doesn't have the EMU fleet to add 24 peak trains when their monthly meeting minutes reveal that they've barely been meeting EMU car requirements for years. Word is also that LIRR means to retire its M3 fleet and replace that fleet with an M9 fleet, meaning that LIRR would have to get to MTA to sign off on a rather large capital expenditure, which seems doubtful in the present climate. There are other problems too. A major one is that the proposed ESA service increases are major league overkill. E.g., Port Washington and Port Jefferson Branches AM peak hour service were supposed to double. No one in his right mind actually believes that ridership could actually occupy all of those trains, assuming that they're even bought and run. And there's also the issue of LIRR running that many more trains pretty much bankrupting MTA given LIRR's very high subsidy rates. Another problem is that the rates of turning trains around at ESA are faster than what LIRR has been able to accomplish at stub-end terminals, so likely the 24 tph capacity for ESA is in fact wrong by up to 20-25%. So realistically, it's natural at this point to expect that LIRR will be re-routing certain existing service to/from ESA. Thus I'd expect, e.g., that 40-50% of Pt Washington branch runs would be ESA trains, with the remainder remaining NYP trains. If so, that would free up capacity at LIRR. MTA of course wants to give that capacity to MNCR. However, NJT and AMTK probably want that capacity, so it will be a bureaucratic fight for LIRR to gift that capacity to MNCR when NJT and AMTK want at least some of it. On the other side of it, MTA CC claims that PSA (Penn Station Access) is real and they were up to draft scoping alignments. Remember MTA was going to merge LIRR and Metro-North into "MTA Rail Road" as well? That died too. Correct. In fact, I speculate that part of that move would've made the transfer of capacity rights at NYP easier than it might now turn out to be. At this point we have questions, not answers. Finally, there is also the issue that there's no budget item, to my knowledge, dealing with the required third rail extension, and Dutchrailnut informs us in this discussion that the test of the third rail shoe design wasn't satisfactory. |
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