Innovate or Die –– From Our Colleagues at Railway Age

Photo by William Beecher

ATLANTA –– This commentary is from David Peter Alan, a Contributing Editor with Railway Age and is made available to RT&S through colleagues at our sister magazine.

Ed. Note: Although the primary focus of Railway Track & Structures is railroad infrastructure, we also cover important topics that could directly or indirectly impact those who work in railroad engineering and maintenance-of-way or could directly or indirectly impact rail infrastructure. Along with our sister magazine, Railway Age, we sponsor the annual Light Rail Conference, with the 2023 edition held last November in Newark, N.J. If you’d like to read about last year’s conference, please follow this link to Railway Age Contributing Editor David Peter Alan’s excellent review.

One of the issues discussed at the conference was the impact of the pandemic and working from home on commuter and light rail ridership, maintenance, and operation. Mr. Alan’s commentary below expands on his discussion of this issue at the conference, and is important reading for anyone associated with the commuter and light rail industry, whether you’re an executive, manager, train & engine service employee, or maintenance-of-way associate. Undoubtedly, this will be a topic at the 2024 Railway Age/RT&S Light Rail Conference, the dates and location of which will be announced soon. DCL

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Innovate or Die

By David Peter Alan

RAILWAY AGE APRIL 2024 ISSUE: “Long COVID” for America’s regional/commuter railroads is restricting post-pandemic progress speed.

Passenger rail is bouncing back from the devastating impact on ridership from the COVID-19 pandemic. Agencies are making necessary changes in service in response to shifts in traditional peak-oriented ridership patterns caused by flexible hours and remote work. Some are dealing with the looming “fiscal cliff” as federal relief money winds down. This is a best-case scenario.

Progress is coming slowly, though. The COVID-19 pandemic, which started slightly more than four years ago, changed American life more than any events since the Great Depression and World War II, nearly a century ago. We still don’t know what the final effects will be, especially in and around our cities, where the “regional railroads” run. It would be somewhat of a misnomer to keep referring to them as “commuter” railroads, because commuting ridership is down, and it will be a long time coming back to pre-COVID numbers, if it ever does. The non-commuting ridership is becoming stronger now.

After the virus hit, reporters at Railway Age and its sibling publications Railway Track & Structures (RT&S) and International Railway Journal (IRJ) joined forces to report on the swift decline of all sectors of the railroad industry. After that situation stabilized, I continued to report about every six months on the state of passenger trains and rail transit in the United States and Canada, as service slowly came back. Now that we are examining the railroads that once carried the “9-to-5 army”; many of whom no longer commute to the office five days a week, we find progress here and there. Large-scale change has not occurred yet, but there are signs that it’s coming, and an impending massive shock to those railroads might kick the change engine up to its top speed. 

Personally, I can’t say I’m surprised at the change in workplace and commuting habits. I first predicted this on July 22, 2020 in a commentary on the Railway Age website, headlined “Rail ‘Commuting’ in the ‘New Normal,’” one of the first of several such glimpses into the post-COVID future on the trains that run between the suburbs and the city’s core.

That’s not to say that there are no more trains that are crowded. Some of the busiest now run on weekends if a line has enough weekend service to lure suburbanites into the city for the day. Efforts by landlords and employers to lure or force employees back into the office for the traditional five-day commute are not faring very well. Managers from the agencies who run the local railroads flash a figure like 70% or 80% of pre-COVID level, but that does not yield much useful information. More than the aggregate, it’s the distribution that counts. A weekday train might be relatively full on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, but not so much on Monday or Friday. Those have become the popular days for employees to work “remotely” from home. Weekend trains don’t run as often as weekday trains, but it’s more difficult to find a seat on them than it was before the virus hit. The railroads surrounding some cities are still running sparse weekend schedules, which will not alleviate crowding. 

Managers are aware of that, but local passenger railroads are hardly bastions of innovation, and old ideas die hard. Some have talked extensively about the “post-COVID future” of their railroads, as we have reported. Change seems to be coming, but the ideas that will bring new life to those railroads look more like seedlings than plants in full bloom. Still, some managers are talking about some sort of innovation. That could be innovative.

Signs of Progress

Whatever the pace of innovation might be on the freight side of railroading, it always seems to happen at the most-restricted speed possible on the passenger side. We checked the schedules of every local rail line in the United States for this story, and found most of them surprisingly similar to those from a year or two ago. Small operations that run only for a limited number of traditional commuters still do so. Giants like Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) have returned to pre-COVID schedules, except that the LIRR has made adjustments to accommodate its new “Grand Central Madison” underground terminal on the East Side. Those schedules do not indicate as much choice for riders into Manhattan as many had hoped, while most Brooklyn riders must now take a shuttle train from Jamaica, where the timed cross-platform transfers that were so convenient for so long have now been relegated to the dustbin of history. New Jersey Transit has also gone back to its pre-COVID schedules, with only a few minor differences.

If genuine change has taken root among most of America’s regional railroads, it did so in Boston, the historic epicenter of cultural conservatism. The MBTA (better known as the “T”) still calls its regional trains “commuter rail,” but the actions of its managers portend a service pattern that appears to benefit more riders. After deep COVID cuts (at one time, seven of the system’s 12 lines had no weekend service at all), the system is making its comeback. The commuter-peak was all but gone. Instead, trains started to run hourly throughout the weekday schedules, which offer a full span of service. On lightly patronized lines, trains run every 75 or 90 minutes, but the headways are constant through the service day. On weekends, trains run essentially every two hours, both on Saturdays and Sundays. 

