The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania just release it's 2035 Rail Plan detailing the ongoing and future projects and issues related to rail transportation.

I've browsed most of it so far and it looks to be really well-written. Some good "by-the-numbers" reading depending on what you like.

It's worth a look.

http://www.dot.state.pa.us/Internet/Bureaus/pdBRF.nsf/RailFreightHomepage?OpenFrameSet&frame=main&src=RailPlan2035?OpenForm

Regards,
John

Looks like a million bucks! Though.. it likely cost much more to fund the research to write the report. Money well spent (as in 'that' money has been spent).

It is in fact well written and as I breezed through it I thought it would
make an excellent show and tell for a middle school or maybe a suitable
material for the first week in a college class as an intro to rail systems
in PA.

Here's the jest of the study -

All Corridors
• Bring existing track into a state of good repair.
• Expand track capacity.
• Streamline dispatching.
• Increase frequency of trains.
• Provide seamless connections among passenger modes.
• Reduce travel times.

There is mention as well of preserving abandoned rail lines (amazing), and if you can believe this - the desire to improve passenger service on the Keystone Corridor to speeds (in some areas) up to 15 mph faster then they are today!

Also of particular note is the desire to fund even further studies.

Brilliant!

/Mitch

(Can you just imaging what China's 15 year plan would look like??)

Come on lets be serious. Planning TWENTY FIVE years out?

Think back to 1985. Did you see the fall of the Soviet Empire? The rise of militant Islam? That the 275 pound beasts being drafted into the NFL back then to play guard, would look like Pop Warner players today? Did you see cell phones with cameras? Cell phones everywhere? Cell phones smaller than a size 12 shoe? The internet? Would you have shorted the bluest of blue chips, GM or thought that EMD would be independent? Did you see the "gen set" coming as the hot new thing, or would you have bet on the ACE 3000? The rise of "rap music"? Did you think that among sports records, that Lou Gehrig's consecutive game played record would be smashed by a shortstop considered to big to play the position? Did you ever think that there'd be a "911"?

The point about the endless parade of people making FIVE YEAR plans, getting them wrong but having an endless parade of successors withy the same process and predictive inability was made rather colorfully by Taleb in his book "The Black Swan".

This is an exercise in specious powerpoint sorcery, with a REGULATORY agency eagerly selling corporate welfare (Alfred Perlman and the rest the executives that watched the ICC strangle their railroads must be rolling over in their graves now). Its actually worse than the folks at the SEC that we now now missed Enron and Madoff and the market crash because they were surfin' fer porn. Technically,its called "regulatory capture".

The most important part of the report is the financing agenda; where the report glibly suggests taxes (without any consideration of incidence, elasticity or other factors) on wholly unrelated industries and activities.

PA is rapidly becoming a drive through state. The last thing we need is taxes that will kill or maim the one industry that thrives, tourism.

Yeah I know, NS is going to bring the F units to Harrisburg so a few movers and shakers can get a ride to dinner in Sunbury (Northumberland). I wonder how many state employees or appointees will be able to value this er uh, I guess I can't really call it what it really is now, can I? on their financial disclosure forms at the end of the year.

Disclosure: I own NS stock, subject to a June call with a 60 strike price (soon to get called, I think). I'm still not waiting for public excursions on the NS OCS to convince the people that will pay for the "public private partnership".

In the field of urban planning, 25 year plans are not unreasonable. With the models that were developed in the 1960s and 70s, accuracy of the plans is (and has been) remarkably accurate for "seeing into the future".

--
Will

Also mentioned is the Capitol Corridor between Chicago to Washington by way of Cleveland and Pittsburgh, and says the following...


I'd be curious to see if one of those alternatives would be to electrify the Port Road Branch from Perryville, MD to Middletown, PA. IIRC, NS normally runs down the Port Road at night since most of their trains run on the NEC to Newark, DE.

