Two reports that I’ve collaborated on are out now, one about high-speed rail planning for Marron and one about Northeast Corridor maintenance for ETA. A third piece is out, not by me but by Nolan Hicks, about constant-tension catenary and its impact on speed and reliability. The context for the latter two pieces is that the Northeast Corridor has been in a recurrent state of failure in the last three weeks, featuring wire failures, circuit breaker failures, track fires, and transformer fires. The high-speed rail planning piece is of different origin – Eric interviewed officials involved in California High-Speed Rail and other American projects that may or may not happen and this led to synthesizing five planning recommendations, which aren’t really about the Northeast Corridor but should be kept in mind for any plan there as well.
The broader context is that we’re going to release another report specific to the Northeast Corridor, one that’s much more synthetic in the sense of proposing an integrated infrastructure and service planning program to cut trip times to about 1:53 New York-Washington and 2:00 New York-Boston, informed by all of these insights. Nolan’s piece already includes one key piece of information that’s come out of this work, about the benefits of constant-tension catenary upgrades: 1:53 requires constant-tension catenary, and if it is not installed, the trip time is 2:04 instead, making this the single biggest piece of physical infrastructure installation the Northeast Corridor needs.
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