What is with all these half-hearted wimpy attempts at double-tracking? First the Future of FrontRunner study that still proposes only 'strategic' double-track and still does it all wrong, and now this proposal to double-track only 2 miles of the 5-mile gap between Vineyard and American Fork?
I feel a rant coming on. Nobody take this personally, but I'm just frustrated that politics and mediocrity seem to be dictating the future of FrontRunner more than any actual plan or facts.
First this vineyard station. The gap between American Fork and Vineyard is one of the easiest gaps UTA has to fill. It is mostly flat and straight, there are no neighbors nearby to be affected by construction, the foundations for the bridge over the American Fork (river - creek?) are already built, and for the most part UTA has all the ROW it needs. In places where it doesn't have ROW, it will be easy to shift the Union Pacific track over far enough for a second track, since there is only one UP track at that location as compared to 2-3 at other locations.
Why not double-track the whole distance?
They will say it is to save money - that the extra 3 miles it takes to completely fill the gap is not needed. This is compartmental and small-minded thinking. Yes, in order to get the trains to pass each other according to the current schedule at Vineyard, the second track doesn't need to go to American Fork. But that completely ignores UTA's policy of future-proofing their investments!
In a few more years when UTA actually gets directed to double-track their whole system, that fancy new (and expensive) switch 2 miles north of Vineyard is going to need to be ripped out in order to make way for double-tracking. Will that be saving taxpayers money? No, it won't.
Furthermore, until that second track gets added in, travel times between American Fork and Vineyard are going to get stretched out. Unless UTA is planning to go with a REALLY expensive switch that can handle 80 mph trains - and why would they since they know it will get ripped out in a few years - all trains will have to slow down to 40 mph in a zone that used to be 80 mph. Trains will have less time to cruise at their top speed and will have to spend more of their time limping along at 40 mph on perfectly straight smooth double-track because of a poorly-placed switch.
And it isn't just at vineyard either. If you look at the track diagrams in the Future of FrontRunner study, they propose not double-tracking the system, but instead
lengthening the sidings so that trains have a longer window to pass each other. This absolutely infuriates me more than I can articulate, because it shows that the people in charge of the study have no real vision of what FrontRunner can truly become.
By lengthening the sidings it does give trains the longer 'window' to pass each other, but once again, because the 40 mph switches are placed farther away from stations (at great expense and definitely causing system-wide shutdowns in order to construct) trains must spend less of their travel time at their top speed and more of it plodding along at 'switching speed.' It makes a big deal going from 80 mph down to 40 mph.
Have a look at the expected travel times in the report. Every single one of the projected travel times goes
UP except for one, which is a full-double track with infill stations. (And boy, would I like to see their travel-time estimate for a double-track electrified system
without in-fill stations!) After $3 BILLION spent to 'improve' FrontRunner, it will still take LONGER to travel by FrontRunner than it does now? How can that possible be considered an improvement?
They consider it an improvement because they don't care about travel time, they care about reliability, hence the siding lengthening. It isn't bad to want to increase reliability, but it is very bad to increase reliability at the expense of desirability. No one is going to want slower service! With autonomous vehicles on the horizon travel times by road will likely decrease as traffic congestion is unclogged, but FrontRunner will still be going slower and slower because instead of double-tracking the line, we chose to lengthen the passing sidings and make our trains go slower.
This is the sort of thing that makes people hate government projects, because the incentives are completely wrong. In their desire to assist trains that are off-schedule to pass each other more easily, they are punishing the system as a whole by making it go slower. They are dumbing the system down at the expense of it's potential. This reeks of politics - no city along the line would likely agree to have other station pairs get full double-track, so therefore everyone is going to get an equal amount of siding-lengthening so that they all feel special, even though in reality everyone has been harmed.
And what is worse is if we shifted our focus to be on double-tracking between station pairs, reliability would be positively effected as a byproduct! When two trains are free to travel to their next station without needing to stop in the middle of nowhere, both reliability and safety are increased! Have the trains wait for other passing trains at station platforms, where passengers can get on and off, and emergency personnel can get on in case of an emergency! If trains are stopped at switches between station pairs, there is no where for passengers to get out unless of a very severe emergency. Maintenance personnel will still need to access the switches, so put them close to the stations for easy access!
ARGH! I could go on and on.
Would you think it is a good idea if your friend told you "I don't have enough money to buy a new car right now, so I'm just going to buy some car pieces from the dealership and when I have the rest of the money, he'll sell me the rest of the pieces and build it for me." NO! That is stupid, and we all know it. So why do people think "we don't have enough money to double-track the full distance right now, so we'll just buy a piece of it, then when we have the money, we'll rip that out and then buy some more!" ?!?!?
And in the meanwhile, our roads just got an unexpected $371 MILLION, but yet we don't have enough money to even build 3 more miles of double-track? 3 miles of double track costs a single-digit number of millions of dollars. Compared to this road budget windfall it would hardly be noticed!
I just don't get it. UTA used to be so forward-looking. Instead of having FrontRunner share tracks with freight trains and only run a few times a day - a model that every other western city in the USA has implemented - UTA built their own track, 89 miles of it, and runs more trains per day than than any other commuter line outside of the Northeast and Chicago. It was an amazingly bold move, and it is paying huge dividends. FrontRunner is so successful its cars are bursting with people at rush hour. The thing is capacity-constrained. But in the face of all this overwhelming evidence that the increased capacity of a full double-tracking is not only justified, but it is also popular and wanted - despite this, the best this study thinks we can do is to run a few more trains more slowly down line that is still single-track?
What happened? Where did the old UTA zeal go? Where did the vision of a fully double-tracked, electrified, and high-speed train system go? Why are we now only talking about strategic siding lengthening and adding more infill stations that would make the trains go even slower? Why, why why?
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It is more than a little telling that people ride the rail services more, since they are more user-friendly (established stations and schedules). It's almost too bad that UVX is always free, because I would like to see how big its increase would have been. I wonder if the 35Max route got a larger increase than the other bus routes?
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