Building up to higher speeds

Railway Age, May, 2003 by Tom Judge

Amtrak engineers are proposing track designs and selecting materials to ensure ease of maintenance, ride quality and, most important, safety.

In addition to the flashing speeds of the Northeast Corridor, high speed rail plans are under way elsewhere in the U.S. Across the country, if plans for conventional equipment skimming along local corridors at up to 110 mph come to fruition, higher speed trains will become more viable, even in car-loving America.

New rolling stock and motive power are debuting around the country. Sophisticated signal systems are ensuring the safety of passengers. Underlying it all is the track structure, which must not only be safe, but also support consistent, highway-competitive service if rail passenger service is to lure people out of their automobiles and SUVs.

The federal government has designated high speed rail corridors throughout the U.S. One of these is Midwest Regional Rail, a nine-state consortium with a hub-and-spoke system centered in Chicago. Proposed and current operations include Chicago-Cleveland, Chicago-Indianapolis-Cincinnati, Chicago-Carbondale, Chicago-St. Louis with a Sr. Louis-Kansas City leg, Chicago-Quincy, Chicago-Omaha, Chicago-Milwaukee-Madison-St. Paul with a Milwaukee-Green Bay leg, Chicago-Detroit with a Detroit-Pontiac leg, and Chicago-Grand Rapids.

"They will be coordinated corridors to the extent we can create a network timetable and maximize equipment utilization," says Mike Franke, senior director-planning and business development for Amtrak. "Also, they will be incrementally higher speed rather than high speed in the context of European or Japanese operations."

"It's important to understand that not in every case are we co-mingled with freight," Franke says. "Sometimes we plan to use existing tracks, but we also plan to build dedicated passenger tracks on existing right-of-way where there's room. Let me put this in perspective. In many cases, trains were operating at 100 mph a century ago. We're trying to incrementally bring back the track to something close to that speed."

There are three types of rebuilds. The first is conventional, such as the Chicago-St. Louis line, which has undergone extensive tie and surfacing work. Second is a virtual rebuilding of a very light density line. Third is a new, dedicated passenger-service track built on existing right-of-way.

One example is the line from Watertown, Wis., near Milwaukee, to Madison. This is a little-used branch line that will be completely rebuilt. Engineering work is advanced to a great degree on the line and an environmental assessment has been filed with FRA. The former Milwaukee Road line now operated by Wisconsin & Southern handles freight trains three times a week.

"What we do ranges from the Watertown branch line to what works on other corridors," Franke says. "We look at where we'll do grade separations and where we'll put bridges across rivers. We check to see if there is enough right-of-way to build a separate dedicated track for passenger trains."

"Where there's a high-density freight line, but enough room on the right-of-way, we'll build a separate passenger track with 28-foot track centers from the passenger to the freight track," adds Charles Quandel, P.E., vice president of HNTB.

"We're sensitive to the amount of room we have," Franke says. "We also have to be sensitive to the future growth needs of the host railroad. Developing this service has got to be done in a cooperative spirit. For example, we think there is potential to use capital in congested terminal areas such as Chicago and St. Louis to make things much better for everybody."

"Conceptual planning has been done in most of the corridors," Quandel says. "We've analyzed it and reviewed it to be sure there will be no degradation to the freight operations. Additional infrastructure should benefit all parties. That includes new tracks, signal enhancement, interlockers, heavy tie programs, and more. And in several areas where there are diamonds, we're actually looking at flyovers to take our passenger trains over the freight tracks."

"It's important to sit down with the freight carriers and figure out what their problems are, what their anticipated goals are and so forth," Franke says. "We then try to figure out a way to accommodate both freight and passenger in a better way than today. That's often done by reconfiguring, putting some bypass tracks in, eliminating a diamond that may be nearby. We're trying to co-exist here. The beauty of this is that much of this planning could improve freight distribution as well, which is a good incentive for cooperation. This is not a green-field approach. Rather, we're building on what's already there. This is an incremental process, until we finally get up to our top speed of 110 mph. This is the reasonable approach. We're trying to compete with the automobile. We want to offer comparable travel times along with the benefits trains have to offer, such as all-weather reliability, onboard amenities, etc. There is a perception by some that we're going to use high speed rail to take the place of short-ha ul air carriers. But our marketing studies show that 90% or more of intercity travel is by car. That's where we have to get our customers."