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GETTING UP TO SPEED
Amtrak's Northeast Corridor, the nation's premier high-speed passenger route, is a crucial part of the passenger railroad's economic plan, as well as a showcase for passenger-rail potential for other corridors throughout the country. By the winter of 1999-2000, for the New York-to-Boston part of the ride, the aim is a three-hour trip on express trains over the 231-mile line; non-express trains are aiming for three and three-quarter hours. (Improvements to the already-successful south end of the NEC will be addressed in the future, after the north-end work, with its potential for significant revenue enhancement, is completed.) When the improved New York-to-Boston system is in place, nearly half of the route between the two cities will see speeds higher than the current maximums.
New trains, being built in Barre, Vt., and Plattsburgh, N.Y., by Bombardier and GEC Alsthom, will have top speeds of 165 mph, allowing for 150 mph traffic.(The companies won the contract for the 18 new six-car trains at $27 million per set.) Tilt technology will allow the vehicles to maintain higher speeds through the more than 220 curves that will remain along the route. But for all the attention surrounding hi-tech improvements, much of the effort being made to bring the NEC up to high speed is in the form of good old-fashioned steel-on-steel engineering improvements. In fact, while the eventual arrival of the high-speed transits will indeed cut 45 minutes from the travel time, the first 45 minutes of savings will come from a range of comparatively-mundane track and electrification improvements.
Those improvements are moving steadily forward. "Everything we're doing is to get this project finished," says John Gensel, senior program scheduler. A third-quarter report issued at the end of July by David Carol, Amtrak's vice president of high-speed rail, described electrification and other infrastructure work between New Haven and Boston, along with the design of the new high-speed transits, as being "on schedule for the start-up and phase-in of new high-speed rail service by the close of 1999."
High up on Carol's list of projects is electrification. Underway in Connecticut and Massachusetts, electrification from New Haven to Boston will mean trains will no longer experience a 10-minute delay at New Haven for switching between electric and diesel power. Further, the fully-electric trains will be able to accelerate and decelerate faster than their diesel counterparts. Carol reports that approximately 17 drilling rigs are being used to install what will eventually number 14,000 pre-cast-concrete catenary-pole foundations while additional crews install the poles and wire. More than a third of the foundations have been installed, with work scheduled to run through July 1998. Carol says that work on 24 electrical supply and management facilities, including four substations to step-down public-utility power from 115kV to 25kV, is set to begin this Fall.
Also high on Amtrak's priority list is adjusting bridge clearances for installation of the catenary system. Two tried-and-true methods are being used for this: Wherever possible, track is being undercut and lowered; in other cases, bridges are being raised. In 25 instances so far, tracks have been lowered for electrification clearance, with nine more cases left. This work is being conducted with Amtrak's Plasser RM 76. Meanwhile, nine bridges have been raised and 16 more will be.
Amtrak frequently tries to piggyback work because of the severe limitations placed on track outages. "We have to use them as effectively as possible," says Gensel. Undercutting, for instance, is coordinated with programmed surface maintenance or bridge deck conversions are performed in conjunction with other kinds of surfacing work.
There have been numerous opportunities for such simultaneous work, because the NEC's entire infrastructure is being upgraded. Within the scope of the New Haven-to-Boston Northeastern High Speed Rail Improvement Project (NHRIP), there have been improvements to track, turnouts, bridges, curves and c&s systems.
TRACK AND STRUCTURES
On the track side, the scope of the NHRIP included the installation of 98 rail miles of continuous welded rail, of which fewer than 25 miles remain to be installed. Some 332,000 concrete ties equipped with elastic fastening systems have been installed, about 1,000 shy of the total the project calls for. For the past two years, the railroad has been standardized with the Pandrol Fastclip; ties installed prior to that time employ an amalgam of systems. For its main track-laying work, Amtrak has benefited from its TLS, or track-laying system, which can execute a complete concrete-tie track renewal in essentially a single pass.
While the NEC's ties are predominantly concrete, a significant test of wood ties, for use on the corridor, is being conducted at the Association of American Railroads Transportation Technology Center's Facility for Accelerated Service Testing. Wood-tie proponents hope to demonstrate the efficacy of using wood-tie track on this high-speed passenger corridor.
Of the 127 curve modifications called for between New Haven and Boston by the NHRIP, only eight remain to be completed. Although the track moves are relatively minor-even the most extreme are within five feet of the current layout-in total, they are expected to help shave five minutes off travel time. According to Conrad Ruppert, director, field engineering, most of the modifications were intended not at reducing radii but at lengthening spiral transitions. Accordingly, the realignments will provide greater passenger comfort, especially as the new, faster trains achieve accelerations older equipment was never capable of. A similar program is proposed for the route between New Haven and New Rochelle, in which 27 additional curves would be realigned to permit higher speeds between New Haven and New York.
