When you get around to it, Jis, look at LIRRs platforms. They are no wider than Amtrak's or NJ Transit's. They are just considerably less cluttered. If you remove the clutter, excessive intrusions, garbage cans, and so on, you can make the platform a heck of a lot more usable.
You can expand the current station somewhat, increase the amount of tail tracks, and so on. Look at Alternative G. Alternative G was a much saner plan than this one.
I am there almost every weekend. My considered opinion still is that people who think NYP can be made as good as a newly designed station using modern station design standards for commuter traffic are blowing smoke. Of course things can be improved a bit, but not nearly enough to enable the kind of traffic flow that would be need to accommodate an additional 25tph.
Surely you mean Alternative S if all you are talking of is tail track etc.? As has been discussed elsewhere (mostly on railroad.net - by people who are actually designing or have participated in designing this or similar stuff), all that tail track gives you is a place to park a train that becomes unserviceable. They are pretty useless for just turning a train around unless they a re a loop like at GCT.
I have not seen any.
I did mean Alternative G, meaning the routing through to Grand Central Terminal. In addition, I sincerely doubt there is demand for an additional 25 trains per hour. Trains pull in from NJCL and NEC during rush hour at a rate of one every 10 minutes each, and MidTOWN Direct is about the same frequency, IIRC. RVL doesn't haul that many passengers, and the number that want to continue to 34th Street is fairly limited- most of them take Path. Actually, it shocks me that any people don't take Path since it is much cheaper.
More people don't take path because it's not a one seat ride. If you're headed to lower Manhattan, then fine, people may be willing to deal with the extra 20 minutes of ride time and the transfer between two trains. But otherwise, if one is headed for Mid-town or further north, the few bucks saved by getting on PATH aren't worth the three seat ride and the extra 30 to 40 minutes of ride time.
You're counting today's trains. They're trying to plan for the future. In fact I suspect that they may be a bit low when one starts to factor in Lack Cutoff, MOM, and the increased ridership that is going to come with the one seat ride for the other currently existing lines that don't currently run into NYC.
If it isn't on the list for at least one or two direct trains, you can bet that there will be howls of protest from those riders.
The Lackawanna Cutoff and MOM will never be built... and we both know it. There isn't enough money or demand.
I don't think that anyone really knows what will happen with MOM. But the Lack will get built, they're only a very short ways from breaking ground on the first few miles. Whether we'll ever see the entire distance back in service might be a bit more debatable, but I'm pretty sure that at least part of it will see service in the next few years.
Isn't that a scream! Of course, maybe having cars in the tunnel is wishful thinking on Joe's part. That way he will avoid exposure to swine flu.I thought this was going to be an automobile tunnel, not a train tunnel.
I'm pretty sure I'm right, too. Joe Biden said so!
Think of Biden the same as I though about Al Gore with Clinton: Assassination protection for the president. Anyone who does not like the way the guy in charge is doing only has to look at the VP in both cases and decide the alternative is worse and he will change his mind and instead pray for the survival of the guy that is president, whether he likes him or not.
Well what the FTA approved in the SDEIS can be found on page 2-13 of Chapter 2: Project Alternatives. No further comments forthcoming from me since I don't have any special additional information that cannot already be found from the SDEIS. My attempt here is to simply try to base the discussion on established numbers as they currently exist in the plans in question, instead of conjectures. Frankly, I have no idea whether that many people from Bergen County want to take the train to Manhattan or not. Someone else will have to attack or defend those numbers.
Interesting.... I would love to see that... GCT has so much more charm then Penn... seems like a great way to save money to me...
While I've never stopped to actually count things, I'd bet that NJT already runs at least half of their rush hour trains through Penn to Sunnyside, and quite probably more than half. Many are of course stored at Sunny till the evening rush hour, but some just loop around and run back through to NJ, after picking up passengers at NYP. So sending them to GCT, along with the other "half" that currently turn in NYP, isn't going double Penn's capacity.
But it has been amply established that you can't because there is nowhere to put that many trains in GCT once they get there. If you connect to the LIRR level they literally have nowhere to go since nothing that NJT has can pass through the ESA East River tunnels. If you connect to the upper levels it is not clear that there is capacity available even to move them through the Park Avenue tunnels to Highbridge or beyond, after one has dealt with the issue of different power collection systems and all that.
