ATLANTA — Talk of restoring passenger rail service on the Georgia-owned Western & Atlantic Railroad between Atlanta and Chattanooga, Tennessee, often runs into the same refrain: It would be expensive to “upgrade the line.”
Three rail engineering experts who weighed in for Railfanning.org News Wire say the claim can be both true and misleading. It depends on the type of passenger service and what costs are counted.
Aaron Shavel, a New York-based civil engineer who focuses on policy and construction economics and has worked on MTA infrastructure construction, said the physical track on a major freight corridor may not require dramatic changes. However, he said freight railroads are generally optimized for “long, slow and methodical” movements, not higher-speed passenger schedules.
In other words, the problem is operational.
“The tracks themselves would require very little upgrades, if any,” Shavel said. “The major concern when converting freight to passenger, which there is precedence for, is that freight rails are built with very different requirements.
“First off, freight corridors are built for long, slow and methodical trains. Meaning that the corridors can’t support the higher speed that passenger rails want,” Shavel added. “Then, of course, there is the concern of right of way. Running passenger rail on routing dedicated for freight means that passenger rails never get priority and are often delayed.”
Denys Schwartz, a civil engineer in Australia with rail project experience, said the expense is rarely just “laying down new track.”
“Running passenger trains on a Class I railroad mainline is not a simple task and would require a variety of infrastructure upgrades — especially when you consider the difference in operational needs between passenger and freight trains,” Schwartz said. “The concerns about the high costs of such upgrades are well-founded, as it’s not just about laying down new tracks but also ensuring that the entire system meets the specific needs of passenger trains.
“Passenger trains generally travel faster and are lighter than freight trains, so the existing track may need some work to ensure it can safely support those higher speeds and more frequent services,” Schwartz added.
He also flagged structural and alignment constraints that can drive costs on older corridors, including bridge and tunnel clearances and track geometry such as tight curves or steep grades.
Schwartz pointed to his experience evaluating proposals in Australia to convert a freight corridor between Canberra and Sydney into a fast passenger route. Preliminary business cases struggled because of the capital and operating costs required to achieve passenger-speed performance, often leaving projects dependent on subsidies and indirect benefits such as regional development, Schwartz said.
Harry Teng, a railroad engineering and intelligent transportation systems specialist who leads a U.S. Department of Transportation-funded railroad research center and serves as a commissioner on Nevada’s high-speed rail authority, said safety and capacity requirements often dominate the conversation.
Teng said Positive Train Control, the collision-prevention technology now required on passenger and Class I routes, is a major expense because it involves trackside equipment, train location and speed enforcement systems, and integration with signaling and dispatching. He also said adding passenger trains to a busy corridor can require detailed capacity analysis and, frequently, more sidings, new operating plans and compensation arrangements known as access charges to reflect wear on infrastructure and freight delays caused by passenger movements.
“There could be other issues like the railroad needs to double-check to see the impact of these passenger trains on their operation,” Teng said. “If their number of trains is already close to their capacity, then the passenger train will delay their freight train operations because sometimes freight trains have to stop waiting for the passenger train to go through, which is a really big loss to a railroad and in terms of travel time because their delivery of the commodity will be delayed waiting for the passenger train.”
