You’re wrong about the Baltimore light rail not reaching Penn Station. See the Camden Yards - Penn Station light rail line, it runs a few times/hour. https://www.mta.maryland.gov/schedule
How are you ever going to achieve high speed if you are stopping every 10 miles for another station? There appears to be 8 stations in Baltimore alone.
The article doesn’t understand dwell times at Penn Station or the capacity limitations there.
For example:
* Penn Station Dwells are not limited by passenger movement at doors. It’s not a metro, go and watch trains being loaded.
* Escalators constrain the rate at which people can actually reach the platforms
* These escalators need to switch direction when a train arrives, meaning multiple arrivals and departures are not simultaneously supported.
* The tracks do not support all operators and the station design divides Amtrak from LIRR
* Some tracks do not support full train lengths
* Not all tracks in the station are through tracks
* Trains are terminating at NYP which requires a longer process of ensuring no passengers are still on on board before leaving for the yard.
* It’s not only the north and east river tunnels, there is an entrance from the Empire line for Amtrak and separate paths to the WSSY for LIRR, not to mention train storage within Penn in the ACDE yards.
* Engineers walk the entire length of the train when a trip reverses direction. This takes a long time. The OP mentions through-running solution, but doesn’t point out the problems with it, namely incompatible equipment and giving an entirely different agency access to your multimillion dollar trains.
This is cool, but you are missing NJ Transit which has passenger trains separate from LIRR and Metro North. You are also missing Septa and MTA internal city light rail and subway lines, which are technically passenger trains.
Philadelphia has VERY little 24 hour service. Last I checked two bus routes operate along the same path as the 'orange' and 'blue' subway lines and nothing else. The regional rail service shuts down by midnight.
No, it travels on the main East Coast line that runs from Miami up to DC. What it doesn't do is STOP at any of the intermediate stations. It leaves the DC suburbs in late afternoon, and drops off just outside Orlando, Florida in the early morning of the next day.
Oh no, I do mean by train! Both the SEPTA route and the NJT route I was referring to are trains - they just don't go the whole way from Philly->NYC, so you need a transfer.
Now, frequency on SEPTA's Regional Rail lines has tanked during the pandemic, so using it may not be as practical as it once was. Haven't checked recently. Hopefully they get service back to reasonable levels.
It's not working partly because the LIRR, for reasons beyond comprehension, failed to order additional trainsets and instead is splitting existing trainsets between the three terminals (Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn): https://nypost.com/2023/09/12/lirr-failed-to-order-new-train...
The platforms by the tracks in Penn Station are narrow, dank, and poorly lit. I think that's why you see the boarding method there. Better platforms would make a huge difference.
The far-end (~50 miles) of the mainline regional rail line in Philly (used to be the R5, I forget what it's called after they renamed it) has half-hour coverage in the mornings for commutes, settling back on hourly during the day. To be fair that is unusually good coverage, but it is certainly possible to do elsewhere.
It's not a commuter train it's intercity. Tri-rail is the existing commuter service, it has 17 stations between Miami and West Palm Beach included (and Mangonia Park beyond WPB). This has 3 stations total: Miami, West Palm Beach and Fort Lauredale.
Silver Service has more stops along the way than Brightline.
DC metro was falling apart with massive service cuts as recently as like.. last year wasn't it? As I recall they had some massive deferred maintenance on the rolling stock causing derailments.
Sometimes I suspect that there is signaling going on that helps the traffic signals to favor the light rail train here. Then, sometimes, I suspect that there is not.
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