Amtrak has spent more than 13 years evaluating various advanced turnout designs, with a distinctly different spin on the goal established by the western, heavy-haul-oriented freight roads. In Amtrak's case, the goal has always been to provide increased comfort and safety to its passengers, at increased speeds, with reduced maintenance costs. This point was made at an American Railway Engineering Association symposium on turnouts and special trackwork last year by Amtrak's Nick Skoutelas, director engineering tests and standards and Paul Rice, engineer design. The railroad's general policy, Skoutelas said, is to use tangential-geometry and asymmetric turnouts with movable-point frogs, all on concrete ties, where speeds are at least 100 mph. Even in cases where speeds are lower, the railroad will make use of such advanced designs when traffic patterns and density warrant doing so.
This philosophy was at work in regard to the five high-speed interlockings that were installed at Guilford and Old Saybrook, Conn., and Westerly, Davisville and Kingston, R.I. The interlockings will allow for 80-mph track changes. The Plasser American Corp.-built Switch Exchange System has enabled construction forces to install these massive trackwork configurations with comparative ease. Modifications were set up for seven others, of which five remain to be done. Nine wayside turnouts were installed, and 10 more remain. Amtrak's policy has been to use spring-frog turnouts with as high a straight/diverging traffic ratio as 60/40.
Amtrak has acknowledged disadvantages to advanced turnouts-they have an increased initial cost; are more difficult to handle; require more-involved shipping preparation; and have typically provided a significant challenge to North American suppliers when it comes to manufacturing certain key components. Nonetheless, the advantages outweigh those drawbacks. Substantially-reduced switch angles; improved ride quality; reduced maintenance; better stock-rail reliability; and raised weather-free switch points are among the factors that make them cost-effective; the new-generation turnouts also incorporate 100% cast-in-concrete Pandrol shoulders.
Most significant on the structures side, 38 open-deck bridges have been converted to ballast deck, with 19 remaining, for a total of 57. The elimination of the transition from ballasted track to fixed track on bridges should translate into reduced maintenance and high speeds along with improved ride quality.
Among communication and signaling needs, the project has called for 150 miles of reverse signaling, along with the c&s demands of the five high-speed interlockings. In addition, the NEC has gained an upgraded Centralized Electric Traffic Control system; 150 miles of electrification compatibility, of which half is done; 150 miles of civil speed enforcement; and the removal of 5,200 c&s-line poles, with another 1,300 left to be taken down.
Of the 15 grade crossings between Hew Haven and Boston, two are scheduled for closure in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The 13 remaining are all in Connecticut, and the state has received an $800,000 Federal Railroad Administration grant to test a four-quadrant gate protection system at the School Street crossing in West Mystic-another case of Amtrak operating as a leading-edge-technology showcase.
In another such example, Amtrak is creating a hi-tech map base of its facilities. The railroad contracted with John E. Chance & Associates, Inc., to map the 450 miles of NEC track in order to collect data for use in a geographic information system database. Chance's FLI-MAP¨ system -- a helicopter that integrates a sub-decimeter positioning system with video imaging and a scanning, reflectorless laser rangefinder was used for the job of compiling data on mileposts, switch locations, signals, electric utility poles and wires, grade crossings and bridges. The result is an approximately 200-foot-wide record of the railroad, accurate enough that engineers could theoretically determine crosslevel and curves along the route. While such an application isn't likely -- a geometry car reading is simpler -- the system will be used for maintenance planning for areas such as rights-of-way, utility lines, inventory and pipeline surveys.
Initially intended to provide data that would have to have been acquired by walking the track, Amtrak now recognizes that it has acquired a highly-valuable cache of flexible, detailed and exportable information. "Now that we have the data, we're realizing that there is a lot more we can do with it," says Director of Field Engineering Ruppert. Among the possibilities, the railroad is investigating using the system for emergency response, because it can be overlaid with other commercially-available global information system data that show, for instance, highways or utilities.
Down the road, Amtrak will turn its attention to the south end of the NEC-New York to Washington-to move this already-successful part of the corridor up a few notches. That work, tentatively programmed for 2003-2005, is aimed at allowing speeds of up to 135 mph, the product of replacing the electric traction systems with constant-tension catenary and a nine-aspect signal system along with interlocking upgrades, tie-pad replacement and continuous welded rail. Reprinted with permission by Railway Track & Structures Return to article listing
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