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.
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.
The PATH trains are still around, but they haven't expanded service in at least a decade. PATH services the two Penn Stations (Newark and NY), but doesn't run to Secaucus. In fact, I think Secaucus is still exclusively NJT when it comes to rail.
There was some talk years ago about expanding AirTrain (at EWR) to Secaucus and the Penn Stations (for one-seat rides from midtown Manhattan to the airport), but that hasn't gone anywhere.
Some metro systems have a 24/7 bus system, but Philly's is an exact replacement for the trains. They don't make all the extra stops of the buses that serve similar routes. I'm unaware of anywhere else that does this
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.
My google fu is failing me but here are a few of the problems.
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Reliability
For a connection like this to work the trains have to meet, consistently, every hour or however frequently they run. This is pretty difficult, most rail networks are highly complex and delays cascade across a network. With station transfers this is okay, you can drop off anyone who needs to transfer to wait and let everyone else continue, but in this sort of moving transfer either people just totally miss their connection because it wasn't there, or the train loops around somehow and delays everyone else continuing on.
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Practicality
Let's say trains meet at 80 mph. Assuming you give people one minute to get their bags, walk to the door, take their seats in the other train (fairly aggressive for anyone who isn't a fit young adult) that means you spend 1.3 miles of distance traveling. That means 1.3 miles of parallel track where neither train can actually stop to serve local communities.
Station transfers in comparison are fairly compact (the length of a train) and they can actually also let people on and off from the surrounding areas with appropriate exits, whereas that's not possible with moving trains.
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Safety
We can't really guarantee two trains will move at the same speed parallel to each other. Trains are not automated to such a degree outside of self-contained metro networks, full automation is too complex to do in one shot and partial automation is still very complex and in its early days. Also whatever physical mechanism has to be tight enough to accommodate accessibility (wheelchairs can't go over large gaps) and reliable enough to work all the time; what happens if said mechanism breaks down while the trains are moving and conjoined?
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Finally there's the matter of actual need. If you need trains to not get slowed down, you can have some express services skip connecting to local regional services at all. It turns out demand for that kind of service is fairly limited; as an example, Amtrak has tried several times to introduce nonstop DC to NYC service, but it turns out that the additional passengers do not offset the loss of passengers from Baltimore, Wilmington and Philadelphia.
I'm pretty sure the commuter trains are a completely separate system from the subway and have quite different control systems since they operate over longer distances.
You must be using the LIRR. Things are not as consistent on the NJTransit side if the house. I know with about 90% certainty which of two platforms to go to for my train. Sometimes, like Monday, they throw us a curve ball and board us on the other side if the concourse. Occasionally we even board on track 13 in the LIRR area.
No, this is the issue. A sick passenger on union sq on N Q R in a rush hour means for twenty minutes trains are stopped. A sick passenger on the L, means trains are stopped in both directions. It takes hours for the train service to get back to normal. This happens nearly daily. If we still had Gothamist, we would have still had daily articles about what caused the delay.
You're somewhat close to being able to do it between Boston and New York (and then all the way to Philly); there's just the gap between Wickford Junction and New London.
(MBTA's Providence line, gap, CTRail's Shore Line East, Metro-North’s New Haven Line)
The platforms are not large enough to support people waiting at the same time as the train is unloading and are full of columns. There are safety concerns in not being able to evacuate passengers quickly enough in the event of an emergency via narrow escalators.
Through running NJ Transit onto LIRR is through running AC trains onto a DC network. That is billions. In addition, nobody from NJ wants to go to Long Island and vice versa, and most NJ Trains run-through the station in the same direction already to be stored at Sunnyside. The same is true of LIRR, they go into the west side yard as a straight move. The NJ trains that don’t run to SSY are usually making use of the stub end tracks at Penn where through running isn’t an option.
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.
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