There have been some tweaks since then, including the restoration of a few trains for peak-hour commuters, but not many such trains. The evenly spaced headways throughout the service day on weekdays were not disturbed. There are other changes, too. “Plymouth” trains all go to Kingston, rather than the former “Plymouth” station, which was not close to downtown Plymouth. Some short turns on the North Shore to Beverly have been added to offer hourly weekday service there. Those trains fill the gaps that existed when all trains east of Beverly went either to Newburyport or Rockport, further east.

Metra in Chicagoland recently added weekday trains on several of its lines to approach hourly service, although some two-hour gaps remain and service ends earlier than it did before the virus hit. On the former Rock Island, Metra is running short turns at Blue Island that allow transfer to trains that run express to there, and then to Joliet. Will this labor-intensive operation attract more riders than hourly locals? Time will tell, but at least Metra is experimenting. Another Metra experiment is not doing as well as had been hoped. The Big Noise from Winnetka last year was half-hourly weekday service; the hourly schedule augmented by short turns on the other side of the hour. Now the Winnetka turns run only every two hours, producing an odd schedule that demonstrates that the Big Noise has quieted down. Weekend service on Metra still runs every two hours, with some extra trains here and there.

Metrolink in the Los Angeles area has always run schedules that emphasized peak-hour commuting and provided only sparse service at other times. When the virus hit, it was the only railroad of its type that slashed service outside peak-commuting periods, rather than reducing “commuter trains” despite their lack of riders. For the most part, the pre-COVID schedule is back, but with one notable exception. The railroad recently expanded service on its Antelope Valley Line, northward to Lancaster. The agency has added several short turns at Via Princessa, a stop located in the middle of the line: four new round trips on weekdays and six on weekends. Weekend service between Union Station and Via Princessa is now the strongest in the system, with twelve trains in each direction, rather than only the six Lancaster runs. The San Bernardino line has stronger weekday service, but only eight round trips on weekends. 

Caltrain, running south of San Francisco to San José, now features more service than it did at the height of the pandemic, but the weekday schedule calls for a “limited” train and a local train that run about ten minutes apart; each pair running hourly outside peak-commuting periods. For most riders, that feels like one departure during the hour, not two. Service at peak-commuting times is as strong as ever, with the return of the “Baby Bullet” schedule and many “limited” trains, even though transit in the Bay Area is suffering because so many workers in the tech fields are working from home. Local trains provide weekend service, running hourly, the only place with such strong weekend service outside the New York area. The line will be electrified soon, though, which could mean big increases in service. North of the Bay, Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) has expanded service both on weekdays and weekends.

Not all the railroads are advancing toward a future of less commuting and more discretionary riding, especially on weekends. SEPTA in Philadelphia has added a few trains at peak-commuting times and almost runs hourly service on weekdays, with some two-hour gaps on some lines. Weekend service is a mix of lines running every two hours, and other lines that ran hourly before the virus struck, and now run a seemingly random schedule of either one or two hours between trains, depending on the time of day. Only the Airport Line runs every hour on weekends, although more used to run that way. To make matters worse, the Chestnut Hill East and Chestnut Hill West lines might be eliminated soon. Another railroad that has reduced service almost to the sparsest COVID level is Shore Line East in Connecticut, between New Haven and New London. The schedule is down to eight round trips per day.

Jolted Into Changes?

A major threat is coming to all transit modes, everywhere in the country. As the virus devastated the nation, the federal government enacted grants to keep millions of people and many industries going during the crisis. Transit, including the local railroads, were among the recipients. Normally, federal assistance for transit must be used for capital projects, but Congress made exceptions on account of the virus. According to a Jan. 18, 2024 report by the Congressional Research Service titled Federal Support of Public Transportation Operating Expenses, Congress authorized $69.5 billion in supplemental appropriations for transit. 

With changes in commuting, ridership (and, therefore, revenue) remains below pre-COVID levels, and with inflation claiming its share of scarce dollars, this money will run out for many transit providers during the next year or two. How can the agencies that run the local railroads and other transit keep going when that happens? We don’t know, and some of them don’t, either, but others are working on solutions.

New York’s MTA expects to keep balancing its budget, thanks to new taxes and fees, but the congestion pricing plan to charge vehicles for entering Manhattan south of 60th Street is being challenged in court. Gov. Phil Murphy has proposed a levy on big corporations that would keep NJ Transit going. Proposals like these face stiff opposition, and we plan to examine the coming fiscal cliff and efforts to keep transit going in spite of it, and report these stories soon. We can conjecture that a shock of that magnitude will force progress toward recovering from the crises caused by COVID-19, if anything can.

The prediction at the top of this article might appear a bit optimistic for the time frame but is still fundamentally correct. The traditional model of the “commuter railroad” is outdated and is no longer sustainable, given the recent changes in commuting that will probably become permanent. The country’s local railroads are facing an “innovate or die” situation. The progress we mentioned must happen, and it must happen soon. Now it’s time to get the word out to the senior managers on those railroads, as well as the elected officials who must raise the money needed to make that progress occur.