In the field of urban planning, 25 year plans are not unreasonable. With the models that were developed in the 1960s and 70s, accuracy of the plans is (and has been) remarkably accurate for "seeing into the future".

--
Will

Except this isn't urban planning, its a statewide plan, vastly larger in scope and far more dependent on anticipating the unanticipable. Railroad development in PA is now focused on Marcellus shale-extractable only because of new drilling techniques.

From what I read-"urban planning" isn't seeing the future, its making it into a self fulfilling prophecy, using the force of government.

Just look at Wilkes Barre, one the lab rats for the federal government and its "model cities". They razed all of the cities history, spent huge gobs of cash to make shiny new buildings with the idea that it would revitalize the city. Been there lately?
After a judicial scandal that has a national footprint-and the resignation of a county commissioner, the Central Railroad of New Jersey Station lies rotting; abandoned by the local version of PT Barnum. The Vulcan Iron Works buildings survive thanks to the adaptive reuse as Abe N. Solomon's scrap operation.

The now abandoned urban planning of the local Congresscritter, one of those multidecade incumbents that will probably only cede his office to the reaper, ala Murtha- had a vast plan for Wilkes Barre that included employing the Army Corp of Engineers to create an inflatable dam on the Susquehanna. The purpose was to create a mini inner harbor, complete with a paddle wheel river boat, despite the lack of any inland marine tradition on the Susquehanna. Of course private property would've been in the way, and had to have been seized via eminent domain.

Had the bureaucrats been right; (and I don't accept the idea that "accuracy", however you measure it equates to propriety) some of the NRHS convention activities would have focused on WB; instead WB is noticeably absent from those plans because despite its extensive railroad, mining and industrial history-nothing has been saved.

While bureaucrats have been planning, the city is dying because people leave to go where there are fewer bureaucrats planning.

On my kitchen wall is a 1971 picture of a CNJ freight in downtown Wilkes Barre. It wasn't the planners fault that a year later Agnes destroyed the city and the CNJ abandoned PA ops; but they failed to protect serious rail access to the city.

In short, the popular delusion is that government can and will reign in the unrestrained forces of Shumpeterian creative destruction-yet whereever bureacrats get involved in erecting their new temples-the past meets the bulldozer.

"Urban Planning" can mean anything from a couple of acres of industrial property to nations. It is a very broad term, and covers things like transportation, economics, land use, environmental impacts, and so forth.

--
Will

From wikipedia:

Urban, city, and town planning integrates land use planning and transport planning to improve the built, economic and social environments of communities. Regional planning deals with a still larger environment, at a less detailed level.

Urban planning can include urban renewal, by adapting urban planning methods to existing cities suffering from decay and lack of investment.[1]
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Do you really want to debate bureaucracy with a bureaucrat? Or just tell me how the practitioners of this craft can see 25 years in the future with enough confidence and precision that we should allow them to become such zealous advocates for the industries they are supposed to be regulating that they should glibly be proposing to tax the citizens they are supposed to be serving.

I eat lunch in the building where a substantial portion of the centralized part of PA's transportation department is housed; I've yet to see one person with a DOT badge and a crystal ball.

OK, fine, nitpick. You win.

Your opinions are so politically tainted anyway, that they are worthless to me.

--
Will

Among the things I do for both the preservation of history and because I'm apparently something of a masochist is to peruse selections of books on "urban studies" looking for information centering on transportation and transit planning and management. Books with appropriate material end up at the Maryland Rail Heritage Library, under "Transit" or "Studies".

I have studies and articles, for example on the future suburban utopia of Columbia, Maryland. One reads a 1968 article in Life Magazine, and wonders what illegal substances the authors were smoking. (Much of these future visions assumes a society where everyone is unselfish and benevolent, disregarding the basic human drive of greed and self-centeredness. For example, the planners of Columbia assumed various religious faiths could make use of interfaith religious centers or meeting halls, totally disregarding the fact that religious congregations almost always gravitate to a house of worship to call their own.)

It becomes utterly staggering to see the vast difference between the proposed or planned future versus the realities that evolve. Fifty years ago they were planning for robot maids, flying cars, and SST transport; few foresaw the realities of the Internet, GPS, cell phones, and telecommuting.

The Commonwealth is to be commended for at least having the foresight to think many years ahead, and hopefully be able to plan for such things as, say, tunnel expansion, bridge replacement, adding tracks, or even a high-speed link between Philly and Pittsburgh. And I would like to think that they are also intelligent enough to figure out that the rail needs of suburban Philly or Pittsburgh are vastly different from those of, say, Erie (which finally got a main line to bypass town instead of going down one street) or Wilkes-Barre or Elk County.

Now, if they actually propose an intermodal terminal at Strasburg or Kempton, or reactivating the EBT for coal traffic, on the other hand......

While I can understand the need for long range planning, 25 years does sound like an awfully long time to be projecting this sort of thing. By the time you get there, 25 years in the future, it's quite likely that changes will have occured that alter the circumstances the plan was based on.

Let's take Strasburg as an example. Anyone recall what it looked like in 1985? How does that compare to what it looks like now.

How about Pittsburgh? In 1980 (Couldn't find '85 data, though I'm sure it's out there someplace...) it had roughly 424,000 people. In 2007, it had 311,000 people. So, in 27 years, it lost over 25 percent of the population. Typically, you would expect urban areas to grow, not shrink, so what happenes when you make a 25 year plant for a city that loses 1/4 of the population?

One last question. Why does it take 25 years to get this stuff done? Moving at that speed you'll always be behind the curve as things continue to change.

OK, fine, nitpick. You win.

Your opinions are so politically tainted anyway, that they are worthless to me.

--
Will

The difference is; I'm in the belly of the beast, I know what I'm talking about. You're free to ignore my posts as politically tainted; I'll return the favor, and consider yours as Pollyanna.

Correct me if I am wrong; but I assume that every now and then; these 25 year plans go through a check-and-adjust review.

So if their vision is off a little 25 years down the road, no big deal; some bureaucrat down the road will make the need changes along the way. I doubt seriously the Commonwealth will engage in a death march because the plan says to, and demand infrastructure for flying cars while ignoring the need for internet access -- they haven't so far.

Like the saying goes, "without a vision, the people will perish"; and I also would prefer to see a 25 year plan that may be off in distant future years than the 5 year plan or no even plan that many organizations use.

Correct me if I am wrong; but I assume that every now and then; these 25 year plans go through a check-and-adjust review.

I doubt seriously the Commonwealth will engage in a death march because the plan says to, and demand infrastructure for flying cars while ignoring the need for internet access -- they haven't so far.


How do you "adjust" a plan when money's been already spent to build or rehab a line that turns out to be unnecessary. Remember, NS and other huge corporations are coming to a state that's in the midst of a fiscal and political crisis

You're right; the Commonwealth isn't on a death March, its a mad dash. We have two of the formerly most powerful legislators convicted, and new indictments promise to make it a bipartisan affair. The former chief justice of the supreme court worked with legislators to create the infamous "midnight" pay raise (and quit & died before his conduct could be scrutinized)-that's how the lights were shined on these guys.
The one thing these creeps that seems to be honest is their cheesy defense-"everybody's doing it".

Its been seven consecutive years without a timely budget, and the last one was done with tricks like cutting back on contributions to the fund that pays employee medical insurance-in essence borrowing without issuing bonds. In a couple years, similar tricks from the past are going to create a pension crisis as the requiring funding skyrockets.

Why, other than "I like trains" should the citizens of Pennsylvania ante up for the stockholders of NS when the RRMPA was cut in funding and staffing due as an emergency austerity measure?

This is a PRESERVATION board, not a corporate welfare advocacy.

I noticed this article, says that the City of Harrisburg is looking at declaring bankruptcy, and that the payments due this year on bonds and loans are now four times what the city collects in property taxes.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... eDI&pos=14

PC